Garden 2013 no 9
The harvest is completely finished and I seem to have spent the last month or so re-painting my blue gates, fences, doors and garden edging.
I’ve not done the outside painting for a couple of years and the blue was looking quite worn. I figured if I do it this year and give every thing a couple of coats, maybe it will last another two, or at a push, even three years.
I painted the fence my daughter made a couple of years ago and I painted the new gate that her partner made earlier this year. The old one blew away one stormy day.
This one has gaps between the wood so the wind blows right through it instead of blowing it off its hinges. It also has a wide strip of rubber nailed to the bottom that touches the ground; this stops the rabbits from coming under the gate into my garden.
I still have all the white walls to paint and retouch, but I’m having a bit of a break from garden painting for a while, I’ll go back and repaint the white later. 
This hansom couple were loitering in the fence, I didn't see them at first. Glad I noticed them before painting them. They even posed or a photo before diving for cover.
I’ve been so busy since retirement I’ve realised I have to prioritise on my activities. The two things I really want to spend my time doing is travel and painting, and I don’t mean painting garden fences either, I mean painting canvases. Therefore the plan is to cut down on the gardening for the next year or so. I want to dig the little vegetable garden and turn the whole thing back into lawn. Actually I’m quite looking forward to it. My lawn never was the pristine golf course sort of lawn, it always was a bit lumpy and bumpy and then I dug up most of it and turned it into a vegetable plot.
So if I carefully dig and level the whole thing and seed it, sometime next summer I should have a pristine lawn that needs a gentle mow every couple of weeks. Or at least that’s the plan. I’ve even bought this little machine to help me.
Before starting the painting I cut back the Tayberries.
I read up on this and found out that you have to cut back in the autumn after the fruit has finished. All old wood has to go and the strong new canes have to be tied up and trained ready for the fruit they will produce the following year. I know I’ve done mine a bit early but I’ve already had quite a lot of fruit from it. There was some fruit left but it had something wrong with it. The fruit that was left was small, green and hard, and instead of ripening it was going moldy and rotting on the cane. I’m not sure why this happened, maybe because I didn’t cut it back as I was supposed to last year; but I hope by cutting it back and training it along the fence, the same thing will not happen again next year. Anyway………..if I had left it until all those little green fruits had gone mouldy and fallen off, I wouldn’t have been able to paint that bit of the fence. 
I’ve also been dead heading the buddleia, I know this has to be pruned back in the spring not the autumn, but I hate all the old, dead, brown flowers so I cut them off as they appear. I think this actually makes the flowers last longer, as soon as I cut the dead ones off, new ones appear. But, I’m sure I’ve seen the last of them for this year. I’ve cut the bush back a little, just enough to get rid of all the dead flowers and next year, I’m going to prune it quite hard to make sure it doesn’t grow too big and get too out of control.
The other thing I’ve been doing is using the harvest in the kitchen.
I have made loads and loads of rhubarb chutney ( with added red wine),
more jars of pickled onions than I can possibly eat and a whole batch of carrot and coriander soup for the freezer.
I’ve also made more herb oil. The herbs, onions and garlic all came from my garden and the red chillies came from my daughters greenhouse. I can’t grow chillies because I don’t have a greenhouse.
I tried to grow them in the windows last year but even that didn’t work, they really need the warmth of a greenhouse to grow properly here. I have a freezer full of fruit and only half a pot of jam left which means the next big kitchen venture is going to be a mammoth jam making session.
So; that’s my garden almost ready for winter. I still have the white painting to do, and I would like to get the lawn sorted out before winter, but apart from that, the garden is definitely winding down for winter. 
Garden 2013 no 6
As I said in the previous garden update, I spent the month of May in France. It rained a lot while I was in away, but this is Scotland, and I’m pretty certain it rained even more here. Thanks to the heavy rain throughout May, I came home to a jungle. I’m not complaining, every thing I planted before I left had grown, but so had every thing else.
The grass was knee high and took several attempts at cutting and there were more weeds than my little veggie plot had ever seen.
The pond looked lovely with forgetmenots all around and the water marigolds spilling out of the pond. But the water was so high it was overflowing at one end. 
On the plus side, the radishes were ready to eat as soon as I arrived home and the strawberries will not be far behind, they already have lots of flowers.
It took me a couple of days to cut the grass, weed the shallots and then weed the little plot behind the pond. I planted garlic sets, red onions sets and beetroot there before I went away.
The garlic and red onions have done very well but needed weeding and the beetroot, which was planted from seed, had done so well in the rain they needed thinning out as well as weeding.
This little chappie was my constant gardening companion for a few days.
The bags are all doing ok, the radishes are ready to eat. The rocket seems to be slower, I just hope it didn’t get too wet, the spring onions are looking good, they needed thinning out but they are fine and the beetroot I planted in bags also looks good. 
The carrots are coming up very well in the tubs. It looks as if I accidently left some potatoes in there because I have potato plants growing in there with the carrots, which I wasn’t expecting. 
I resorted to buying some little lettuce plants last weekend because the rocket is no where near ready and it would take too long to grow lettuce from seed. I bought a tray of green lettuce and a tray of red lettuce, the type where you can just pick leaves and leave the plant in the ground. I need some green to go with my radishes. 
And on the ‘non eating’ front, I came home to find the London Pride and the Bluebells in full bloom down the side of the garden.
Lastly…………….this beast of a plant nestling between the Pink Campion and the Bluebells is Mullein. I scattered seeds from wild Mullien on the ground two years ago and when nothing happened I thought the seeds were dead.
I didn’t know Mullien takes two years to grow. They are fantastic plants, described on good old Wikipedia as; ‘’a hairy biennial plant that can grow to 2 metres tall or more. Its small yellow flowers are densely grouped on a tall stem, which bolts from a large rosette of leaves’’. I first saw this plant growing outside a ruinous, abandoned farm building in rural France and fell in love with it straight away. I’m so pleased I now have these in my garden. Its old fashioned herbal name is lungwort which reflects mullein’s traditional use as a treatment for relieving cough and congestion of those with minor respiratory ailments. Mullein is recommended by herbalists for treatment of cough, sore throat, and colds. Not of course that I intend to use it, I just like looking at it and as it grown to its full height, I’ll be posting more pictures of it.
Monday 15th April was a rare day of sunshine and I took advantage of this all too brief window.
The shallots I put in last week were virtually unearthed by the heavy rain, they all needed bedding down in the soil again.
I dug over my other small bed and planted out the red onions in neat little rows.
After the onions the garlic went in. Or at least some of it did. I have another whole garlic to split into cloves and plant out individually.
There is a space left at the side of this small bed for my beetroot. I didn’t have time to put the beetroot seeds in because the weather started to turn but that is the next task on the list. Hopefully I’ll not have to wait too long for another window of opportunity. The important thing is that I get these few basic tasks done before heading off to France.
I put some carrot seeds in my big potato barrels late last year and left them to over winter. I wasn’t expecting much because I thought I’d left it too late, and then we had so much awful weather I thought what ever was there would be ruined, but to my surprise, I’ve now got more than a kilo of young sweet and tasty carrots. I intend to replace some of the compost, re-fertilise it and then grow more carrots in the same barrels. I think if I can keep this going, I could get two crops per year.
The ultimate plan is to get the beetroot seeds in, plant the rest of the garlic, prepare the barrels and get some more carrot seed in. Then I’m going to prepare a couple of the containers. The containers will be used to sow lettuce, radish and salad leaves before I leave, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll come home to fresh salad. I’ll also come home to weeding, grass cutting, tidying, fence painting and all the other routine jobs that badly need doing. Of course on the plus side………….being a retired lady I’ll have the time to do all these little jobs.
Garden 2012 no 21
There’s still stuff to do in the garden before real winter sets in and the ground freezes. Last Sunday I carried out boring routine tasks, I cleared the paved area of weeds and grass and removed the deep rooted weeds from around the fence. I tidied up around the outside of the fence and cut back the over hanging plants. I pulled the last of the spinach and lettuce and threw them in the compost because they were too bitter to eat.
I’ve collected all the compost and filled up the empty tubs ready for next year, I’ll just have to feed and fertilize before planting. I missed most of the Tay berries and black berries this year because the fruit came when I was recovering from the eye surgery. The branbles were taking over and beginning to wind themselves around the two gooseberry bushes.
My solution was to replant the gooseberry bushes in pots ready for next year and train the blackberry and Tayberry brambles around the fence where the gooseberries were. I’m hoping for a bumper crop next year because I missed the crop this year. 
I dug up the carrots; they were the only crop left in the ground. These are the weirdest carrots I’ve ever seen, no idea why they grew like that but the smell when they were dug up and washed was delicious.
They may look like monster carrots but I think they will taste good. I’m going to make carrot and coriander soup, that way their poor misshapen bodies will make no difference, as long as they taste good the soup will be good. 
After digging and bottling the beetroot last week I made beetroot soup using the stock the beetroot were cooked in, some red beetroot stalks, some beetroot leaves, some of my garlic, some of my red onions and some vegetable stock. It’s a deep red colour and has a satisfying earthy taste. I ate some with home made garlic bread and saved some in the freezer
Next Sunday, weather permitting, I hope to finish off tidying up and tying back the fruit canes, clear the vegetable patch and start digging ready for the winter.
Garden 2012, no 21
Cooking with the harvest
It’s as if someone flicked a switch, the first two weeks of October were like a real Indian Summer; and now its cold, wet and miserable. The season changed in the blink of an eye, like flicking a switch. The heating is on, the winter woollies are out and the soup is on the stove. No more nipping out across the road to the shop in your indoor clothes, now its coat and shoes just to put the rubbish out. If you need milk or bread, or any thing else from the shop, remember to pick it up on the way home from work. Because once indoors, it’s into the baggy, warm, indoor clothes, turn up the heating, close the blinds, close the curtains, lock the door and turn up the TV to drown out the sound of the wind.
Fortunately; I found time in my busy schedule to harvest every thing from the garden. I’ve picked the last of the beetroot, last of the onions and last of the fruit. Actually, there are a couple of lettuce and spinach plants left in the ground, but they are old and taste bitter, so for now, they are staying in the ground until I get out and start digging.
I’ve done lots of cooking with the produce. I’ve been saving the fruit in the freezer, especially the rhubarb, until I had harvested as much as possible and could use it all together in a huge end of season jam making session.
The Rhubarb was mixed with the fallen apples from my friends’ garden, I had bags and bags of apples, none of them fit to eat raw but perfect for jam making. I used some of the apples, all of the Rhubarb, a couple of lemons and a generous amount of ginger and made jam, eight large jars of it, and it tastes delicious. I did have a little help with the labels. 
And once that was done, I made sweet white jam. This time I used all of the gooseberry, all of the white currant and some more of the apples and another couple of lemons.
No ginger this time, this white jam has a delicate sweet taste that I wanted to keep. There wasn’t as much white jam but poured into small jars it went a surprisingly long way, I filled 11 small jars in total. 
The fancy white frills around the tops are just paper cup cake cases placed upside down over the top of the jars before the lids are screwed down.
On to the Beetroot;
It was dug from the ground, boiled in the pan and bottled in spiced vinegar.
This time I made another 5 large bottles of beetroot. Last time it was 3 large bottles and 4 small bottles, not a bad total for such a small garden and difficult year.
The last of this years cooking with produce wasn’t exactly cooking. I made eight bottles of infused olive oil. Which; I hope to use both as a salad dressing, and to cook with. Each bottle was filled with extra virgin olive oil to which I added one sprig of rosemary, one sprig of mint ( chocolate mint), a couple of garlic cloves, a couple of slices of red onion, and a few pieces of chopped red chilli. Every thing except the chilli came from my garden and the chilli came from my daughters greenhouse. 
I still have quite a lot of garlic and some red onion drying out in the kitchen. At the moment I’m not sure what to do with them but I’ll probably just store them in the cupboard next to my potatoes that are already stored
So………..grand total for this year is’ bottled beetroot, pickled shallots, two lots of jam, herb oil, stored potatoes, stored garlic, stored onions, a bag of frozen broad beans and a bag of frozen spinach. What I need now is a fairly dry day at the weekend to start weeding, tidying and digging ready for next year and before the ground freezes.
This hansom couple were loitering in the fence, I didn't see them at first. Glad I noticed them before painting them. They even posed or a photo before diving for cover. 
I’ve also been dead heading the buddleia, I know this has to be pruned back in the spring not the autumn, but I hate all the old, dead, brown flowers so I cut them off as they appear. I think this actually makes the flowers last longer, as soon as I cut the dead ones off, new ones appear. But, I’m sure I’ve seen the last of them for this year. I’ve cut the bush back a little, just enough to get rid of all the dead flowers and next year, I’m going to prune it quite hard to make sure it doesn’t grow too big and get too out of control. 
