Hardy orange trees: Calamondin
We are trying to become less dependant on imports to the UK. One key ingredient that we lack at the cottage are easily grown citrus fruits. We have a greenhouse which is chock-a-block in the winter so an ordinary citrus tree would have to live in the cottage for the winter months. We reckoned that our tiny windows and poor light would make a citrus tree suffer and go straggly. Ages ago I bought what can only be described as an expensive lemon twig on Ebay. It was given the affection that only a proper bountiful tree deserves. Kept in the...
read moreLamb mince burger recipe with chips in our halogen oven by Danny
Lamb can be greasy but these were delicious and not at all fatty. If our friend KC is reading this, then you can skip the rest, K! She hates lamb. We did not know this when we invited K and JP for Sunday lunch of roast lamb and dauphinoise potatoes. Poor K was too polite to say anything when she arrived and heard the menu but she really cheered up when the big dish of potatoes was placed on the table. One bite later she realised that, as a special treat, the lamb was roasted on a rack directly over the potatoes so that all the juices would add...
read moreHow to make a temporary vase for cut flowers
I invested in Sarah Raven’s The Cutting Garden: Growing and Arranging Garden Flowers a while ago. It’s a brilliant inspirational book if you are raising flowers to cut for the house or to sell. A perfect reference guide. Recently I also bought her later book Grow Your Own Cut Flowers. This is a much simpler book than The Cutting Garden, listing just her favourite flowers and bulbs. But there are new tips and tricks and I’ve enjoyed lolling on the swing seat with the Min Pins and immersing myself in its pages. If I was going to...
read moreSpoils from the annual village fête
Yesterday was the Cheveley village fête. Held in aid of St Mary’s church and celebrating the 750th anniversary of the church. To link in with this the organisers had given the fête a medieval theme and many of the organisers and stallholders wore medieval costumes. Danny was serving at the bar and claimed that his everyday clothes were so old that they were almost medieval. Usually I serve on the bar too but this year I visited as a guest – which was great fun. Watching the Molly dancers and the falconry display and catching up with...
read morePlanting potatoes in bags and borders
I know that I live with the Potato King who can eat a kilo of spuds at one sitting but I never thought that I would have so much to write about this particular vegetable. In fact growing decent spuds has become a bit of an obsession. Yesterday I took all the seed potatoes out of the new potato border. They’d only been in for a week or so. I had lost confidence in my ridges and during a sleepless 3am fret had come to the conclusion that they would be too fiddly to earth up. I decided to go for the Australian farmer’s method right across...
read moreThank you
Today marks ten months off work and I think that finally I’m gradually getting better. But progress is achingly slow. I’m too tired in the evenings to develop new recipes at the moment. Instead we are looking back over the Cottage Smallholder archives and resurrecting some long forgotten recipes. The problem with constantly developing new recipes is that there is little time to enjoy past ones. So this has been a surprising solace. The focus is now on the garden and trying to achieve a stream of income from growing flowers, fruit and...
read moreStrawberry companion planting dilemma
I love the idea of companion planting and really want to get the best out of my strawberries this year. Most companion planting charts state that strawberries hate potatoes and cabbages. A lot of charts declare that onions and strawberries are incompatible and a few declare that they are friends. I have a patch of alliums (Christophii) in one of my fruit cages – left over from the days when it was a herbaceous border. So when I discovered that strawberries this incompatibility on the companion planting charts I whistled down the garden to...
read moreStop Press: Eat Weeds teams up with Herb Mentor
I’m a huge fan of Robin Hartford’s site Eat Weeds. It’s a site packed with great information and a valuable resource for those who want to find free food. But what about free medicine? Eat Weeds has negotiated a 33% discount on the monthly subscription to Herb Mentor – a massive American website dedicated to all aspects of herbal medicine. I watched Robin’s video review of Herb Mentor and was very impressed with all that Herb Mentor offers – from training courses for the beginner to lectures from top international...
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