Onions and other things

Finally got out into the garden again today - we've been meaning to do so since October, but then I was struck down with a pernicious virus (no voice for 3 weeks - hell for me, heaven for C!!), and then Life caught up with me (mostly trying to find out where I was at with all of my classes), then suddenly The Cold came, and the snow and then Christmas and New Year.

Christmas day was fantastic - a range of our home-grown produce on the table: our leeks sweated in butter and our garlic, baby roasted shallots (ours) and our fantastic King Edward's potatoes roasted extra crispy. Sadly the parsnips were immovable from their icy grave, so will have to be enjoyed later on. I also put some of the foraged Sloe and Bramley jelly into the gravy, and handed out bottles and jars of home made and foraged goodies: Plum chutney, hedgerow cordial, spiced apple jelly, quince and apple compote (admittedly the quinces were bought, but come September and everyone's offering me apples and I can't say no!!).

Northernmas was fantastic too - went up for 5 days and had a good chance to catch up with all the family. Brother in law P is beginning to show an interest in Veg growing - we gave them some seeds last spring and he grew some potatoes quite successfully - so this Christmas we gave him a copy of the RHS Grow Your Own Gardening year, a lovely book with step-by-step guidelines on what to do when. I also made some seed packets (found a natty tutorial to fold them online) and gave him access to my Seed Box - so fingers crossed he'll have some fun growing a few veg this summer.

Today, we finally went out - our leeks are still small and have gone a bit floppy but amazingly still seem to be growing, so we should get a few more meals from them - we have about 9 left.

We dug over the other half of the leek bed (where peas and carrots had been last year), and have finally put in the onion and garlic sets that I bought in November. My understanding is that the point of planting them in the autumn is to give them a chance to put down some roots over winter, so they should still be okay in January. The soil was lovely - still cold (of course) but soft and friable and almost as if it were waiting for all the life that will spring forth soon. I'm amazed to see that the rainbow chard is springing up again already, and we may be able to pick from it in the spring!! Hurrah!. We're hopeful that the very cold winter will have knocked out some of the nasty little beasties in the garden, or at least dampened their ardour somewhat.

I also potted up the root cuttings of Bocking 14 comfrey that I bought on eBay - the instructions warn you to choose your site carefully, so I shall have to find somewhere sensible to put them, and as it propagates by root, possibly not next to the veg patch. Fingers crossed, the comfrey should feed and nourish our vegetables and improve the quality of our compost.

Watched a lovely program of Nigel Slater's New Year Suppers the other night - he was comparing planning his veg plot to planning a summer holiday and I can see it - it's the same idea of mapping out what you want and then looking forwards to the sunnier days when you can enjoy the fruits of your labour. Can't wait!! C bought us a membership to the Heritage Seed Library for Christmas so we can pick our 6 varieties to grow. The catalogue is full of wonders and I'm fascinated with all the little stories of how they were rescued - best of all, the tale of two sisters whose brother had a particular variety of tomato. They thought they'd lost all the seed when it rotted and hadn't dried properly, but then later found 3 seeds in the bottom of their seed box. That the variety survived after that is amazing! I can't help but think that those 3 seedlings must have been so carefully guarded against plague and pestilence!

Time for a slice of tea and a cup of that rather good christmas cake, I think!

A new decade....

I haven't been doing a lot of blogging at all. I've read a lot of other people's blogs, and have even photographed and composed posts in my head but somehow they've not made it on here.

So much has changed in my life in the last 18 months - I'm married, I'm teaching, we've bought a house, made plans, dreamed dreams and yet none of it has been recorded.

I don't usually make resolutions at the beginning of a new year, I find they get lost along the way very quickly. But as I sat looking out of my bedroom window on New Years Day, I thought about what I wanted to happen during the next year and I made certain decisions.

My dad often used to ask me if I was "being constructive". He had a great sense of purpose, of things that needed to be done. I want to be constructive, I want to look back at 2010 as the year that Achieved Things.

So, here I am, without readers, without any clear idea of what I will and will not write about but a clear purpose of what I want to achieve this year.

I want to serve Christmas dinner next year with homegrown vegetables on the table.
I want to host friends and open our home to new people.
I want to capture the beauty of little moments as so many other bloggers do.
I want there to be a record of my life.

A new decade, a new start and so many great possibilities.

Promise

It's been a slow starter, this summer. We had snow in April, and have had wind and rain and grey skies ever since. Occasionally we have a day of sunshine and then it's glorious, but the following day it returns to the type of cold overcast day more familiar in march or october than June.

One thing I've noticed, though is that nobody has told the plants that summer hasn't come, they are still coming along beautifully waiting and hoping. It's as if they know something that we don't. My tomato plants are flowering bravely, confident that there will be a burst of summer sun to ripen their fruits, the trees are all in glorious leaf waiting to provide relieving shade for the passers by. And then there's the lavender. On my walk from home to the bus stop, and from the bus stop to work I pass lavender bushes. The ones near my home have just this week burst into flower. Bees are buzzing away merrily and the flower heads sway gracefully in the not-so-summery breeze. The lavender bushes by my workplace are a little more reserved. They've been in bud for weeks now, but haven't had the courage yet to venture out. Perhaps they, like me, are unconvinced that this summer will be any better than last summer. Every day the lavender and I size each other up - they're still not flowering, I'm still wearing long sleeves and a jacket. Obviously the time isn't right yet.

Perhaps in the next week or two the weather will improve and both I and the lavender will be persuaded to relax a little and enjoy the sunshine. Just not yet, apparently.

Beautiful soup, so rich and.. er... orange!

I waited in the rain for 20 minutes this morning, as the number 1 bus made up its mind whether to come, or not. Had I caught a bus immediately, I would have been rapidly ensconced in my normal early-morning fug of cigarette smoke from the boys at the back of the bus. Happily buried in my library book I would have sat in traffic until I got to work.

However, this morning, the bus was late or missing and I was cold, wet and blustered by the time it arrived. I still got stuck in traffic and so I was 15 minutes late for work. Better than that, the powers that be had decided to schedule the most vicious part of the morning's rain/hail storm to commence at the exact moment I got off the bus, and last exactly long enough for me to get totally drenched while crossing the road to our building. Eugh! The cars were busy on harborne road, and didn't want to let a bedraggled female cross in front of them, perhaps my pitiful soddenness offended them in their cosy, watertight cars...

When I entered the building I removed my raincoat to stop it dripping on my trousers, and left a puddle in the hall. I got upstairs, totally soaked from the waist down and spent the next two hours with cold, bare feet as I waited for my socks and shoes to dry. The bliss of hot-water-pipe-warmed socks on cold-but-dry feet brought forth sighs of rapture, but the best of all was the bowl of thick, scented, velvety soup I'd packed for my lunch. A good bowl of soup does wonders to cosset a cold soul, and my sweet potato and cumin puree was absolutely delicious! Thank heavens I have some more for tomorrow - they're threatening snow!

Them Boots were made for Walking

I have been reading The Cottage Smallholder regularly for a couple of months now and absolutely adore the way its owner, Fiona, writes. Her most recent post is about boots, and reminded me of my beloved CAT boots that I bought when I was 16 and in full flush of Rocker-wannabe mode.

I bought them at a factory outlet store in Denver, Colorado and was so excited about my big black kick-me boots. Unfortunately, I grabbed a pair off the shelf and didn't realise that US size 6 is a UK size 8. So whenever I wore them I had to wear big thick socks.

I loved my Cat boots, they were of the bulky butchness that made me stride with intent everywhere I went. Not made for mincing or tripping lightly, these boots made me feel confident and that I had purpose. I wore them with jeans, I wore them with my long khaki skirt. I even wore them very happily with my ankle-length velvet dress, long black coat and spiky dog-collar. I wore them on my first date with my first boyfriend, and the new-boot smell still reminds me of taking the boots off at his house.

After a while the soles began to wear down and lose their grip, and on one occasion I had a thrilling sense of aquaplaning at the top of New Street as a layer of water formed between the smooth surfaces of boot sole and blue brick paving. I fell flat on my arse. I got back on my feet, but felt I'd lost the self-important gravitas that the all-black ensemble gave me and after that I only ever wore them on dry days.

My love of the loud thrashy music which had inspired my image faded gradually towards the summer of my A Levels, and when the autumn returned again, my boots were somehow wrong for the new wardrobe and mindset. I did not take them to poland with me, and when I came home in the spring my head was full of girly thoughts of love and I rushed to buy more feminine outfits.

I found my boots in the back of my wardrobe a couple of years ago, sad and lonely and thick with the dust of over 4 years neglect. I felt so sad to get rid of them, almost like betraying an old friend. I probably even explained to them why I didn't need them...

Vegetable aspirations

I'm very excited about the idea of having parties in the summer, and being able to use vegetables and salads that I have grown in the garden. We visited our friends the Skinners at Eastgrove Cottage Garden for Easter Sunday, and I spent a long time grilling Carol about how to grow different types of veg and salads.

I've already mentioned the courgettes, peas and beans, but I'll also be growing a salad mix, some rocket and Chard in two varieties: the first is the "Perpetual Spinach" which we can either have as baby leaves, or let the plant grow (to about 2' tall), then get spinach to cook off it all the way through til next March!! The other is a mixture called "Bright Lights" which has brightly coloured stems in shades of red and yellow. This one isn't quite as hardy, but should still last through to do Christmas lunch!

I've ordered some nematodes from the Organic garden supply people at Ryton, so they should arrive soon. They feed on the slugs under the soil and will kill off (hopefully) all the baby slugs that are hiding and waiting to eat all my seedlings! I've also bought some compost activator which contains all the microbes needed to build me a hot heap.

Plans for today are to build a bamboo fence for the front of the compost area (which is all nicely layered up again now), to plant up my salad seeds and tidy up a bit more in the side by the wisteria, to prepare for my peas going in.

Green grows my garden, oh!

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonders where the birdies is.....

With dad's illness and mum's previous back problems, our garden at home has become very neglected: it's generally well stocked, but the shrubs are overgrown, perennials need to be divided (Inula, dicentra and a sunflower thing) and annuals have seeded themselves all over the place (love in a mist, aquilegia etc). There is a very strong spirit of rebirth and renewal at home at the moment, very appropriate for spring and Easter. Mum has big plans to overhaul the garden, and I am hoping to make a big contribution myself. We spend a lot of time making plans of what needs to be moved/replaced/rejuvenated and what new things we're going to put in. It's a very exciting project! We have a few before photos which I will upload when I finally track down that round tuit!

In the last few days, we've been doing a lot of pruning, starting with E.S. and his team of students coming round from the botanical gardens on Tuesday to prune the wisteria. Apparently, our wisteria is particularly special as it flowers twice a year, grows longer shoots than it should, and flowers on these in the first year... none of this is "normal behaviour" apparently!

{We gave them dinner afterwards, of course, mum did a nice starter of poached smoked haddock, and I followed with a "Moroccan" roast leg of lamb which had been marinated in spiced yoghurt for about 18hours and served with a couscous salad. I tried to replicate a gorgeous one I had in Montreal, but it wasn't quite right. I suspect I didn't have the necessary gumption with the olive oil bottle! It was Delia's lemon roulade for dessert, very nice!}

So, inspired by the pruning book they gave mum, we headed out into the garden on Wednesday to have a bash at the Abelia (me) and the Viburnum bodnantensii (mum)
At first I had no idea at all what I was doing, and was terrified that I would either cut too much out, or else damage the bush for future years, but it got a lot easier after a while. We both essentially halved the amount of foliage, then bagged it all up for Birmingham's nice green waste collection men (we've got about 4 bags of stuff in the side entry now...)

Yesterday I started to look at doing the herb garden - our rosemary needed replacing to be trained properly, and I've bought a sage plant too. We've already got mint, but it needs dividing, and I'll probably get rid of most of the lemon balm. I've also got a few cuttings of culinary thyme which I've been growing in water on the windowsill.

Well, when I looked at it, I realised that the earth is more like concrete, and needs a lot of compost to be dug in, so my attention turned to the compost heap, which hasn't been turned (or organised) for at least two years. The dear doctors around the corner gave us some tiger worms a while back, and they have been doing a good job of munching, but the grass clippings tend to form mats which cut out oxygen and delay composting. So I decided it was time to have a go at fixing it all!
I read a few websites offering advice and have tried to mix the wet and dry things up a bit. There's some woody stuff that just wasn't rotting, so will need to chop that up a bit, and mix it all in with the wetter stuff (grass mowings mainly) to make sure they all compost nicely. Yesterday I split the heap into two piles (a lot of hard work with a fork, felt like mucking out the sheep in Berlin, only much worse!) so there's some nicely rotted stuff which will mature behind the shrubbery (ni!) and the other stuff which will go back when I've rebuilt the wall around it.

For vegetables, I'll be growing some mange tout ("Oregon Sugar Pod"), runner beans ("Scarlet Emperor"), courgettes ("Green Bush" on the new compost heap) and hopefully some lettuce at some point. So today I've got the beans, courgettes and some nasturtium "Empress of India" and "Whirlybird Mix" planted in our cultivator, which is getting nice and warm while I'm typing this in the garden!