welsh hills again

This year I absolutely promise that I am not going to turn my back on the garden and just sneak off inside.  I am going to clean the greenhouse and cut back and mulch and all those good things.  Honestly.  But there is nothing like a rainy day to set me thinking about winter projects.  I am not one of those people who carefully finishes one thing before starting another but even I was surprised at how many things I seem to have on the go or waiting.  Confession time. It is a bit of a giveaway that the basket which holds all the wool waiting to be worked is my  parents' old log basket, i.e quite a big one.  The bag on the top contains the project which at the moment is at the top of the queue.  Younger son and his wife are expecting their first baby in November and I am making a blanket. Not a delicate white blanket for a newborn but a cheery, cosy blanket for the car and the pushchair. The wool is a soft merino aran and the pattern is fr...

I have been reviewing plants from the online plant nursery Plant me now  right over this year and now is the time for winter bedding .  For me, winter bedding means plants that I use in pots, planted on top of layers of bulbs for spring.  I am very inclined to leave my garden be in the winter and come inside by the fire but I do plant up seven big pots before I give up and turn my back on it.  It is choosing the bulbs for the pots, especially tulips,  that really gets me going so I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed choosing other things for colour and form over the winter.  Last week the order arrived and I had a lot of fun unpacking it all and potting some of it on as I am not yet quite ready to do my tulip pots. As usual, the plants arrived well packaged and well grown, not huge but bigger than many plug plants which come from other nurseries.  I had ordered two different types of Viola Sorbet. This one is Viola Sorbet Lemon Blueberr...

For the last few years I have taken part in the End of Month view series of blogs, hosted by Helen at Patient gardener .  It has been an interesting exercise and, for someone who is trying to make a new garden where there was field before, a really useful way of looking back and seeing that there is progress. Even when I feel that everything is taking so very long and nothing is coming to fruition as I imagine, a look at the end of month photos since 2009 shows me that I am quite wrong.  Things are settling and maturing.  It is very cheering. This year the garden has very much taken second place to the rest of my life.  I had a big crisis of confidence with it last year and, although I recovered myself as spring returned and I fell back in love with my garden, I have had more time away from it than usual.  I have felt this year that I was running to catch up with myself, falling back through the door from a week in Devon with my parents, gathering myself, wand...

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...