The sun is shining and I need help!

We have had (whisper it) a couple of really quite nice spring days recently. With sunshine and a bit of warmth and everything. The garden is starting to sprout in all directions (hence the grass cutting which needs doing again already!) and the herbs I planted out are doing nicely, thank you. FB's primrose has settled well into our front garden and is providing some much needed colour (I don't really do flowers. The daffodils don't count because they moved in here before we did) and SB's sunflower seedling continues to grow.

But I need your help, internet, and I am particularly looking at you green-fingered types (Isabelle? Are you there?). Do you remember that I told you we bought a strawberry plant for SB when we went to the garden centre a while ago? Well, we have been looking after it quite well I think. It sits on a sunny windowsill, I have managed neither to drown nor to dessicate it and it has grown and grown. It now has three times as many leaves (big ones!) as it did when we bought it and today it grew a flower. A flower!! I could hardly contain my amazement excitement. Nothing, and I really mean NOTHING flowers under my care. I'm more used to things gradually drooping, turning brown and leaving the house in a bin bag.

Anyway, my question is this: do I keep the plant in its little pot on the windowsill for longer or do we take the plunge and plant it outside? Do you leave the flower to, well, flower? Or are you supposed to do something gardener-y like pinch it off to encourage fruit? (Hah! Fruit! I swear if we actually get a real honest-to-goodness strawberry on this thing I will be hospitalised with advanced astonishment.) All advice gratefully received.

And just to prove that we are genuinely in the throes of non-winter, look what happens when the temperature rises above frosty in Edinburgh:


This is FB. Sitting in our back garden with his feet in a bucket of cold water. Because any red-blooded Scottish male struggles to survive when the thermometer rises above 7 degrees.



And this is SB, hanging out on the back door step and communing with our increasingly mangy cat. Note FB's bucket in the background, ready for any overheating feet emergencies.

I love these photos because they are so typical of my boys, but the thing I love most of all is that in both photos the boy in question is reading a book. Every time I see them with books in their hands, it makes me go all warm and fuzzy inside. I hoped and hoped that I would have children who loved books like I did and whilst they may not quite approach the obsessive levels of reading that I used to indulge in as a child, they do read a lot and what's more, they do so voluntarily. I am so happy. I bet the first time I catch them trying to read under the bedclothes with a torch, I will be entirely unable to discipline them for it. I may in fact climb in and join them!