Weather report

We woke up this morning to a very light powdering of snow, belying thoughts that winter is over. This follows persistent and very heavy frost over a couple of days last week. Who said there were signs of spring?

Last week's frost stayed all day in parts where the sun didn't reach, one of those parts being my garden. The whole lot remained frostbound for two or three days, demonstrating the difficulties I am under in its situation.

The garden is at the front of the house, facing south and some very tall Leylandii trees border it at the far end. Not mine, I may add, but belonging to the neighbouring property. We're a through terrace, but we don't have a back garden due to the awkward configuration of the houses around here, so I'm stuck with what I've got.

I've already written about the vegetable patch at the furthest end of the garden which I have been considering giving up due to the lack of success at growing anything there. The fact that we had frost long after it disappeared from most other places highlighted the fact that our garden is not ideally placed.

Ah well, we battle on

Izzy wizzy, let’s get busy

The garden has remained untouched after a bad back and tiring flu-type illness laid me low in health and spirit. Mind you, there was also snow for perhaps a week or more.

One gardening website - I forget which - reckons one should rule out January altogether for any outdoor work. But Susan, my weather oracle, believes it won't get bad again. She bases that on her gut feeling and seeing two huge flocks of geese flying in a north-west direction the other day while she was out walking the dog in the woods.

Whatever the outcome, there is a definite feeling of spring in the air and I have even got some produce to get started.

I mentioned the possibility of shallots in a blog posting last year and have finally got round to buying some from Poundland. They'll be going in the ground soon on a spot near the compost bin where crops have not really done well. Maybe this will finally be the year when something takes there.

Good friend Kate has given me some onions and first early potatoes called Rocket. She got hers from Wilkinsons, another fine store patronised by those on a tight budget.

You don't have to spend a fortune on seeds and bulbs, but I don't suppose a purist would approve.

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.

Shall I or shall I not?

I've been doing some overdue leaf clearing and digging over the soil before the frosts and really bad weather strike. Not much of a job really in my little space and I don't know why I haven't got round to it before.

Thoughts turned to next year and what to plant as I was working. I had been intending to ditch the space right at the back of the garden where the sun hardly shines. The combination of the leylandii in the neighbouring garden and our shed have combined to make it a dodgy spot for growing anything. The spuds of 2009 were meagre and the beans of this year failed to take off.

My relatively new compost bin now sits in part of this patch, but I was wondering if I should make use of part of the ground. Garlic could go there, I thought. Also, my eye has been caught by a short piece about shallots in the Yorkshire Post gardening column. Both the garlic and shallots could be planted now.

Mmm, I wonder. Should I give this spot another chance? Wouldn't do any harm, I suppose.

Well, we tried some

We've started buying potatoes again after using up the modest stocks of Lady Balfour spuds which I grew this year in the garden.

Our eye was caught the other day by Albert Bartlett Purple Majesty potatoes. That's right, purple. A novelty we could not resist and so we duly trotted off to home from Sainsbury's with a bag.

It was our suspicion that this potato was genetically modified. But not so, says Perthshire-based Albert Bartlett, who reveal it was developed at Colorado State University from a traditional variety. The benefits? According to the growers, the purple potato is healthier than the standard variety of white potato because it contains up to 10 times the level of antioxidants.

All very well, but the proof of the pudding is always in the eating. They didn't taste bad, but we decided the producers have got a mountain to climb because of the colour. First impression on opening up the bag was that they looked like beetroot (no bad thing), but on cooking the outcome is that they take on the appearance of a grey sludge. It didn't look good.

An interesting experiment, but I'm afraid we won't be buying again.

I thought so

The mystery object turned out to be parsley after all. And very nice too in a little parsley & lemon butter I cobbled up at teatime tonight.

At least I hope it was parsley. Come back in a few hours and I'll let you know.

Today's mystery object is...

A real autumn mist pervaded our neighbourhood for most of yesterday morning, the first day on which the clocks had gone back. The days are cracking on now and even I am starting to think of Christmas, have previously slated the shops for starting the season too early. I've succumbed already to buying some bottles of Christmas ale, an offer at the Co-op being too good to refuse. They are sitting there on the shelf now. Will I resist temptation, I wonder?

Among the presents I got last year from my daughter was what I described at the time as a teabag full of herb seeds, bought at the Imperial War Museum North. You had to place it in a bowl of water for a day, then plant under a thin layer of soil.

The label said the bag was embedded with a mix of herbs including parsley, chives and basil. I don't know what has happened to the mixture, but I have succeeded in getting one herb only after about four months of growing very slowly in the pot. But what is it?

Susan suspects it's parsley. In truth, so do I. But I'm not totally sure. I am a dunce, aren't I?

My pungent aroma

It always seems right to make jam and chutney on a Sunday. And in autumn too. They just seem to go together.

I spent a very happy morning yesterday using up the last of my store of green tomatoes during a session in the kitchen. Mind you, there were complaints about the strong smell of vinegar. I don’t mind it. In fact, I find it rather pleasant, preferring to use the word aroma rather than  smell. Do other people think the same?

There was only a jar and a half of chutney, but it was good to make use of the green tomatoes before they went off. The green tomato jam was a bit of an experiment in my state-of-the-art bread maker. But hey, why not try the jam setting if you’ve got it? No-one quite believes me that you can have such a flavour of jam and indeed it’s something I’ve never had before. Time will tell if it’s OK.

And so ends this year’s crop of tomatoes. Not a very successful growing season. Let’s hope it goes better next year.

I've bin thinking

Munching on a banana this lunchtime, the thought occurred to me: Can I compost the skins?

I've been slowly getting to grips with the idea of composting after my friend Kate gave me the bin which now nestles at the bottom of the garden. But it seems a subject fraught with difficulties, different ideas and plain bonkers obsession.

I don't want to carry it to extremes, I just want to know what's safe to chuck in the bin. My wife Susan can usually answer most of my questions, but composting is a blank in her knowledge. Can I compost egg shells? Dunno. Can I compost lemons? Dunno. What about egg boxes? Ditto.

Luckily, I have now found the wonderful Compost This website run by Louisa Parry and John Leach. The beauty of it is that they keep it simple and concise. Browse each of the categories and it gives you a plain yes, no or maybe, leaving it up to you to click and find out why.

It's a bonus that these two active recyclers, reusers and composters live together in Leeds, a city where I spent 17 very happy years after moving north from Kent when I went to university.

Banana skins? Yes. Egg shells? Yes. Lemons? Maybe. Thank goodness for help like this.

And, with Christmas coming, it seems opportune to say that all I need now is a kitchen caddy (hint, hint).

And these I forgot

I realised that I left out a few things in my posting Taking Stock. I forgot about the lettuce and salad leaves.

Well, the salad leaves did OK. Both seeds in pots and straight in the ground outside worked well. The La Rossa lettuce didn't go too well. All right in the beginning, but soon seemed to taste bitter.

Ah well. Try again.

Taking stock

At my suggestion, I snipped off some mint to add to our home-cooked meal tonight. Susan quietly threw it away, telling me later she didn't think it was mint and it just didn't seem right. Obviously past its best and a reminder that the season has grown to a conclusion.

Time to take stock and examine the failures and successes of this year and what I can learn from them.

1. Potatoes - absolutely brilliant. But I need to plant more than one variety.
2. Courgettes - three plants in pots produced about half a courgette between them, but the one planted outside in the soil has been wonderful. It's producing even now.
3. Raspberries - about five grew, a welcome gift for the birds. Bushes dug up after two seasons of failure with them.
4. Rhubarb - continues to baffle me. We've had about one pudding this year from the two crowns in the garden. Susan says it's because I don't feed them.
5. Spinach beet - has done OK.
6. Tomatoes - a major disappointment after being such a winner last year. The outdoor plants caught blight early on and had to go. The plants in the conservatory were hardly big producers. The lesson I have learned is to use growbags rather than pots and to stay away from heritage seeds. They're heritage for a reason, I feel. Mainstream toms for me next summer.
7. Broccoli - doing all right, although it was my friend Kate who started them off before giving them to me as a present.
8. Pak choi - a waste of time. Has failed to grow.
9. Mizuna - also not very successful. Failed to grow outdoors, the indoor pot produced just a few leaves and then stubbornly refused to grow more.
10. Squash - nothing doing from the single plant in the conservatory.
11. Herbs (that's thyme, oregano & basil) - fairly successful, although I don't think we've utilised them to their full extent in our cooking.
12. Broad beans - blighted.
13. Cherokee Trail of Tears beans - about two handfuls produced, a bitter disappointment. 

More failures than successes, but I'm not crying. I'll be trying even harder next year.

Lessons? More effort needed, composting needed, I should learn to propogate more plants in the conservatory rather than planting seed directly in the ground and I must ditch the back plot where I put the broad beans and the Cherokee Trail of Tears this year. The sun just doesn't shine there and also it is very stony, this being the land where they did a lot of quarrying in the past. I plan on digging out a further patch elsewhere in the garden.

Massacre of the innocents

You bring them up, feed them, nurture them, love them - then they let you down.

My tomatoes have been a bit of a disaster after the runaway success of last year. The outdoor ones were ditched a little while ago after being blighted, while the indoor ones have produced very little red fruit. It's been a poor season.

One lesson learned is not to put them in pots again. Growbags did very well last year and they are what I will have next year.

The nine potted plants in the conservatory were finally ditched today, having gradually wilted and yellowed over the last week. There was, though, a bit of a haul of green tomatoes from them and I have saved them to make chutney.

But that job will have to wait until next weekend as we are going on holiday. Hay-on-Wye, seeing as you ask.

Yes, I know it's about time

I've got a compost bin!

My good friend Kate gave it to me last weekend, she having got a splendid new wooden structure for her compost.

To be honest, it's just dumped in the corner at the moment as I have spent hardly any time in the garden this week. It's going to remain where I have put it, at the side of the shed in the corner where the sun don't shine, and I've just got the small job of making sure it's level before I pile the stuff in.

I've written before about how my soil really needs improving, so I'm hoping this will be just the thing. I must say I don't know much about the art of composting and so will have to read up about it.

I'm off now to mull over the debate about whether you should or should not compost teabags.

Oh dear, I hope I don't become obsessed.

Something to bear in mind

I have had a very successful courgette harvest this year, losing count of the number produced by the single outdoor plant which survived. They've gone into innumerable meals and into chutney. Sometimes we haven't known what to do with them.

So I was tickled when I came across this story on the First Post website about a new use for a courgette:

WOMAN FIGHTS BEAR WITH COURGETTE

A US woman fought off a black bear which attacked on the porch of her Montana home by hurling the nearest item to hand at it - a courgette. The woman’s dog was attacked by the bear first. She kicked the animal and it retaliated by swiping at her leg, ripping her jeans. She retreated into her house but the bear followed – until a vegetable to the nose sent it running.

Power of veg!

I go a'foraging

I spent a pleasant hour or so the other day raiding the blackberry bushes that border the unmade and unadopted lane that leads to our house and which also grow in the woods around the corner.

Each year I plunder as many as I can for jam and puddings and consider myself lucky that there is not generally a race with other people to get them.

Armed with a plastic container from the kitchen, I managed to get a decent batch for immediate use. No need to be greedy as our freezer is full and there is always tomorrow for another harvest.

There was a deviation this year when I decided to make blackberry & apple jam in the breadmaker. A lazy way? I don't know, but it makes good bread and I thought it worth experimenting with the jam setting to see what would happen. You never know until you try.

The Morphy Richards Fast Bake model is, by the way, almost brand new and was donated to me by one of my followers on Twitter, who knew from my tweets that I made bread. This was an extraordinary act by a complete stranger who no longer wanted the machine as her husband has to lay off the bread for health reasons. It was so kind of her to think of me.

As this was my first time, I made enough jam just for one jar. Seemed to taste all right when it came out of the pan, while have a proper taste when it settles down in the jar.

The remainder of the blackberries went into a crumble which we shall have for tea tonight (the others being out of the house at the moment on visiting duties).

Only too late did I come across this recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for blackberry brandy to drink at Christmas. Mmm, that's mighty tempting. Looks like it's back down the woods in a few days.

A satisfying job

I don't have a big lawn or pretend to keep it in pristine condition, but I find something deeply satisfying about mowing.

And so a session this afternoon - long put off because of rain, wet and lethargy - proved to be calming and just what the mind needed. It was 30 minutes or so of gentle work away from everyday cares as I pushed the mower up and down the lawn.

I have a trusty electric lawnmower bought from Woolworths I don't know how many years ago and at one time I used to hurry the job. But since I gave up newspaper work, I don't mind taking a bit more time. I've developed the patience to switch off the mower to move the lead into a better position as I go around the lawn.

As I was cutting the grass, it was chilly and became overcast at one point. I realised there won't be many days left this year for mowing.