Last weekend we went to an open day at the Harris Garden, part of the University of Reading.
For some reason I’d completely forgotten how to make my camera behave, so I managed to come home with a grand total of three in-focus photos.
Here they are!
It finally felt a little bit like summer, for about an hour at lunchtime today. I’ve been ill for most of this week, and cooped up indoors, so I thought I’d brave a little walk.
The hydrangea above, and these poppies, are in the garden of my local church. It’s a brand new building with a brand new garden, but a few small plants are finally starting to establish themselves.
I do love my little camera. It’s a Pentax Optio A30, about five years old, and it took this picture all by itself, on the super macro setting. The only post-processing I did was to crop the image into a square.
Sadly it’s just about on its last legs (it’s terrible in low light, and barely speaking to the batteries), which means I’m going to have to replace it. I’m not looking forward to that, partly because I can’t afford a new camera, and partly because this one’s been so lovely that I’m completely spoiled by it.
This hogweed (I think!) grows at the side of the path down to the underpass.
It gives me ideas for silver clay jewellery, with this lovely sculptural shape pressed into a pendant. Or perhaps a lovely embroidery, with the buds made up of french knots.
These cornflowers have both appeared in my front garden. Who knew you could have white cornflowers? The only ones I’ve ever known have been blue. I sowed three mixed packets of wildflower seeds, and this is the only little patch that’s come up. A square foot of daisies and cornflowers amongst the thyme.
Hopefully they’ll seed themselves, so that next year we have a front garden full of these little gems.
This is going to take ages.
And it’ll need two coats.
The colour is Cuprinol Garden Shades, in Lavender.
I was going to paint the window frames and the doors in Pale Jasmine (cream), but I’m not so sure now. Perhaps it would look better if it was all the same colour.
It’s going to look lovely when it’s finished though – much nicer than having a GIANT ORANGE SHED staring at us and at all the neighbours.
I wonder what the chances are of me being able to finish the front before it rains? Perhaps I shouldn’t have started it on a day when I have to go out in the evening for an extra choir rehearsal, but I had to take advantage of the sun!
A few weeks ago we bought a cheap breadmaking machine.
It’s brilliant.
Chuck in a bunch of ingredients, press a couple of buttons, and you can wake up in the morning to a freshly baked loaf!
As with any new device, there has been a certain amount of trial and error. The first couple of loaves sank rather a lot at the top, so you can imagine my excitement when I opened the machine to discover this beauty! Not only had it risen right to the top of the pan, it had overflowed and stuck itself to the lid of the machine. Oops.
Still, it came away easily enough, and tasted pretty good as well. This is a white loaf made with added cheese. Unfortunately, what you can’t tell from this picture is that almost the top half of the loaf is completely hollow!
We’ve now taken to using the “sandwich” setting on the machine, which produces a lovely dense loaf with hardly any crust. This makes it nice and easy to slice, and makes a lovely neat square sandwich. Next time I might be a bit more adventurous and buy a bag of wholemeal flour. Apparently this necessitates pushing a different button on the machine, but I think I’ll probably manage.
This is my entire crop of first early potatoes – a 14cm plant pot almost-full. Okay, so that’s not very many potatoes from four plants, but there were dozens more teeny-tiny ones clinging to the roots. Skycarrots reliably informs me that if I’d been better at watering them, the tiny potatoes would have been much bigger – which would have doubled my crop!
So, I’m trying to remember to water my main crop potatoes more often (not that they’ve needed any help this past couple of thundery days!), but I’m a bit worried about some yellow and brown patches on a few of the leaves. I’m not sure whether it’s the beginnings of blight, or whether the plants have just gone a bit crispy in the hot weather. I think I’d better get rid of the affected leaves, just in case. If it is blight, and it travels to my tomato plants, I’ll be very upset!
I’ve been a teensy bit busy lately, and that’s meant I haven’t had much time for blogging. Plenty to blog about, but no time to sit down and write about it! I haven’t had much time to pay attention to the garden this week, and I’ve mostly been watering it in the dark, so somehow I hadn’t noticed quite how many things are just about starting to grow!
Above, you can see what will eventually become sweetcorn. I’ve got four plants and two of them look like this, so that seems quite hopeful.
Teeny tiny tomatoes. These are Sungold, and there are a couple of fruits on the Moneymaker plants as well. My other six tomato plants are considerably smaller, and really need separating into six separate pots. That means a trip to the garden centre, so they might have to manage being a bit crowded until the weekend.
Look! The World’s Smallest Aubergine! It’s currently about the size of a blueberry, so I’m hoping it’ll survive and grow a little bigger. I’ve only managed to grow one solitary aubergine in the past. I had to harvest it when it was about the size of a tennis ball, before it was eaten by insects. And I still ended up sharing it with a woodlouse.
Hopefully this will grow up to be a pumpkin. I have four pumpkin plants, two of which are absolutely bursting with flowers. I’m kind of hoping that most of them are male flowers, otherwise I could end up with a lot of pumpkins!
This is quite exciting – there are about half a dozen budding courgettes on this plant. I’ve grown courgette plants before, but never managed to harvest an actual courgette, so I’m really pleased to see these.
And then I spotted this! A whole, real, actual courgette! So exciting! It needs to be a teensy bit bigger before I harvest it, but look!
Ahem.
Sorry about all the exclamation marks. It’s just that I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, and I’m really excited that I might actually get some food out of it!
Today I found out what a potato flower looks like.
If only I could remember which varieties I planted, I could find out the right time to dig them up!
(Seriously… how do you know when your potatoes are ready to harvest?!)
Paul and I had the day off work today, and the first thing we did was go for a little walk around the lake and pick some elderflowers. We’ve been watching them open for weeks, and today there were just enough to fill a bag and bring them home.
After a quick trip to the supermarket for sugar, lemons and limes, we now have a big saucepan full of ingredients just waiting to turn into cordial. The nicest thing about this recipe is just how simple it is. Combine ingredients, ignore for 24 hours, remove bits, drink cordial! I think the hardest part is waiting for it to be ready.
Here’s the recipe that we use.
I have a sneaking suspicion that we picked enough flowers for two batches, but I’ve put them all into a litre and a half of water, the same as we did last year. Hopefully it won’t be too strong – although as it’s cordial, I suppose we can just keep diluting it until it tastes nice!
The first (almost) ripe strawberry of the season!
I have seven strawberry plants tucked into this little terracotta planter. There are several different varieties, but I didn’t manage to keep the right labels with the right plants, so I don’t know which they all are.
This one’s definitely one of the little alpine strawberries though. It’s very tiny – not even an inch long – but I’m hoping it will taste delicious.
I plan to leave it on the plant until it’s fully ripe – and hope that the blackbird doesn’t eat it before I do!
When I came out of hospital I assumed that most of my vegetable seedlings wouldn’t have survived. I forgot to ask Paul to water everything for me, and although he did take care of the pots in the garden the ones in the Shed were left to their own devices. So you can imagine my surprise when I went out there yesterday evening and found that some of the seedlings had actually thrived on a week’s total neglect!
I have three courgettes like this, two pretty impressive pumpkins, and the sweetcorn and tomatoes are starting to show signs of life. No such luck with the peppers, or the tomato plants that I bought from the garden centre, but everything else in the garden seems to be doing okay.
Yesterday afternoon I popped the larger seedlings into some little pots, and decided that they were probably big enough to survive out of doors.
This morning I woke up to the sound of the weather report on the radio telling me that the temperature had fallen to -2° overnight, and that there’d been a frost.
This morning Paul woke up to a cry of “Oh no!” and the sight of me leaping out of bed* and dashing down the garden in my dressing gown to make sure that my seedlings had made it through the night.
The pumpkins seem fine, but the three little courgette plants were looking a bit sorry for themselves. They’re all now residing on the kitchen windowsill, just in case. Fingers crossed that they all survive!
*Turns out that leaping’s quite difficult when you’ve just had a hip arthroscopy.
