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I can’t wait to see this film, it looks like a real eye-opener:
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
This is a totally un-food/garden/allotment related post. This post is because I love my little sister SO much. She is incredibly talented and needs your help. She entered a competition to design a video for an anti-bullying campaign and is one of three finalists!
I can’t think there are many of us who haven’t been affected by bullying, so please support this campaign by going and watching the three videos, and hopefully you’ll agree that Izzy’s (the little sister) is great. If you do, please please vote for her – you can vote as many times as you like.
Vote here (Izzy’s is the first video with her name spelt ‘Issy’: http://www.sugarscape.com/main-topics/homepage/394603/vote-you-favourite-suso-video
This is her video:
I’ll be back next week with more food-related goodies.
Very excitingly I have been nominated for a Dorset Cereal ‘Little Blog Award’. I know I’ve been pretty lax on posting over the past week, but I promise I’ll get back into the swing – a busy return to work after being off ill has left me rather stressed and consequently eating a lot of bad things that are not worth sharing.
If you’ve got a moment to pop over to the Dorset Cereal’s website and vote for me I’d be so pleased. You can also find lots of other lovely blogs listed there too. Just click on the ‘vote for me’ image in the lefthand column of my blog.
Lovage says “please vote for us!”
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’ve spent a lovely day at the Tatton Flower Show with N’s mom. Tatton is quite near to us, so N’s mom headed over to ours early this morning, then we set off in convoy. The weather switched between warm sunny spells and sudden downpours – there is a constant eb-and-flow of people rushing into the pavilions as the rain buckets down, then back out into the show ground when the sun reappears.
There were some lovely garden designs this year (my favourites are always the back-to-back gardens as they are small ordinary-sized gardens), although I think there were more I loved last at last year’s show. One of my favourite garden’s this year was ‘Be Fruitful’ and is the only one I took photographs of.
I’m not a huge fruit lover (although raspberries and alpine strawberries go down a treat), but this garden was delightful. It was an urban fruit orchard, with small espalier apple trees and strawberries in window boxes, interplanted with soft grasses and chocolate brown scabious.
We discovered these beautiful little tomatoes called red currant. They produce slender bunches of tiny red tomatoes, much smaller than cherry tomatoes. We picked up a seed catalogue from the exhibitor and will hopefully buy some seeds next spring to try growing them.
This exhibitor also had some other fabulous vegetables. Including these other fabulous varieties of tomatoes…
And take a look at those onions!
And here’s something to keep me dreaming – I didn’t ask the price…
I bought some lovely things including a couple of grasses (including a bunny tails grass! very cute), a pretty new lantern, a cosy waterbottle, a outside light for the front of our house, and some fantastic sounding anti-slug pullets made from wool. If I get time towards the end of the week I would love to share with you this great product – I put some down straight away when I got home, so we shall see if it helps my slug and snail problem.
If anyone else has been to Tatton today, or is going over the next couple of days, I hope you have a great time!
Image: The Soil Association
I receive occasional emails from the Soil Association, and today an email landed in my inbox that asked my to help ‘Save the honeybee’. I’m aware of some of the problems the honeybee is facing, so always keen to do my bit to help I clicked on the link and signed their petition.
If you’re interested in trying to help the honeybee, this is what the email said:
‘Over the last two years in the UK, beekeepers have reported a one in three loss of bee colonies. Neonicotinoid pesticides have been shown to kill honeybees and the Soil Association believes that these pesticides should be banned today. We’ve launched an online petition calling on the Government to do just this. Lend us your voice by signing our petition today.’
Please help the honeybee by adding your name to the petition – click here to find out more and sign the petition.
A quick hello at the end of long day. N and I have had a lovely week of cooking and eating – we’ve made fairy cakes with butter icing and raspberry jam…pink gooseberry and nettle fool…pasta with homemade fresh tomato sauce and basil dressing…and pea, mint and taleggio risotto.
I’ve spent hours stood in my vegetable patch munching on so many peas that I couldn’t eat anymore….picked juicy strawberries that have never reached the kitchen…tidied the allotment and watched ladybird larvee turn into ladybirds…and been to a lovely garden party in Walton Lea’s walled garden.
I know its been a few days since I posted, so I will be back tomorrow with a recipe – not quite decided what to share with you all…peach and yoghurt ice lollies or a zingy tomato and bean salad. Oh, or the delicious Lebanese lunch I had in London yesterday!
This is just a quick post to share with you a couple of cool things I’ve stumbled across on the web this week, and thought that they might be of interest to others. Am hoping to head out into the garden later today (I see blue sky peeking through the clouds!), and I desperately need to rescue my peas as they are listing to one side after the terrible winds we’ve had this week. I also have a few pictures of my ‘Local Food Celebration’ from Tuesday night to share so will try and post them later.
In the meantime, I found this website called Dinner4Good, which allows you to raise money by having dinner with your friends. From what I can see, you invite your friends round for dinner in aid of a charity, and your friends donate money through the website. The website allows you to send invites and for your friends to donate via it, so there’s no awkward moment at your dinner party where your rattling a bucket asking for loose change. The Soil Association are linked up with the website, which is how I found out about the website, so get cooking people and raise some money for your favourite charity!
The other neat thing I found this week is a fun poster guide to eating seasonally from the website Eat Seasonably. I love the design of it and how it almost looks/reads like a poem. Print off a copy and stick it up in your kitchen.
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