There's A Hole In Your Sieve...

...said Bob. I felt he hadn't quite understood the principal of the thing - I mean, isn't a sieve designed to be full of holes? Even the Jumblies discovered that.

What Bob meant was that our garden sieve [aka The Riddle] had got a very large hole on one side. Our riddle is at least 40 years old and came from Bob's Dad.

I have been using it a lot recently. The soil which the builders dug out for the Lathe Palace Foundation was in a large heap - and I wanted to use some as the base layer in the raised bed. But it was full of beautiful Norfolk flints as big as my fist. I needed to make it more of a 'fine tilth'

So I have been riddling out all the big rocks and I got the soil to an acceptable condition. But the hole wasn't helping. So I found some wire, and a 'darned' it

It is not very elegant, but it works, and I was able to get the soil all sorted. I'll be posting pictures of the completed raised bed later.

Thank you to everyone who has shared encouraging words and useful gardening tips, I really do appreciate them.

I love the fact that riddle can mean a coarse sieve [noun], or the act of sieving [verb], as well as a conundrum or word puzzle [noun] or to pose such a conundrum [verb]

Rosie has just started to understand jokes and wordplay properly. She keeps posing questions about animals of various types crossing the road - but most of the answers make no sense. But her best one thus far 

Why did the cow go to the cinema, Grandad?

To see a mooo-vie! 

D'you get it Grandad? cows moo....

I have tried telling her that she shouldn't explain the punchline...

Do you or your grandchildren have favourite riddles?