Last week, we were lucky enough to attend the Garden Media Guild Awards in London for the first time.  We had received the astonishing news a couple of weeks earlier that we were finalists for the ‘Blog of the Year’ prize, so on Thursday afternoon, with hair styled, nails painted and high-heels on (and that was just Ade), we caught the train into London and made our way to The Savoy Hotel where the annual awards lunch was to be held. We were so chuffed to be finalists and felt this would be a wonderful opportunity to meet the great and the good of the gardening media world, to finally put faces to the names of some fellow bloggers whose work we so much admire, and to enjoy a little bit of glitz and glamour.

Never in a million years did we expect to win the prize.

But we did!

We’re still reeling from the shock of it all, to be honest! A huge thank you to the judges of the Garden Media Guild Awards (particularly to Camilla Akers Douglas and George Plumptre who said such wonderfully encouraging words to us after the ceremony), to the lovely Anne-Marie Powell who presented us with the award, and to everyone who has been so supportive on social media – our Twitter feed has been going nuts since Thursday!

For those of you who have been following our blog for a while, we thank you too. Particularly those loyal, steadfast readers (you know who you are) who have been with us since the very beginning. Without your continued interest and lovely comments, we would have had nothing to sustain us and would have probably jacked the whole thing in months, if not years ago. You’ve been instrumental in getting us this far.

To all our new followers – welcome! Pull up a pew, put the kettle on and make yourselves at home. This is who we are and this is where our journey started back in February 2014. We blog about our allotment, our garden and our kitchen. We love to share recipes, occasionally share videos, and often share embarrassing anecdotes. Ade has written about the trials of going back to college to study horticulture and Sophie has written about environmental campaigns we’ve supported, and has occasionally stood on her soapbox for an impassioned rant about the value of allotments. We both have a lot to say and we hope you’ll stick around and join in the conversation.

We’d like to high-five all our fellow finalists in the ‘Blog of the Year’ category. Some were known to us already, some are new discoveries, and if you don’t know these blogs already, we urge you to follow them:

Gardens, Weeds and Words
Dig My Veg
The Dahlia Papers
Jack Wallington

They are beautiful, thoughtful blogs written by people who are equally passionate about gardening. In fact, they’re so good, we’ve no idea how we ended up bagging the ‘Blog of the Year’ award (which is why we did a runner from the Savoy ballroom as soon it was all over, for fear that some terrible administrative error had occurred.)

We had a wonderful, if slightly unreal day, but we came back down to earth with a bump the next morning when Ade’s long-awaited delivery of sh*t arrived. (Praise be!) While Ade was smearing manure onto his allotment, Sophie undertook the altogether more fragrant task of making a celebratory pumpkin pie with one of our recently-harvested Musquee de Provence.

Thank you all again, and congratulations to the finalists and winners in all the categories at the GMG Awards. You can check out the full list of finalists here and the official photos from the event here.

Normal blogging services will resume from the Agents of Field veg plot next week! 😘