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Garden Diary – Making Pesto & discovering Beardtongues
Erysimum ‘bowles mauve’, also known as a perennial wallflower, is such a fabulous plant to have in your garden, it just keeps flowering all year around! It is classed as a perennial but it’s more like a small shrub in appearance and the fact that it doesn’t die off in winter adds to this. Eventually, after a few years they go to look really spindly and get too big. This is the time to take cuttings, if not before. It is a really easy plant to take cuttings from, just choose a new shoot with no flower buds yet formed. Pop it into some gritty compost, or just pop it…
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Garden Diary – A rejigged hosta bed & an extra hour in mine!
I’m so pleased with the hosta bed after having to dig most of it out in the spring – well at least the gardeners mate had to dig it for me. I started by getting a few plants out as it had all got a bit congested, but I had no idea that Lily-of-the-valley was so invasive! The gardeners mate said, he thought the roots were heading for Australia! Anyway I’d only had green in the bed before but as it’s on the patio I fancied bringing a bit of colour in. Geranium ‘Patricia’ had not been doing too well in her position in the border so I thought I’d…
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Garden Diary – Grey days cheered up with Apple turnover
What a lot of grey days we had last week. It makes it so much harder to get up in the morning, but luckily the thought of breakfast usually does the trick! We still have plenty of cake made from garden produce, sliced and frozen to make it easy to get out. But this week a new treat, suggested to me by an acquaintance. An apple turnover. It’s been an amazing year for apples, as I’m sure quite a few of you know. Even if you don’t grow your own, everybody seems to be offering you a bag of apples. I’ve even seen a few boxes outside people’s houses, with…
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Garden Diary – An excellent week, bulb planting & Adam Frost!
On Monday last week I started planting my spring bulbs. I was planning to do some jobs in the house but then the sun came out and was so warm that I just couldn’t resist getting outside. It really is one of my favourite jobs, and it fortunately comes at a time of year that I find quite depressing. It just feels like such an optimistic task, trusting that spring will come again and I’ll be here to enjoy it! Could the week get any better? Yes. Tuesday night was super exciting, as we went to see Adam Frost in Chester. I like lots of the well known gardeners and…
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Garden Diary – It’s time to get those spring bulbs planted!
As we move into October, it is definitely bulb planting season! It’s so easy to forget, but you know you’ll be sorry next spring if you do! I actually put it on my phone calendar with an alert to remind me, which is something I do more and more these days. Time just goes so quickly and before you know it, all the nice bulbs are sold out and quite honestly it’s too cold to be out there sorting all your pots out. So I’m pleased to say that I’ve bought all of my spring bulbs for next year, well, unless I get tempted on the entrance to a shop.…
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Garden Diary – Hurray, I can’t smell the cucumber cake!
Well, thank goodness for the gorgeous weather last week. Not much gardening got done but there was plenty of sitting around relaxing, which is frankly unheard of in this house. Unfortunately I found myself with a dose of Covid which started the previous weekend, but fortunately the worst of it passed relatively quickly, just leaving me lethargic. Lethargic enough to sit around! Normally when I sit with a coffee in the garden, I’ve hardly finished it before I’ve jumped up to do some job or another, intending to sit back down, but of course I never do. One job just leads on to another… I’d much rather be fit and…
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Raspberry Seed Biscuit Cakes
I’ve called them biscuit cakes because they’re a hybrid between the two. A crunchy biscuity outside, with a soft cake-like inside. But whatever their name the gardeners mate and I have decided they are the best biscuits we’ve ever tasted! We grow our own autumn fruiting raspberries, the variety is called ‘Polka’ and they are very productive. In fact once they start fruiting, we can hardly keep up with the picking, eating and preserving of them. These biscuits came about because we hate wasting food, especially when we’ve gone to the trouble of growing it! I was making a raspberry cheesecake, so I’d briefly stewed up a pan of raspberries…
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Spiced Cucumber Cake
If you grow your own cucumbers, there comes a point during the growing season when your plant produces more fruits than you can eat. This is the moment to preserve them for the coming months and there is no better way than turning them into cake, slicing it and freezing it. You can never have too much cake! Those of you that follow the garden’s process will know by now that the gardeners mate and I make quite a lot of low sugar fruit and vegetable cake that we eat with yogurt for breakfast. Cake made with vegetables, especially with nuts added for protein, make a great and nutritious start…
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Garden Diary – A week of surprises, not all good!
As I was walking down the garden, I just noticed some little pink flowers almost buried under the heucheras, I bent to take a look and it was a bunch of cyclamen flowers. I always forget about them, then get a lovely surprise. Last week was full of surprises. I was so lucky to spot a strawberry, in September! It’s been a funny year in the garden with the multiple heatwaves, how many? Who’d have thought that we would loose track of how many heatwaves we’ve had in one uk summer. The world’s gone mad! Talking of going mad, why can’t I grow Aubergines? My niece grows so many she…
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Garden Diary – Does the sky look bluer this week?
Last week, in between the pretty good balance of sunny spells and showers, I kept feeling that the blueness of the sky seemed much more intense, so much so that I googled it. I know we say this all the time now, but, what did we do before googling? I suppose we just wondered! Anyway it turns out that I am quite right, the sky is bluer in autumn and it’s all due to the temperature dropping and humidity levels falling. This drier air means less scattering of the blue light, allowing more of it to reach our eyes and making the sky appear more blue. I thought that was…
