The wildflower bed

One of the beds in the garden when we arrived had a horrible straggly hedge along it, and all sorts of rubbish dumped beneath it. It was completely wasted space, and I was keen to put more plants in to provide food for both us and all the animals and insects that visit the garden.
So out came the hedge, the bed was cleared of all the rubbish, and in went a wild plum hedge (with some wild pears and a few others thrown in too). I then spent the next 6 months planting wildflowers seeds and plants that will need to be in a permanent position (cardoons and jerusalem artichokes)

In all these pictures it is the hedge/bed on the very right hand side of the pictures (although you can also track the changes to other bits of the garden in these pictures)

March 2013: its unclear that there is even a bed under all the plastic rubbish, book case and the straggly hedge....

April 2013: ...yes there is a bed under there, straggly hedge still there, but most of the rubbish has been removed

May 2013: and now the hedge has been removed too

May 2013: with the wild plum hedge in and two cardoons planted too

June 2013: the wild flowers are starting to take over and the hedge is growing well

September 2013: the bed is looking very lush with lots of wildflowers getting established

May 2014: the wildflower bed -  the wild plum hedge survived the July 2013 heatwave (thanks to all the waterbutts). Lots of wildflowers are in the bed now: salsify, red campion, white nettle, poppies, forget-me-nots. Its buzzing with all sorts of insect activity now.

Foraging produce 2013

2013 was a fantastic year for berries and fruits so the larder was bursting by Christmas with jams, conserves and various alcoholic concoctions!

I've made the usual - bramble jams and jellies, crabapple jelly, wild plum jams and jellies, Apple butters, Greengage jams, and lots of blackberry and apple jams and jellies.
Sloes were also abundant so we made lots of sloe gin, and also tried our hand at sloe vodka and blackberry vodka.

But by far the best drink I made was blackberry cordial. This is a recipe in Pamela Michael's wonderful 'Edible wild plants & herbs'.

Blackberry Cordial

I made 500ml of blackberry juice by rubbing blackberries through a sieve,  then added a 500g of sugar and honey (the recipe says either so I added half of each). 8 cloves are meant to be added next, but as I'm not keen on them I only added 2, and then I included 1 teaspoon of cinnamon. This was all brought to the boil, simmered for 5 minutes then left to cool at which point I added 8 tablespoons of brandy and bottled it. Its a wonderful rich thick syrupy drink, it needed to be diluted about 1:6 and I guzzled loads when I had a really bad sore throat as it seemed to be the only thing that soothed my throat.

2013 Garden produce

Produce from the first year in the Broadway garden

Artichokes (Jerusalem) - Novembers

Aubergines - August

Beans (Cobra variety?) - October

Beetroots (Yellow and Chioggia) - September

Carrots (Purple dragon) - August

Chilli peppers - September

Courgettes (De Nice, Lebanese, Black Beauty) - Augusr

Courgettes - late September

Leeks (Bleu de solaise and Jeune Pitou)

Leeks - May (2014)

Potatoes (pink fir apple) - November

Potatoes (Vivaldi) - August

Squash (Acorn?) -  September

Squash (unsure of variety) - September

Squash (no idea of variety, has been referred to as the 'willy squash' in our family for obvious reasons - delicious flavour!) - September

Sweetcorn (Supersweet) - October

Sweetcorn (Supersweet) - October

Tomatoes (Mixed varieties) - August

Wild plums - August

Courgettes, Beans, Tomatoes -  August

Purple orache, Sunderland Kale, Purple-podded peas, Courgettes - June

Mixed courgettes and Chillis - October

Tomatoes (mixed varieties) - November

Mixed courgettes, Beans - September

Spring growth in the garden and an obsession with water

While not as advanced as previous years because of the very cold spring, the garden is finally getting going and we've been eating some meals produced by it, and eating out in it (when the weather permits).

Almost all the beds are now set out, although I need another 2 tonnes or so of good soil rather urgently to get the sweetcorn, dwarf beans and squash in.

Looking back over the pictures its hard to reconcile the bare waste-ground look we first had...

...with the lush greenness that is there now - well in some beds at least.

So far we've only been eating mesclun and lettuces from the greenhouse, Sunderland Kale, turnip broccoli, purple orache and pea leaves from outside.  But there are plenty more plants getting bigger now and the broad beans and peas are only a few weeks away.

There are now some 26 tomato plants in the greenhouse, and various chilli and aubergine plants as well. I've got the usual Sungold F1 variety that I've grown for the last few year growing round the edges in grownbags with the aubergines and chillis in pots in front of them. In the middle of the greenhouse I've put large potato growsacks with up to 5 tomatoes in each.

The tomatoes in potato grow sacks in the middle have almost 10 foot above them and rather than stake some of them as I would normally do I've coiled twine up in the eaves and am allowing it to hang down then winding the tomatoes around that. the theory is that once the tomatoes are growing up in the eaves of the greenhouse, the lower parts of their stems will have finished fruiting, so the coiled string is let out a bit at a time, slowly lowering the plant a bit at a time allowing them to continue to grow upwards.  In theory at the end of the season the tomato plant should be much taller than the height of the greenhouse, but much of its growth will be coiled at ground level. That's the theory.

The aim with all these tomato plants is to can/bottle/freeze vast quantities so that we are relatively self sufficient in tomatoes through the winter.  Of course producing that amount of tomatoes requires serious amounts of water.

We moved here with 4 water butts - about 700 -800 litres capacity in total. We also acquired two metal water storers that were already plumbed into the greenhouse - so about another 500 litres capacity there. However moving in February meant emptying the water butts at the old house of all the water I had carefully stored and it was actually quite dry for significant periods of the spring and I refuse to pay for water to water the plants when its coming down for free and just needs collecting. I started getting worried a few weeks ago when all the butts were rapidly emptying from the little I had managed to collect and the weather was beginning to warm up - and once the first really good downpour got going, rushed out and bought a further 3 butts (~600 litres). 

I then amused the family, and the neighbours no doubt, by rushing around between the various water butts  ensuring that water from the two butts filling rapidly from the house drainpipes was transferred down to the water butts at the bottom of the garden where it was most needed - most of this was down with hosepipe and gravity, but I also moved about 300 litres with watering cans and got very wet in the process. What is scary is how fast the butts are emptying now the plants are really getting growing and with the hot sun we've had recently. I'm certainly water obsessed and spend far too much time planning how I'll get the most water possible down the garden into the butts down there once we have the next heavy downpour.

Reducing waste in the kitchen - using up the ends of the bread

Bringing two families together means there are rather a lot of us and we get through a lot of bread in a week - sadly very rarely made by me at the moment.  The ends of the loaf always get left  - occasionally they are cut thick enough that we are able to slice it thinner, but usually not. So what to do with the leftovers, apart from fill up local ducks and our chickens, so that we reduce the waste?

I love gnocchi and vaguely remembered a recipe for gnocchi made from breadcrumbs so got searching for ideas. I've done my usual adaptation to suit what ingredients I have available and what I think feels right - and to take advantage of all the very abundant stinging nettles at this time of year!

Nettle and breadcrumb gnocchi
115g nettle tops
340g bread - ends of old loaves are best and use up what would might be wasted.
1 egg
Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
Seasoning

Drop the nettle tops into boiling water and leave for about a minute then drain but don't squeeze out all the water.

Pop the bread into a food processor and start to turn it to breadcrumbs - it really does need to be very fine breadcrumbs to allow the mix to hold together - the first time I made breadcrumb gnocchi I didn't have fine enough breadcrumbs and the gnocchi fell apart.

Once the breadcrumbs are fine enough, drop the stinging nettles in to the food processor - this results in a bright green mass of breadcrumbs

Add the nutmeg, salt and pepper and then bind the whole lot together with egg to form a nice dough.

Pinch off bits of the dough and roll into marble sized balls, and place on a floured board.

Once you have made all the dough into gnocchi  you can drop them into rapidly boiling salted water then drain them once they have all risen to the top of the water

At this stage you can drop them into a frying pan with some butter in it and fry briefly, or mix them into a cheese sauce.

Very quick cheese sauce
Carton of double cream
Whatever cheese you like
Seasoning
Bay leaf

Put the cream and bay leaf into a pan and bring to a slow boil with stirring. Remove the bay leaf and add in the grated cheese (I used a mix of emmental and mature cheddar - about 100g in total), and stir and heat very gently until you have a smooth and creamy sauce, season and the pour all over the gnocchi.

Serve with a garden salad and vegetables.  Its not possible to tell this is made of stinging nettles - but the bright green colour they impart makes this perfect for kids: 'alien bogies in sauce' - even our 5 year old ate all of his knowing it was made with stingies!

Lemon yellow butterflies and lemon cake

Spring has finally arrived - heralded by the arrival of the brightest of yellow butterflies, the Brimstone Butterfly. I saw these while out walking the dogs at the Seven Fields Nature reserve and then spotted my first bumblebee of the year too.

Having spent yesterday plumbing in water butts and glazing the small greenhouse, this meant today was the day for cooking rather than gardening.  And, inspired by the dancing yellow flutterbys and the sun, it had to be a lemon cake.

We had some limited edition Yeo Valley Lemon and Poppy Seed Yoghurt in the fridge so I decided to use that in the cake to help it stay really moist - the best lemon cakes are always a bit squidgy.  But I couldn't find a lemon cake recipe anywhere, only one with ricotta cheese in it, so decided to make it up.  I'd put in an extra egg next time to hold it together better, but other than that I think the recipe works perfectly.

I mixed 8oz light brown sugar with 4oz margarine and then added 6oz of the lemon and poppy seed yoghurt. I then added the zest of 2 lemons and the juice of 1 1/2 of those lemons (the juice of the other half lemon is used later in the recipe). At this stage it looks a bit like the mixture had curdled - I think this is the effect of the lemon - best just to ignore it and carry on.  I then mixed in 8oz flour and a teaspoon of baking powder, half a teaspoon of salt, and finally two eggs. After mixing this all up thoroughly I cooked it for about half an hour at gas 5.

Leave the cake halves to cool. I then mixed up some of the yoghurt with icing sugar until it was the consistency of double cream and used that to sandwich the cake together. Mix the juice from the remaining half of the lemon with some icing sugar, until its the consistency of double cream, then pour that all over the cake

I slightly undercooked the cake - still getting to grips with the new oven - and this meant it was really oozey and gooey - lovely!

In case you want to attract lemon yellow butterflies into your garden, the butterflies sip nectar from teasel, knapweed and buddleia.  You can also help out all bees and butterflies by planting lots of wildflowers in your garden - a really easy way to do this is with seedballs which you liberally scatter about whever you want wildflowers.

All paths lead to... the greenhouse

As the sun is so rare at the moment, I spent as much of the day out in the veg garden as possible to make the most of it - I thought this weekend was supposed to be cold and wet so the warm sun all day has been an unexpected bonus (however wallpaper stripping has taken a serious nosedive).

As there are still so many slabs around the garden I decided to use them to make some more paths between beds - really useful when the soil has been so wet and sticky.  I found another 5 slabs winding their way down the garden behind the old pond - and a frog too when I was digging them up.  I put them down to finish the main path  running from the entrance to the veg garden up to the greenhouse and then started on another path between beds 1 and 2.

Plan of the kitchen garden (not everything is in place yet but this is where it is planned for now)

I laid all of the path between beds 1 and 2 with broken slabs thinking there were no more intact ones -  and did it properly with sand and mixed hardcore that had been left lying around in the garden so its fairly level and stable compared to some of the other paths put down so far.  While clearing soil off a carpet under where bed 5 is due to go I discovered yet another buried path. This was after yesterday's discovery of a path under bed 3 which was jarringly painful when I enthusiastically plunged the fork into it and it stopped dead. Anyway, this most recent path is made up of two very large slabs running perpendicular to the greenhouse and on top of them some more running parallel to the greenhouse. We've already moved about 6 slabs from this area to make the path on the north side of bed 3. Its all a bit like an archaeological dig; digging down through the layers to find older and older paths underneath - I think that this might have been the bottom-most path though.

The new path between beds 1 and 2

While there is an ever increasing pile of rubbish forming in one place in the garden - all along where bed 4 will be eventually (and I stand here to take all the photos so no-one can see it!) - the garden is now starting to look a lot clearer in other places and I've managed to clear a lot of the dumped rubbish from bed 1. Underneath the apple tree in bed 1 is another of the strange mounds of soil that are abundant in the garden. I'm not sure where in the garden it has come from, or why, but as it is all on top of an old cream carpet, it has clearly been put there on purpose. Having found no body under it as I excavated I've started to redistribute it elsewhere - bed 1 is starting to look more level, and the remainder of the soil will eventually move to the bed 5 area. Because of the carpet this soil was on, the bottom of the mound is very clay-ey and filled with some of the biggest worms I've ever seen - the soil at the top of the mound however is lovely and crumbly.

There are a number of plants around the garden (and in the soil mounds) that I am fairly certain are Aquilegia -  I'm really happy about this as I love these flowers and had loads self-seeding in the old garden, but  when we moved I wasn't able to find and dig them out and bring them like I did with the comfrey, meadow cranesbill, oregano, mint, lemon balm, thyme and Monkey puzzle tree.  I've moved these aquilegia plants to bed 1 as some are clearly very happy growing under the apple tree already - apparently they like dappled shade as well as full sun.

Finally, I sprinkled a load of sweet rocket and poppy seeds (collected from the old garden) along the cracked path - this will probably drive me mad in the summer if they germinate well, but it all looks so sterile at the moment and I want to start this garden being as bee-friendly as possible straight away.