Gardener's resolutions

New Year's Eve and that time when you think about the year gone, the year to come and whether you will keep awake to midnight (life and soul of the party!).

What could I do better on the garden front next year? Here is my little list:

1. At least get my name down for an allotment, even if the waiting list turns out to be lengthy 
2. Don't just play at being a veg gardener – put a lot, lot more effort into it
3. In fact, try and do something outside every day
4. Don't concentrate solely on the veg – tend to the flowers as well (that's if I can manage to tell them apart from the weeds)  
5. Get the soil into good shape  
6. Cook more, hopefully using ingredients from the garden – and enjoy it  
7. Get the beer kit I had for Christmas on the go sooner rather than later
8. Don't bother attempting to grow tomatoes in pots, it was a hopeless failure in 2010. Use growbags  
9. A hose wouldn't be a bad idea to save endless trips to and from the tap in the kitchen
10. But then I suppose I do need the exercise
11. Be realistic and give up on that back patch where the sun don't hardly shine. It just isn't meant to be
12. Interact with other gardeners to learn from them.

 

No doubt I have left many things out. But above all I must realise this is a fairly modest list, so the biggest resolution of all would be:

Don't recycle it for the 2012 resolutions

A merry Christmas to everyone

Well, it's the white Christmas we all wanted. Somewhere under all this is a garden.

Good tidings to all.

Thinking & eating

I had a very serviceable cheese & chutney sandwich today, combining bread and courgette chutney I made. Not my own cheese, haven't reached that stage yet.

The courgette chutney was part of a batch I made during the summer and it occurred to me today, not for the first time, that it was a bit bland. I cobbled it together from two or three recipes using up what ingredients I had to hand. While I'm happy with the colour and consistency, it's just a bit tasteless. More spices would definitely have helped.

This bit of musing set me off thinking about the courgette cake I made during the the summer. Again OK, but you wouldn't have known it contained courgettes unless you were told.

I think the moral of this is that I need to up my cookery skills. And now that we've got a new gas cooker, that's what I'll do (when we eventually get the thing working).

Expansion plans unveiled

There'd been no jump racing in Britain for almost a week until today because of the snow and not a lot of other horseracing activity, yet Racing Post newspaper managed to keep going. So I feel I must make a new entry in my blog, even though gardening has been non-existent on account of the weather.

The good news is that I'm hoping to get an allotment. The bad news is that I've prevaricated over ringing the secretary and have failed to raise him now that I have finally rung. We'll get there in the end.

I've been told an allotment will do me good in that it will get me away from the house and chatting to people and give me more space for growing. Not being naturally blessed with green fingers, I hope to pick up a good few tips from seasoned gardeners.

I'm not holding my breath on being allocated a plot any time soon, but I need to put a marker down with the secretary. Could be years, could be next week (oh no, not in this snow and frozen ground).

I'm staying in

Fresh snow has been falling for more than an hour as I write this. If anyone thinks I'm going out in it, think again.

The renewed onslaught has produced a sense of hibernation and put a definite full stop to any activity in the garden. I think that planting shallots and garlic can wait a bit, the ground is far too solid to work and buried under a good depth of snow.

All we can do at the moment is drive our daughter mad by talking like old folk about the big freeze of 1963. Now, that was what I call a winter.