WordPress informs me that today is my five-year blogiversary. Yay! Shall we celebrate? There’s home-made lemon drizzle cake (eggs from the garden, lemons from the limery) and a pot of tea made with real leaves (no plastic teabags here).
Frankly, I’m quite astonished that I’ve managed to write so regularly for five years: previously I’ve been rubbish about keeping any sort of diary. I think that it’s probably you, the readers that have kept me going… I’ve made so many friends and so enjoy reading your comments.
Over the years I have, apparently, written 870 posts (excluding this one), but I thought it would be fun to choose one post from each year to mark this special day.
On 1 September 2012 I wrote a post entitled 21st Century Womble. It may be one of my all-time favourite posts. In those days I didn’t always include a picture and so this particular post is just words, but I still like it. In it, I mention finding an old spatula whilst out for a walk and bringing it home to use as a scoop to clean out the chicken house. And, you know what? I’m still using that object… it’s still going strong and I’m still a Womble at heart.

Yes – it is worth growing potatoes
In August 2013 I turned my attention to the humble potato, asking the question Is it worth growing potatoes? At that time I had been experimenting with various more exotic crops and not necessarily enjoying them – I don’t mind oca, for example, but I wouldn’t want to eat it every day. Potatoes, on the other hand guarantee me a crop I like, but since they are easy and relatively cheap to buy, I wondered whether it was really worth bothering. The resounding answer was ‘yes’ – apart from avoiding all the associated pesticides and transportation, there is the simple joy of eating delicious, freshly harvested potatoes and knowing exactly where they have been.

Charlotte’s books
No celebration of this blog would be complete without mentioning the all-time most-visited post. It still gets dozens of views every month and it originally appeared in May 2014. Why is it so popular? Well, I didn’t write it! It is the post that contains the full text of a poem entitled Just in Case by the late Charlotte Mitchell. My blog is, as far as I know, the only place on the net that you can find this poem and the book that it was originally published in is out of print. Don’t think, though, that I ignored copyright. In fact I contacted the author’s daughter, Candy Guard, to get permission to quote it. Hopefully one day Charlotte’s work will be republished, but until then The Snail of Happiness and second-hand bookshops are the only places to find what is probably her most famous poem (do follow the link and read it – I’m sure you will enjoy it).

Abundance in the limery – year 1
New readers may be a little confused about my frequent references to The Limery (it’s what we call our plant-filled conservatory). You can, however, read about its origins and the search for a suitable name here. Regular readers from the time will recall my distress at having an influx of builders, but, as you all told me, it was really worth it in the long run. Today the limery is bursting with plants and it’s hard to remember life without it!

WWKIP 2016
And finally, I have to choose a post about yarn. Perhaps that one that sums up all that is good about knitting and crochet is about what we did last year for Worldwide Knit in Public day. On the Street Where You Knit describes how I spent the day sitting outside The Make It Shop teaching folks to knit and making twiddlemuffs. I met lovely people, shared skills and made something for charity… what more could I ask for?
So, there we are, a selection of old posts that gives a flavour of what The Snail of Happiness is all about… and I managed not to mention knickers! Here’s to another five years of writing, crafting, gardening and trying to be that bit more sustainable.