welsh hills again

Well let’s turn away from the deep stuff and look at what really matters: jam.  There is something altogether delightful about making and eating home made jam.  It makes you feel like someone from Little House on the Prairie when you  have a pantry or a store cupboard full of home made preserves, and better still it tastes fantastic.  I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth and lots of shop bought jams are far too sweet for me but a home made jam has a juicy tang to it that undercuts the sweetness perfectly.  If you have never made jam before this is the easiest jam ever, doesn’t take too long and uses autumn raspberries which we find much easier to grow and tastier than summer ones.  For some reason our raspberries are massively prolific and produce great thickets of canes with runners coming up all over the place, ready to invade the cutting garden or the rhubarb patch the moment you turn your back.  For a couple of weeks we are quite excited ab...

It is a truism that women of a certain age become invisible.  You hear it again and again.  The phenomenon even spawned a response in the blogosphere where older women posted photographs of What I Wore Today, trying to reclaim the right of the older woman to be interested in clothes and style and what she looks like.  Occasionally I would stumble upon one of these posts, rarely perhaps and only because it was written by someone I read for other reasons, such as the thoughtful and erudite posts of Materfamilias.  Recently Mater posted about a certain disaffection with the idea  of these posts and it got me thinking about why I had never wished to join in. I like clothes.  I am interested in the way I look.  But I also find clothes deeply boring and am far more interested in what I do than in what I wear.  What is going on here in my head?  Do I think the older woman is truly invisible and if so do I care? When I was young I was reasonably ...

What is in my kitchen this week?  Well for a start there are quite a lot of flowers. A jug of sweetpeas picked this morning and waiting to go to a friend. Every time I walk past the scent makes my head turn. The cutting garden is producing so many dahlias that I haven't brought any cosmos inside yet.  I love these huge orange ones, Ludwig Helfert, next to Bishop of Llandaff and some Euphorbia Oblongata.  They are like a firework exploding on the table. And the fact that the kitchen is full of flowers means that it is also full of vegetables. Fresh peas are one of the glories of summer.  I can't pick them without shelling some and eating them right there in the garden.  I haven't been able to bring myself to do anything with these other than cook them briefly in boiling water and eat them with butter and mint.  I have a lovely recipe for pea and lettuce soup which I keep meaning to try but the peas are so young and sweet that making a soup w...

We always grow too many courgettes.  Four plants for a family of three is ridiculous.  I thought I had persuaded Ian that two plants would be fine this year but somehow he sneaked another one in.  So three plants should be better than the four we had last year.  They should be producing enough to use and to give away but not so much that I can't get in the door for piled up produce.  But nobody told them.  The hot July sun and now the intense stormbursts of rain are making courgettes bubble up out the garden like the suds from the bucket in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Turn your back on them for an hour or so and they grow from this, rather beautiful and demure flower: to this (note egg cup for size!) So yesterday was courgette day.  All day long I cooked with courgettes.  I made courgette soup.  This is easy and really delicious. 1 onion, chopped 1 glove of garlic, chopped 1-2 cm piece of root ginger, crushed or chopped 3-4...

Does everyone love the idea of a cutting garden in the way that I do?  I love flowers in the house but in the main flower growing bit of the garden, known here as the side garden,  I am trying to create a particular feeling with the planting.  Here I do not want to take the peonies, the poppies, the tulips or the alliums which are making the garden sing and leave it denuded.  So for five years I have been trying to create a cutting garden in a big bed beyond the new orchard. It has been hard going.  The first couple of years were a total disappointment. Annual seed which I sowed failed to germinate.  Some things worked, notably cosmos, but there were huge gaps when the garden was empty and dull, not to say full of weed. Here is cosmos purity in 2009 looking beautiful. Here is the cutting garden itself in 2010 looking rather grumpy and dull. I had at least by that stage discovered the importance of sweet peas, even if I did not have the varieti...

I expect heat in summer.  That is daft really.  I don't live in the South of France or Italy, I live in North Wales, but somehow an adolescence spent in New Zealand where the sky is reliably blue for months and the natural colour of everyone's skin is a light tan has left me with an expectation that in summer the sun will shine and I will eat breakfast outside and walk in bare feet and seek the shade.  The last few summers have been so wet and grey and cold as to be non existent.  I don't think I had realised quite how much the absence of sun had got to me until the temperature soared and the sun was hot on my skin and every morning I woke to sunshine and warm wind.  I find I have relaxed deep down inside myself.  The brightness of the light has made me smile.  Walking around with bare feet has made me feel young again although the green valley is bleaching with the sun. Our house is great when it is really hot.  The old stone walls create a ...

Today I lay on a rug under a tree.  It was a huge sycamore which stands in the boundary hedge of our field. The sun was so hot I was driven off the garden and into the shade where the grass was cool.  I dug an old check rug out of the bakehouse where we keep outside things for the holiday cottage and spread it out.  I brought out my book and a big glass of elderflower cordial and lay down and looked up into the tree.  It soared above me like a huge green cathedral. When did I stop lying down on a rug in the garden?  When I was a child I loved eating outside and a cheese sandwich, a packet of crisps and an apple was immediately transformed into a picnic by eating on a rug.  As a teenager I spent hours lying in the sun, seeking the perfect tan.  I remember trying to revise for my A levels on a rug in the garden and eventually giving up as I squinted in the sun and my papers blew about in the breeze and snoozing for half an hour before going rel...