Six on Saturday - 30 December 2017

Joining in for my second Six on Saturday after a quick scoot around the garden this afternoon at the end of a difficult year. A lot of things have felt like a struggle this year and I think I'm not alone in looking forward to a more positive year next year.

Being more positive is going to be my buzzword for 2018 for starters!

I was quite surprised as I walked around the garden on this mild but windy last Saturday of 2017, to see signs of new growth in the borders. I've neglected the garden a little since I got my allotment 4 1/2 years ago but I'm hoping to make amends in the coming months, having made a tentative start this year.

ONE

I've decided I have a 'thing' for hellebores. I love the colours of the flowers; so subtle but such variety in their limited palette of pinks, mauves and white.

Pale pink Hellebore flower

I inherited two hellebores in my garden when I moved here, one white and one pale pink. For some reason the white one died on me but the pink one is going strong and I spotted this new flower bud this afternoon.

I remedied the loss of the white one by planting a new white variety to replace it a few months ago. I seem to have lost the name of it but think it's a double white. I love them so much I think I need to get another couple to fill the bed.

TWO

In another area that I've worked on this summer, I planted a pieris. Again I love the flash of red in their new growth. This one is just getting going, the variety is Mountain Fire.

Pieris, 'Mountain Fire'

THREE

I planted some more daffs in the same bed and it was pleasing to see those poking their tips through the soil.

New daffs

FOUR

The Euphorbias come into their own at the start of the year. Again, I've no idea on the variety but when I was googling to find out the type of plant they were, I remember finding a website for a guy who specialised in growing them. So many varieties!

Euphorbia

FIVE

The end of my garden has partial shade due to a large ash tree in my neighbour's garden. I worked on this bed earlier this year to replace a lavatera that had died. One of the plants I added were some mini cyclamen. I love the variegation on their leaves.

Cyclamen foliage

SIX

And finally to bring my end of year look around the garden to a close is this euonymus I planted in the same bed earlier this year, again with variegated foliage. The variety is Emerald Gaiety.

Euonymus, 'Emerald Gaiety'

I mentioned positivity being my resolution for 2018 earlier in this post, my other resolution is to remember the names of any plants I plant out in my garden!

Many thanks for @cavershamjj for hosting. Check out his blog for more Six on Saturday.

Six on Saturday - 9 December 2017

'Six on Saturday' is a newish regular blogging thing created by @cavershamjj aka The Propagator on Twitter via his blog, thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com. In  nutshell you post six images of your garden each Saturday and share them online. You can read more about how to participate here.  

I have a feeling I'll struggle to do it weekly let alone have six different things I can photograph each week in my garden. I may also have to employ a loose definition of the word 'garden' and include my allotment as well...but let's start off with a positive attitude and pretend we might at least be able to do it monthly and maybe incorporate it into my 'monthly' plot updates!

1. First up a little ray of sunshine that is continuing to add a burst of colour to my front garden.

Yep, it's a calendula! No idea of the variety, other than a regular one as it has come across from my neighbour's front garden and self seeded itself. A perfect little flower on a winter's day.

2. Continuing the 'plants still in flower when they ought not to be' theme is this rose in the garden.

Again, I have no idea of the variety. It was in my garden when I moved here. It provides a wonderful spread of colour at the end of the garden in the summer.

3. Heuchera. Despite living here for the best part of ten years, I'm only now starting to put my mark on the garden and planting a few new things out in it.

This heuchera has lovely purple leaves which you can see clearly from one end of the garden to the other. Not that it's a big garden mind you! I'm in awe at all the different colour leaves in this genus and just might have to invest in some more.

Which reminds me I meant to keep a planting plan on the go so I could remember the names of everything I plant out, but I've forgotten what this variety is already!

4. A naked Christmas tree.

I bought this tree, Picea Pungens 'Glauca' from a local nursery so I could use it for my allotment association's entry into the town's Christmas Tree Festival last weekend. I desperately want to be able to put lights on it at home but don't think I've got a socket I can use. Current thinking is I need to install one in a bin store cupboard out the front. I've just got around to googling the variety and it's a blue spruce. Here it is in all it's glory at the tree festival, and yes we made decorations from veg!

5. Seed heads. These are Love in the Mist on my allotment. I haven't got around to tidying them up yet. Saying that, I've just seen a post on Twitter where someone has collected seed heads of various plants and flowers and has made a wonderful arrangement with them, so these may still come home with me....

My friend, Gina, in South Wales sent me a load of seeds last year. They provided an awesome array of colours on the plot this summer.

6. And lastly for this week, oca.

I'm stretching the 'in my garden' thing here to include all of my outdoor space! Oca are a tuber which originate from South America. They are day-length sensitive in that the tubers only start forming once the days start to shorten. There's a bunch of people on Twitter attempting to breed this characteristic out of them. If things had evolved differently, we could have been eating oca instead of potatoes, which is something that fascinates me. I've taken a pic of this one as it looks heart shaped. They are usually oval and taste like potatoes with a hint of lemon.

So that's it, my first Six on Saturday. Thanks for reading. Not sure when my next one will appear. I'd advise you not to hold your breath, just in case!

Linking up with The Propagator for this week's post which you can read here. Have a look at his post and all the other blogs linking up their posts this week in the comments.

Joanna x

Making Sloe Gin

This is a rather belated post on how I made my sloe gin with the sloes I collected a couple of months ago.

As I wasn't quite ready to start right after picking the sloes, I split my harvest up into bags of 500g (just over a lb) and put them in the freezer. I also figured freezing them would mimic to some extent the effect of a frost on the sloes; and that is to soften the skins of the fruit which will result in more flavour exuding from them. It also saves pricking each one with a pin!. I also thought it might be a good idea to find out where Gordon's Gin was cheapest. I'd heard from two different sources that yes it does make a difference if you use cheap gin, and no it doesn't! So I thought it best to try and have the best of both worlds and buy a good gin when it was on offer.

A quick google found that in one particular week it was on offer at Asda so a trip to a nearby town was needed, luckily by my friend Judi as she works there several days a week.

A few days later and I was good to go. I think I roughly followed the recipe in my go-to preserving book, The Preserving Book, but I can't remember; which is really useful! Well the book is. I'm not!

I took out one bag of 500g of sloes from the freezer and split them evenly between two 1ltr Kilner jars. This is where it goes a bit pear-shaped...I might have added about 100g of caster sugar to each jar and then I definitely added 1 litre of gin between the two jars i.e. about 500ml per jar.

And then you wait, well kind of. For the first week you need to give the jars a shake each day to help the sugar dissolve. Within a week all of the sugar has been absorbed.

Day 1

Day 3

Day 6

And then you wait, again. After six weeks or so you *need* to have a little taste of the contents to see if you need to add any more sugar; the resulting sloe gin should taste like a sweet liqueur so after tasting I added a couple of heaped tablespoons of sugar and did the shake thing for a few days afterwards until it had dissolved.

I'll take another taste in a few weeks time and it should then hopefully be ready at Christmas!

Joanna

The sloe way to go.....

When you have an allotment you very quickly learn that you need to find ways of preserving your harvests. It is very much a case of feast or famine at times; not famine in the case of not having anything to eat from your plot. This doesn't happen too often apart from maybe when you reach the hunger gap in the spring; that time when your over-wintered crops have run out and the spring sowings aren't quite ready yet. But rather more a case of feast or glut I guess! Try as hard as you might, sometimes you can just get overwhelmed with the harvest of whichever veg is in season, whether it's the dreaded courgette glut or runner beans or what have you.

So preserving is an allotmenteer's best friend.

But we can't grow everything we want on our plots and for that we can raid nature's larder, for come September the hedgerows are teeming with berries and the like.

And so it was yesterday, my friend Judi and I headed off to a secret location to harvest fruit from the hedgerow; namely some sloes.

    

Sloes are the fruit of the blackthorn which is one of the earliest shrubs to flower in spring. Masses of white blossom line the hedges and roadways. Looking back I remember the blossom being plentiful this spring so we were hopeful of there being loads of berries.

We weren't disappointed.

The berries have this purple/blue blush on them and darken to a deep purple/black. Ideally it is best to wait until the first frost of the year before harvesting the berries but with our winters getting milder, the first frost can be quite some way off yet in the autumn.

I restricted myself to half  a trug-full. Being a pro at sloe-picking, Judi had a bucket and picked 4kg!

Our next stop is the nearest Asda to buy some Gordon's Gin. They currently have the best price on 1lt bottles.

Sloe gin here we come!

View from the Plot - May 2017

I thought I'd try something a little different this month and post a video update of how the plot is looking. A quick google suggested the best way of doing this is to post the video to YouTube and then link/embed it into a blog post.

There were a few teething problems but my channel on YouTube is now set up and here is the view of my plot at the end of May, ok start of June because I didn't get the chance to film the video until yesterday...

Previously I've done live Periscope tours on Twitter but of course, as they are live, I don't get to see them many more times as they disappear in my feed. So I might try posting videos once and a while. We'll see! I might even get better with the commentary. Yesterday I had to cope with a windy day and someone strimming nearby and my quiet voice....

View from the Plot - April 2017

So, what did I get up to on the allotment last month? To some extent it feels like very little, although looking back through my diary quite a lot of sowing and potting on has gone on. I guess it feels like I haven't accomplished much more than more digging because the plot is still relatively empty.

I dug up the remainder of last year's crops last month; the last few leeks and carrots and a lovely big parsnip. Currently deciding whether to make a parsnip cake with it! The purple sprouting broccoli seemed to finish quite abruptly. I think because I missed picking it for a few days, the heads went too far and started flowering.

As far as this year's crops are concerned, the onion sets I started off in modules were planted out and I've gradually been planting the chitted seed potatoes, just one more variety to go out now and they will get planted where the PSB are. I'd left those to flower as the bees seem to like them.

PSB left to flower

I've sown some root crops; two types of carrots, beetroot, parsnip and some radish. I warmed the soil this year and sowed them in the small polytunnels I use for my sweet potatoes and think that made a difference, particularly with the parsnips although come to think of it, I'm not sure the beetroot have germinated yet.

I've also sown some calendula and eschscholzia on the plot and am pretty sure they have germinated.

The first asparagus spear appeared a good week or so earlier than usual. The spears have been a bit sporadic again. Maybe I don't have enough crowns? Not sure. Unfortunately a frost on 26 April put paid to a few of them that were ready for harvesting. I cut those out and am pleased to see new spears popping their heads out of the soil.

New asparagus spears appearing

Weather-wise, the temperatures are still up and down and it feels a bit risky planting anything out at the moment. Another cold night is forecast in the coming week but after that things are looking a bit more promising...

The main problem is a lack of rain. The ground is bone dry, like dust. I can't remember when we last had a decent deluge and I think we're going to need to have quite a few to make any difference.

It does look like the strawberry crop may be a good one though. Although the blackened centres of some of the flowers suggests some were damaged by the frost last week.

Lots of flowers on the strawberries!

On the whole though I have a feeling it's going to be another challenging growing year!

Introducing.......Plot 51b

As promised a couple of weeks ago, an update on where I am with the 'new' half plot. You can see what it looked like when TK and me took it on a couple of years ago here. I guess I really started working on it last summer. I had previously tackled an area at the top end of the plot with the vague notion of having a polytunnel. One of the storms put paid to that notion when I saw another one on the site flattened for the second time....our allotment site is on the edge of town with farmland bordering on two sides so it's very open and the wind really races through when it blows!

As the plot was in quite a poor state, the worst weed to deal with has been couch grass and really the best way of dealing with this is to literally remove every root; and when every spadeful you dig up is just a mass of couch grass root system, you know it's going to take a while to make sense of a plot. Before long though I'd dug one bed which equated to about a quarter of the plot. I decided this would be a bed for currant bushes as I loved a blackcurrant cordial I'd made from the berries from my father's garden.

Blackcurrant bed

One bush was inherited on the plot but needed relocating for a second time; this time I made sure I cleared the rootball completely, When we had moved it the first time, in our innocence we just dug it up and replanted it with the result that the poor bush was being smothered by grasses.

A purchase of a proper bush, Ben Nevis, from the now defunct Edible Garden Show, a bargain buy of another variety called Ben Ojebyn and cuttings which had rooted filled the bed nicely. I just need to create some kind of fruit cage to protect them now!

Next job was to try and limit the out of control raspberries to one section, so I've made a bed in the middle of the plot so that I can contain them more. There does seem to be a rogue plant in the bed which I think is a thornless blackberry. It has flower buds forming for the first time this year so hopefully we'll know more soon!

The raspberry bed with the possible thornless blackberry in the foreground

There will be a flower bed but this area is pretty much overgrown still. I did cover it with cardboard to keep the weeds down, but many of them have grown through it as it breaks down.....

At the top of the plot is the lovely shed we inherited from another plotholder. The area next to it is where a couple of fruit trees will go together with the thornless blackberry. The plan is to train it as a cordon along wires between two fence posts. I'm in the process of creating this area at the moment. I'm also planning on erecting that short length of chestnut paling between two of the posts to act as a wind break of sorts. One of the fruit trees is a small pear tree called Little Sweetie from Blackmoor Nursery. It won't ever get bigger than 5ft odd and as it blossoms so much earlier, I figured the more protection I can give it on our open site the better. The other fruit tree is a Victoria Plum, also from Blackmoor. Thank you Santa!

So still very much a work in progress (aren't all allotments?!) but it's starting to take shape.

Plot 51b - April 2017

Famous last words.....a rebirth

So.....having said three years ago that I was going to make my life easier and merge this blog with my main one i.e. so I only had one blog to maintain and hopefully post more often to....I've decided to do a U-turn and restart this blog.

Quite a lot has changed on the allotment since the last post here, although there haven't been many blog updates on my main blog either, so no change there!

I guess the main change is that now puberty has kicked in and schoolwork become heavier as his GCSEs get closer, there is no 'TK and' anymore, just 'me' on the plot now. He has come down occasionally to help harvest potatoes and he did come to help demolish an old shed on the plot.

Goodbye old shed....

Sadly a case of preferring destruction to construction and creation!

The other big change is the other half of our plot became available. I ummed and ahhed briefly about whether to take it on as well as our existing half plot. On the plus side, it had a shed albeit a rather decrepit one, and it would give us (me) more room to grow fruit. Our existing half plot was pretty much full to bursting each year so a bit more ground would come in handy.

On the minus side, the plot hadn't really been worked much in the time we'd been there and it was pretty overgrown with out of control raspberries in the middle of it. Basically it was going to take a lot of effort to bring it under control.

I decided it was worth the extra work and effort it would take. Didn't want to kick myself and find someone else take it on and usually you can kiss goodbye to getting another plot next to you for many years. In fact, since our allotment association took on the management of the site, plots have been let on a regular basis and we are due to have a waiting list again very soon.

Two years later, the new half plot is vaguely tamed but with still a lot of work to be done. And yes I know that two years with not a lot accomplished is terrible progress but in my defence for the first year TK was 'working' the plot for his DofE skill and I wasn't allowed to do much on it until he had finished.

I think the progress on the new half plot can form the basis of the next post!