Flowers 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...
read moreThe Spork™: a review
“Every year you need to lightly fork over the herbaceous borders in spring. This loosens the soil and gives the plants a better chance to soak up any nutrients.” My mum explained 18 years ago. I had just moved into the cottage and she had come to stay to help me the garden. It was more of a field with long thin borders down the sides. There were infestations of ground elder on one side and a lot of buttercups on the other. I only had one trowel and one hand fork and as far as I remember we took turns to use the fork as it was far more...
read morePropagating fruit bushes by mistake
Last year I used the prunings from my gooseberry and currant bushes as pea sticks for my overwintering crop of peas. Those six inch pea shoots were guzzled over a matter of just a few days by mice during the freezing winter weather. The mice had everything going for them as the wooden mouse traps froze too! This spring when I pulled away the cloche half of the ‘pea sticks’ had rooted. I had no idea that fruit bushes germinate so easily. All I did was push them into the soil around the peas. The only problem is that I’m not sure...
read moreKale buds, cabbage buds and Lucky (our dehydrator)
I had no idea that you could eat kale buds until Margaret Thorsom who writes this blog alerted me to the fact on a comment on my latest purple sprouting broccoli post. They are absolutely delicious and we are mixing them with our PSB. And Margaret Thorsom’s blog is pretty good too – she is a weaver and crafter and her husband is a vegetable farmer using hoop houses. I’d love a hoop house – they are really nifty. I’d also like to make rag rugs in the future when normal energy returns. Yesterday I spotted that a lot of the cabbages...
read moreStore cupboard recipes: spaghetti and veal meatballs in a light tomato sauce
I had a yearning for spaghetti and meatballs yesterday. I have no idea why as I don’t think that I’ve ever eaten this dish in my life but somehow the combination appealed. I spent a morning in the kitchen creating the sauce. My challenge was to use as many dehydrated ingredients as possible and some of our home bottled/canned tomatoes from the autumn. Incidentally these are delicious and I will be making much more this year. The meat wasn’t dehydrated – I haven’t tried doing meat yet – but I had found and defrosted some...
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