A Sunny Post

As promised, a sunny post!  The sun came out yesterday afternoon so I snapped some photos.  The garden has changed so much in just the few days I've been away.  In the flower border the pink geraniums are flourishing.

The purple ones aren't doing quite so well, but are making nice little splashes of darker colour against the pink.

Campanula Elizabeth is in flower.

Both lupins are out.

The flower border doesn't look bad.

The cat was out too, pretending that he was a big lion on the savannah.

In the veg bed, the broad beans seem to have have grown several inches since I last saw them, and have podded!

In the front garden, all is green and leafy.

One of the potato plants is in flower!

And the strawberries are fruiting like mad - little red gems glowing amidst the green leaves. 

Strawberries!

I arrived home from a three-day conference on Wednesday evening to find these.

The first strawberries from our garden!  They were delicious, and there are many more just waiting to be plucked and eaten!

I am fed up with this bloody weather!

I could not BE any more fed up.  I have just been outside to mow the lawn - which I hate doing anyway, and am thinking of gravelling all the non-veg-patch/flower-border bits of my garden - and I was wearing jeans, a jumper, a coat and GLOVES.  Well, a glove.  The little finger and third finger on my left hand are bizarrely sensitive to cold and become very painful if I go from one temperature to a slightly colder one (freakishly).  And it started to rain while I was mowing so I had to come in again.  AND it's been so cold that my poor courgettes and tomotoes are looking, to be honest, moribund.  And all the other veg are so far behind what they should be at this time of year that I doubt we'll get any crops at all.  SULK.

Crappy weather - official.

Hoping to be able to post a more sunny post tomorrow, in both senses of the word.

Back Garden Update

It's almost sunny today!  Rain and greyness first thing, but a bit of blue sky and sunshine now.  I took the opportunity to do a back garden update.  Clockwise from nearest the back door we have sweet peas, peas, broad beans, rocket, shallots, cauliflowers, the flower border, potatoes, tomatoes and cougettes.

The sweet peas are getting quite big now.

The real peas have come through!  I'm so pleased.  When they first appeared they were really sweet little furled-up shoots.  Now they're opening up a bit.  You can also see one of last year's potatoes has sent a shoot up!

The broad beans are things of splendour - I can't believe how big they've grown.

The rocket is still weeny.

The shallots are looking good, but the cauliflowers seem to be mainly functionning as slug snacks (in spite of the myriad drowned slugs in the beer traps).

The flower border is starting to look pretty (even if the temperamental possible-Philadephus is totally out of control and in dire need of pruning.

My big clematis is flowering beautifully.  Its brother, to the right, hasn't really recovered from my attempts at pruning earlier this year.

The geraniums that I divided earlier this year are also doing well.

Weigela is splendid.

The lupins have got a bit battered by the rain and wind.

And I have tomatoes and courgettes in my new bed!  Alastair planted them out for me while I was incapacitated last week.  They've been suffering at the hands of the rain and wind too.

Happy Birthday Fi!

I'm back!  I haven't baked for weeks because I've had/been recovering from a stomach bug, and I've really missed it.  As luck would have it, one of my favourite people in the whole world, the lovely Fi, had a birthday this week.  I made afternoon tea to celebrate.

 
We had little egg mayonnaise sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and savoury scones with cream cheese and smoked salmon.

We had fondant fancies (which I'm going to make again, and I will give them their own post as they're fun to make and a good party piece).

We had carrot cake with cream cheese icing.  The icing went a bit wierd because I didn't beat the butter enough - the blobs are bits of butter.  Fi thought it was special textured icing though so that was okay - or she said she did.  Maybe she was just being polite!

We also had beautiful flowers.

Happy birthday darling Fi!

Front Garden Update

It feels like I haven't been out in the garden for ages.  This is largely because I haven't, as it has rained pretty much continually for what seems like months.  It's also been nasty and cold so things are growing very slowly.  Mum and Dad sent me some photos of their gardens recently (yes, they have multiple gardens!) and I couldn't believe how far ahead everything is down in sub-tropical Nottinghamshire. 

Here's an update from the frozen North.

In the front garden, we have - going clockwise from under the window - herbs, the salad bed, raspberries, potatoes in a bag, strawberries, a bed containing the gooseberry bush, King Rhubarb, some more raspberries and the blueberries, and the coldframe.

The herbs are parsley, mint, thyme and chive.  I've got basil, oregano and rosemary growing and waiting to go into the empty pots.  And, not that you can tell, I sowed spinach seeds in the raised bed some weeks ago!

Then there are the raspberries...planted this Autumn as the old ones, which fruited beautifully and in the case of the Autum Bliss until December, got mildew and had to be dug up.  I was very sad.  These ones are Glen Ample and seem to have got off to a slow start.

The potatoes in a bag are coming along better than the ones in the veg patch in the back garden, due to the front garden being south-facing.  Alastair has become the official potato-eather-upper and has been keeping them well banked up.

The strawberries, by contrast with the raspberries, have loved all the rain.  Fingers crossed we should have a good crop.

There are lots of little bundles of fruits like these just waiting to ripen (and hopefully we will get them before the birds do!).

The big raised bed has a mixture of fruit in it.  King Rhubarb, of course, and also the reluctant gooseberry, and the blueberries.

The reluctant gooseberry has never produced any fruit - actually I tell a lie, in 2010 he produced one gooseberry - so his future is highly uncertain.  I pruned him hard earlier this year and he's grown back beautifully but isn't yet in flower.  Watch this space!

The blueberries have got fruit on them - can't wait until they ripen.  The best thing about last Sunmer/Autumn was going outside before breakfast and picking blueberries to go with my bran flakes!

The coldframe is harbouring a real mixture - Mum and Dad's courgettes and some slug-nibbled caulifowers for them, plus some left-over tomatoes for a friend's plant sale, plus the two remaininng melons (three died), the geraniums and my courgettes which are enjoying a therapeutic stay in the warm after being planted out too early and being very traumatised.  They have come alomg very well - they are the ones in the second photo and they're catching up with the ones that have been in the cold-frame all along.  It just goes to show how much of a difference just one variable like temperature can make.

And finally, I couldn't finish without mentioning my dahlias...or rather the bleeding stumps of my poor dahlias!

We got home from doing the food shopping about about ten to ten on Friday night (we lead a very exciting life) and there were not one but two snails snacking on my dahlias!  Teetotal snails evidently, as they'd ignored the beer trap Alastair had installed for me.  Not entirely sure what I can do to protect my poor dahlias now - might try copper tape around the pot as this worked so well with the flowerpots earlier this year.  I'm not sure whether snails burrow deviously into the soil and hide like slugs do or not, but I'm pretty sure they can't abseil in like Dad said they could!

Sunday Lunch Part 3

The denoument!  I was exceedingly pleased with how everything turned out, and while I wouldn't normally serve two pastry-based dishes in one meal it wasn't too heavy because it was puff rather than shortcrust pastry.

The chicken pie came out of the oven looking delicious...

...and I am pleased to report that it tasted delicious too.  There are so many delicious flavours in this dish that it's just a taste sensation.  It's also a fantastic way of stretching one chicken breast over four meals (we exercised serious restraint and only had one portion each so we can have it tomorrow as well).

Do excuse the fact that this photo is not particularly aesthetically pleasing - I was hungry!

And as for my rhubarb strudel - invented by me, not from a recipe - it was amazing!  Cut in half, put in a nice white dish and sprinkled with icing sugar it even looked rather nice.

As for the taste...I will say it again (and without a shred of modesty) - amazing!  I am so pleased with myself.  The pastry was light and crispy, the rhubarb was sweet and delicious, and the ginger was warm and deep and gave the whole dessert an extra dimension. 

Served with creme fraiche and the liquid I'd been left with when I sieved the rhubarb earlier, it was perfect.

And we even got to work off all that pastry in the garden after lunch - we spent two hours breaking up grassy clods in the new veg bed - it was cold, messy and unpleasant so it was a good job we'd been well fed!