At night

A couple of nights ago I went out into the garden to photograph the moon. There was a lot of cloud around, so it would tantalisingly appear and disappear on me. I made a complete hash of putting the tripod up in the dark, but eventually got it about right and settled myself in a garden chair behind it. As the moon emerged from behind the cloud I snapped away, experimenting with settings to try and get what I could see with my own eyes.

I’d brought my mini Maglite out with me too. Though the display on the D80 lights up if you pull the on switch round beyond the on position, it still leaves the other buttons in the dark and without a torch you’re left fumbling about in the dark changing what you’ve just got perfectly set, instead of pressing the button you were actually aiming for.

I was quite content in the still darkness, watching the moon come and go and the stars start to appear in the summer night’s sky, when suddenly I heard a strange sneezy snuffle off to my right. I froze and stared wide-eyed ahead of me. Ok. I have a torch I can shine over in that direction, I thought, but I’m not sure I particularly want to, because, oh dear God, what if it’s a puma with a cold and it wants to eat me? After a little hesitation I pointed my torch in the direction of the sound and saw … a little hedgehog. Not a puma. He was making his way along the fence, noisily sniffing the ground and heading towards a puma another hedgehog in the corner of the garden.

I summoned Mum and Dad to see our nocturnal visitors and we watched them sniffing around in my dim torchlight. Not wanting to startle the creatures (the hedgehogs, not Mum and Dad) with my flash I settled for just a high ISO setting and torchlight. Sometimes you just have to enjoy something in the here and now and not worry about getting a perfect photographic record. After a while I ran back inside to grab my laptop to see if I could record their wonderfully loud snorting and snuffling. Unfortunately the laptop didn’t pick it up among all the general noise of the night, but I did get a couple of bits of video of them running about.

It occurs to me that I should have pointed them towards my vegetable patch, where I currently only have about 3 little weedy beetroot, slugs having methodically feasted on the leaves all along the row of beetroot I planted. I guess they’ll find their own way there soon enough.

From not so marvellous to blooming marvellous

Down at the bottom of the garden, with its back wall to my vegetable patch there stands Juniper Lodge. It’s a wooden play house that was bought for me and John when we were kids. It has housed many a secret society meeting and now houses the garden furniture and a bevy of (probably rabid, fanged) spiders.

At the front and side of the hut there is a little flower bed that had gradually become less and less spectacular, the clay soil thick with the roots of plants it had killed in a previous season. All that survived around the little pond in a copper cauldron, other than my alpine mint and azalea, were scraggy bits of campanula, violets, feverfew and creeping Jenny. The soil was so hard that it was next to impossible to plant anything new in it.

In late July last year I decided to finally do something about the flower bed. I dug out a few inches of the terrible clay and piled it high with all the weeds and rubbish in a garden rubbish sack. I bought a couple of sacks of new top soil and dug it in, mixing up with the patch of reasonable soil I’d left at the side of Juniper Lodge. Suddenly my soil was a beautiful soft dark brown mass, no longer sickly grey rubble.

I’m not a huge fan of bedding plants, or perhaps more accurately, I’m not a huge fan of having to plant bedding plants every year, so I found some pretty perennials: knautia, phlox, helenium, scabiosa and white catananche. This summer, as everything was growing beautifully a couple of big poppies arrived too, seeded down from wherever, which I left to flower.

The knautia (pronounced “naughtier”) was crazy; the tag had given its approximate height as 90cm, but mine shot up way beyond that and swayed about with pretty pink flowers on the end of the stems. As I’ve deadheaded the finished blooms I’ve collected the seed heads in a paper bag, letting them dry out ready to be used in the bird seed I want to make. I’m just hoping that this paper bag won’t suddenly vaporise like the sunflower seed head I’d been saving did last year. Maybe the sparrows came indoors and took it? After all, they polished off the wheat before I was prepared to let them.

With the knautia mostly over the cornflowers (catananche) and phlox are now flowering, a beautiful mix of pink and white. Those colours are incidentally also a source of intrigue to me at the moment in a different subject. We received an email from Lauren last night, who will be hosting Come Dine With Me tomorrow evening. We’ve not been given any clue as to the menu, but if we could “wear something pink and white, that would be marvellous”.

Mangetout

The second harvest from the patch: 218g mangetout. They started appearing at the end of the week, but I was so taken up with making food for the party we held yesterday, I didn’t have a moment to start picking them until today. I also finally staked my tomato plants, thinned out a couple of carrots and ripped up all the remaining salad that had gone to seed.

Then I had a chocolate cupcake.

7 Days: Day 7 – Weeding

Here I am making a start on picking out all the self-sown seedlings that grow in the gravel. [Runner-up photo here] This year violets were abundant and had turned the stones into a green carpet. Mum and Dad came out to join me after tea and together we’ve made a fine start on getting the gravel garden ship shape for the summer party in a week’s time. Tomorrow Mum and I will be making a start on food preparation, doing what we can in advance and freezing it.

Thanks for another lovely week, guys and girls. I’m somewhat behind with the photos, so they’ll be keeping me entertained next week too, I’m sure!

7 Days: Day 4 – Flowers on my lettuce

Not quite what I was aiming for growth-wise. We had a pile of rain a while back and my lettuce and rocket went to seed. But no matter, I keep pinching off the flowers and we’ve had – and are still getting – lots of great salad leaves for our sandwiches.

The mangetout behind are just starting to get flowers, but that’s ok, they’re meant to. The potatoes are growing, the runner beans are climbing their poles and the rest are just about doing their thing too, but I’ve been neglecting things out there a bit and the weather’s been a bit weird, so I’m not expecting a bumper crop. though when I compare the patch with how it was a month ago, I can see that things are indeed growing. The beetroot aren’t doing much though – slugs have stripped their leaves off. Time for a few more magic blue pellets to be sprinkled their slimy way, methinks.

31st May:

And now, almost a month later:

The potatoes, beans and mangetouts are all growing well

The tomatoes and cucumbers haven’t died. I call this progress.

And my wheat field is coming along nicely.

Accidental farm

We have a few bird feeders around the garden, some hanging from trees and one on the fence near the back door. In the front garden the birds are very good at clearing up the seed they drop, but in the back garden they’re less interested in being tidy. And so the seed is dropped and, in the case of the feeder by the back door, it drops onto nice fertile soil among the flowers.

We’ve had a few little seedlings before, which didn’t turn into anything, and the odd sunflower appearing out of nowhere, but this year growing conditions were evidently just right and below the bird feeder has appeared a little crop of wheat and oats. It’s so much fun to watch them grow, with the ears of wheat already swelling, that I’ve sprinkled some bird seed into a pot of compost to grow.

I’ve also this morning picked out some wheat seed from the bird food and planted a small patch in my vegetable patch. I’m hoping there will be enough time for John to make me a tiny combine harvester before the autumn. Meanwhile, I’m toying with the idea of doing something a little different in the vegetable patch next year: sowing bird seed to attract the birds, along side green manure such as red clover, which is also popular with the birds.

Feeding myself

I have been picking the first thinnings from my rows of mixed salad and rocket – that job that I find so difficult because in order for your crop to come to anything, you first need to massacre what currently looks like such a delightful pile of growth. But when you get in there, the seedlings are already getting leggy and though you don’t like the idea of taking out as many as it takes to leave seedlings standing x inches apart, the chances are the people who wrote the instructions on the seed packet did so for a reason. Stupid people.

Anyway, the thinnings are big enough to eat and so they are the first “harvest” this year to make it to my plate. My current favourite sandwich is a sub roll with gouda, beetroot, mayonnaise and some salad leaves. This was originally lettuce leaves from the farm shop, but now my mixed salad and rocket leaves takes their place. Yum. Later in the year, maybe I’ll even be making this sandwich with homegrown beetroot too.

And with the amount of wheat growing below the bird feeders from dropped seed maybe I’ll even be making this sandwich with homegrown flour one day too…