The Cottage Garden Farmer

Spontaneous Wildflower Meadow

2011-08-20T19:47:00.000+02:00

It's not much but it's ours! The new Community Garden for our village is set to get the green light any time now, and although not a sod has yet been turned, and the Lottery Award is still sitting in the bank, it's already gone from grass, nettles and docks,

to this

all by itself!

Well almost by itself. Jackie and Jeremy across the road are having a new extension on their house and during the work they helpfully offered to donate a skipful of topsoil to the community garden rather than sending it to landfill. This was earlier in the year, and since we weren't allowed to start work it just sat there doing nothing. But then as the weather warmed up it just burst into life. Obviously there are lots of the usual suspects, Fat Hen, thistles and so on, and I suspect some locals may think it's a big patch of weeds but to my eye it's an impromtu exhibition of what nature can do with so little help from us, and until we can get going with the garden proper, it's just a lovely thing.

Poppy seeds are well known to lie dormant in the ground for very many years, springing into life only when the earth is disturbed and they are brought to the surface for some reason. Hence the famous poppy fields of France after the battlefields of WW1. However on closer examination I found all kinds of other interesting things, presumably seeds from whatever had been growing in Jacky and Jeremy's garden!

calendula and sunflowers

evening primroses

more poppies than you can count

this tasselly grass don't know what it is

this looks like fennel or dill

and I think this is a tomatillo, though I'm not sure.

lots of brassicas, including some fledgling brocolli

but it won't last long with these visitors chomping away .- it's a wildlife garden after all!!

Gonna Eat a Lot of Peaches...

2011-08-08T12:03:00.000+02:00

Millions of peaches, peaches for me, or so it says in the song, and although I can't lay claim to millions,relatively speaking, I do have more peaches than I could normally dream of producing. I've never seen so many peaches on my peach tree. Normally we're lucky to get half a dozen, and then they rarely ripen properly. Now I know there are lots of lucky people out there who live in places where you can pick peaches by the bucketful every year, and think nothing of it. Not so here in England. We can do that with apples, pears, plums and many other fruits, but the problem we have here is that peaches flower very early in the spring, and unless you are obsessional about watching the weather forecast and hurtle off off down the garden in the dark with a a sheet of horticultural fleece if a cold night threatens, and then remember pollinating insects are also few and far between in early spring so you have to rush back down the garden next morning to uncover them and possibly also help pollination with a little paint brush if you can, it's certainly not a plant and forget it type of crop.

But this year we had a really lovely warm spell in early spring, which caused all kinds of odd things to happen in the garden, but the happiest outcome has been my wonderful crop of peaches. I did absolutely nothing to help them this year, no fleece, no paintbrush, but nature has rewarded me with these. I must have had this tree for fifteen years, I even dug it up and brought it with me when I moved here, so I'm extra pleased that it's done so well in the year we're moving away. They're a bit small, some are a bit pitted and knobbly, and compared with the perfect giant blemish free specimens imported from the meditteranean and the USA they may seem rather unimpressive, but they are juicy and delicious, and all the more treasured for being so long arriving.

Here's the Millions of Peaches song, I never realised how many famous paintings feature peaches either!

Monty Don's Trousers

2011-07-07T15:16:00.001+02:00

We were lucky enough to be given tickets for the preview day of the Hamptons Court Palace Flower Show,and got to see the BBC filming for their coverage later this week. Here's Monty Don and Joe Swift getting ready for a cosy chat.

Monty Don's trousers are an endless source of fascination for me. He always seems to be wearing the same ones. Doubtless organic fairly traded cotton, the creased blue suit has become a kind of uniform, underpinned when demonstrating work in the garden by elastic braces of the kind my grandad used to wear, I notice the braces come off for interviews. Time was, a man taking off his trouser braces in public would be time to make yourself scarce, but Monty doesn't strike me as a fisticuffs type. But I do wonder if he has a huge gothic wardrobe with a line of sinsisterly identical organic blue suits stretching off into the distance... Or maybe it's always the same one, I'm sure I could detect a hole in the knee of one leg...

Anyway, we had to wait for The Organic Monty to finish his interview in the RHS Grow Your Own garden before we could go in, so we were forced to partake of refreshments while we waited. I know, it's a tough job but someone's got to do it. It was well worth the wait though, this was the best part of the show for me, far more than the usual pretend rustic allotment display that you tend to get at shows, this was a really cutting edge grow to eat collection of displays. Herbs, fruits, nuts, edible flowers, there was even a mini vineyard interplanted with edible wild flowers, and olive groves which were quite lovely. The theme of the garden is that everything displayed is edible, so I learned a lot more about what a huge variety of plants are in fact edible as well as ornamental. Including my bete noir, cow parsley, see below.

The Garlic Farm won the award for best exhibit in this section with their gorgeous Garlic Plaiters Cottage, featuring together with lots of garlic of course, large quantities of cow parsley, It was a lovely day, far hotter than I had expected, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.The best day, weather wise of the week I suspect. We also had the honour of being amongst the peasants to be swept aside at one point by a flurry of suits and uniforms ushering the Duchess of Cornwall around, I wonder that poor old Camilla got to see anything much from inside the battalion of escorts, she'd need to be eight feet tall.

The show gardens were all interesting, with the quest to be different in the concept gardens veering off into the frankly weird, but I was amazed to see that the brilliant garden by Chris Beardshaw, the Stockman's Retreat, was only awarded a silver gilt when it was to my mind the best garden in the show, not just because it was beautiful but it was about gardening and practical skills, and certainly one of the few show gardens bearing much resemblance to reality. Ideas, and concepts are great, but unless you're a millionaire you need practical skills to bring your ideas to life, and to avoid having a huge disconnect between the idea and the reality which I often feel is where show gardens can fall down.

Although I am prepared to suspend disbelief when viewing show gardens, I was nevertheless disappointed with the upside down garden that I had seen previewed on TV, Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky - sounded good and looked great on tv, but in realityit was just too much scaffolding and didn't work at all for me. And The World Vision garden for example was lovely to look at but the gardener in me couldn't help wondering how on earth you'd get a lawn mower into the bowl of grass apparently floating on water!

And lastly I must say I was staggered at the amount of Cow Parsley on show, or Anthriscus sylvestris as I must now learn to call it. . You can even buy a cultivated form from the RHS Anthriscus sylvestris var Ravenswing, for £7.99 no less. Having spent years strimming it away in the wild areas under the trees (or rather David and James have), I now find that it's fashionable Plant of the Moment! I've always thought that clouds of cow parsley do look lovely in the hegerows in spring, but not in my garden, now I'm thinking maybe I could leave them all and be the height of fashion!

Coverage of the 2011 Hampton Court Palace Flower Show is on BBC2 on Thursday 7th July 8 - 9pm and Friday 8th July 7 - 8pm

Lettuce Lawn

2011-06-24T09:33:00.000+02:00

I've heard of a chamomile lawn, indeed I've tried to grow one several times, with limited success it has to be said, but how about a lettuce lawn? This bit of grass is where the Hubbard table chickens lived, and where they consumed many bolted lettuces, and that's possibly the reason for this patch of Green Salad Bown growing in the middle of the grass. Come to think of it, the bolted lettuces were overgrown, but I doubt whether many had had chance to set seed, so maybe it just blew in from the veg patch. I bet I couldn't grow lettuce here if I tried.

It's growing really well though, so as I said before, if things just come up I like to leave them, extra pickings of salad for free. Watch out for Mr Wilkinson coming along on his lawn mower though!

Unexpected Item In The Potting Area

2011-06-15T17:28:00.000+02:00

If you share the rather relaxed attitude to the garden that I have, you can often come across unexpected lovely, and sometimes not so lovely things, small pleasures which tidier gardens may miss out on.

There are weeds. I know there are weeds.

In fact there are quite a lot of "arisings" which have not yet made their way to the "unplaisance". But lots of things come up in the garden which can turn out to have beneficial effects. Now I'm obviously not talking about horrors like Couch Grass and Bindweed here, and I do my gardeners best to keep such things at bay, but I do allow many things to self seed, and if I like the look of them when they grow I just leave them. Even if it looks to someone else like I have just failed to weed properly.

So the little bit of apple mint by the strawberry bed has turned into a bit of a hedge, and likewisethe odd comfrey plant in the path. But passing the apple mint yesterday on my way to the greenhouse, I noticed this eye catching chap

so I had a closer look, decided I didn't know what it was, and had to nip indoors and check it out online. Turns out it's a Scarlet Tiger Moth (Callimorpha dominula), -the scarlet bit's on the underside so you see it when it flies off - and it loves to feed on comfrey! So that's my bit for wildlife, and a good excuse for leaving the comfrey growing in the path. Bees also love comfrey flowers, so it's useful for the "June gap" when early flowers are over and high summer ones not yet out.

So anyway,when I eventually got to the greenhouse, the first seed tray I lifted revealed this somewhat warty gentleman having a nice after lunch siesta. We seem to have a healthy population of frogs and toads, despite the presence of grass snakes, I guess it's all a question of balance. One thing we don't have a major problem with is slugs though, this rather fat toad looks as though he's been enjoying regular slug banquets.

It was all he could manage to do to waddle off (toads tend to walk rather than hop like frogs) in a huff to find a quieter spot where no one would come along poking about with trowels and generally ruining the ambiance of the restaurant.

Rhubarb, The Colonel Gaddafi of the Allotment

2011-06-07T19:51:00.000+02:00

Well rhubarb time seems to be drawing to a close. Thank heavens. It (the rhubarb patch) never seems to get any smaller, though goodness knows I've done my best - I've given lots away, - visitors are seen staggering off down the lane, two bowed legs tottering along beneath the mountain of red stems and green leaves. I've even dug some up in an effort to reduce the Occupied Area, but rhubarb clings to its power base in the allotment with a tenacity reminiscent of a middle eastern despot. I'm expecting Tony Blair to be popping round any time now.

And worse still, much to Mr Wilkinson's consternation, Rhubarb Crumble is off the menu as I'm still on the diet. Sort of. So casting around for ways in which I could usefully put this earliest of the year's fruit crop on the menu, I came upon Jamie's idea of Rhubarb Bellinis which I rather fancy.

Or possibly this reasonably healthy idea from one of my favourite cooking blogs Smitten Kitchen

neither are stricly in the diet regime though....Ah well, the things one has to endure for International Diplomacy.

It's been a while....

2011-06-05T13:46:00.002+02:00

I can't believe how long it is since I last posted. Shameful. But you'll be relieved to know that the weeds in the veg garden are as prolific as ever, so plus ca change, as they say....

The lack of rainfall here has meant a great deal of time moving the hosepipe around the garden just to stop things dying of thirst. And the blog isn't the only thing I've neglected either - the tomato plants have only just gone out,

and other tender things like peppers and aubergines are still in pots!

Also shameful. So now that I've given myself a good ticking off, I can at least say that the long border is looking pretty good.

The roses are just coming out,and the peonies and delphiniums are inadequately staked but really lovely for all that, albeit with a slightly inebriated Saturday night at 2am sway.

These are my favourite kinds of plants, early summer cottage garden reliables - a bit blowsy for some but perfect for me!

Life in the chicken run is pretty quiet at the moment. My two new Goldtops have gone broody already, which is just what I hoped for, and they are installed in two separate runs with six each of Lavender Auracana, and Rhode Island Red eggs to sit on. In fact three of the Lavender Auracanas have hatched this morning.

Not a very good picture I'm afraid, but you have to be a bit quick around grumpy mother hens with new chicks. But then I suppose I'd be a bit grumpy if I'd been sitting on my own in a box for three weeks....

The three Cuckoo Marans that I hatched in the incubator earlier in the year are now in the run, but I have the suspicion that two of them are cockerels. It's too early to tell definitively, but it looks like at least one roast dinner in prospect! We will have to see.

One of the reasons for my lack of posting recently is we've been busy looking around at houses, as we are thinking of moving to somewhere with a bit more land, not just so that I can grow more weeds, though no doubt I will, but so that I can keep some livestock. I've had quite a bit of experience now with chickens, ducks, and bees, but as I said to the estate agents, I'd like to branch out into something without wings. Like say, pigs, or sheep. Or a lovely Jersey cow. I think I'm probably getting carried away to smallholding heaven - pigs might fly, oh no not wings again.....

Two New Recruits

2011-04-24T12:17:00.000+02:00

I picked up these two new recruits to my increasingly fortress like hen run the other day. I think I'll call it the Henitentiary.

Anyway, these two are what's known as Goldtops. They are a cross produced by a white silkie cockerel and a light sussex hen. They really are a lovely golden colour, and are very pretty. I bought them because I was looking for a hen who might go broody fairly easily and hatch out some chicks for me, as I've found the trio of Marans chicksI've been looking after to be quite a lot of trouble, though I'm sure they'll be worth the effort in the end. At the moment the chicks are in the garden during the day, and brought back into the house in their large cardboard carton overnight. They will go outside permanently as soon as they are fully feathered, probably in about a week from now.

My Goldtops came from my new friend Niall Jones who has a lovely smallholding down near Marlborough, not too far from here, where he raises chickens, pigs, sheep and other lovely stuff, on a smallholder scale. What he doesn't need for himself he sells to help support the smallholding. More or less what I'd like to do if I had the space.....

When released from the Henitentiary, the birds have been having a great time sifting through this old compost heap, that I dug out last week. The remaining bits and bobs are just full of bugs and worms, and the chickens love it. I think I will let them clear the area of any pests and then maybe plant it up with some maincrop potatoes. It should be a lovely fertile area.

Raising Your Own Chicks

2011-04-13T16:26:00.000+02:00

With all the attention I've been giving to the Robin family, the arrival of these three little chaps, or rather chapesses, let's hope, has gone fairly unremarked. They're about three weeks old now, and looking a bit less adorable than they did when they arrived, as they are starting to lose all their soft down and grow proper feathers, which makes them look a bit tatty for a week or two. I did take a pic of them at their downy best..

- note I gave them a pretend Mum as they were hatched in the incubator so didn't have a proper mum. I kept them under a heat lamp for the first week or so, but they seem fine in a large cardboard box by the Aga now, where they will stay until they are fully feathered, hopefully at about five weeks or so. Then they can go outside and start exploring the big wide world.

Sadly I only managed to deliver three of the six eggs I had, - I always find incubators more problematic than a broody hen, - there was nothing wrong with the eggs I had, two of the three had died in shell and one had failed to develop. Hopefully the next lot I do I will have a broody for, and won't have the same problems. But for now I have three lovely English Cuckoo Maran chicks, let's hope they're hens not cockerels.

What with the chicks, and the Robincam it's just babies. babies, babies round here these days....

Birth Announcement

2011-04-06T16:59:00.001+02:00

Mr and Mrs Robin are pleased to announce the birth of several of the really ugliest little scraps you can imagine today, around lunch time, weight I imagine about half a nanogram.
I expect Mother loves them though! Click on the live link on the right of the page to see what's happening.

Young Farmers New Recruit

2011-04-06T10:25:00.000+02:00

Thought I'd just post a picture of the youngest prospective recruit to the West Country Young Farmers - this is our grandson Brown with his two new friends. As you can see he's already got the green wellies, and the tractor - just needs a few acres now (bit like his Granny Kathy...)

Still Sitting Here.....

2011-04-02T12:59:00.000+02:00

You know what it's like at the end of a pregnancy, waiting and waiting, gets a bit boring just sitting around. I feel for Mrs Robin, not even a Hello magazine to flick through, though she does still get out and about a bit each day. My daughter says she saw Mr Robin pop in with a snack for her, but I missed that. Nice to know he's an attentive partner though.

With a somewhat vague 10 -14 day sitting period, the young robins' EDA should be somewhere from Monday onwards, so do check back when you can to see how things are going in the delivery room. I feel a bit like one of those over enthusiastic 70s hippy dads with a video camera, but in this case I feel assured that the expectant mother isn't being distracted in any way by the presence of the camera. I hardly dare say it, as it will surely bring down Sod's Law down on my head with a vengeance, but the video link seems to be working well now and is pretty stable most of the time. There's a box at the top right of the page with a play button that should link live to the nestbox camera. If you find it's saying "off air" it probably means my network adaptor has gone offline, but I try to keep an eye on it and reset when necessary.

My New Swedish Garden Assistant

2011-03-30T18:53:00.001+02:00

Allow me to introduce Johanna, my new Hot Composter from Sweden.

Not tall blonde and willowy, but rather short dumpy and green, the Green Johanna is my new compost bin. She represents the latest enclosed, and therefore rat proof, composting system. Rat proof is quite important to me as I live near the Cotswold water park it doesn't take much to encourage Mr and Mrs Ratty and their many offspring to make a holiday home in the compost heap. I do quite a bit of composting, indeed I am a trained, card carrying Compost Ambassador for the local council, and find the subject fascinating, (I know, I never thought I'd hear myself say that either).

As a friend of mine said the other day, rats are the elephant in the room in composting circles. Everyone is being encourged these days to compost their household waste, but no one likes to mention the R word in polite society in case it might put newcomers off. Which of course it would. Who wants to let their children play in the garden which is also home to a nest of rats? Obviously, no one. I've heard no end of ways you are supposed to "discourage" rats from your compost - kicking the bin everytime you walk past is the favourite - I heard it on Gardeners Question Time again recently. Take it from me it's a waste of time. Not putting cooked food waste in the compost is another, - but I've even had rats in compost made entirely from garden waste, it's such a warm cosy place to make a nest.

And lest people think I'm being excessive about it, remember that rats carry disease. People still die, albeit not in large numbers any more, from Weil's Disease, which is a kind of leptospirosis caught from contact with animal, notably rats', urine. And so I have tended to be wary of encouraging people to have garden compost containers other than enclosed wormeries, until now.

The Green Johanna could be the answer. I've had her for a few weeks now and she's doing a good job. She arrives in bits, and is quite simple to put together. The main difference is that the bottom is not open to the ground as most compost containers are, but has small holes in it, to allow for the entry of worms, which are so necessary to the composting process, but are too small for rats to gain entry. The lid screws on quite firmly and the access doors at the bottom fit quite snugly and can even be screwed down for extra rat proofing. And because it's enclosed you can put all your household waste , including meat, fish and bones into it quite safely. You can even buy a winter jacket for Johanna so that she works faster in the cold weather.

Well that's the good news, the bad news is that price -see the north american site and even the European one . But since good old Wiltshire council are offering them at a subsidised price of £24, I thought it worth a try, and so far I'm quite glad I did. If you live in the UK you may find your local council running a similar scheme.

It occured to me though, as I was assembling Johanna, that I could probably achieve a similar kind of enclosed decomposition in one of these second hand plastic drums that I bought last year to use as water butts. If I just drilled some holes in the bottom? Might give that a try too.

Robincam off air

2011-03-28T12:31:00.000+02:00

Sorry to everyone who's tried to tune into Robincam and found it offline or not working. I don't know why it won't work anymore, I'm trying to fix it, but frankly I'm losing the will to live there's not all that much to see at the moment. I will upload videos as soon as there's any hatch activity if I can't get the live feed to work. This computer stuff takes us far too much valuable garden time especially at this time of year. Must get my tomato seeds sown or I'll have no crop this year!

Video from this morning, still sitting here.........

Robin Cam Goes Live

2011-03-25T19:12:00.000+01:00

I think I've managed to work out how to broadcast the bird box camera live to the blog. Amazing! I don't know how feasible it will be to have this on all the time, but I'll see how it goes. The broadband service is terrible where I live, so I may have to switch it off, for bandwidth reasons, but I thought you might like to have a look at how Mrs Robin's getting on.

The box should be at the top of the page on the right hand side.

A Plague On Both Your Houses

2011-03-23T14:06:00.000+01:00

Mr Wilkinson and I take our dose of culture once or twice a year at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford upon Avon. Stratford's only about an hour or so's drive from here, so we've taken advantage of the close proximity for all the years we've lived here. Most of the productions we've seen have been excellent, as you would expect. Though some, to paraphrase Orwell, are more excellent than others. Mr Wilkinson has been known to nod off, and I've found myself drifting away during some of the less exciting moments.

This was the first production we'd been to in the new RSC theatre which has been undergoing refurbishment for what seems like aeons, and we had got quite used to going to the other place, down the road a bit. So it was nice to get back into the proper theatre, though I'm a bit confused as to what took so long and cost so many gazillions of pounds. Anyway, not to carp, it's all very nice.

But yesterday's visit to see Romeo and Juliet, surely the play everyone thinks they know inside out, was quite stunning. Whether you've seen a million Shakespeare productions, or never seen one at all I would thouroughly recommend it. It's very much an all action production, with fire, noise, explosions and violence aplenty, enough to keep the least Shakespeare oriented teenager transfixed, and great comedic elements supplied mostly by the nurse, played brilliantly by Noma Dumezwen, and most especially by the hilarious and somewhat pornographic Mercutio played with a strong Northern Irish accent by Jonjo O'Neill (that's the actor not the race horse trainer). I loved it.

This is the trailer, just to give you an idea.

If you get a chance to go, don't miss it, you'll love it too.

Birdbox update

2011-03-23T10:24:00.001+01:00

I've invested in some of this for my new garden residents

Who knew you could get gourmet food for robins? Mr Wilkinson is complaining that they get better food than he does. (I'm on a diet, and when I'm on a diet, he's on a diet)

I don't know how many eggs robins normally lay, but as you can see she is proceeding apace. But then why wouldn't she - comfortable modern house in a good area, and more worms and peanuts than you can shake a stick at, so no worries about the kids going hungry.

She only visits the nest once a day though at the moment. She's there in the mornings when she lays an egg, and then she's off until the next day. So we will have to see when she thinks she has enough eggs to start sitting. I'm finding all this fascinating, and can't wait to check in the mornings to see what's happening. So exciting.

Marital Bliss and Harmony

2011-03-21T09:47:00.000+01:00

Mr Wilkinson and I inhabit for the most part, a pink fluffy cloud of matrimonial bliss and harmony, but occasionally something comes up on which we hold, lets say, a divergence of views. One such is the matter of garden Edges. Not Hedges, edges.

This is how the garden looks when the grass is mown, the border weeded and the edges cut..

This is how it looks before..

So there is no doubt that cutting a nice defined edge really shows off the border, and the lawn. The point of contention is whether the "edge" is in fact the edge of the lawn (and therefore the responsibility of the Lawn Cutting Operative - the said Mr Wilkinson) or whether it's the edge of the border and consequently the job of the Border Patrol - me. There is no doubt in my mind that even our rather weedy old lawn is enhanced by the clear definition of the edge, but Mr Wilkinson is adamant. Doing the edges would entail him descending from the mower and wielding a tool, not within his remit. So in the end, for the sake of marital harmony I do the edges, and it does make all the difference, don't you agree?

First Bird Box Movie

2011-03-20T12:55:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post today, to test out my first birdbox movie. Go on, press play -

I know, I apologize that although it's called a movie, there isn't actually any movement in it. I was thrilled last week when a pair of robins started building a nest in my camera bird box. And for the last few days Mrs Robin (or possibly Mr and Mrs Robin, since I can't tell them apart) has been in and out of the nest all week adjusting the grass and moss to her satisfaction, and has laid the first egg this morning, since when she appears to have cleared off. Temporarily, I hope. Probably stocking up on worms and peanuts, for the forthcoming brooding scenario, during which she'll get precious little of anything I imagine.

If the scheme is the same as it is with chickens, and I imagine this applies to all birds, she first makes the nest, but doesn't sit on the eggs until she has laid as many as she considers make up a decent family, so we should see one extra egg a day until she decides to sit. This is obviously so that all the eggs hatch at more or less the same time.

I haven't worked out how to stream live video to the blog yet or indeed if this is even feasible, so this is just a quick test video to see how it looks. There doesn't appear to be any sound either I notice. I will continue to update as things proceed. I hope this is viewable to everyone, please let me know if it isn't.

Hopefully I'll have more action in my later movies, this is after all, my directorial debut.

A Small Scale Hatchery

2011-03-09T17:57:00.000+01:00

As my stock of garden poultry was somewhat depleted last year (don't mention the fox) I thought I would have a go at raising some of my own chicks this year. I've done this before and it's always an exciting thing to do, although it can be disappointing and a bit sad if all does not go well. I would very much prefer to use the services of a broody hen, who would happily sit on the eggs for three weeks, and then look after the chicks until they were big enough to manage on their own, but since I don't have one, the incubator is the next best thing.
Cleanliness is definitely next to godliness with incubators - it's amazing to me that hens produce healthy hearty broods of chicks in general farmyardy unsanitariness, whereas if you tried to replicate that in an incubator you would almost certainly fail dismally. Everything has to be sanitized properly before you start. I use Brinsea Incubator disinfectant specially made for the purpose, and I don't recommend using anything else. Switch the incubator on at least a day before you need it, so that it can get up to an even temperature. My Brinsea Octagon has a rocking cradle integrated into it, which is not to rock the embyos to sleep or anything, but to ensure that the eggs are turned regularly which is essential to their development. (Another job the broody hen does on her own).

So that's the incubator. Now you need some eggs. Lots of people who keep the older breeds of chicken will sell hatching eggs in the spring. Unless you're seriously into breeding you probably won't want to keep your own cockerel so it's easier to buy fertile eggs when you want them. Ebay is a good place to look and I've had some good eggs via ebay in the past.

This time I was looking for some good birds that would provide me with a supply of lovely brown eggs, and possibly the odd cockerel for the pot, and having looked on the Over the Gate country forum, I found a nice lady called Sue who keeps a lovely strain of English Cuckoo Marans, (as opposed to the French Marans, which can be discerned by their tendency to have hairy legs. Well they're feathery legs really but who can resist a joke about the french). If the eggs are clean, and these were, you can put them straight into the incubator. If they arrive in the post, as mine did, you need to allow them to rest in a cool, but not cold room for 24 hours, before setting them. Some people like to dip them in the sanitizer, and some people don't. I dipped mine breifly and dried them carefully before setting them in the incubator

.
All that I have to do now is to check on the eggs each day, to see that the temperature and humidity levels are correct, and keep my fingers crossed for three weeks time when there should be a patter of tiny feet, or a tapping of tiny beaks, or something. I've had failures before though with the incubator,and I would feel a lot more confident with a broody, so I'm just keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best.

Thanks for everyone who wished us well for the Community Garden Open Day. I'm pleased to say it went very well and we are working towards getting the project launched in the coming months. Updates to follow.

Just The Two Of Us

2011-03-03T18:17:00.001+01:00

I don't want to bore everyone with local politics, but people who know me know that I've tried before to set up a local food group/allotment/gardening group in my village, with, it has to be said, less than 100% success. However, I'm very pleased to say that there has been a revival of interest locally so a couple of us are organising an Open Morning this Saturday in the village hall in Latton. The village is lucky that the landowner, the Co-operative Group, have offered the use of some of their land in the middle of the village for community use, and if we can just get enough support, I'm hoping we can maybe set up a Community Orchard, which once planted will be low maintenance, and possibly other things, like a seating area, and a couple of veg growing beds, not to mention things like composting, a wildlife area beekeeping, childrens growing area, preserving, and competitions, which could all follow on from this.

But Latton is a tiny village, and most people who live here commute to other places to work. And they often can't spare much time to devote to projects like this, - I'm hoping on Saturday we'll be able to persuade them otherwise. This is the field we may be able to use a bit of..

We have to make a reasonable compromise between what everyone wants including of course the landowners, who have said they don't really want to see an untidy allotment style arrangement with it's attendant sheds and plastic bins and so on, (the site is in the middle of the village) but something more attractive to the eye, and I think an orchard, and a seating area with a few shrubs, would be a great start. And before you allotment holders all start to take umbrage, let me say that I love looking round allotments and rarely if ever find them an eyesore, but I have to bow to other views here!

The Parish council are fully in support of the idea, and I've had loads of informative stuff sent to me by all kinds of organisations like Garden Organic, and Wiltshire Wildlife, and the Federation of City Farms and Gardens, to use at the open morning. But we will need funds the get the thing off the ground which means someone to organize paperwork/applications for funding/committee work etc and look after the money. Plus people to dig holes in the ground, and do all sorts of practical stuff. So our current "committee" which is in fact just me and Anne, will have to be expanded quite a bit if things are to proceed.

So I'm giving this my best shot, everyone in the village has had a newsletter with details, signs have gone up, and people are starting to avoid me in the street in case I start harping on about the Open Morning, so it's really up to local people to decide if this is something they would like to see in the village, and whether they will be up for it, or not. If anyone's passing Latton on Saturday morning we're providing coffee and biscuits, so do drop in. I so hope it won't be just the two of us.

Oops I did it again

2011-02-24T17:36:00.000+01:00

Last year when digging over a neglected part of the plot I found I had inadvertently left some parsnips in the ground and they had grown to humungous proportions - well, while digging over a neglected part of the plot this year, I expect you can guess the rest.....

Some people just never learn, here's a picture of one of them next to my size sevens for comparision. Not many of those to the pound, as they say. Amazingly, they're not tough and woody as I would have imagined, and although they're not as sweet as they might be, roasted in the oven and glazed with a bit of honey or maple syrup and they're still good to eat. That's the parsnips, not the wellies.

Under these two old shower screens is where I came across them, while preparing a section for some early salad sowings in a week or two. I thought I could put them to good use as lights for a cold frame type thing. But I didn't make allowance for the fact that they weigh a ton, (probably some sort of safety glass I expect) and are not really ideal. They'll help dry and warm up the ground a bit though, ready for the seed to go in next month, and then I think they will have to go to the tip or be Freecycled.

Wild Thing, You Make My Heart Sing

2011-02-16T17:48:00.000+01:00

...well not so much Wild Thing as Wild Bird, - (there are quite a few "Wild Things" I could manage without, - foxes, grey squirrels, and rats for example), but I've really been enjoying the wild birds just lately on my new bird table. We seem to be getting through peanuts at a rate of knots at the moment.

Birds are said to begin looking for nesting places on St Valentine's Day, February 14th, though this somewhat arbitrary date will obviously vary with the weather, and the ones in my garden still haven't made any use yet of my other Christmas present, the webcam equipped nesting box. Even though I've moved it to a more secluded position in the midst of a clematis alpina, (var Francis Rivis, not that I expect them to appreciate the variety), but guys, just use it please - it's rent free. I've even taken the front off now to encourage a wider variety of birds to consider this desirable residence and every morning when I come down I anxiously check the tv screen, and am disappointed to find no one in there. David says I must be more patient. But patience never was my strong point.

And just quickly on the subject of things that make your heart sing,

it's hard not to be thrilled by the smallest flowers in February, a few little species crocus, like these crocus thomasinianus, a favourite of my son's.

and even the otherwise rather ordinary flowers of winter jasmine are always such a joy simply because they're there in February.

And snowdrops always make a good show in this shady graveyard area under deciduous trees, (that's pet's graveyard I hasten to add, nothing more sinister..)

Germination Test Results

2011-02-04T16:47:00.001+01:00

Just a quick note to say that most of my test germinations have proved to be fully viable. It took just a few days sitting in a warmish spot in the kitchen, to produce quite a forest of sprouting.

Failures have been, quite predictably Parsnips, which are well know for having a short shelf life, some ancient seeds I've had lurking in the bottom of the box for simply aeons, and rather more suprisingly some chillies and aubergines.

I think these latter two may be looking for warmer temperatures/ longer germination period, so I will give them a bit longer before consigning to the bin. Just goes to show though, most seeds are viable for far longer than one season, these ornamental gourd seeds for example are dated best before 2008 and still have at least 50% viability !

So whilst I wouldn't advise keeping them longer than two or three seasons, it's always worth checking before binning.

January Gardening

2011-01-30T10:51:00.000+01:00

I've been busy doing "January Gardening". That is, not bestirring myself to go out into the actual garden, (brrrr!) but flicking through seed catalogues, and thinking what I would be doing if only it wasn't so cold and mudddy out there. What a wimp I hear you say, a real gardener would be out there come what may. I bet Toby and Carol aren't sitting by the aga nursing a cup of tea. And to be fair, on the odd decent day, I do go out and flail around a bit. Today I managed a quick sprint down to the greenhouse, where I made a temporary repair to a broken pane of glass with some plastic and sellotape, which helped raise the temperature in there to something slightly less arctic. I cleared off the propagating bench, last year's new construction, turned on the power, and put a few seeds in a pot. So a start has been made.

Most of the rest of the day has involved hunting high and low for the plastic box I keep my seeds in, and which I was beginning to think I'd thrown out by accident, which would have been disastrous, since like many gardeners I keep seeds for several years, and also save some of my own. This helps to keep costs down,- most seed packets contain many more seeds than you will use in the course of one season, and with certain exceptions, seeds remain perfectly viable for several years. Following a suggestion on ferris' blog, I have made some trial indoor sowings, particularly those that I have some doubts about, either because they are more than two years old, or are self saved.

I started with this kind of thing, bits of damp kitchen towel, a label, and cling film to cover, and left them by the aga to see whether they would sprout

and rapidly realised that I could get through a lot more if I just numbered the seed packets

and the bits of kitchen towel (I do have rather a lot of old half used seed packets). I won't be using the seeds as it's far too early in the year for most of them, but I will know which ones are viable and which will have to be replaced, which should save me time and effort later on.

And how is it by the way, that you can search the shed for something three times, and it's definitely not there. And then, suddenly on the fourth search - there it is. It was there all the time, and you just didn't see it. Does this happen to anyone else or is it just me? I think strange forces are at work in my shed!

In case anyone is looking for suggestions, these are the veg seeds I've done best with in recent years.

Perpetual spinach - excellent crop. Still standing in the garden now even after all the snow. I no longer bother with the summer spinach except as baby leaf for salad. Rainbow or Rhubarb Chard is also good, but has not weathered the winter in my garden.

Kale Redbor. This is also still providing some pickings, and has withstood the winter along with Cavolo Nero.

Garlic Music. This variety always does well for me.

Sweet Corn Lark. This is an F1 hybrid, so you can't save seed, but it's always quick to grow and crops well in my garden.

Onion Kelsae. I only did well with these because my brotherwho is a champion onion grower grows them from seed and gives me the plants. They were whoppers though.

Runner Bean Wisley Magic. Grew this for the first time last year, and will grow it again. Lovely flavour, not stringy.

Tomatoes, many and varied. It was a great year for tomatoes, all my heritage varieties did well, as well as the modern variety Sungold, which never fails and tastes lovely. If you only grow one I'd suggest this.

Failures
Broad Bean, Masterpiece Longpod, made poor plants, wouldn't bother again. Will go back to Bunyards Exhibition this year which has done well in the past for me.
Late crop sweet corn, can't remember the name, was a waste of time, I'll stick to Lark this year.
Brussels Sprouts. I never grow decent sprouts here in Wiltshire, even though I had good plants, they mostly didn't come to much. Nothing wrong with the variety, Trafalgar, it's just me.

No Dig No Weed Gardening - Garlic

2011-01-24T17:47:00.000+01:00

Gardening without digging and weeding sounds a bit unlikely. A bit like smoking without inhaling, you wonder what else there is? But with a little planning you can make your gardening life easier, avoiding that back breaking digging and tedious weeding. I'm all in favour of spending less garden time digging and weeding and more in the deck chair. If I had a deck chair that is.

We use enough garlic around here to keep Christopher Lee cowering in a corner, so really, I should plant it in late Autumn. More or less as soon as you've gathered one year's crop, you can decide which cloves will make good seed garlic for next year, and get them in as soon as you have a spare space. Always pick the fattest cloves for replanting, and with a mixture of natural selection and gardener's selection, you will improve your seed stock year on year, eventually producing almost your own variety, perfectly suited to your own soil and your particular climate. You can do this with many crops of course, provided you don't use modern F1 hybrid seeds, which don't breed true, but with garlic it's particularly easy because the bit you eat also happens to be the bit you plant.

For such a mediterranean crop you'd think they would suffer in the average freezing cold wet English winter, but not a bit of it. They sit there in the ground all winter, putting down good roots, and then in the spring they happily shoot up, apparently none the worse.

But for the last two years, I find January arriving and the garlic is still not in the ground. Oh dear. Happily last year was a very good growing year, and my crop was still excellent, - if you don't get good results make sure that weeds are not the culprit spoiling your crop. Because it's a long season crop it's very easy to plant garlic and forget it, and before you know it the bed is full of weeds which are awkward and time consuming to get out, and if you don't get them out you will drastically reduce the crop. Ask me how I know.

Anyway, before any more of my garlic found its way into winey beef casseroles or ground onto crusty bread, I thought I'd take the opportunity afforded by a day or two of watery winter sun to plant out this year's crop.

They're very quick to plant if you already have established raised beds - just select a nice weed free area, lay out the cloves in rows using a bamboo cane as a guide - mine were about 6 inches apart, and about a foot between the rows, and when you're happy with the layout just go along the rows planting them with your trowel so that the top of the clove is just covered with soil Raised beds are best because you can work from the sides, - walking on the soil at this time of year compacts and damages its structure I don't dig my established beds at all any more, adding as much organic matter as I can during the year seems to keep it in good heart, and not treading on it with my size sevens in the winter helps maintain structure and drainage. If you're starting from scratch with a new garden, you will need to get rid of the nastier perennial weeds like ground elder first, but if you're thorough this is a one time dig.

Straight rows look nicer and make weeding easier, but I've reduced this job to a minimum here as the garlic bed is the first to receive the many offerings from the lawn mower in our garden. The garlic will be growing well by the time you start cutting the grass, so use the first lawn mowings to mulch the garlic bed, making sure you cover every inch of visible earth with the mowings. The grass gradually rots down and enriches the soil, smothering weed seedlings at the same time. Keep it topped up during the year and you'll be feeding your crop, enriching your soil, and saving yourself all that tedious weeding at the same time. Oh and if it turns out to be a humdinger of a summer it will also cut down on watering needs too.

Maybe this year I'll treat myself to a deck chair.

Seasonal Garden Visitors

2011-01-22T12:53:00.001+01:00

Having had such a brilliant year on the apple front, I find I still have more than enough supplies to keep the local blackbird population well fed through the winter months. It's vital to sort through your stash of apples during the cold months and remove any damaged or rotting fruit immediately - the well known saying about one bad apple spoiling the whole barrel is well known for a reason. Garden birds will be more than grateful for these at this time of the year. I find it's a good idea to put them in two or three different places in the garden as blackbirds can be very territorial and the strongest will chase away the weaker ones, but even the most dominant bird can only be in one place at a time, so others get to enjoy the bounty too.

I think of pheasants as mostly seed eaters, but this hen pheasant came into the garden this morning drawn in by the apple bonanza apparently.

But as I was standing at the kitchen sink yesterday, absent mindedly washing some dishes, I was astounded to see two, yes that's not one but two, foxes stroll along the fence line and cool as cucumbers, out onto the lawn directly in front of the window I was looking out of. Whilst foxes are common in urban gardens these days, it's very unusual to see them at such close quarters around here. Of course I was outraged at their audacity since I spend half my life trying to think of ways to outfox foxes, and after watching them for a minute, I opened the door and let Mo chase them off at high speed and in great excitement. Sadly I didn't have my camera to hand. I've never seen two foxes together before, certainly not six feet away from me, but having read on John Gray's blog Going Gently, that January is the month when foxes usually find mates, I wonder whether these two were a prospective breeding pair - they certainly seemed to have something other than safety on their minds anyway.

Bird Box Camera

2011-01-15T14:04:00.000+01:00

I'm worried that I'm turning into Bill Oddy.
It's not that I'm growing a beard, or even the somewhat more rounded shape I've assumed over the winter. No, it's the new bird box camera that David gave me for Christmas. It's from Handykam and you get a whole kit in a box, nest box, feeding station, tiny video camera and all the fixings so that you can watch the interior of the nest box on your kitchen tv. (After you've got your technical son in law to fix it up for you of course - thanks Brown!)

I'm was thinking that maybe we hadn't got it in quite the right place, as there seemed to be no activity for quite a few weeks, but then I noticed this (bear in mind that this is a photo of a tv screen)

Ok so it may not look all that exciting, (it's a bit of moss in case you can't tell) but it indicates that a bird has actually been in the box. Having a look round, possibly thinking of making a home here, and bringing in a bit of moss to try it out. What I really need now is the avian equivalent of Kirsty and Phil to point out to prospective residents all the advantages of living in this luxuriously appointed New Build complete with double glazing and level access to all local amenities (if you can fly) not to mention full cctv security arrangements. How could any bird resist?

All I need to do now is to work out how to get the video linked to the computer so I can have a live video link on the blog. And I'll need to work on my slightly annoying, over enthusiastic wildlife presenter skills too...
.

Making Order Out Of Chaos

2011-01-12T14:23:00.001+01:00

I wish I had greater self discipline.
If I had, my veg garden wouldn't look quite so bad as it does at the moment

because I would have spent a few days in the Autumn tidying up, and generally putting everything to bed for the winter, like a proper gardener.

Of course I do have the very best of intentions as the summer season draws to its end. But come September and I'm snowed under with the harvest of apples and tomatoes and so on that need to be dealt with, and then in November I start to think about Christmas, and then whoof! before you know it, it's December and I've lost all my inclination to go out there until here I am in January surveying the bleak prospect. Again.

Anyway I made a start today by having a good tidy up. One of the benefits of having designated beds rather than traditional rows is that although the ground was still frozen , you can sort things out without needing to walk on the growing areas very much at all, so that compaction and damage to the soil structure is kept to a minimum. So they're worth having if only for that. There are a few things still soldiering on, a row of perpetual spinach seems unaffected by the weather, but most of my brassicas, not usually great specimens in any case, are looking a bit past it. Some of the kale may be usable and some leeks, but I should really have dug them up before the snow. And of course, Jerusalem Artichokes, which are always around in January.

And that's about it really, so much for my plan of keeping us in salad greens during the winter! I should have grown my chicory in the greenhouse bed as all the outside plants have disappeared. Note for next year. But the makings of a large compost heap are coming together, and it's amazing how when the old bean sticks and general detritus are cleared away, it does start to look a bit more respectable.

One note I have made to myself for next year, is that I will try to reduce my use of plastic materials in the garden to zero or as close as I can get. Plastic is cheap but doesn't wear very well in the garden environment. Beside my composting pile I have a small dayglo heap consisting of the remains of some pea and bean netting , along with some bits of lurid green plastic which were once plant trays, all of which will have to go to landfill. So no more of that thanks.

Also I will try to make more use of my Compost Blocker, a natty little device that saves using pots at all, which you can buy from the Organic Gardening Catalogue or from Blackberry Lane and possibly make some more paper pots, which I have used with some success in previous years.

And finally now's a good time to go through your seed box and see what you've got leftover and what you need to order. Ferris over at Adventures in a Field reminded me that the best way to check whether your last year's seeds are still viable to to sprout a few indoors as a test. Much better than finding they don't come up and wasting valuable growing time getting fresh supplies.

And if you've been moaning about the weather at all here in the UK, (it's a national pastime) do take a quick look at Grannys blog from Queensland Australia, and think how lucky we actually are!

At Last, A Proper Gardening Programme!

2011-01-07T23:33:00.001+01:00

I've just finished watching the first of six programmes presened by Carol Klein - Life In A Cottage Garden, and for once, I feel I've actually watched someone doing some gardening, as opposed to someone walking across a film set and "presenting" it to me.

I have the feeling when I watch Gardeners World that immediately before the bit that I get to see, there were twenty three strapping lads getting everything ship shape, so that Toby and Alys can stride about showing me how hard they've been working. I know this because there is never any sign of a twig, let alone a weed, out of it's allotted place, no leaf blows unsupervised across the set, no cane, ball of string, no stray plant label ever falls drunkenly over to one side.

I like Toby Buckland well enough, and like most gardeners, I always watch Gardeners World, but it's rarely a piece of inspiration, unlike Carol's programme which just made me want to get out into my own garden and start sorting it all out for the new season ahead. This is what a garden programme should do. And a cookery programme come to that, in fact anything based on a practical skill should make you want to rush off and have a bash. And it's one reason why I like Jamie Oliver, his programmes are nothing if not inspiring.

In this first programme of the series, Carol was in her garden in January, clearing away all the detritus and rubbish, not flinching from showing all the dead plants that we all have to deal with after such a harsh winter. Propagation being one of Carol's watchwords - she never discards plant material if it can be used to make new plants, and demonstrates enthusistically just how easy it is to do.

At one point at the top of a ladder supported by an anonymous man below in a non speaking role, she yanked vigorously at an overgrown clematis , "you need to get all this dead stuff OUT" she declaimed from up aloft, and as the ladder wobbled a bit ominously , "and that's my husband Neil down there in case you were wondering". I expect Neil must be used to his fearless wife by now, addressing the audience confidently from twenty feet in the air, he probably thinks at least he can at least break her fall if she comes down a bit quicker than she went up. And since Carol is some five years or more older even than I am, there really is no excuse now for me not to be out there with the wheelbarrow tomorrow. Possibly not the ladder though.

Galette des Rois/ Twelfth Night Cake

2011-01-05T14:44:00.000+01:00

This is the frangipan pastry cake I mentioned yesterday, wherein a bean lies hidden, to be discovered by one lucky person who received it in their slice, and then gets to be king for the day, and can boss everyone about rather tiresomely for the rest of the day.

I haven't made this cake before, although I've always known about it, because frankly I thought it looked a bit dull and boring. Compared with a spectacular chocolate fudge cake, or mountainous pavlova it would certainly seem a bit of an also ran, but do not be deceived by appearances (as I was). This really is a very good result from a small amount of effort.
Ingredients
Because its ungilded beauty relies entirely on the quality of the ingredients, I would suggest you use the best you can find. And if you're a regular reader you may have noticed that I'm not one to splash out on unnecessary luxury ingredients where they aren't really warranted. I put it down to my Yorkshire upbringing. But in dishes like this you'll really notice the difference. This is my slightly tweaked version of Mary Cadogan's recipe

You will need
1 400 gr pack of all butter puff pastry
2 good tablespoons of your best homemade raspberry jam
100 gr/4oz butter at room temperature

100gr/4oz caster sugar

100gr/4oz ground almonds
1 egg
2 tablespoons vanilla infused rum, or just rum

1 large dried bean such as a butter bean

Roll out the puff pastry and cut out two 9inch, 23 cm circles.Cut a narrow strip from the leftover pastry to fit all around the pastry circle which will give you a lip so that you can get more filling in. Stick it on with water. This is optional if you're in a rush.

Cream the butter and sugar til light, beat in the egg, then stir in the ground almonds and rum.

Spread the jam on the pastry circle. Top the jam with the almond mixture. Remember to hide your bean in the mixture.**

Brush the border with water, top with the second circle and seal. You can decorate the top with a knife blade -spokes like a pinwheel are traditional, if you wish.

Brush with beaten egg and bake in moderate oven for 25 -30 minutes until golden brown.

Like most puff pastry items, at it's best served slightly warm.

**There are many ancient traditions connected with Twelfth Night, some of recent christian origin and some of older Pagan and Roman and Viking origin, and are often connected with riotous behavior and the idea of turning things upside down. The idea with the bean is the person who gets it in their slice becomes the King of Misrule, whereby peasants become rulers and rulers become slaves, (just for the day of course, it's not the Peasants' Revolt) so an excellent cake for socialists who will enjoy for once, both having their cake and eating it. Not many cakes have a political stance. There are many versions of the cake, some entailing a small ceramic figure being hidden, but a bean sounds less dangerous and the price of dentistry being what it is.....

And finally, as to the date, we have always insisted on regarding tomorrow, January 6th as Twelfth Night, despite the Church of England's pronouncement that it's the 5th. There are good ancient traditions supporting the 6th, and anyway it's my daughter's birthday, so we always kept the decorations up for her, and had the riotous children's party in appropriate surroundings, and then swept up the whole shebang in one massive clear up!

Happy Birthday for tomorrow Sarah. And play nicely.

Our Beautiful Beanette

2011-01-04T16:44:00.000+01:00

I was going to do a post on Galette des Rois,or Kings Cake, the delicious almondy cake traditionally associated with Twelfth Night and Epiphany. In ancient tradition, a bean was hidden inside the cake and whoever received the bean in their slice of cake was made King or Queen for the day, and could lord it over everyone else for the rest of the day. But I am laying aside the recipe for today in favour of another bean which has currently taken centre stage in our lives.

Proud granny with beanette

Bean I hear you say, what bean? Well obviously this is not a Bean, it is in fact a Beanette. When you get pregnant these days they send to to have a scan very early on and when my daughter had her first scan earlier this year, sorry last year,she thought the picture resembled nothing so much as a little bean, so Bean it became thoughout it's foetushood, and since they chose not to know the gender, possibly Beanette. So it seems appropriate that Beanette (as it turned out), has chosen to put in an appearance just around the time of the "bean cake" celebration. I think we will have to have a Galette des Rois every year from now on just for her.

Luckily it's a wonderful confection of sweetness, just like her.

My granddaughter's proper name is Amy, an 8lbs 4oz bundle of joy, born 2nd January safely at home with no medical interventions.

And I feel blessed.

Why Mums Don't Need To Go To Iceland

2010-12-31T16:07:00.001+01:00

Just a short post about some easy to do party nibbles that I've tried recently which seemed to go down well. I've noticed that there's a great trade in so called Party Food at the supermarkets these days. You can buy a ton of "party food" at Iceland for a couple of quid, but I dread to think a) what's in it, and b) what it tastes like, so whether you're a Mum or not, save yourself the effort of trailing round the aisles and try this simple recipe that you can knock up in the time it would have taken you to drive to Iceland and back, (for overseas readers that's the supermarket not the country) plus you'll use up what you've probably already got, and have something that tastes great and contains no rubbish.

Using greek filo pastry means you don't have to go to the effort of making your own pastry, which is beyond the call of duty at this time of year. I recommend keeping a packet of filo in the fridge over Christmas as it can be pressed into mini muffin tins and filled with all sorts of things should the need arise. It's not that I think it's particularly delicious, in fact it's quite bland, but filled with Christmas type luxury goods it works really well. You also have the advantage of being able to lever yet more food out of the fridge and into people's stomachs, thus using up some of the Christmas leftovers such as smoked salmon, stilton, and cream, before they spoil and are wasted, which is of course, a criminal offence.

The bases

You'll need a packet of filo pastry, and a tin to make the little tarts in - I used a mini muffin tin which has makes two dozen at a time.

Melt a large knob of butter and use it to brush on yourtins and your filo pastry sheets before you cut it up roughly with a pair of scissors into small squares suitable for your tins, .Scrunch about three layers of buttered filo into each tin, you can be as rough as you like with the finish - it adds to the appearance it bits are left sticking up.

The fillings

I used three fillings because that was what I had in the fridge. You may well think of others.

1.Several ounces of chopped smoked salmon, (use inexpensive trimmings if you're buying it)

2. Chopped walnuts with crumbled stilton cheese

3. Onion marmalade, with a slice of goats cheese or brie on top

Lightly beat together two medium eggs with a good half pint or so of double cream. Season with salt and pepper, except for the smoked salmon ones, which will be salty enough. It's difficult to give exact quantities as it rather depends on how much filling you put in each tartlet. But I would try to fill the cases and use the cream to fill in the spaces and you won't go far wrong. Bake in a hot oven till golden brown and slightly puffed. You can serve them straight away, or more usefully cool them and store in the fridge for later.

Go upstairs and do your hair, put on the frock, and the shoes. Teeter into the kitchen and reheat your homemade canapes on an oven tray for a few minutes when you're ready to serve.

Happy New Year!

When Icicles Hang By The Wall

2010-12-24T22:57:00.000+01:00

When icicles hang by the wall

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,

When nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;

Tu-who, a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot,

When all aloud the wind doth blow

And coughing drowns the parson's saw

And birds sit brooding in the snow

And Marian's nose looks red and raw,

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

When nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;

Tu-who, a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

William Shakespeare

From Love's Labours Lost, Act V. Sc. II

This was a poem we had to learn by heart in our English lessons at school, and at the time it seemed very boring to us, and indeed, recited as it was at our leaden pace, it certainly lacked the tour de force of a great Shakespearean performance. Gielgud it wasn't. But it does come into my head every winter at some juncture, especially when I see things like this on the roof of the house

so I'm glad now that we did have to learn it. Even though we spent more time making silly schoolgirl jokes about "greasy Joan" than was strictly required.

Even in the depths of winter the wisteria manages to give us seasonal delights.In fact these two foot long icicles are something of a ghost of the summer flowers when you think about it. I did endanger life and limb to get these shots though - if there had been a sudden thaw I could have been impaled!

Anyway, the Met Office advises us now that no more snow is expected in the Wilts/Glos area before Christmas, - we have got quite enough to be going on with thanks very much, so I'm spending some time making mince pies, wrapping presents, and generally catching up on all the stuff I should have done last week before what will henceforth be known as The Log Basket Incident. And on that subject, many thanks to all those lovely people who left kind comments about our little incendiary moment, which really cheered me no end when things were looking a bit bleak last week. Our Lady Decorator, Sharon, and her other half is doing a sterling job, and assures me we will all be ship shape again before Christmas day.

Merry Christmas to one and all!

from Kathy and all at Carters Barn

Change of Address

2010-12-14T21:28:00.000+01:00

I've changed my address. I no longer live at Carters Barn in the lovely Wiltshire countryside. I now reside at twenty seven Catastrophe Mansions, Disaster Avenue, Slough of Despond, Hades.

There's a rule of life that says If Something Can Go Wrong, It Will. So if a fire is going to break out, it will do so a week before Christmas when your rellies are about to arrive, and your decorations are just going up.

I also find that one never looks one's best when a burly fireman is bursting through the front door, hose in hand. I love a man in uniform as I think I've said before, and yet when you should be wearing your best Nigella style black satin dressing gown, floating back elegantly from the kitchen, wodge of chocolate cake in hand, you find yourself in fact wearing your slightly shrunk in the wash cotton nightie, a pair of wellies, and a dog walking coat that's let's face it has seen better days. No make up and a hair style reminiscent of Bill Clinton's worst excesses, where the hair appears to be growing at an angle perpendicular to the head. I'd jumped out of bed and grabbed the first thing to hand before dialling 999. And thank goodness for the Swindon Fire Brigade, and the Cricklade Retained Fire Service. Lovely men, fantastic service. Could not have asked for more. Thanks guys.

I can see the funny side of this now, but only because no one was hurt, thank goodness, when an ember set fire to a log basket in the early hours, and I know that the damage can all be put right. The man from NFU was quick and helpful, and we just have to find a carpet fitter, a decorator, and a builder who can restore us to some normality this side of Christmas. "Stuff" is all replaceable. The only thing I was really upset about was a little thing that's not reallly replaceable

My children made a set of partridges/doves/calling birds(not quite sure which) many years ago from card and tinsel, following instructions from Blue Peter, and I have brought them out every Christmas since. So I was particularly sad to see that they had gone in the fire, all but this little charred remain. But I will continue to treasure this single little partridge/dove/calling bird with it's singed tail as a reminder of good fortune, and wait until my grandchildren are old enough to make me another set. Things could have been a lot, lot worse. So maybe it's not quite Catastrophe Mansions, maybe it's more like twenty seven Lucky Lane, Therebut-Forfortune, Wiltshire.

Black satin on the Christmas list maybe?

PS Please check your smoke alarm batteries, they could save your life.

Kathy's Homemade Christmas

2010-12-06T17:59:00.000+01:00

If you're a fan of homemade stuff in general Kirsty's TV series on how to make things yourself will come as no surprise to you, and pretty, homespun and folksy as it may be, lots of us have been doing things like this for years. But it is good to see these easy tideas brought to a wider audience. At least now you don't have to apologize for it, and since it's now vaguely fashionable to have home made stuff around the place, you can even give it to people as presents, and they might even be pleased to get your home produced jar or preserves, or hand knitted scarf, or whatever. The older ones among us may remember the wonderful Joyce Grenfell's monologue "Useful and Acceptable Gifts" where a lady from the WI lectures on the acceptability of some truly terrible home made items. Crinoline ladies astride the spare loo roll, spring to mind. It was very funny,but it's probably a sign of the times nowadays when people are so time poor, and many of us just collapse on the sofa in front of the tv in the evenings when in times past we might have amused ourselves with a bit of knitting, sewing or craftwork.

All of which brings me to the point - salt dough. Many people think of this as cheap play dough for children but there's no need to relegate this cheap and cheerful stuff to the children's playgroup, although children will love doing it with you. Salt dough is quick and easy and can be made into durable and attractive decorations for Christmas. Now I really do sound like Joyce Grenfell.

Just mix one cup of salt to each two cups of plain flour, and add about one cup of water to make a dough. Don't use expensive sea salt here, you want the cheapest bag on the supermarket shelf for this. Knead it to a smooth dough and roll out and cut using appropriately Christmassy cutters, remembering to make a small hanging hole at the top.

Bake the decorations in a very cool oven for several hours until dry and hard. The bottom oven of the Aga is ideal or around 200 degrees F.When completely dry allow to cool and paint and decorate as you wish. You can use any kind of paint you like, I happened to find an old tin of red gloss paint at the back of the garage which worked well, but it's a good idea to cover the finished item with a waterproof varnish of some kind, so that your ornaments will keep from year to year.

And remember you can always embarrass your children in years to come by lovingly bringiing out the creations they made when they were three.

Decorate your items in seasonal colours, glitter, and tie with raffia or ribbons. A bit of gold or bronze paint rubbed on gives a suitably distressed effect if that's what you like. Or you can go for the neat and tidy like the one at the top of the page.

I've made a job lot this year, as we have the village hall to decorate, and can't afford to spend much money on it. So it's home made, homespun, and, to my eyes at least, even prettier.

Disappearing species?

2010-11-27T14:19:00.000+01:00

Wow, look at this amazing rarity

yes, I hear you say, it's a greengrocer's shop. Whoopee do. So what? Well, this is Bramley's - it's the only greengrocer's shop in Cirencester and it's new. The last small greengrocer closed some years ago, leaving the almost the entire fruit and veg market to the supermarkets. There is a farmers market of course, for local seasonal produce but that's not there every day, and fine as it is, it's some way from any parking area, so people tend not to buy large amounts of heavy stuff, like potatoes and oranges.

It may seem amazing to people like my daughter say, who, living in London is surrounded by fine shops selling all kinds of British. European and Asian greengrocery, but in many English towns small shops have, one by one, fallen victim to the overwhelming buying power of supermarkets and closed down. They tend, by the way, to reopen as coffee shops, I had a quick count up and there are at least eleven cafes and coffee shops in Cirencester at the moment. At least most of them are independents though, and some of them are really good, but I can't help wondering how much coffee people can drink?

Anyway it does seem like perhaps the tide is turning, we now have a fishmonger in the town, and I also noticed a new butcher's shop has opened too, maybe people are at last getting tired of one stop shopping, and some variety will be returning to our town centres at last. And one of the best things about this shop is that it's in the middle of the Brewery car park, so you can buy your potatoes, oranges, swedes and other heavy items and put them straight in the car, without giving yourself a hernia. So hopefully people will use it. I was in a hurry when I snapped this pic on my phone, so didn't have time to go in, but it all looked good and I will certainly be giving it a try very soon.

I'm sorry if this seems unneccesary jubilation over a simple greengrocer's shop, especially coming from someone who bangs on about home grown fruit and veg, but I can't grow lemons say, and the salad's a bit thin on the ground in November, so it's great for those things, but most of all it's a resurrection of some kind of choice and variety in the high street that I'm so pleased to see. Well done Bramleys and good luck!

Robin's Bounty

2010-11-23T21:29:00.005+01:00

Robin sent me these knobbly chaps recently

The true quince, Cydonia oblonga, (as opposed to Chaenomeles japonica the ornamental or japanese quince) is something of a rarity in English gardens, so can usually only be obtained if you have, or know someone who has, a quince tree. Ornamental quinces are often seen in gardens and indeed do produce a quince like fruit in the autumn, but in my experience this is nothing like the fruit of the proper quince. They look a bit similar, in that they are both hard and completely inedible raw, but the true quince, when cooked has the ability to be transformed into a fragrant amber puree, quite unlike anything else. Incidentally it's said that the "apple" of the Garden of Eden was in fact a quince, though it speaks volumes for Eve's powers of temptation that she could lure anyone with such a sour knobbly thing as a raw quince! Maybe it wasn't really the fruit he was after....

Anyway, Robin was kind enough to send me quite a lot of quinces, so I've been playing about with various recipes and ideas for using them. They are famously partnered with apples, and bring a special fragrance to a traditional apple pie which lifts it quite out of the ordinary. But it has to be said that the flavour is fairly intense, and even if you like it, as I do, it can get a bit overpowering after several days of experimental simmering and stirring. So I intend to set aside my creations for a day or two and then come back and see what works best. So far I've made Quince and Apple Jelly, Quince and Cranberry Preserve, Quince Cheese, or Membrillo, and Quince Mincemeat.

Quinces are hard and curiously downy, so first of all you need to wash off the downy covering, then chop them roughly and either boil them until soft and strain through a jelly bag, or steam them in your Mehu Maija hot juice extractor machine if you have one.

You will end up with a quantity of clear juice for making jelly, which should be sparkling clear

and quite a lot of pulp that can be seived and boiled with sugar to make quince cheese, which the Spanish dry and eat with cheese, apparently. I've never tried it so I will see how it turns out.

I found I had rather a lot of quince cheese, so I tried mixing it with some of my home made mincemeat, and it's quite delicious. It adds a rich flavour and moistness to the mincemeat which I really like. And finally from an idea I saw on Marisa's blog I cooked up some of it with cranberries to make a Cranberry and Quince preserve. I quite enjoy a dollop of Cranberry sauce with a cold turkey sandwich, but the addition of the quince lifts it out of the everyday and into the seasonal luxury, and even though it's a lot of trouble to go to, as they say on the adverts,
You're Worth It

Frosty Mornings

2010-11-21T15:38:00.000+01:00

Mo and I were setting off for the morning walk, when I found myself sidetracked into looking at the effects of the overnight frosts. She is used to delays, it happens a lot, for one reason or another, and here she is standing pointedly by the gate, waiting patiently.

Often it's feeding the chickens, or breaking the ice on the pond, or some little job that presents itself on the way from the back door to the gate.

This frost edged rose looked so pretty

and this verbena bonariensis

Of course, what I really should be doing (apart from walking the dog) is setting out my winter bedding plants in the pots by the back door.

I should have had this job finished by now, but I find it hard to make time for garden duties at this time of the year, apart from the approach of Christmas, it's pretty damp and chilly all the time, and although I know I will really appreciate a few pots of colourful violas during the winter, I find it a real effort to go out and do it. But I'm pleased to say James and I made a start yesterday and I intend to finish off later on today. So well done me.

Just a couple more Jack Frost pictures, and then I really will walk the dog.

The Scotch Egg Society

2010-11-15T20:03:00.000+01:00

Every Friday morning, the Ancient Order of Scotch Eggers meets at a secret venue near Bristol, to celebrate the ancient and apparently secret art of the Scotch Egg. It must be secret because it's almost impossible to buy an edible version of this lovely old fashioned food item, under normal circumstances. Dry, mass produced, and all but inedible to anyone but a starving trucker, the Scotch Egg lines up in the petrol station chill shelf alongside the Cornish Pasty in the roll call of Abused Foods of Britain. If Scotch Eggs could use a phone they'd be ringing a helpline. But more cheeringly, the home made Scotch Egg can be a truly delicious and portable delight, and like many other simple foods it's down to the quality and freshness of the ingredients. So once again you have to either do it yourself or know where to go. And if you're a member of the Ancient Order you'll know that the bakers in Westbury-on-Trym who make their own Scotch Eggs will be just putting them out on the counter fresh from the pan at precisely o nine hundred hours and Our Man in Westbury will be dispatched to obtain this week's Friday morning supplies.

Scotch Eggs

If you don't live in Westbury-on-Trym you may have to make your own. I know you're thinking, boiled eggs, breadcrumbs, deep frying, takes too long, too much faff for me. But I urge you to have a go. The ones I made took no more than half an hour start to finish. And if you followed my advice last week about not chucking out your stale crusts of bread, and blitzing them in the processor, you will have a jar of dried crumbs ready to hand anyway.

Fresh medium size free range eggs

2- 3 best quality sausages for each egg

1 egg beaten

Dried breadcrumbs

First put your eggs on to boil, and while they are boiling take your sausages, slit the skins with a sharp knife and remove them.

Press them into a rough ball and flatten out onto a floured surface.

Don't boil the eggs to death, a good five minutes or so should do it, then run them under the cold tap and remove the shells.

Place egg onto sausagemeat and mould around to encase the egg to make a cricket ball sized sphere.

Now dip the ball into beaten egg and coat in breadcrumbs, and deep fry for about five minutes.

And now I suspect you're thinking "but Kathy, I don't have a deep fat fryer, I'm far too health conscious " well neither do I - I just use a small sturdy saucepan with about an inch of oil in the bottom. This means I have to go to the trouble of turning the Scotch Eggs over when one side is done, but I calculate the calories expended in this effort completely offset those incurred by the deep fat frying, so problem solved.

This simple recipe makes an excellent family supper served with salad, leftovers ideal packed lunch. If you want to gild the lily you can use dinky little quail's eggs to make cocktail sized scotch eggs for a party.

Of course, Our Man is also an active member of the British Pickle and Chutney Appreciation Society, an important sub section of the Ancient Order, who always maintain a selection of appropriate pickle type accompaniments, provided, it's rumoured, by the chairman's mother. If he should read this he might want to advertise the name of the baker's shop, which eludes me.

Poppy Day

2010-11-14T14:43:00.000+01:00

Today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK, or Poppy Day, when red poppies are worn in commemmoration of Armistice Day when peace was declared at the end the First World War, the war to end all wars. I found this touching footage of the Battle of The Somme.

I have no fear nor shrinking. I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me. I thank God for this ten weeks' quiet. Life has always been hurried and full of difficulty. This time of rest has been a great mercy. They have all been very kind to me here. But this I would say, standing in view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

Last words of Nurse Edith Cavell, shot before a firing squad, October 1915

Doing Something Useful

2010-11-11T12:18:00.000+01:00

I've noticed that I have a tendency to write about useful things you can do with this, that or the other. But sometimes you just don't feel like doing anything very much, so here's a post about not doing anything much. When we went to Surry last week, and collected the acorns I told you about, we also collected these

lovely sweet chestnuts. My husband hails from Surrey and has fond memories of collecting chestnuts as a child. I was quite amazed at how prolific they were - I don't know about other areas of the country, certainly a sweet chestnut in this part of Wiltshire is uncommon, but Surrey is heavily wooded and seems to support the growth of this lovely tree and its equally lovely fruit. Naturally the nuts you pick in the wild are not so big as the ones in the shops, most of which are imported, in fact I think they are all imported. If you want English ones you have to go and get them. French chestnuts are delicious though. I'm starting to see that the further south you go the better the chestnuts seem to get. Anyway, don't despise the humble english offering, it's fresh, wild and free.

We collected quite a lot in the space of half an hour, and I had intended to do something useful and clever with them. But on Saturday night, it was cold, we lit a fire, David roasted the chestnuts, and we just ate them, What could be nicer than a roaring fire, the Guardian supplement, a glass of something, and a plate of roasted chestnuts.

PS Should you wish to do something more imaginative with chestnuts I can highly recommend Hugh Slightly- Annoying's chocolate chestnut truffle cake recipe

Fashion Extra

2010-11-10T11:15:00.000+01:00

An item by Rachel Johnson in Saturday's Guardian about the latest fashion for city types to dress in "country clothes" made me smile - "It's only the City types who dress up like the royal family at an Edwardian era shooting party" she says.

And my recent encounter with a country estate agent confirms that this is not only a city trait, as I watched him bounce around a nice old Cotswold house in his Barbour and Hunters pointing out the dual aspect fenestration.

Proper country types, says Johnson wear "Dunlop boots lined with acrylic fluff, ancient fleeces, and their grandfather's tweed trousers with a huge rip in the crotch".

So good to know that I'm still the height of sartorial elegance.

How To Never Throw Bread Away (Hardly)

2010-11-05T00:36:00.000+01:00

A good housewife/person will never throw away bread, it's just not done. There's so much you can do with stale bread. The Italians make a lovely salad with it, but you need a decent sour dough type of bread for that. Here in England we tend to make breadcrumbs out of our stale bread and use it for either savoury stuffings, or best of all Treacle Tart. Of course, sometimes the bread gets away. You open the bread bin and there's a big green hairy monster trying to get out. There's nothing to do with mouldy bread but compost.

But most times, you don't have to be Superwife to notice that although the bread's too stale to make a sandwich you can still whizz it up into crumbs and store in the freezer in plastic bags ready for use. And with Christmas only seven weeks away, you'll be needing plenty for all that lovely stuffing you'll be making for the turkey.

My freezer tends to be full of plastic bags containing all manner of odd looking things. I don't have many bought items in there, so it looks to the innocent browser like a large collection of Bits in Bags. Which is what it is.

This is not because I am Superwife, it's because I think my food is better than Tesco's (not saying much) and I find that having a supply of basics in the freezer makes it much easier to produce good things than if you have to start from absolute scratch, making breadcrumbs, and then making the pastry, you tend not to bother, whereas if you already have the pastry case in the freezer and a bag of breadcrumbs, the Treacle Tart, for example very nearly makes itself. So I never throw away pastry either, but use what's left from what I'm making to line a tart tin and stash in the freezer for another day.

Treacle Tart adapted from Rosemary Moon's recipe
1 8 inch/20cm flan tin lined with shortcrust pastry

3 oz/75gr white breadcrumbs, fresh or frozen. You need reasonably soft breadcrumbs for this, save the dry ones for stuffings

12oz/350gr golden syrup

2oz/50gr ground almonds

grated zest and juice of half a lemon

quarter pint/150ml double cream

1 egg beaten

If you use a solid metal flan tin you don't need to pre bake. But you can if you prefer. Mix the filling ingredients together and pour into the case. Bake in a medium oven for about 30 minutes, covering with foil if it starts to get too brown.

Serve just warm, with clotted cream.

I always used to make treacle tart with just golden syrup, breadcrumbs, and lemon in the traditional way until I discovered Rosemary Moon's more exuberant version, since when I, and my bathroom scales, have never looked back...

From Tiny Acorns..

2010-11-02T16:04:00.001+01:00

We were walking in leafy Surrey last week and found ourselves ankle deep in acorns, so, having read recently on Kate's blog that acorns make good chicken feed, I thought I would gather some and bring them home. It seemed a shame to leave them all to the squirrels. So I taking the plastic bag from my pocket, - being a responsible dog owner I find all my coat pockets are stuffed with plastic bags these days, -we gathered quite a few handfuls, including leaves and other detritus, tied up the bag and brought them home. As we also gathered some chestnuts, food for people took precedence over food for chickens when we got back and the acorns languished in their plastic bag on the countertop for several days. When I opened the bag this morning, I was amazed to see this

virtually all of the acorns had germinated, some with shoots three or four inches long.Now it comes as no surprise to me that, as all small children know, from tiny acorns, great oaks will grow, but I didn't realize that they would do so quite this readily. So I took them out to the greenhouse and put them in a tray of compost, and will wait to see if they grow into little seedling oak trees next year, I could have my own forest Obviously this rate of germination can't happen with all the acorns that fall from the tree, since if this were the case oak trees would be crowding out stockbrokers and bankers in Surrey. And what a shame that would be.

I started to wonder if there's some way that they"know" when they're in a new environment, and can germinate away happily, so I looked it up, and rather more prosaically, apparently they tend to dry out when they just fall to the ground, and only germinate when a squirrel carries them off somewhere and buries them in damp ground, or when he ties them up in a plastic bag and leaves them on his countertop for a few days.I prefer to think they just know..

Chateau Rita

2010-11-01T21:26:00.001+01:00

My past efforts at producing a drinkable alcoholic beverage have not been amongst the greatest of my acheivements. I've many a time produced an excellent and eco friendly drain cleaner, and very occasionally something that you could put into a casserole if you were really pushed, so it was with some trepidation that I promised my friend Rita that I would call round to pick up the two carrier bag fulls of red grapes she had picked from her garden and kept for me, and that I would try to make them into something drinkable. Rita said that she had categorically no other possible use for them, so it was either me or the compost heap, and that being the case, I thought I might as well give it a go. Again.

They have produced almost a gallon of juice, rather sharp and acid, and so I topped it up with some of my pressed apple juice, which is quite sweet. It's certainly fermenting away like the clappers, so let's hope that the end product is something drinkable. I've already got the cleanest drains in the area.

Autumn colour

2010-10-31T15:44:00.000+01:00

Victoria plum and Stella cherry trees in veg garden

It really has been a corker of an autumn this year. I don't know what the weather conditions are that make it so, but this year every field and hedgerow is ablaze with wonderful reds, and golds. Westonbirt, the National Arboretum, is only a few miles from here, and I often visit at this time of year to see their amazing display of autumn colours, which is predominantly provided by the collection of Acers. You can see some of them from the road as you drive by, even without going in, and lovely as they are I have to confess that this year, the display along the A419 as I was driving from Swindon to Cirencester the other day seemed almost as good! And all our own wonderful native plants. Unfortunately the local police take a dim view of people trying to take photos whilst driving by, not to mention the blur factor, so I can't show it to you, but I have every reason to believe that many other parts of the UK has had similar displays. Even my wisteria looks a picture with its leaves turning a greeny gold.

Enjoy it while it lasts though, as a couple of days of gusty autumn winds will sweep it all away in a big russetty carpet.

Bed Of Roses

2010-10-23T11:33:00.001+02:00

My lovely son, the Professional Gardener, brought me home an armful of roses that he had taken from the last of the summer's display, and I've been enjoying them in a jug on the kitchen table for several days. You simply can't beat garden roses - nothing you get in a florist will ever approach the naturalness and sweet scent of garden roses. And they are all the more enjoyed now, being the last armfuls we are likely to get, - many roses continue with sporadic flowerings during the early winter, but this is the last month for really generous bunches.

As I was drinking my coffee this morning a clump of petals fell off onto the table with a soft thud, and it struck me how they are still lovely, even after they have fallen, and in fact it put me in mind of a line from Shelley "Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heap'd for the beloved's bed".

Let's hope old Percy was thinking rose petals, not "leaves" in the sense that we know them, as the leathery and rather prickly leaves of the rose would make a considerably less attractive proposition as a bed. I expect it's poetic licence or something, what do I know. What I do know though, whilst we're on the romantic theme, is that you can make your own wedding confetti from dried rose petals very easily. I did it for my own wedding quite successfully. Just gather the petals as they fall and put them in a single layer in a warm place to dry for a few days, if it's a shotgun wedding and you're in a hurry you can dry them on a paper towel in the microwave, but be careful not to overcook and brown them. And if you're not thinking of getting married, they make good pot pourri too.

The Shelley poem I mentioned is a well known favourite about the impermanence of physical things and yet how such things live on in the memory. Funnily enough I know it more as a song than a poem as I used to sing a setting of it in the school choir. Here's the full text

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory,

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on.

Percy Byshhe Shelley

Best Cream Tea Ever

2010-10-22T14:23:00.001+02:00

I'm a bit of a Cream Tea Connoisseur. When my children were small and we ran a pub we used our precious Sunday afternoons off trying out the local teas in South Devon, and we all became quite expert, even marking the establishments out of ten. And then we got even more obsessive about it, and marked the scones, the jam and the cream separately, and eventually even the loos!

In recent times the best cream tea I knew of was to be had at the Corn Dolly in South Molton in Devon. We went there last week during our week away in Cornwall, and very good it was. But I'm afraid it has had to be demoted to number two in my list, as we also found this lovely place, entirely by accident as we disembarked from King Harry's Ferry on the Fal Estuary.

The Tea House at Tolverne is a pretty thatched cottage, where you can enjoy your tea overlooking the estuary, or on summer days, outside on the many tables in the gardens. From the number of tables I'd guess they must be pretty busy in the summer season, but when we visited it was a quiet October day so there were just a handful of customers.

It was a bit chilly to sit outdoors, so we sat by the window and enjoyed the lovely view

The scones were fresh and warm, tea was loose leaf in a proper china tea pot, - no tea bags here - and the jam was as close to home made as I have found anywhere. It tasted like damson to me and when I asked the waitress she told me it was "Key plum" or maybe that was "Quay plum", I don't know, as she airily waived her arm in the general direction of an old plum orchard that "they are renovating and we get the plums". So, good for "them" whoever they are, and well done the jam maker, delicious. We had to ask for more cream, and they were happy to bring us some, but that's probably because the scones were big, and we are greedy.

As we waddled off down the garden afterwards, to look at the beach and get a breath of fresh air,

I spotted this plaque commemmorating the departure of thousands of American soldiers from this beach for the D Day landings in 1944. And indeed, as you drive away, you can still see among the trees, numerous remains of places used by the American troops during the war. An interesting historical and poignant footnote to our visit.

Heritage Apples

2010-10-21T15:42:00.001+02:00

Whilst we were in Cornwall last week we popped into the National Trust Garden at Cotehele, to give the dogs a walk and have some tea and delicious carrot cake. And we were also able to have a quick look at the recently planted Mother Orchard, well, fairly recent I think it's two or three years old, but the point is it's eight acres planted with all kinds of old traditional westcountry apple varieties. The kind you rarely see anymore, and which are in grave danger of dying out completely. It's quite staggering to realize that some English counties have lost almost all their traditional orchards, Devon for example has lost 95% of it's orchards since 1945. But it's not all bad news, and the establishment of the Mother Orchard at Cotehele is intended to provide cutting stock for other National Trust properties around the country which can then be used to bolster the numbers of these old cultivars.

It's often thought that apples won't grow well in the wet mild climate of the westcountry, or that they won't grow in the east because it's too and windy, or in the north because it's too cold, but there's an apple for all situations, and you just have to do a bit of research to find the best apple for your garden. Many of the ancient varieties are very local indeed, and are unknown in other parts of the country. Ashmeads Kernel is a great local Gloucestershire variety, or how about a Pigs Snout or a Devonshire Quarrenden, maybe a lovely old cider apple tree like Kill Boys (a particularly crispy variety said to have killed a boy, presumably as a missile, not poisoning one hopes - I feel an HSE warning coming on) or Hens Turds, (not recorded how it got it's name, thank goodness) There are thousands of known cultivars listed as grown in the UK, and many more are unlisted local varieties. I wonder then, why we can only buy about four or five from our supermarkets? Don't get me started...

The ground under old fruit trees was often tended by livestock, poultry, sheep, or pigs, giving extra benefits to the farmer and to the wider natural environment. I noticed however at Cotehele that they were trying out a more 21st century option

This little gadget was running around the place all on its own, cutting the grass, its area of activity defined by electronic markers under the grass, and when it ran out of energy it just goes back to the docking station to recharge itself. And then it sets off again, I could really do with one of these! Goodness knows what it must cost.

And finally I must mention the famous Cotehele Christmas garland, which they make every year from dried flowers grown on the estate and display in the Great Hall. I think it goes up about a month before Christmas. Quite magnificent, and well worth a visit. Carrot cake's pretty good too.

For info on Cotehele http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1604452

Bengal Relish - Hot Stuff!

2010-10-20T16:31:00.000+02:00

This is the time of year for finishing things up, clearing away the last of the summer crops, (and thinking of things to do with them). I left my outdoor tomatoes a few days too long, and many if the fruits have the tell tale browning of exposure to too cold overnight temperatures. So I gathered them all in yesterday, and spent a hour or so sorting out the undamaged ones to keep indoors for ripening,** and chopped up the damaged fruits for chutney making.

I've adapted an old WI recipe from a 1970s book I have for the green tomatoes this year. It's actually quite some years since I had any green tomatoes to use up so I'm looking forward to tasting the results of this old recipe. It's called Bengal Relish, - I think that's probably because it's a bit spicy, and in the old days anything spicy was thought to be Indian, hence Bengal. I somewhat doubt that they have green tomatoes to use up in Bengal! Anyway this is a relish, rather than a chutney, the difference being mostly in the amount of time that the mixture is cooked for. Relishes are usually more firm or crunchy in texture, whereas chutneys are long, slow cooked mixtures with a softer texture. You'll need to start the day before as you have to salt the vegetables for a day. This draws out the moisture and helps keep the relish firm.

**even the greenest of tomatoes can be encouraged to ripen up if placed in a drawer with a banana for company, apparently the ethylene gas given off by the banana encourages the toms to ripen.

Bengal Relish

obviously halve or double the recipe according to how many green tomatoes you have, I happen to have about four pounds, so..

4pounds/2kg green tomatoes, chopped
1 small white cabbage, shredded
2 red peppers, chopped
1lb/500gr chopped onions
4 oz/100 gr salt
2 chillis
small piece of horseradish grated
cider vinegar
1 lb/500grsugar
spices -1 teaspoon each of cinnamon,nutmeg,alllspice,celeryseed, and mustard seed

Chop up the vegetables and sprinkle with the salt. Leave overnight.
Tip the veg into a colander to drain and rinse with fresh cold water to remove the salt.
Place in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil and drain.
Almost cover with cider vinegar, add the sugar and spices and bring to boiling point. Simmer for 7 minutes stirring occasionally.
Pot into warm jars and cover. Keep for 4-6 weeks before use.

Mo The Foraging Dog

2010-10-18T22:39:00.000+02:00

The last few mornings have seen a sheen of silver frost on the lawn and the field beyond, which means, not only is it time to turn on the central heating, but it's the end of the outdoor tomatoes, time to gather in the last of the apples and pears, and the blackberries in the hedgerow have mostly blackened and shrivelled. This last is a bit of a disappointment for my dog Mo, as she has developed a habit this year of helping herself to blackberries. I can rarely pass by a laden bramble bush without stopping to gather at least a few pocketfuls of berries, and instead of standing by with a somewhat pained expression suggesting we should be getting on with the real reason for the expedition, ie walkies, she's taken to nibbling the berries growing low down on the hedge whilst I gather the ones from further up. Blackberrying isn't easy for a dog, having just the wet nose to select the berries - she tends to nibble one or two rather gingerly, before the prickles on the stems set off a sneezing fit! Very funny to watch, and I've never noticed her doing it before. I wonder if anyone else has a fruit eating dog?

Major George Wilkinson MBE

2010-10-07T13:41:00.000+02:00

My dear father in law, George Wilkinson, has died at the age of 94. I've only known George during the last 12 or so years of his long life, but it was a privilege. I can't tell you about his military career, of which he was so proud, - he would regale any audience with reminiscences of his life in Germany during and after the war. I can't tell you about his early life, born as he was into a very modest Yorkshire mining family and destined to go down the pit, until the army opened up an entirely new life and unimagined opportunities for him. I can't even tell you much about his later career as a gun dog trainer, and country sports enthusiast. Suffice to say that his son, my husband, has to this day a somewhat ambivalent attitude to roast pheasant, born he says of the many ever-so-slightly-past-it's-best, game dinners he endured as a child in the post war years. And we will draw a veil over the apocryphal Roast Swan I Thought It Was A Goose incident.

What I can tell you is that George was one of the Old School. He was a gentleman and a charmer to the end. He was engaging and funny to talk to whether you were young or old, humble or grand. Because there was no silver spoon for any baby born into George's family back in 1915, he appreciated and enjoyed the good things that had come to him in life, perhaps like only those who have known a degree of deprivation can do. A potter in his pristine garden, followed by a good dinner with a glass of red wine, (or two), and a dog at his feet, and life was good. And although I only knew him in his later years, I can truly say I never heard him say a bad word about anyone.

Ninety four year olds are not often known for their witty riposts, but George would often surprise you, even in the last months of his life when you thought he wasn't really listening, or able to take things in, he would suddenly add some little aside, make some little joke. Just a week before he died, he and Marjorie celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary, there was a write up in the local paper, since 70 years together is pretty special, and amid the cards, photos and congratulations George was heard to ask "Do I get a long service medal yet?"

We will miss him.

Style Makeover

2010-09-26T21:01:00.001+02:00

In case anyone thought I'd disappeared into thin air, I am in fact still here, but have undergone an inadvertent style makeover. I thought I would try one of Blogger's new template designs, just for a bit of a change, and of course, it made my blog almost unreadable. So I had to spend ages messing about trying to make it ok again. Whilst I enjoy blogging, messing about with computers is not my most favourite occupation, in fact it seems like a bit of a waste of time when you're already up to your eyes in apple based harvesting activities viz

Amazing how those Ikea bags do come in handy isn't it?

So it was easier to put it to one side as one job to do "later on", like say, hoovering under the spare bed. Fortunately I did eventually get round to sorting it, and it didn't turn into one of those many jobs at Carters Barn whose appointed hour never arrives, like ironing underpants and stuffing mushrooms, or you may never have heard from me again. What a lucky escape you almost had!

Not to mention these vast quantities of climbing french beans that I never got round to picking green, and had consequently produced a harvest of these

I've never had home dried beans before, but there were too many to allow them to go to waste, so they're in the kitchen finishing the drying process, and I will see what they taste like in casseroles and so on. Worst case scenario I'll have a home produced supply of chicken feed!

Ink Caps

2010-09-15T23:24:00.000+02:00

Where we've had trees cut down to improve light levels, we get an annual crop of these pretty little Ink Cap type fungi.

They appear almost like magic, overnight, usually after heavy rain has soaked the ground, and on the area where the roots of the felled tree are still in the ground but gradually rotting down. Fungi help this process, and do no harm. Indeed many millions of fungi are found in healthy garden soil and are essential for plant growth.. Although the Inkcaps in my garden aren't edible, some inkcaps, notably the Shaggy Ink Cap, or Lawyers Wig, which you can see everywhere in the autumn, are edible. I've tried Shaggy Ink Caps fried with a bit of bacon, and found them ok but nothing special, and not so good as many other wild fungi, such as Parasols, which are delicious.

Incidentally, Inkcaps are so called because all members of the family soon deliquesce, as it's called, into a black inky mess, soon after they're picked, and the resultant liquid was used as a writing ink.

It goes without saying of course, that you should never consume any fungi you pick unless you are absolutely certain about what it is. Amanita Phalloides or the Death Cap mushroom is said to be the cause of more than 90% of European fatal mushroom poisonings, and to the untrained eye can look remarkably like a tasty supper. So take an expert, do a course, and take great care.

We're Thinking of Starting A Football Team..

2010-09-08T23:11:00.000+02:00

Grandchildren are like buses, you wait ages for one, and then in no time at all you have the makings of a First Eleven. I just had to share this lovely picture. It's our grandson Brown Toby telling his newly arrived brother Alfie George to smile for the camera. Just too cute!

Last Honey Harvest

2010-09-08T22:01:00.000+02:00

This is the contraption I use to extract honey from the frames of honeycomb so that it can run off as liquid honey and be bottled for use. It's a simple centrifuge which holds two frames of honey, and can then be spun round by means of me turning a handle and the liquid honey is thrown out to the sides of the drum and runs down to the bottom. But before this can happen the frames of honey comb have to be uncapped, that is, the sealed cells where the bees have stored the honey have to be broken open, so that the honey can drain out, a job most easily managed by slicing off the top layer of was with a serrated knife. Here I'm slicing off the top layer of wax with a bread knife.

As you might imagine this is all quite a faff, you have to cover the whole area of the kitchen with newspaper, or you end up with annoying bits of sticky floor which are impossible to clean. Plus the equipment has to be cleaned and stored. One of the main reasons why I'm keen to adopt the natural beekeeping methods and use a top bar hive, with which I will harvest honey on the comb, and not bother so much with the centrifuge.

Anyway I'm happy with my harvest of honey this year, the girls have done really well for me, but they will soon be preparing for winter which will entail expelling all the drones (males) from the hive as they do no work and are not needed for mating, and the remaining female workers will settle down to a winter of safeguarding the queen, looking after the hive and waiting for the spring. I will shortly be checking them for evidence of Varroa mite, and treating them appropriately if I need to, before seeing them bedded in for the winter with a plentiful food supply, and a nice warm watertight hive.

Pheasant And Ham Pie Recipe

2010-09-06T19:30:00.000+02:00

I have a few pheasants in the freezer that I needed to use up and the remains of a bacon collar joint in the fridge, not to mention a mountain of plums, and so this recipe is the happy result. It's a hearty pie but I think the plums just lift it out of the ordinary and would probably work ok with chicken though I would use boned thighs for this recipe.

Pheasant and Ham Pie with Victoria Plums

Breasts from 1 pheasant (or 4 boneless chicken thighs)

Some chunks of ham or failing that a few slices of bacon

1 large onion

1 large clove garlic crushed

4 Victoria plums, halved and stoned

1 large carrot

1 tablespoon plain flour

Scant half pint of good stock
A glug or so of red wine

chopped parsley

seasoning

Half a pack of ready rolled puff pastry.

Chop and fry the onion, garlic and carrot until soft. Add the chunked ham and pheasant. Sprinkle with flour and fry until well browned, stirring from time to time. Season well. Add a glug of red wine, and enough stock to make a sauce. Add the chopped parsley, turn into a pie dish and press the plum halves into the gravy. Cover with the half sheet of puff pastry, trim, and brush with beaten egg or milk. Bake in the middle of the roasting oven of the Aga for 20 minutes, (gas about mark 6) until well browned, then move to the bottom oven for another half hour or so (gas about 3). Serve with a seasonal green veg.

Glass Of Mud Anyone?

2010-09-01T17:39:00.001+02:00

What could be nicer than a glass of freshly pressed apple juice. Juice from my own apples, pressed by me, grown by me, no chemicals, no additives, no airmiles, no packaging, truly organic, sounds great doesn't it. Well it is great of course, but this being my first foray into the ancient art of apple pressing, the results have been a bit, er, mixed. As you can see from this picture, the juice looks a bit like muddy water. Not very appetising.

First of all, the press I bought online from Selections, is really too big for the amount of apples I have. I wanted the 12 litre size but they had sold out, but I have loads of apples, I thought, so I might as well get the bigger one. Not loads enough it seems. Before you can press your apples you have to reduce them to a pulp and this reduces their volume dramatically. So a few bucketfuls of windfalls only half fill the press by the time you've pulped them.Lesson one. It's recommended that you use a Pulpmaster, a tool that you use in conjuction with an electric drill. But I found it quite a faff, and I'm sure I could have done a better and quicker job with the Magimix, despite what I've read about this not being the case. Most of what you can read on the internet about apple pressing and cider making is written by men, and I don't wish to sound sexist or anything chaps, but I can easily pulp apples in my Magimix without reducing them to puree. But then I use a Magimix all the time.

Then you tip your apple pulp into the press and away you go. The press itself works well, although I think I could either do with a smaller one, or a lot more apples. I'm hoping to have access to quite a few more as the season goes on, both from my own garden and elsewhere. Lots of people have apples that go to waste in the autumn so I should be able to find a source.

Now to the results. The apples juice looks like a mixture of mud and water. It's not very apple-y looking at all. I taste. A bit sharp, but fruity and fresh. And nicer than it looks. I need a second opinion. I take a glass of the liquid over to the office for David, a man who has even been known to give an honest answer to the question "Do you like my new hairdo?" so I know he'd say if it was really bad. He tastes and pronouces that it's a bit sharp but after a few sips you get used to it and it's quite nice.

Conclusion. It's a lot of trouble to go to for a few pints of apple juice, but this is my first effort, and now I feel I have an understanding of the process, I'm looking forward to having another bash. I only used a couple of bucketfuls of windfalls of asssorted variety, so next time, with any luck we should get better results. If anyone else offered my a glass of muddy looking liquid to drink I'd probably pass, but like anything else you've produced yourself I'm rather proud of it. If I never make another posting you'll know it's been fatal, but for now, cheers.

Harvest Time

2010-08-30T20:45:00.014+02:00

Now seems like a good time to post a few pics of the current seasons crops.

I've been really busy with family stuff for the last few weeks so the garden is groaning under the weight of stuff that needs picking and storing. We've done very well on the stone fruits this year, the Victoria plum tree (above) has produced a large amount of fruit, and the damson Merryweather

has, after several years of standing around doing nothing very much, produced a huge basketfull of fruit

ready for copious numbers of crumbles, and jam. Surprisingly, I find the fruits are also delicious raw, - I always associate damsons with jamming and cooking, -certainly the wild versions seem much more tart, but this cultivated variety is flavourful, rich and sweet. I would certainly recommend it, provide you're not in a rush as I planted this tree some four years or so ago.

The tomato plants have continued to crop well this year too,

so we will be having plenty of lovely tomato salad, with lots left over for makiing a delicous sauce for use all through the winter, I gave the recipe last year

I've also got round to buying a proper fruit press this year, so I'm hoping to be able to make the most of my windfall apples.

I tried to store my surplus crop last year, but I found that I lost quite a large number of fruits due to spoilage. Clearly any slightly blemished fruit will have to be used or juiced to avoid wastage, so my plan this year is to inspect all fruits for storage very carefully, and to use or juice the rest. I may even have a bash at cider making. I could be the Eddie Grundy of Latton, more details later.

Glad All Over

2010-08-25T13:41:00.019+02:00

Horizontal Glad

The recent much needed rain has caused the usual late summer havoc in my garden, runner beans have fallen over on to the courgettes who must be wondering who turned the lights out, but won't be prevented from growing at a rate of knots even in the dark under the beans. Tall perennials have lurched alarmingly to the side under the weight of both themselves and the additional water, so I will have to set aside some time to go out and resurect some staking and reinforcements as soon as I can. Of course if I had done the job properly in the first place none of this would have happened, - I knew all the time that the first heavy rain would topple those swaying runner bean plants! The wigwam style beans are fine, it's just the ones in a long, insufficiently supported line that are suffering the effects of Gardener's Procrastination Syndrome - or That'll Do For Now, I'll Be Back Later To Finish. Lucky for me that I have about ten times more beans than two normal human beings can be expected to consume, even with the help of willing friends and neighbours. Next year I'll do better, honest I will..

Vertical Glad

The up-side of all the falling over is the unexpected increase in the supply of cut flowers for the house. Fortunately for me most late summer perennials seem to be quite self supporting, things like Rudbeckias, and Heleniums and so on, are rarely affected by bad weather unless it's really extreme, but if you have and of the tall Gladioli they will keel over without support in rain and wind. There are three solutions to this, (four if you count not growing them at all James), you can either be a Proper Gardener like Toby and Alan,(and my son James) and put in support canes early in the season, but see above under Gardener's Procrastination Syndrome. Or you could grow the smaller, more fashionable varieties which require no staking, like Galadiolus nana. Or, like me, you can plant them where you think they will be reasonably protected, hope for the best and use the ones that blow over for the house. I have to point out here of course, for those of you who have your image to think of, that Glads are deeply deeply unfashionable, and you can only grow them if you're still wearing the same clothes you wore twenty years ago in the hope that they will eventually come back into fashion, or maybe you could grow them ironically, perhaps with three flying ducks on the fence behind them. I'm thinking I could develop this into a whole new style - "The Ironic Gardener", book and TV series to follow.

I only have a few glads, and only white ones, I think the variety is White Prosperity, butI really like them and I think I will get some more for next year. People used to dig up glads after they had flowered, like dahlias, and replant the following spring, but mine have been in the same place for several years and have survived even the hard winter we had last year, so like Dame Edna, and old ladies everywhere they are clearly tougher than they look and will soldier on regardless of whether you like them or not.

http://www.we7.com/song/Eddie-Izzard/Old-Ladies?m=0

Millionaire's Shortbread Recipe

2010-08-22T22:57:00.001+02:00

If you have a family of what my mother calls "good eaters", (as if it were a kind of skill like dentistry or playing the oboe) like our family, having a tray of a great standby bake like Millionaire's Shortbread in the fridge pleases everyone and lasts through various teas and snacks over a lovely family weekend such as we have just enjoyed. Everyone knows what it is, the biscuity bit, the caramelly bit and the chocolate on top.

So far so good. But I'm afraid that many of the things I have sampled which purported to be Millionaire's Shortbread were in fact nothing of the kind, Skinflint's Biscuits of the worst sort, mere impersonations of the proper thing. I have even come across these Fagin's Follies in National Trust Tearooms of all places, I know they have to make a profit but really! A thick dry wedge of biscuit, a thin scraping of caramel topped with an even thinner scraping of chocolate, or, deary me, "chocolate flavoured" something or another.

It's quite simple, you just have to think "generous" in all respects. In terms of millionaires, Think Zsa Zsa Gabor, not Srallan Sugar.

Millionaire's Shortbread
Base
8 oz/250gr plain flour
6oz/175gr butter
2oz/50gr icing sugar

Whizz all together in processor until the mixture binds together, then press into a 8"x12" tin and bake in a low oven until slightly golden. Do not overbrown.

Caramel
1 x 1kilo tin condensed milk
10oz/300gr butter
10oz/300gr soft dark brown sugar

Melt the sugar and butter together in a saucepan over a low heat. Stir in the condensed milk and continue to stir over a medium heat until the mixture is a rich brown colour. Should take about five minutes or so. Don't leave it to answer the door, or stop stirring as it will immediately burn. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly.
Spread over the shortbread and allow to set.

Topping
300gr bar of good milk chocolate (I recommend Lidl's Madagascan chocolate)

Melt the chocolate and spread over the caramel. Chill in fridge.

Notes
1 You could probably use a bigger tin as I had some left over even with this generous layer. Half quantities would do in an 8" tin if you're on a diet, or have a small family with delicate tastes.
2 Leftover caramel can be kept in a jar in the fridge and warmed with some cream to make a hot caramel sauce for ice cream.
3 You should have about a centimetre/half inch of shortbread, topped with a very generous layer of caramel and enough chocolate to crack invitingly when you try to slice it straight from the fridge. Probably best in small squares, they can always ask for more.

Proper job.

The Wasp Lady Returns

2010-08-20T13:30:00.001+02:00

The lovely Laura, our local wasp exterminator from Wiltshire Council has had to make a return visit as I discovered after her last visit that we were still inundated with small stripy visitors, this time coming from the opposite side of the roof, and so a different nest. I had a look up in the roof space and found this

and this is just the bit you can see, the exit point is some feet away so there's likely to be quite a bit more of it on the other side of the masonry. The third wasp nest this year. Actually I took this photo after her visit, just to be on the safe side, that's why you can't see any wasps flying about. The nests really are the most amazing looking things, made of chewed up wood collected by the wasps from the surrounding area. (I was wondering why my garden furniture was looking a bit "distressed", at this rate it will soon be a danger for all but very thin people to sit on.)

All gardening by it's very nature entails management of wildlife to a greater or lesser extent, I don't like to kill anything for no reason, but it's true to say that I think nothing of crushing a few slugs under my wellie, and removing hundreds of aphids with the water hose or just wiping them off with my finger, whilst at the same time I encourage worms with a wormery, feed wild birds, and provide harbourages for ladybirds. No life form is intrinsically bad, it's just that some are more useful to the gardener than others. If I thought there was any danger to the population of grey squirrels, rats, wasps, foxes, wood pigeons, and rabbits, I would certainly feel obliged to provide environments to encourage their numbers, but we are in danger of being overrun with grey squirrels in England, and I can no longer allow my chickens and ducks to range freely in my garden because of marauding foxes. My eyes are trained to spot the first sign of a rat run near the duck house in winter, and I immediately put poison down to kill them, retrieving and burning any cadavers that I find(so that they pose less of a danger to animals further along the food chain such as owls).

Mice are a problem too, but because they are mostly harmless wood mice and voles that like to eat my early pea and bean seedlings, I generally find that I can take measures to outwit them by sowing indoors in covered pots and containers, and not resorting to anything more drastic unless they take it into their heads to come indoors during the winter, which they sometimes do. Anyway, I suppose what I'm saying is it's a matter of moderation and tolerance wherever possible, realising that ones garden is a living part of the landscape and not something superimposed upon it, - no one wants to live in a sterile desert, at least I don't, but sometimes I have to admit it's just a matter or me or them!

Marsh (and other) Mallows

2010-08-15T18:57:00.000+02:00

When you mention marshmallow, most people think of the pink and white fluffy sweet things. And not the delicate wild flower above, Althea officinalis. Of course, the sweets or an ancient version of them, used to be made with extract of the roots or leaves of the plant, although modern marshmallows, you may be relieved to hear, no longer contain any trace of the plant. Now it's just sugar and glue (not really).

Marshmallow contains a large proportion of what herbalists call "mucilage", which when mixed with water forms a kind of gel which is used topically to reduce skin inflammation, or can be taken internally to calm inflammation of the throat or stomach. "Mucilage"sounds pretty unappetising, so I guess a large amount of sugar would have helped to make it more attractive to the consumer/patient. I've never tried making anything with my marshmallows, but I do like the plants, they are tall, with rather soft velvety foliage and delicate flowers of the palest marshmallow pink - I didn't plant them, they just appeared on their own in the bog garden (so weeds then really) next to the pond. I have an overgrown area of yellow irises and the marshmallow grows happily amongst them, together with a few Willow Herbs and Purple Loosestrife, which I know people think are dreadful weeds but I quite like them and I justify them as being a good dinner for the Elephant Hawk Moth,and bees and butterflies generally. The marshmallows look a bit like a wild and more delicate form of hollyhock, Althea rosea, to which they are closely related

All kinds of mallow make good cottage garden plants, - especially the white form of the common mallow Malva moschata

which again appears uninvited and is a sparkling white low growing flower that goes on for ages, so I usually leave it to grow. It's easy enough to pull out if it gets a bit too rampant. And then there's the good old hollyhock, Althea rosea, which I love but it always gets rust in my garden so I don't usually have them unless my brother gives me a few of his spares.

And finally there's the shrubby mallow, or Lavatera

which I grow as an easy fast growing plant for difficult places. It's unfussy and never fails to produce its mass of bright pink flowers in the summer months. This one is a proper garden plant and numerous named varieties are available, notably Lavatera Barnsley which is a softer colour than this ordinary one in my garden, but they all need to be cut back after flowering though, or they just get very woody and bare at the base. They strike easily from cuttings, and it's just as well to have a few coming along as the plants are often short lived and die away after a few years.

Blueberries or Blackcurrants?

2010-08-11T12:06:00.004+02:00

I don't really get blueberries. To be fair, I don't have the right kind of garden for them, they are ericaceous, or lime hating plants, in the same class as rhododendrons which also luckily don't grow here. So I have two blueberries in pots.

I got them because I kept reading how delicious/ fruitful/ good for you they are. And easy to grow. My two plants in pots did nothing the first year, so to give them more space I potted them in half barrels (old water butts that I sawed in half, and I used rather expensive ericaceous compost). And they have produced a little fruit this year. Thing is though,I'm not impressed with the flavour overly much. And the quantity would have been fine if I'd been looking for the kind of quantity I need with say cranberries, (ie a couple of handfuls per annum for some sauce to go with the turkey) They are low acid, and therefore edible raw, but they tasted a bit dry mealy and uninteresting. Is it just me? Tesco's are selling them by the ton. It must be just me.

But give me a blackcurrant anyday. Now there's a proper berry. Juicy, tons of them on each bush, and enough acid to strip the paint off the garage doors. That's the kind of berry we like in England. There are some new varieties introduced in recent years that are meant to produce larger sweeter berries, such as Big Ben and according to Graham Rice's New Plant Blog on the RHS website can be eaten raw so I'm intending to give them a go, since my old plants are just that, getting on a bit, and producing less and less each year. I would also like to give Jostaberries a go since I heard Bob Flowerdew recommending them. And there's a man who knows his fruit, if not his hairstyles.

Blackcurrants make excellent jam, second only to damsons in my book, partly because they are strongly flavoured and highly acidic. But they also do very well in traditional English puds like Blackcurrant crumble, a great favourite of Him Indoors. You can even make your own Ribena, and I discovered by accident last year, that if you bottle some blackcurrant coulis you can make an instant dessert simply by mixing the coulis into a little ramekin of double cream. Blackcurrant coulis, by the way is not as complicated as it sounds, and is just a posh way of saying sieved stewed fruit. A recipe would be something like

Blackcurrant Coulis
8oz/250gr blackcurrants in a saucepan with a little water and sugar to taste. Probably about 3 or 4 oz.
Stir over gentle heat to dissolve the sugar then bring to a gentle simmer for a minute or two, just enough to soften the skins a little, then pour into a processor and blitz to a puree.
Pour through a strainer to get rid of pips.
Bottle in hot sterilized jars, or freeze in little plastic pots.

Instant Blackcurrant Pudding
First of all I apologize for the name, it sounds like one of those horrible powder things you get in packets, but I can't think what else to call it, it's not a mousse, no air or whipping involved, it's not set with jelly or anything, just fruit and cream. Blackcurrant Cream maybe?

Pour some double cream into a ramekin dish, and stir in a few teaspoons of your coulis to taste. Miraculously the cream will thicken up as you gently stir, and voila, your dessert. I do like to understand how things work so if anyone can explain the science behind this miraculous transformation, I would love to hear it, (it doesn't seem to work with other fruits I've tried)- I'm not whipping the cream in any way, it's not curdling or separating at all, but it just thickens into a lovely creamy dessert.

PS did youknow that blackcurrants contain seven times as much vitamin c as apples? Considering that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, if you planted a couple of bushes of the new blackcurrant Big Ben, you could probably deter a whole range of NHS personnel in no time at all.

Wasps and The Waspinator

2010-08-06T09:46:00.001+02:00

I had a visit from the Wiltshire Council Pest Control Department this morning. Which is not as alarming as it sounds, it was the Wasp Lady as I call her, a lovely lady who gets rid of wasps nests in difficult positions. I don't mean she does it standing on one leg, it's the nest that's in the difficult position, in the roof space once again, same as last year. The Wasp Lady is kitted up in bee suit, or wasp suit I suppose, and a spray on the end of a long lance which enables her to reach up to the roof level. It costs £50, but is a necessary expense for me to protect my beehives from wasp invasion.

As I've mentioned before, wasps are a bit of a menace if you're a beekeeper, as they usually turn to robbing the beehives at some stage during the summer. I always wait to see if this will happen before ringing the council, as I would otherwise leave the wasps well alone, but I have found that my strong hive has a battalion of guard bees at the hive entrance fending off the wasps quite successfully, but my other hive, the weaker one is looking pretty much overwhelmed by the invasion. Wasps steal not only honey from beehives, but being carnivores they also eat the larvae, and even the bees, and over time can destroy a weak colony of bees. In fact we have two wasp nests in the garden, but the other one is in the ground and I can deal with this one myself. It's an easy matter to don my bee suit, and spray the nest with a proprietory wasp nest destroyer, best time to do it is at dusk when fewer insects are flying.

At least this is what I've had to do until I discovered the Waspinator recommended on Sarah Raven's website, and anything that's good enough for the sainted Sarah is good enough for me. They are imitation wasp nests which are apparently very effective at convincing wasps that the area is already occupied by another colony and so they give it a wide berth. Frankly it sounds pretty improbable but they are sold out on Sarah Raven** though still available from the manufacturers direct, so I've just sent off for a couple of Waspinators, and I will see whether they work and report back in due course. It would be lovely to have something that just kept wasps away, and didn't involve toxic chemicals and/or wholesale death and destruction. Generally speaking I'm in favour of life, rather than death, even for wasps.

**See comment below

An At Risk Group

2010-08-04T13:19:00.002+02:00

To quote one of my favourite comedians, David Mitchell,
"I do not have OCD, I've checked . Three or four hundred times. I definitely don't. I've stopped myself catching it by washing my hands an even number of times. But I'm aware I'm in an 'at risk group' "

If you grow sweet peas, you may notice a tendency towards this kind of behavior. I certainly do. I took the dog out this morning in the pouring rain, the first pouring rain I've seen for ages so I wasn't complaining, just put the wellies on and set off, and we were making a fairly cracking pace towards the front gate when I was obliged to stop and attend to this

Seed pods on the sweet peas. (Variety Cupani, by the way, an old fashioned variety with smaller but highly scented flowers) Seed pods however, are not allowed to form on the sweet peas, it contravenes Garden Regulation 472 paragraph 7 subsection 3.1, which clearly states that if you allow a seed pod to ripen on sweet peas the plant will fail to initiate any further flowers even if you take it off later and it will just sit there for the rest of the summer, a pile of pale green leaves and tendrils. I'm not sure that this is even correct, my sweet peas grow in a tangle on a wigwam so it's impossible to discern accurately. But I'm not taking any chances, and so every single time I pass the wigwams I have to stop and gather any seed pods that may have formed since last time I walked past, even if it was only ten minutes ago.
I have to do it. Even in a force ten gale, three feet of snow have fallen, and the house is on fire, David's revving the car in the drive waiting for me to open the gate because we're late, I just have to stop for the few seconds it takes to pick them off.

But of course however careful you are, like the labours of Penelope you will never finish, and this morning when Mo and I came back some twenty damp minutes after the first Seed Pod Incident and we were both desperate to get into the kitchen, dry out, and have a cup of tea (she likes tea), I spotted out of the corner of my eye...

there it is, lurking at the back. And there were numerous others too.So we had to stand there in the pouring rain just to pick off the rogue seed pods ( actually I did all the picking, she just sat there in the rain, no help at all...)

I'm definitely in an "at risk group".

Tomatoes

2010-08-03T17:31:00.002+02:00

I had intended to show you a mouthwatering array of home grown toms, but I seem to have got the light setting wrong on the camera for this shot and they all look more anaemic than Tesco's offerings. So you must take my word for it that they are lovely -the varieties for gardener's info are top row left to right Black Prince, Mr Stripy, Marmande, and bottom row left to right Sungold, Sweet Million, Costelluto Fiorentina. I would recommend any of them, but I especially liked Black Prince, with it's dark and unusual colouring, but delicious flavour, and Mr Stripy is good too, -I think this is also known as Tigerella in some catalogues.

So far, and I hardly dare say it, there is no trace of the dreaded tomato blight. Not wishing to be slow to award myself the credit for success I am putting this mostly down to my Anti Blight Measures taken earlier in the year, (although I also suspect that the much drier weather this year has helped quite a bit too). We are getting a steady and manageable supply of ripe tomatoes at the moment, plenty for salads and everyday needs with some to give away, but not a super huge amount for sauce making for the freezer as yet.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the plants keep on producing and stay healthy. Any one else had improvements on blight this year?

Cherries Jubilee and Other Incendiary Devices

2010-07-30T12:34:00.060+02:00

You may think I'm going on a bit about cherries, but when you've waited as long as I have to get your hands on some of your own cherries, you certainly do want to make the most of them. I have frozen most of the crop in syrup in plastic boxes. It's worth getting one of these nifty cherry stoners if you have many to do as they get the stone out without wrecking the fruit. Also useful of stoning olives.

They do take up quite a bit of freezer space like this, but I'm not intending they should be there for very long and the space they occupy will be vacated over the coming weeks. I'm not really keen on summer season fruits in the middle of winter anyway. They also bottle very well, and it's a good way of storing them.

Cherry jam is excellent and best made with Morello or sour cherries as they have better setting qualities. I mentioned Cherries Jubilee in my last post and it's a lovely easy pudding if you have some cherries in syrup either bottled or frozen, mine were frozen. I'm sure you'll be fascinated to know that the dish was invented by Escoffier for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897, and the original involves thickening the cherry juice with arrowroot or cornflour, which refinement will stretch your cherries to serve more people and looks nice, if you want to take extra trouble and do the flambe stuff. It's not recorded whether HM was amused...

Cherries Jubilee

Heat the thawed cherries in a small saucepan,and drain off the syrup. Spoon some good vanilla ice cream into individual dishes. In another small saucepan gently heat a sensible amount of brandy, and when it's hot put a match to it and pour it over the cherries, and then over the ice cream, watching out for people's eyebrows. If you're not of an incendiary frame of mind of course you can just heat the cherries and brandy together and pour over the ice cream, which is what I did and it tastes lovely. The pyrotechnic version is good for a dinner party although I recommend rehearsal first to avoid an unexpected visit from the Fire Brigade...

Once, years ago, I overfilled the petrol tank in my little car and parked it at a bit of an angle causing petrol to drip rather ominously from the petrol cap. It was a very hot day, and I was a bit concerned about the safety aspect being as the car was parked right outside my front door. So I phoned the Fire Brigade for advice, not 999 or anything you understand, just their normal enquiry number, and explained my concern. The nice man on the other end said I was right to be concerned, and that I should stay in the house and close the front door, and they would send someone along. Someone, he said. No sooner had I hung up the phone than a huge fire engine with sirens, flashing lights and the full works came hurtling down our little road, causing all the neighbours to come out onto the street to see where the fire was, and vast numbers of burly firemen running along, hoses aloft, ready to deal with the imminent danger to life and limb. Now I love a man in uniform, but I have to confess to being slightly overwhelmed and embarrassed at the response to my little domestic scenario. They were all lovely about it though, and said that I had done the right thing, and they had to respond in that way because it could have been much more serious than it had seemed to me at the time. Apparently petrol being highly explosive, I could have blown up the whole street.
It must be great having me as a neighbour.

2010-07-29T13:56:00.000+02:00

I've reminded myself to post the results of this year's anti bird tactics in the fruit garden, after last night's lovely pudding of Cherries Jubilee ( recipe tomorrow) made with some cherries from the freezer. I should have posted this a few weeks ago when I harvested them but here's my thoughts anyway. The Buzz Off product, which is a thin plastic line that whirrs in the breeze and frightens away birds has proved useful though not revolutionary. I have found that it has to be used in conjunction with other barrier methods to keep birds off cherry trees, and my plastic bags and bin liners, whilst not aesthetically pleasing, do seem to do the job quite well. I've made a mental note not to put the bags on too early though, as I lost quite a lot of fruit from doing just that, and they either dropped off or rotted. But I still got quite a good crop of sweet cherries from the Stella tree

and also sour cherries from the Morello tree

where I used only the line as protection, and no bags, since sour cherries are not quite so readily taken by birds as sweet cherries, (although they've stripped the tree bare in the past). So for me a couple of buckets of cherries as opposed to no cherries as in previous years, is a result. And at £3.99 for 30 metres it's well worth a go.

I have found the Buzz Off line most useful over the strawberry bed, where it can be placed two or three feet above the plants, but I also cover the bed with plastic netting. In previous years I have often found that birds get under the netting,- it's quite annoying to have to rescue a corpulent blackbird who's spent the morning gorging himself on strawberries and can now barely waddle flatulently off down the garden - but I think the Buzz Off line has helped stop this from happening. Although the soft fruit is mostly finished, I still have the lines in place as I'm wondering if they will help to deter pigeons from the winter brassicas that I've just planted out into their final quarters. Once again I will be netting the plants, but I think the lines may have a bit of a belt and braces effect, and frankly anything that helps protect the plants is welcome in my book. I really can't be doing with pigeons, the only ones I like are on a plate with bacon and mushrooms, accompanied by a glass of red wine.

A Pot Of Basil

2010-07-24T16:36:00.003+02:00

This is the famous Pre Raphaelite painting Isabella And The Pot Of Basil, based on a poem of Keats, and depicts the heroine Isabella draped over a pot of basil in which she has, somewhat gruesomely in my view, buried the head of her murdered lover. The basil seems to be doing quite well, which is surprising in the circumstances, since basil is a mediteranean herb and prefers quite hot and dry conditions, which would presumably not be found in the humus rich environment of a composted head. But that's artists and poets for you. No horticultural training at all.

This is my own somewhat less romantic pot of basil.

I've never thought, even on a difficult day, of burying David's head in it, it's far too small for a start, and come to think of it, if you look at the painting, Isabella's other half must have had a remarkably small head to have been accommodated in that pot, allowing as you must, for the roots of the plant and a reasonable amount of John Innes No 3.

Anyway, my basil has done remarkably well this year. I've often found that I had much less basil than I would like so this year I sowed a line of seeds alongside my tomato plants when I planted them out, and the ones in the greenhouse have done very well. The ones outside have fared less well, they do have fleshier leaves but far fewer of them.

But it's always feast or famine in the garden and my plants were starting to produce flowers before I could use them all, so I cut them all off at about four leaves from the base (so they can sprout again for a second cut) and brought a great armful into the kitchen. I have made a pot of classic basil pesto (basil leaves, garlic, olive oil, parmesan, pine nuts, seasoning in proportions to suit you all whizzed together in the blender). Float a layer of oil on the top to prevent discolouration. Keep it in the fridge. You will notice I have very efficiently dated the pot so that I will remember not to keep it too long. Low acid food in airless conditions like this has a very slight chance of playing host to botulism, and that's not something we want to be trifling with is it. It's the reason commercially made sauces like this are always acidified and therefore taste terrible. The risk is extremely slight, so I don't suggest you worry too much about it, but I always think that knowing about and understanding the "science bits" makes us better consumers. So all the more reason to stuff yourself and your family with as much as you can manage to eat for a few days, and keep the rest in the freezer.

Basil isn't the easiest herb to store, but if you have a surfeit freezing is the way to go. I wouldn't add the nuts and cheese before freezing as they won't keep as well, and you can add them later if you wish. Just whizz up the basil leaves with some olive oil and you can either freeze it in ice cube trays, or as I do, just freeze it in a flat sheet in a plastic bag and break it up when it's frozen to make pesto or add to soups, sauces or pasta. Disembodied heads are entirely optional.

Fig Trees and The Sentimental Garden

2010-07-19T14:10:00.002+02:00

You don't often see figs growing in England. Fig trees yes, but actual figs, not so often. The RHS says that figs will crop three times a year in tropical countries, twice in the mediteranean, but only once in cool temperate areas like England. The tree is hardy enough to withstand our winters happily, but getting some fruit is apparently, as with so many things in life, all in the timing.

Fig trees make an enormous amount of growth, and often sucker at the base - this tree in fact was a sucker that I pulled up from a tree growing in the garden of the French house we had a few years ago. So it's a kind of nice souvenir, although I don't know what the variety is, but it reminds me of those few balmy summers we enjoyed in the Charente every time I look at it. One of the differences between one's own garden and a public garden like the RHS (apart from the weeds) is that in our own patches we have some plants for sentimental rather than purely horticultural reasons. And there's nothing wrong with that. The Edwardian gardener Gertrude Jekyll would certainly not have approved, she said the gardener has to have a hard heart, and remove any failing plants and replace them with something better. And I can see her point, why struggle with a plant that is clearly unsuited to its surroundings. But we home gardeners have no paying clients to please and we can afford to be a bit more sentimental, and persevere with our funny old fig trees and so on.

Anyway, according to the RHS, if you want to grow figs in England, the thing to do is to leave the little tiny figs that form late in the year, as next year they will grow and mature into your single crop. My crop is, of course, entirely accidental, it just seems to have turned out right. Now I'm hoping we have enough sun to sweeten and ripen them up by the end of summer.

New Toy

2010-07-13T23:14:00.001+02:00

I've treated myself to one of these..

and no it's not some weird victorian medical contraption, it's a steam juice extractor. I bought it very cheaply on Ebay from a lady whose dad used to use it for wine making. I've got such a generous harvest of fruit this year, I thought it would be a useful bit of kit.

There's basically a pan at the bottom which you fill with water, then a second pan on top that collects the juice with a funnel in the middle that directs the steam up to the fruit which sits in the top layer in a basket. It's difficult to describe, you kind of have to see it to get how it works.

So far I've used it to juice a bucketful of gooseberries, from which I made an elderflower jelly which is as clear as a bell,

and the remaining pulp I used for a batch of summer chutney.

It takes up quite a bit of room and will go in the garage in the winter, so no good for anyone pressed for space but so far I'm quite pleased with the results. Cheese and chutney sandwich anyone?

The Luscious Pea

2010-07-11T23:30:00.001+02:00

FORBIDDEN FRUIT

Forbidden fruit a flavor has

That lawful orchards mocks;

How luscious lies the pea within

The pod that Duty locks!

Emily Dickinson

I've had more luscious peas this year than even Emily Dickinson could have dealt with. Some have even made it to the dinner table. Usually they never get that far, and to be honest, having had a few servings of cooked peas, we have decided that we like them best raw, and so I serve them in the pod as a kind of starter before we eat. It reminds me of a trip to Italy, a couple of years ago, when we ordered broad beans in a restaurant, and were presented with an enormous plate of raw beans, not only were they raw, but also still in their pods! I later learned that this is a local speciality in Puglia, and although I couldn't finish the whole plateful, I did enjoy them as they were young and tender, if a little inelegant!

As you can see my peas are tall, the variety is they very old variety Telephone, and they require staking. I think it's worth the extra bit of effort, since you get far more pea per square foot of row than with the short varieties, which have mostly been developed for the convenience of Messrs Birds Eye, who require peas that grow uniformly, mature all at once, and can be harvested mechanically. And you can't harvest six foot tall plants with a machine. The peas aren't all ready at once, which is what we as gardeners are looking for, and can be picked over a period a week or two. The only problem is that there's such an abundance of them that it's difficult to keep up with the picking, and it 's looking like pea soup will be on the menu pretty soon for the older cannonballs that I've missed.

I've also grown "Alderman" another tall pea, whose seed is more generally available, and whilst it's perfectly fine I would still recommend Telephone for its stronger growth, and bigger pods containing up to nine finely flavoured peas. Seed can be obtained from Real Seeds, who warn that the pods tend to swell up before the peas have developed so don't be fooled into picking too early. Seeds Of Italy also supply the seed under the name "Telefono".

Calabrese

2010-07-08T22:25:00.001+02:00

On a more successful note than the broad beans, I'm very pleased with my summer brocolli, or calabrese, as it should properly be called. I've never managed to grow good calabrese before, although I've often had success with the winter purple sprouting kind. I've tended to think of it as "difficult" but I think I was mistaken. This variety is Corvet and has been very quick and surprisingly easy. Sowed in modules and planted out at about six inches high, about a foot and a half apart. Firm in well, water generously. It makes a large central head and after you've cut that, the side shoots make a second crop of spears to cut a little later. Highly recommended, give it a go.

I have to cover all brassicas in my garden against pigeons, and it helps to keep the cabbage white butterfly at bay. Note the rogue "volunteer" potato plant coming through on the left!

Aphids, The Watercannon Approach

2010-07-06T14:47:00.001+02:00

My broad beans this year have been rather poor. I'm not sure why, I think I sowed them early enough, in pots and planted out in timely manner. They seem to have been occupying their bed forever, and I really do need the room for winter brassicas, which are getting severely overcrowded in their nursery quarters. Maybe it's the dry weather, maybe the variety, it's Masterpiece Green Longpod, not one I've grown before, and I certainly won't be bothering again! I will probably go back to Bunyard's Exhibition, if anyone has recommendations I'd be grateful to hear what has worked well for you.

One of the things broad beans often seem to fall prey to is blackfly.And mine is worse this year because they've been so slow to mature.

I don't use insecticides** in the garden, so in a case like this, which I admit I have let get a bit out of hand, I use the water cannon approach. That is supporting the plant stem in your left hand, the hose pipe in your right and using a medium strong spray, (don't go mad and blast the leaves off) you can remove most of the aphids quite easily. It will take a few minutes to do a row of plants, and although the aphids will gradually come back and you'll have to do it again in a week or two, it does get rid of most of the little devils ok, and your insect and bird population will thank you for it. I do the same with roses if I find outbreaks of green aphids that sometimes infest the flower buds. But generally speaking, a healthy insect population means that aphids are not normally much of a problem for me.

**I noted yesterday that we have once again, a wasp nest in the roof space, which sadly may have to be chemically removed if the wasps start to raid my beehives as they did last year, will have to see how it goes.

Honey Harvest

2010-07-05T12:49:00.003+02:00

I have two bee hives in my garden most of the time, and rather like Alan Bennet's dad, who always had an everyday suit and a best suit which he referred to as "my suit" and "my other suit" respectively, my hives always seem to be "the Hive" and "the other Hive". Except in my case "the Hive" is the good one and "the other Hive" is not so good.

I was very pleased to find enough honey for a decent harvest in the Hive, when I did my inspection the other day. Not so good in the Other Hive, which still appears not to have a laying queen, despite my earlier efforts, so I have transferred another frame of eggs and larvae from the Good Hive to the Other Hive, in the hope that this will encourage the bees to select one of the eggs and nurture it into a queen which they do by feeding with royal jelly and generally mollycoddling her. Quite democratic when you think about it, she's really just a bee like any other but is selected to be treated differently, and if I were Richard Dawkins, I would no doubt see this as evidence of Nurture over Nature, or am I thinking of Steven Pinker?

Anyway Bee queens, rather like The Queen, are very well looked after by vast numbers of servants, and also work very hard indeed, (but without the dodgy relatives). It may even be truer to say that everyone is her relative since everyone is either her sibling or her offspring (I'm obviously back to the bee queen here) - she is the only one who can lay the fertile eggs which will ensure the future of the hive. I really need to set up a bait hive to see if I can attract a passing swarm, as one good hive isn't enough of an insurance against possible future losses. Even small beekeepers like me should always try to have at least two good hives at any one time. One hive and one "other" just isn't safe enough really.

I've made so much marmalade and jam this year, that I've run out of jars, so I have stored all my honey temporarilly in large preserving jars for the time being, and I will decant it into smaller jars in due course. If I do get another super of honey to harvest I will have too much for myself and my family/friends and will have some to sell, which will be the first for quite a while. But I always make certain that I leave more than enough to last the bees over the winter. It is possible to feed bees on sugar syrup, and indeed commercially this is always done, but I much prefer to let the bees have the food they have worked so hard to make, and only feed sugar syrup in an emergency.
What a good egg I am.

The Clergyman At The Back Door

2010-07-03T23:17:00.001+02:00

Thought I would just show you a picture or two of the vigorous white rose Rambling Rector who lives by the back door. I took this picture last week, when it was at its peak, it's just gone over now - there's no second show, it's all at one mad flurry, but quite lovely for a week or two in June.

Not only is it visually stunning, the perfume is lovely too, and has filled the kitchen whilst I've had the doors and windows open in the hot weather.

It's fairly generally available, but don't be tempted to plant this rose on a small pillar or arch.It is vigorous and needs plenty of room to spread and is ideal for planting at the base of an old apple tree. There's another one in the village growing on a dead almond tree which also works well. If you plant it by the back door like me, you do have the side effect of a confetti filled kitchen for a few days when the petals start to fall though. Small price to pay I feel.

Home Made Yogurt With Garden Fruit

2010-06-30T23:50:00.000+02:00

I have a feeling that yogurt is very good for you. I know this isn't really news, lots of other people think this and I also have no scientific basis for my view, but it's what I think. If it makes me live to a hundred and ten I'll be very pleased to have been right, if not, well it's still a delicious treat, so win-win (except I'd be dead...)

Anyway, I often make my own yogurt, partly because the Aga makes it so easy, and partly because if you make it yourself you can make it how you like. I like it thick and creamy, so I use full fat milk and I strain the yogurt, Greek style through a square of muslin or cotton. And the great thing about thick creamy yogurt is that is goes really well with the soft fruit from the garden, that's really coming into season now. If you don't happen to have an Aga lying about the place, you can use the airing cupboard, a slow cooker, or a large thermos. I say large because it's not worth making dribs and drabs especially if you strain it because the volume is considerably reduced. Also it keeps pretty well in the fridge - treat it as you would fresh milk.

Home Made Yogurt

4 pints of fresh full fat organic milk (I can't physically stop you from using low fat, but I would if I could)

A couple of big dollops of plain full fat yogurt, I use Yeo Valley, or Total, about a third of the large tub in the picture.

Place your yogurt in a pristine mixing bowl, and whisk in the milk. Cover with cling film and place in a warm spot until thickened. It will depend on the temperature, but I usually leave mine overnight at the back of the Aga. It will be thickended but not very thick. Put it in the fridge to chill and it will get a bit thicker. You can use it as it is if you like, but I much prefer to line a large sieve or colander with a bit of scalded muslin or cotton, and pour in the chilled yogurt and leave. It takes a few hours, and you'll be left with a bowl of thick creamy yogurt and some cloudy water which is chock full of probiotics, and which you should give to your chickens, so that they will also live to a hundred and ten. Spoon the yogurt into another pristine container (I'm harping on about the cleanliness as it's quite important with any dairying process, try to think of yourself as a dairymaid in a Thomas Hardy novel..) and store in the fridge (not so Thomas Hardy but safe).

Flavoured Yogurt

Now for the best bit, yogurt for breakfast with some lovely soft fruit from the garden. With yogurt as thick as this, you can just add fruit as you fancy, just mash up a few raspberries and redcurrants a bit, add a little sugar or honey to taste and use to top your little dish of yogurt. One other thing I like to do for a change from fruit is to scrape some seeds from a vanilla pod, and add to the yogurt with a little icing sugar to taste, Vanilla Yogurt, delicious!

2010-06-28T23:54:00.000+02:00

The past week or so of hot sunny days has really got the soft fruit season off with a bang. Every year I try very hard with strawberries and for the last couple of years I have done fairly well. Yesterday I picked a big basketful,and very delicious they were, but for me, nothing can beat a great big dish of these that I picked today.

Raspberries are my favourite soft fruit. To the extent that I have extended the raspberry row the full length of the veg garden, about thirty odd feet. I have a six foot fence that separates the front garden from veg garden, and although I still have some gaps, I have managed to fill most of the veg side of the fence with raspberries. Raspberries, like most soft fruit are easy to propagate, - new canes come up all around the current years growth, and surplus ones can be easily detached and dug up, and re planted where you wish.So splash out on some good plants from a reliable supplier like Ken Muir and extend your row as you please.

My fence faces north east on the veg side, which is why I chose it for raspberries as I find that whilst they won't thrive in poor light conditions, they do well in a cooler damp aspect. I expect that's why we so often see Scottish raspberries in the shops. I mulch them well, but they still need copious watering to ensure a good crop.

It's useful to bear in mind the conditions required by different fruits when planning a garden fruit supply. Even if you have a limited amount of space, if you think in terms of using the vertical space around the edges of your plot, you will often find room for a supply of delicious organically grown fruit that you can pick at the peak of it's ripeness and goodness. Pears should always be given a good sunny condition, especially the delicate varieties like Comice. Victoria plums are happy in most places but you can grow fine varieties that you seldom see for sale like Coe's Golden Drop, against a warm sunny wall. But raspberries and redcurrants are quite happy in relative shade. My red and white currants are now grown against the north fence of the chicken run - that's the inside of the fence where the chickens are. I grow them as cordons, (that's basically just a single stem with fruits growing all the way up) and throw a net over them when they are ripening, which I would have to do anyway to keep blackbirds off. I don't find the chickens or the ducks do much damage, possibly eating the foliage low down, but that just keeps the "leg" clean, - when I've picked as many as I want, or can be bothered with, I take the net off, it's quite fun watching them jump up to try to get the fruit.

If you don't have the time to devote to a veg garden, do think about trying some home grown fruit, it takes much less time and commitment, and can be acheived in a relatively small amout of space. And when you're tucking into that bowl of home grown raspberries and cream, you'll be glad you did.

Don't Panic Mr Mainwaring

2010-06-25T12:15:00.002+02:00

Calm in a crisis that's me. Like Tom Hanks in the Apollo 13 film. Houston we have a problem, we're about to crash the spaceship, no panic, we can deal with this calmly. So when someone (naming no names, but I'm married to him) rings up and says sternly "we've got an emergency situation here, can you go over to the office now and ring me straight back", I waste no valuable time asking questions but hang up and rush,(but without panicking Mr Mainwairing) over to said office, all the time wondering whose blood is on the floor, whose life may be ebbing away, and in my hurry (but not panic) my fingers won't press the right buttons, don't panic, don't panic, can't get the phone to work, but eventually it does and it's engaged,dial again, oh god, what can it be, this time he answers... could I just look through the invoices for a missing delivery number as one of our largest customers won't accept their delivery without the correct number.

It's kind of an emergency I suppose, since they are a big customer, but it's not AN EMERGENCY. I should have realised of course that I couldn't supply any life saving information from the office phone that I couldn't already have given from the home one, if indeed I even know any life saving information. But it's the word "emergency" that got me going, but not panicking. EMERGENCY to me indicates some kind of life and death matter, grievous bodily harm, falling off a ladder at the very least, and trying not to panic, definitely not panicking, but.. delivery numbers??. I had to laugh afterwards though. One person's emergency is another's missing delivery number.

Sorry, post has absolutely nothing to do with gardening or cooking. Back to normal tomorrow. Don't panic.

The Great Scape

2010-06-24T13:42:00.001+02:00

No that's not a typo for the Steve McQueen film, the scape I refer to is the great garlic scape, which looks like a kind of curly spring onion

I posted about this last year, but make no apologies for repeating myself, as it seems garlic scapes are still much undervalued, and not appreciated for the delicious treat that they are. Some people have been known to cut them off and throw them away! (Throw up hands in horror)

If you grow hardneck garlic, variously known as porcelain, or rocambole garlic, it will produce, around this time of year, a curious curly central shoot, which is in fact the flowering stem of the plant. I know of no other allium either edible or ornamental that does this curly wurly thing, it seems to be only porcelain garlic. My variety is "Music" and I have grown it for several years, saving a few heads each year for replanting. We eat a lot of garlic, I believe the allium veggies are very beneficial for health if not social life, and this year I've bought hardly any garlic at all, using our own supplies until well into the spring, with a bit of a gap until the scapes come into season, and tide us over until garlic harvest proper in August.

You need to cut off the scape for the benefit of the plant, so that it can direct its energies into plumping up the bulbs rather than producing flowers and seed. So cut your scapes, take them into the kitchen and chop off the flower buds at the end, and make yourself some Garlic Scape Pesto. This is a loose recipe, and endlessly variable, but here's the general idea.

Garlic Scape Pesto

6-8 garlic scapes

two handfuls of walnuts

2-4oz/50-100gr parmesan or similar hard cheese

handful of flatleaf parsley or basil if you prefer

Salt and black pepper

a good half pint of extra virgin olive oil

Cut the end off the scapes and chop into 1inch pieces.

Chop the cheese into manageable (for the blender) cubes.

Put everything except the oil into the blender and blend until finely chopped, at which point add as much oil as you fancy, to make a thick paste. Keep it in the fridge in a jar, floating a little oil over the top to keep the air out. Use it for:

Spreading on toasted sourdough and topping with sliced tomato for bruschetta style nibbles.

Stir into cooked pasta for a quick tasty supper when you've had a long day in the garden and don't want to cook much.

Spread on chops, chicken thighs, and/or chunky veggies, and slam in the aga to be cooking whilst you shower away the vestiges of the day's gardening, emerging Stepford fragrant, twenty minutes later to serve dinner.

I can hear someone laughing...