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It is snowing here! How exciting – it never snows here, it only ever rains…and rains some more. So we are very excited to see big white flakes tumbling from the sky.
The bunnies have been out having fun in the snow – our littlest bunny and newest addition to our family seems to be getting along well with Lovage and so fingers-crossed will be staying…
She has a name too – Daisy.
Here is Lovage and Daisy having fun in the snow…
Borage, Lovage and Daisy had their first Christmas present (I didn’t know bunnies got presents at Christmas!) delivered today from the lovely Carole and Geoff at Fed & Watered. Carole and Geoff, along with a lady called Clare are our bunnies ‘furry godmothers’ – they come and look after the bunnies when we go away on holiday. They come highly recommended!
It’s been a miserable day here today – wet and wild. While I was stood by the bird table crumbling up some stale bread, my two little mice friends appeared! I thought they had gone, got by the fat cat who ate my robin babies, but no! Maybe not the original mice I saw, but a pair nonetheless. They were so sweet, scampering out of the shrubs to grab morsels of bread as I dropped it.
So we have spent the evening cosy inside, N watching rugby and me browsing the internet. I came across this lovely ‘Waste Not Want Not’ table runner at one of my favourite shops, Re-found Objects. How lovely is that! Definitely one for the Christmas wish list.
Image: Re-found Objects
After a long week with the little sister (who’s been staying with us while on work experience) things are finally getting back to normal in our house. The weather is surprisingly mild and you might even describe it as sunny!
N and I spent the day in the garden doing a number of jobs. N has been re-filling, re-sanding and re-painting our ‘new’ old front door which has been a nightmare (it’s a long story…) – this is what it will look like one day (but not left white – we’re going to paint it a lovely dark sea blue)…
I tidied my vegetable beds a bit and started to sand my new desk top which has been fashioned out of an old ledge-and-brace door.
I have been trimming the raspberry canes, cutting down sprawling mint (which is all over my garden), and digging up the remaining carrots and spring onions. Just look at those carrots – slightly overgrown and unloved…
And these are the Paris Silverskin onions I planted back in the spring, that have been utterly neglected with our manic summer – I’m going to try using them as normal onions, or perhaps in a salad, we’ll just have to see if they taste of anything…
The bunnies were both out and about today. Borage was in the run and Lovage had free reign of the garden…he was discovered in one of the raised beds amongst the carrots. Rather than munching on the carrot tops from those that I had dug up, he was sampling those on the small carrots that are still growing – grr!
And here is Lovage flying through the air as he leaps across a hedge of garden cuttings and a tangle of nasturiums!
This is Lovage’s new den…
Back tomorrow with a recipe – not sure which one yet!
Mr Robin has returned to my garden! Maybe it is a new Mr Robin, but whichever, I am delighted to see him back again. He sits on a post at the end of our garden, just about the time we get home from work, and sings a cheerful song.
I am so hopefully that he will find a nice Mrs Robin (or already has one!) and that they will consider my garden as a place to bring up a nestful of babies in the spring. This time I am prepared with a selection of nest boxes that I’m going to get N to put up round the garden, so that this doesn’t happen again…
I have also seen a wren in the garden!! How lovely 
Other news – my vegetable patch at the bottom of the garden is a jungle. There are nasturtiums trailing and twisting over everything, the raspberries have gone mad and are about 2m tall, the poor little crab apple is groaning under the weight of its orange fruit, and the buckler leaved sorrel has, well – taken over!
Tips on how to sort out the raspberries would be good, I’m never very good at reading a book and working out what I need to do!
I picked this pretty bunch of flowers and herbs from my allotment and back garden. It’s a mixture of pink and white cosmos, orange marigolds, yellow daisies, purple chive flowers, green mint, and delicate white parsley flowers.
I fear this may be one of the last sights of summer as the leaves are already beginning to change colour and fall.
Over the bank holiday we had a delicious meal with my family with trout caught by my little brother. You may remember this post back in May when he caught me a trout for my birthday which we barbecued on one of the only warm summer evenings we’ve had this year! Well, my mom had three that he’d caught when we went to visit for the weekend.
My mom and I served the trout with a herb butter, garlic roasted smashed potatoes, grilled tomatoes and green beans. The locally caught trout were cooked simply in the oven covered in foil. I disappeared into my mom’s garden to gather up a selection of herbs to make the herb butter – chives, thyme, sorrel, oregano, mint – you could use any mixture you wanted. I also picked a couple of calendula flowers and snipped the petals into the mixture, this flecked the herb butter with vibrant orange streaks.
The butter is easy to make – simple whip up some softened butter, add in the chopped up herbs and optional edible flowers, add a good amount of black pepper and salt. Add a dollop of the herb butter to your cooked trout and watch as it melts and oozes down over the delicate pink flesh.
My mom’s garlic roasted smashed potatoes were delicious – the softness of crushed potatoes, the crispy bits that had been roasted, and all of it infused with a yummy mild garlic flavour. Simply parboil your peeled potatoes. Drain and roughly mash up – just to break them up a bit. Pop the smashed potatoes into an ovenproof dish, sprinkle over some minced garlic, a couple of sprigs of rosemary, and drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Bung in the oven and cook for about 30 minutes until the potatoes are cooked and slightly crispy on top.
N and I are spending a lovely weekend at home with my family in the Cotswolds. Today my mom and I made plum jam from using plums from her garden. She has a tree that is positively groaning under the weight of plums, many boughs almost touching the ground.
With a large basketful we seated ourselves in a sunny spot in the garden and began the task of pitting all the plums.
The saucepan was laden down with nearly 7lbs of plums. The saucepan was popped onto the hob and brought to a simmer. This was then followed by long periods of checking to see whether the plums were turning into jam.
Once the jam had begun to set when smeared onto a plate, it was removed and placed into sterilised jars (they’d been put through the dishwasher). We made about 13 jarfuls. Not sure how it will taste – will have to let you know when we try it.
My mom insists I can’t share the recipe, not because it’s a closely guarded family secret, but because she’s not sure it’s very good. Will let you know how it rates on a crusty piece of grain bread with a good layer of butter.
Have been super busy this weekend – primarily recovering from my terrible flu (just a bit of a cough remaining) and soaking up some sun. I’ve got some lovely food and recipes to share with you from the last week, including a delicious selection of summer salads and a scrumptious and super easy chocolate cake recipe.
I leave you with a picture of the super duper carrot I pulled from my veg bed – what a whopper! And very tasty.
I have always grown cucumbers, ever since I first had a garden of my own even though it was just a little yard. I lovingly tended the cucumber seedlings on our bedroom windowsill, but that lot didn’t survive our two weeks away in France…unsurprisingly.
Again, last year I lovingly tended another batch of seedlings, this time with a perfect growing space – our funny little glass lean-to at the back of our house. It’s perfect for starting seedlings off as it’s like a greenhouse. I thought I would finally grow cucumbers and enjoy the fruits of my labour…that lot grew huge, long tendrils that reached the roof, curling up the string that I’d provided for them…but I’m not great at nurturing, and I didn’t water them enough. All the cucumbers that started to develop just dried out.
So this year I have tried again. This year I decided I would plant them outside, and if they survived and bore fruit great, if they didn’t, oh well. I like plants that just get on with growing, I’m not really great with needy plants.
This is a photo of my cucumber and nasturtium bed. I have planted three cucumber plants into one of N’s beautifully built troughs. Along with them are two Banana Split nasturtium plants, and some odd calendula’s and white daisies that have popped up from somewhere.
And hidden beneath this mass of leaves and jolly orange flowers is this…
It looks like a well toned manly green thigh. Maybe a rugby players thigh….Anyway, I hope it tastes good. I will be so disappointed if it doesn’t.
Any suggestions on how to eat it – other than just taking a big bite of it :O)
Over the last 24 hours I have seen my energy levels slowly creeping back up. I was so fed-up of being stuck in bed all week, and felt completely starved of fresh air, that I took advantage of a spell of sunny weather yesterday afternoon and headed to the bottom of the garden.
My goal: clear the pea bed. I have been very pleased with my peas this year. They are undoubtedly my favourite vegetable and I have enjoyed podding the sweet peas from their crisp pods for the last couple of months. Finally, they have come to an end. I have been holding off clearing the bed to allow the remaining peas who had started to wrinkle to dry out. My intention: to save them for planting next year.
So yesterday I spent about half an hour pulling out all the old pea plants and saving any remaining pods that I popped in my basket.
Below are four pictures taken at different stages of clearing the pea bed:
1. happy peas growing earlier in the summer
2. peas dying back and me starting to fill the wheelbarrow with the old plants
3. the bed emptied and almost a basket full of dried pods
4. newly prepared bed planted with some late summer crops
N finishes at lunchtime on a Friday, so we have spent some time this afternoon finishing off the pea bed. We raked it over, added a couple of bags of donated soil that we had left over, dug it in (there were loads of big fat worms!), and raked it again.
Once the bed was prepared, we planted seven rows of late summer crops – we shall see what grows and what doesn’t: rocket; wild rocket; oriental saladini; spring onion guardsman; lettuce marvel of four seasons; spinach matador; and lovage.
We have covered the whole bed with some pea netting in a bid to keep the nasty fat cats off it. Last time I prepared a bed and carefully planted a neat row of carrot and basil fino seeds a fat cat used it as his toilet the following night. I was not impressed!
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