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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…
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Garden Diary – Turning the harvest into Curry & Pear Cake
The first week of September had the house smelling of curry and pear cake, as the harvesting continued. We make other ready meals for the freezer but we do love curry and cake. Not necessarily at the same time, you probably know by now that we eat our low sugar fruit and vegetable cakes for breakfast. Although, the gardeners mate would happily eat curry for breakfast, he rarely has! After hearing on the radio this week of how, what you consume affects your mood and mental health, I felt really sad that as a nation we’ve moved so far away from scratch cooking being the norm. It’s not that many…
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Garden diary – Cheers! The garden finally got a drink.
Just as the borders were starting to look incredibly sad, the rain finally came and the garden had a drink. We still need more, but it certainly does look better for it! I’m so glad though, that the warm sunny weather lasted over August bank holiday especially for those still holidaying. It is quite a rarity! As I’ve previously mentioned the white garden has suffered the most, mainly because it is underneath our enormous walnut tree, which casts its shadows over the whole area. And also must require a huge amount of water. We’re actually quite worried about it as it is looking very droopy! Unfortunately the bit of rain…
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Garden Diary – I’d rather be in the garden!
We’ve reached that time of year where I spend as much time in the kitchen as I do in the garden, turning all the produce into ready meals for the freezer. Don’t get me wrong I do really enjoy cooking, but when the weather is lovely outside, I’d rather be in the garden! But with more ripe raspberries on a daily basis and a basket full of pears that ripen so quickly once they are picked. There is lots of baking to be done! When out picking yet more fruit the ‘gardeners mate’ shouted me over to see a butterfly he thought looked smaller than usual. I said, “oh it’s…
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Garden Diary – Is it a record breaking tomato?
I’ve been watching this tomato get bigger and bigger, thinking, ‘this is definitely going to break my existing record’. But sadly it was 20g short. The original record was set back in August 2017 by a ‘Brandywine’ tomato. Although they do get rather large, nothing has come close to that huge fruit. Last year I ordered some seeds for a tomato variety called ‘Gourmansun’, but they were not what they claimed to be. Luckily the plant did produce some huge orange tomatoes that I named, ‘Orange Sunshine’, and they were delicious, so I saved the seeds and grew them again this year. The plant has grown tall and thin like…
