Outdoor Salad At Last

I picked my first outdoor grown salad yesterday. We've had some leaves from the greenhouse, and they were ok, but I always find them a bit flabby and insipid compared with the outdoor grown ones. And winter salad, always a hit and miss project for me, was totally non existent in this year's extreme winter.  So it tasted all the better for being a novelty, but that should, if I'm properly organised, be the end of packets of supermarket  leaves for this year.

This is picked from a row of loose leaf mixed lettuce, raised in modules in the greenhouse, and planted out a few weeks ago. I didn't protect it from the late frosts, and luckily it seemed not be have been affected in the way that my early French Beans were. There's loads of mixtures to choose from I recommend the Italian seed companies partly because they are so generous with the seed, Franchi, or Seeds of Italy, but I've tried lots and they're all good. I always like some red coloured lettuce mixed in with the green, partly for the taste but also I just like the look of the dark red and purple leaves in the salad bowl. a row of Lollo Rosso lasts most of the summer and looks decorative edging a raised bed of another crop.

I picked a handful of pea shoots as well to go in my salad, it's a good idea to pinch out the tops of pea plants when they're a few inches tall, it makes them produce side shoots, so you get more peas per plant, and at this early season you get a taste of fresh pea in your salad, that's if there are any left in your basket by the time you get back to the kitchen of course. This helps keep me going until there are real peas to be stolen later in the year, can't wait.

The Bee Inspector Cometh..

I had a visit from the County Bee Inspector yesterday. (For anyone from overseas, we have a system in the UK of Bee Inspectors funded by the government, whose job it is to help and advise beekeepers, monitor disease, and so on.) It sounds a great system, but Bee Inspectors are pretty thin on the ground, I think we have half a dozen or so to cover four counties in this area, and this was the first time I've had a visit in the five years I've been beekeeping.

So I was very pleased to meet Robert, who examined my bees and took some samples to take away for lab testing, and was a fount of information and practical advice. He was completely non- judgemental of my somewhat ancient and rather tatty equipment, which was a relief, as I thought he might tell me to replace it all.  Beekeeping can be quite an expensive pastime, one of the reasons I am keen to move to top bar hives, and pursue more natural beekeeping methods.

I was so busy with Robert that I forgot to take any photos, so here's a rather boring photo of one of my hives.

Anyway for the time being the results for my hives were that one has a bad case of varroa which Robert has suggested I treat by doing a "shook swarm", which will effectively give the bees new varroa free frames to live in. I don't have enough spare frames to do this so I've sent off for some new ones and will perform the shook swarm as soon as they arrive. My other hive seems to have a virgin queen who isn't laying any eggs, and the solution for this was to transfer a frame of brood from the other hive so that the bees can raise a new queen from this if the current one doesn't get on with it in the next day or two.

Coldest May Night For Fifteen Years

We've just had the coldest May night for fifteen years, according to the Met Office, but hopefully we should be moving into a warmer spell soon, even if it means some rain. Personally I blame Daniel Corbett, he never forecasts normal weather. I put some dwarf French Beans out last week and they don't look too happy,

 so I'm going to quickly sow a few replacements in modules in case they don't pick up.

I'm also going to put my runner and climbing french beans out tomorrow, I've been taking them in and out of the greenhouse for the last week or more, trying to harden them off a bit, and at the same time avoid the freezing temperatures we've been having at night. I don't mind the odd late frost, I can work round that but the bean modules have been in and out like pints of beer this last week, and I've had enough of it. The evening gavotte in and out of the greenhouse door with armfuls of pots is a pain. So they're going out tomorrow and hope for the best. And the first squashes and courgettes will be following soon after. So I hope you've got that Daniel, no more frost please!!
Fingers crossed.

Latton Weather Station

Just a quick mention for Latton Weather Station. We are a tiny village here in North Wiltshire, nothing much happens, no pub, no shop,  one very ancient church and a disused victorian school that serves as a village hall. And that's about it. But we do have as much weather as everyone else, and not only that, we have our own weather station!
 http://www.lattonweather.co.uk/nb-0200/index.php

How cool is that! Eat your heart out Michael Fish.

I Have A Cunning Plan..

I'm fed up with tomato blight, It's been a real problem in the last few years and I've formulated a cunning plan to try to keep it at bay this year. It's a miserable disease, once you have it, it's almost impossible to do anything but pull the plants up and take what crop there is. If  you leave it, it will all rot.

Since I know the spores of blight are in the ground, and are splashed up on to the leaves by watering, or by rain, I decided that I would make a raised bed for my outdoor tomatoes this year. I have a long high stone wall at the back of the veg plot, and it always irks me that I can't grow anything against this, the warmest most sheltered spot, because some bright spark, years before we came here, thought it was a good place to put a concrete path. So I have cut up a few old pallets, and used them to make a raised bed, filled with my Warrior Compost, which should be clean to start with.

I'll be running a leaky hose along the top, and covering that with a sheet of black weed suppressing fabric, which I'll make slits in to plant through, so there'll be no soil splashing up on to the plants, and the watering should be even and regular.  I suppose it's the same sort of principle as a grow bag, but on a much bigger scale.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Orange Tip Butterfly

I was out in the garden, about to follow my own advice by removing spent flowers from my little patch of Dog's Tooth Violets, when I spotted this little lady, and I nipped in to get my camera and amazingly she was still there when I got back, so I was able to get a few pictures. I would normally recognize an Orange Tip Butterfly, as they are pretty much what they sound like, little white butterfly with orange tipped wings. I've noticed quite a few of them around the lanes this year, but apparently, as I found when I looked it up, the females don't have the orange wing tips. This wonderful pattern is on the underside of the wings.

Orange Tips feed on dandelions and bramble flowers, and lays eggs on garlic mustard, of which there is an abundance everywhere at the moment. Needless to say I never did get round to dead heading the Dog's Tooth Violets.

How Many Barrowloads in Four Tons?

In case you've ever wondered, and I'm sure you have, what four tons(or is that tonnes) of compost looks like...

well it's quite a lot as you can see. You may recall I recently had a dumpy bag, equivalent to half a ton of Warrior Compost delivered by my local recycling centre, and since I got through it in no time, I thought I would take advantage of their discounted price for bulk delivery.  It came on the back of a sizeable tipper truck, and bless the driver, he did relatively little damage to the garden in tipping this lot into the designated spot. So now all I have to do is barrow it all over the garden.

I've already made up my outdoor tomato beds using this compost, which I hope to finish later today, so I will show you tomorrow. I am trying a new scheme to combat the dreaded blight, which has been so much of a problem for me and many others with outdoor tomatoes in recent years.

More later, I have some barrowing to do...

Fruit Tree Blossom

Just had to take this photo of my Bramley apple tree in full flower. I love fruit tree blossom, it would be worth having for the blossom alone, but when you consider you get buckets of fruit in the autumn as well, it makes me wonder why on earth anyone grows the Japanese flowering cherries you see on every street corner. They are lovely in their way of course, but I don't think they're half as pretty as the fruiting varieties, and the scent on this Bramley today was quite delicious. I have to walk past it to get to the greenhouse, and it's a joy.

I have an image in my head now, of everyone in London clogging up the streets in September with wheelbarrows to collect all the free fruit and nuts growing along the roads.

The South East facing wall of our house is the "blue" wall, in early summer and this is the first of the blue plants it houses to come into flower. It's clematis alpina Francis Rivis - I'll show you the others in a week or two when they come out. If I say so myself it's quite an effective display.

This is the view from my kitchen window.

You can see the blue flowers of the clematis on the right hand side growing up the wall outside the kitchen window and as I only get round to pruning it when I can't see out of the window any more, it's consequently a mass of twigs underneath the new growth, which makes it an irrisistible nesting area for birds in the spring. Usually it's wrens, this year I think there's a robin in there and possibly a blackbird. It's a lovely view while I'm doing the washing up - the nodding blue flowers, and the hard working birds nipping in and out to the nest.

Never Give Up

This is Salvia Elegans,or Pineapple Sage. Or as I like to think of it, The Probably Dead Plant. Being borderline hardy, it dies down to below ground level each winter, and (I hope) shoots again from the roots in spring. However, it's always very late indeed to wake up, and every year in April  I poke about in the dry twigs and think it's probably dead, and then in May I'm certain it's a gonner, and then at the beginning of June, just as I'm about to dig it up, it suddenly springs to life. At the risk of sounding like Rabbi Lionel Blue on Thought For The Day, I can't help thinking  it's a metaphor for  perseverance and never giving up, (well at least not until the end of June anyway).

Of course if I had taken a cutting or two, (cuttings strike very easily ) and overwintered them in the greenhouse, I could have avoided all this. If only..

Salvia Elegans, or Pineapple Sage has the lovely grey green leaves of all salvias, and this one bears a brilliant if small scarlet tubular flower in late summer and autumn. In a good summer it can grow three feet tall,  providing plenty of material for cuttings!!

Anyway there's no sign of life yet, and after the winter we've had this year, I do really think it could definitely be a late Salvia, a stiff,  gone to meet its maker. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-salvia.

Probably.

Cupcakes, Fairy Cakes, or Buns?

I've recently bought one of these

the stand that is, not the cakes, - these were made by Claire for little Brown's 2nd birthday last weekend. And very delicious they were, obviously I had to try a couple in the interests of research....

 In fact, I've bought three of them, one each for my daughter and step-daughter, and one for me. We all like cooking, and I think they're quite a nice way of showing your little cakes off to advantage. There's a bit of a trend for having individual cupcakes instead of one large cake as a celebration cake at weddings and birthdays, and this would be ideal for such an occasion. They come in various sizes, this one is a 23er, but you can leave off the lower tier if you want to.

One of the first things I learned to cook as a young girl were Butterfly Cakes, little fairy cakes topped with butter cream and with the halved lids perched on top at a jaunty wing-like angle. I say fairy cakes, but I notice a current trend to refer to these little cakes as Cupcakes, I'm thinking that must be the American equivalent, and I also notice that they're tending to be a lot bigger than the ones I made as a child, another not altogether unwelcome trend if you're a fan of cake. And who isn't.  I can't help thinking though that some of the "cupcakes" I've seen illustrated would have served as dessert for a family of four in the old days. Just goes to show that not everything gets worse.

If you look on Amazon you will find literally dozens of books of recipes for cupcakes, which is quite amazing really, since, give or take a few additions, the basic idea is sponge cake baked in individual cases and decorated however you like. So call them Cupcakes if you're modern, or Fairy Cakes if you're posh, or, if you're from Yorkshire, more prosaically Buns, it all comes down to a fairly basic recipe and the rest is up to your imagination and patience. I fall back on my usual all in one sponge cake recipe, which I rehearse below -

All in one Sponge

4 eggs
1 pack 8oz/250g of butter at room temperature
8 ounces/250g of self raising flour
1 rounded teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon of cornflour
8 ounces/250g of caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
about 2 tablespoons milk

Put everything in food processor and switch on till blended. That's it. You might want to mix it without the milk first and then add as much milk as you think you need to get a soft, smooth, but not too runny mixture. Depends on the size of your eggs really.

Spoon into little cake cases or larger muffin cases or mini muffin cases, about 2/3rds full, and bake until golden.And when cold decorate with fondant, butter icing, glace icing, or whatever you like.