Spoils 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...
read moreFlowers from our gate side stand: May 2010
I haven’t posted ‘Flowers from the garden’ for ages – mainly because almost everything is sold on the gate side stand. Come high summer our cottage will be filled with flowers from the garden as I have armies of annuals impatiently waiting in the wings for all likelihood of frosts to be over. At the moment commercialism triumphs over pleasure. We always put out fresh flowers so if a bunch is not snapped up within two days they are mine. A sort of jaded bliss – I’m supposed to be selling them after all. So I’m changing...
read moreJapanese maple. Acer palmatum ‘Atropurpureum’- six years on
“Danny can you come down to the garden? I’ve got something spectacular to show you.” In the summer the Rat Room Velux window is open so I can call up to D. I heard him rumbling down the stairs into the kitchen. He stood at the back door. “Wow! Where did that come from?” “It’s that Japanese maple that I bought from Ebay six years ago. It’s been lurking behind the rose bush by the other back door.” “Well it definitely isn’t going to go back there. I want to enjoy it every day.” You’ll probably find this difficult to...
read moreExperimenting with intensive potato planting
Danny has been frantically busy for weeks now. So he swapped cooking for seven nights running (simple quick food) if I finished off his potato border and planted the spuds. As you know I’ve started practicing biodynamic principles in the garden this year. I’m hoping for an increased harvest and a healthier garden all round. I read what John Soper had to say about potatoes in his book Bio-dynamic Gardening –lots of good advice but he didn’t give spacings. So I consulted my gardening bible Joy Larkom’s Grow Your Own...
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