Winter Aconites In May?

Way back in March when the Winter Aconites were in full flower I mentioned that if you wait until the seed pods form, you can harvest the seed and spread it around on any spare bit of ground to increase your stock. Well this is what the ripe seed pods look like. I collected quite a large handful of seed today, and  was tempted to sow it in a seed tray, thinking it would be a useful way of increasing the stock of plants, but when I  looked it up, I found that it will take a year to germinate, another year before it's ready to transplant, and probably two further years before it flowers! No wonder it's taken a few years before I've noticed any increase in the number of flowers. I think I'll just sprinkle it around and cover with a bit of compost, and hope for the best.

I will however dig up a few of the plants before they die down completely, and split them up as with snowdrops, this will increase my stock and will be a bit quicker!

Ashes To Ashes

The Pampas Grass was looking a bit tatty so David set it on fire.

He does this every year around this time and this is what it looked like after the inferno

  I have to say, I would be less than heartbroken if that was the end of it, but amazingly it rises phoenix like from the ashes within weeks to grow and flower again. It's not my favourite plant, by any means, but it's impossible to dig out, and since it isn't apparently going to take the hint and just fade away, this is as good a  way as any of getting rid of the old tatty foliage.If foliage is the right word for the razor sharp blades it produces. You can't help admiring a plant that comes back from this though can you?

Speaking of Ashes To Ashes, did you see the last episode on Friday? Don't you just love the Gene Genie?

Home Made Ice Cream

I've been clearing the freezer of any remnants of last year's soft fruit crop, ready for this year's surplus (she said hopefully), and I've also had rather too many eggs. Since my depleted poultry numbers post fox, I've not been selling eggs at the gate, but I still have a generous supply for the house and friends, but just lately a rather too "excellent sufficiency"! And since there's only so many omelettes a person can eat, I thought a good way of using up both surpluses would be ice cream.

Let me say straight away that I think an ice cream maker is not a luxury but a necessity here. You can do it without, but it's a real faff, and ice cream makers are not all that expensive. I have a Magimix le Glacier, which lives in the freezer so that it's always ready for use, I think it cost me about £20 a few years ago. You can get expensive electric ones that have their own freezing capability, but they're for real ice cream fanatics and cost loads.  But is is nice to be able to enjoy something so luxurious, and yet knowing that it's full of good stuff, because you made it yourself.

Most ice cream recipes are based on a cooked egg custard, which is fine, but I have discovered that you can make it much quicker without making the custard first. This is based on a Ben and Jerry's recipe (and they should know) from a little book of  their recipes I've had for some years and which uses uncooked eggs. (Throw up hands in horror) So obviously only use it where you know your eggs are good and fresh, such as from your own birds, for example. Although I must say, you'd have to cook a dodgy egg a lot more than making custard with it to make it safe to eat, so use good fresh free range eggs and make your own ice cream, mayonnaise and so on, with an unfurrowed brow.

3 large eggs (I use duck eggs, because I have a lot of them)

6 oz/150gr caster sugar

3/4 pint/450ml double cream

1/4 pint/150ml full fat milk

Your chosen flavouring, I made

1.Vanilla using seeds from 1 vanilla pod plus 1 teasp vanilla essence

and

 2.Strawberry by using up some strawberry puree in the freezer ( never throw away strawbs that have gone a bit mushy, whizz them in the blender with caster sugar and lemon juice and freeze)

Beat the eggs and sugar with a mixer, until light and fluffy. Gradually pour in the cream still beating and finally the milk. Add your chosen flavouring to taste, bearing in mind that ice cream needs to be more strongly flavoured and sweeter than you would normally do to allow for the freezing effect.

Transfer to your ice cream maker and churn following the maker's instructions.

Et Voila.

Ben and Jerry's little book also has a very good Hot Chocolate Fudge Sauce recipe, which I will share with you another day (if you're very, very good)

Just Before That Cold Beer

Just a quick reminder to all you rhubarb growers out there, if you have any of these

which are flowering stems, then, pretty as they are, you need to snap them off as soon as you notice them and put them on the compost heap, so that the plant can concentrate all its energies on making more rhubarb leaves,and not seed.

Delicious.

And also, in this hot spell we're having just now, if you're finding it too hot to do any proper gardening, then just do the watering. If you do nothing else, water any plants that you've put in recently. It's all too easy to water them in when you plant, you think you've got them off to a good start and they can fend for themselves, but new plants have small root systems, and need watering during dry spells, indeed shrubs and trees need help for the whole of the first season. So do the watering and then find a shady spot, for a well deserved cold beer. You've earned it.

Wisteria Time

May is wisteria time in the Cotswolds.

The lovely lavender of the flowers goes brilliantly with the mellow cotswold stone of many of the houses. I bought this plant as a present for David when we first moved in here some ten years ago, and it's now a good mature  plant. I know that some people have a problem getting them to start flowering, and I think they respond best to fairly hard pruning. Set out the basic framework of branches, and prune all other side shoots to a couple of buds to encourage formation of flower buds. We prune it fairly hard after flowering, to keep it under control, and tie in any new growth, but that's about all.If you leave them they just grow like the Day of the Triffids, ours regularly comes in the bedroom window by midsummer.

No Wonder The Neighbours Think I'm Bonkers

Can you  spot anything odd at the end of my veg garden?

It may just look like a load of bin liners tied to a cherry tree, but, in fact, it's a load of bin liners tied to a cherry tree for bird protection purposes

Once again, it's  time for this year's instalment of Will Kathy Get Any Cherries Or Not. Last year it was definitely Birds one Kathy nil. At the moment the fruits are no more than hard green marbles, but already they are being stripped from the trees. It does seem early even for the birds, and I am suspicious of squirrel activity. I have been experimenting with live catch squirrel traps, so far without success, but my brother in Wales has had great success with his , so I'm going to persevere, and will let you know how I get on.

But to deter the birds I am using the plastic bag technique as in previous years but I will be keeping a careful watch on them too. I have tied bin liners on the branches with the heaviest crop - I have to admit they do look a bit odd, to say the least, but I am determined to get at least some cherries this year.  

I am also trialling a new product (at least it's new to me) made by Agralan products, who are a local company based near here in Ashton Keynes. They sell quite a few green gardening products, so I was quite keen to give them a try. The product is, Buzz Off  and the idea is to stretch a thin plastic line tautly between two points and when the wind catches it, it makes a noise that birds can't stand, and they fly away, hopefully cherry-less. At first I couldn't get it to make any noise at all, but I soon realised you have to have quite long lengths, around 5 yards/metres for it to work, and eventually I was able to detect a kind of whirring noise a bit like distant helicopters. Presumably birds don't like helicopters.

So having set up the lines last night I went out to check the situation this morning, expecting to feel like an extra on the set of Mash (helicopter background, do keep up...) but surprise surprise, there was no wind, not a breath. Boiling hot day, no wind. The plastic bags seem to be ok so far, and when the wind did eventually blow a bit, the lines did work too. In fact it takes very little breeze to set them going. It would be great if this simple measure really made a measurable difference. I wonder if it would work on the strawberry patch?

 I will report back on how effective these measures are. I really would like to get a few cherries this year...

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.