The waiting game

As you know, I don't do gardening.
Anything that is vaguely green in our house has been nurtured by Blight-of-my-life. It will only have survived through her efforts and in spite of my malign influence.

The stuff that I do in the garden isn't horticulture, it's civil engineering.

Recently. I've also been doing what is best described as 'rough carpentry', at the allotment. I've been hammering in pegs and nailing together bits of wood to surround the various vegetable plots, to accompany the posts and wires that will support the raspberries.
I was really looking forward to the raspberries. They are probably my favourite pie filling, so I needed very little encouragement to make the necessary preparations for their arrival. Unfortunately, due to some kind of clerical malfunction, our order for the plants got lost so we've missed this season's delivery.
Ah well....

One of the other plots is for asparagus. This is not a vegetable for the impatient, as it takes about three years to get anything like a sensible crop from the plants, but if the taste of a fresh-from-the-soil, home grown asparagus spear outclasses that of shop-bought it may be worth the wait. Last season's spuds from the allotment were an order of magnitude tastier than anything from Tesco's, so I'm hopeful.

Knowing how slow asparagus is to develop, there was considerable excitement the other day, when the first green shoots were detected. Well, actually they're a sort of purple rather than green, but you can't keep a good cliche down.

A message from our sponsor

It's been nearly a year since I started this blog, so as it's Christmas Day, I'd like to thank everybody who has been following it.

Your comments and support have made it even more fun than I ever expected it would be.


At last! The perfect excuse to not do anything in the garden.

"There ain't no cure for the Glummertime blues..."

A couple of days ago we passed the Autumn Equinox and although our days have been getting steadily shorter for some time, we are now into the period when there's less day than night. I've always found this slightly depressing, but now, as someone who spends quite a bit of time working night shifts, the diminishing supply of daytime has become more significant. So it's, "Roll on Winter Solstice" when we can start to claw our way back into the sunlight.

As you'll expect, Blight-of-my-life and I employ completely different strategies to combat the onset of Glummertime.

Blight is a much more outdoors sort of person than me, so she has been getting stuck into preparing the new raspberry bed at her allotment, digging up the remaining potatoes and harvesting the tomatoes. I've been only peripherally involved with these activities. I've had to set out some boards for the raspberry bed and put up support wires, but most of my energy has gone into eating the fruit and veg that she has so lovingly grown. The tomatoes have been brilliant again, so all the aggro with the new greenhouse was worth it, but the melons were somewhat less successful; there was only one melon and we didn't realize it was ripe enough to eat until it had become too ripe to eat. Bum!

The potatoes have also been a revelation. People say it's not worth growing your own, but the flavour of a really fresh spud is impossible to deny. Grow some yourself next year and you'll become a believer too.

Another good result in the greenhouse were the Physalis (aka. Cape Gooseberry). It's the second year that we've had these weird things. If you've not come across them before, they look like a very small yellow tomato that has grown inside its own, tiny paper bag. The flavour is so subtle that I can't begin to describe it; it's not really like anything else. This isn't too helpful I know, but the best way to find out what they taste like is to try one. The variety which Blight grew this year had smaller fruit than last year's, so she decided to try making then into jam.

I don't think she'd done any sort of jam making before, so even without using an exotic fruit, this was already going to be a bit of an experiment. I have some dim memories of my Dad making rhubarb and ginger jam many years ago, so I was expecting the kitchen to become a no-go area, while it filled up with mashed fruit, vats of boiling sugar, steam and red hot jam jars.

This did not happen.

There wasn't a huge quantity of fruit, so everything was carried out at a much less industrial scale and after a few hours and very little anguish, the jam was declared "A Success".

It tastes excellent. If you want the recipe, it's at www.celtnet.org.uk

My method for counteracting the pre-winter blues is less practical. I simply spend even more time huddled over the computer.

I'm currently playing "Champions Online", which was released earlier this month. If you fancy yourself as bit of a super-hero but haven't got the physique to wear spandex convincingly, you too may find it as uplifting as gardening and jam making.

Potato fans rejoice!!

Strange as it may seem, there are people out there who have said to me, “why haven’t you told us anything about the potatoes recently?”

I had no idea of the responsibility that I had taken on when I started this blogging lark. I mentioned potatoes a couple of months ago and now I’ve got tuberophiles, or whatever you call potato lovers, demanding status reports.

The potatoes are actually doing pretty splendidly, as it happens, although their well-being hasn't been entirely threat-free. There are these rabbits, you see...

I'd better explain.

Those of you that have been paying attention have probably noticed that although our garden has sheds, lawn, ferns, greenhouses and the odd shrub and tree here and there, it doesn't have a vegetable plot.

"Where are the potatoes?", you cry.
Well they're not here, obviously

The vegetable plot is at a nearby farm, where Blight-of-my-life keeps a couple of horses. She decided to create an allotment ages ago, but only got round to preparing the corner of a paddock at the start of this year. It was pretty heavy going, as it has been grassland for years, but after stripping away the turf and some serious digging, the plot was ready for planting.

If that sounds like back-breaking hard graft, you'd be dead right... which is why I stayed well clear and left her to it.

Everything was fine, the plants were coming up nicely and then all the rabbits in the surrounding fields realized that there was this really nice patch of soil that someone had thoughtfully dug up for them, where they could make nice little burrows.

We could almost hear them.

"I say", said Hazel, "This is handy. We don't have to dig through all that wretched grass."
"Oh aye, it's brilliant", said Bigwig, shoving a potato plant out of the way.
"These spuds are a bit of a nuisance though"
"I think we should leave them alone,", said Fiver, with a worried twitch of his nose "There's something... 'funny' about this place."
"Oh give it a rest Fiver. Can't you just relax for once?", said Hazel
"Yeah.", said Bigwig. "Your Prophet-of-Doom routine's doin' my head in."

And so it went on.

Until last week, when we surrounded the entire vegetable patch with a sturdy fence covered with rabbit netting.

Hopefully now they'll sod off, back to Watership Down.

People in glass houses

Today, I'm celebrating the successful completion of the new greenhouse. It has been an unusually aggro-free project.
OK, the completion date slipped rather badly, but that was largely to do with the Land Rover deciding it wanted to take a month off, leaving me with no suitable vehicle for transporting bulk building materials.

With the base completed at the end of last week, it was a very straightforward task to assemble the aluminium framework and then bolt it down before fitting all the glass. The weather was just about perfect and the whole thing went together with hardly any 'effing and blinding' at all. (it would have been entirely profanity-free, except I managed to misinterpret the assembly instructions for the sliding door and initially put it together in such a way that the glass wouldn't have stayed in.)

You'll see from the picture that I haven't yet put the slabs down that will surround the base, but the plants have already begun moving in and they seem completely happy with this.

If you're thinking of getting a greenhouse, I can strongly recommend "The Greenhouse People". Their on-line ordering process was clear and uncomplicated, the delivery was efficient and the after-sales service was first class when I rang up with a couple of questions.

Another thrilling instalment... ("'Thrilling'? I think not")'

After a bit of an effort, and in spite of the 'wrong kind of weather', the fence is now up. I finished it this morning, and Blight-of-my-life completed the painting shortly afterwards.

We've hung onto half of the old privet hedge, so the sparrows will still have somewhere to congregate within easy reach of the bird feeders and baths.

(If you want to know how it looked before, see this earlier post. ) 

I'm very pleased with how it's turned out, as the sight of wibbly-wobbly fences upsets me. I'm afraid that I'm one of those people who when visiting friends, can't stop themselves from levelling up the pictures on their walls if they're even slightly skew-wiff, so building a fence where the posts aren't plumb vertical and all in line with each other would probably bring me out in a rash.

You'll see that the base for the new greenhouse is also ready, so I've run out of excuses to get on with that now. 

Curses!!

An attempt to make gardening interesting

I don't do gardening

I'd better apologise in advance for this, but I expect there'll be quite a bit of garden related nonsense here for a while. You'll note that I don't actually call it "gardening", but this is because I don't do gardening; plants and green leafy stuff are things that grow in spite of my intervention, rather than because of it. The real gardening is done by Blight-of-my-life, which suits both of us and also gives the plants a fighting chance of survival. The only time that I get involved in garden-stuff is when it veers off into the realms of Civil Engineering; sheds, patios, fences... and greenhouses.

I suppose I only have myself to blame for this. I worked in the building industry some years ago (decades ago, actually) and although there is no way that I'd want to make a living like that anymore, I get quite a kick out of making a nice job of something that other, less experienced/foolhardy people, would have done by a professional.
Just don't expect me to do it without grumbling.

A couple of years ago, we decided that the garden needed a serious overhaul. We replaced some horrible wibbly-wobbly paving slabs with a new patio, put up a new wooden shed, modified the existing brick shed to cope with new recycling bins, replaced some fencing and moved the existing greenhouse. As usual, it all took much longer than planned, but eventually the effort paid off. The garden was no longer an embarrassment and by the end of the summer, the greenhouse was stuffed with yummy tomatoes.

Of course then Blight decided that the greenhouse wasn't big enough.

"I quite fancy growing melons this year, as well as tomatoes. Do you think we could fit another greenhouse next to this one?"
"Grrrrrr!!"
"What did you say?"
"Nothing dear..."
"It can be my birthday present"
This is a sneaky shot, for which I have no legitimate defense. After all, what kind of miserable sod would begrudge his partner a birthday present she genuinely wants, rather than the speculative purchases that most blokes resort to. (Did someone mention 'Ann Summers' by any chance?)
"Grrrr"
"What?"
"I was growling", I reply with surprising honesty
"Why?"
"Because I'm thinking of all the digging and concrete and piles of soil and other stuff that we'll have to do if we get another greenhouse."
"It won't be that bad, will it?..."

Well, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the greenhouse has arrived. There's a long, thin cardboard box, a kit of parts for the base and a load of panes of glass. Before I can put all this lot together, however, I have to clear an area of turf, then dig out and concrete the foundations.
This on its own should be no cause for alarm; after all, I've done it all before with the existing greenhouse... Come to think about it, I've done it twice with the existing greenhouse. No, the bonus challenge this time, is that there's an old and sickly section of privet hedge intruding into the space where the new greenhouse needs to go. The only practical solution is to dig it out and replace it with some new fencing.

...and I've got to get it finished before the tomato plants have got too big.

"...not 'obsessed' with potatoes"

According to Blight-of-my-life, I overstated her interest in potatoes in my previous posting.

"When you read up on a subject, it's 'research in depth', she said, "but when I do it, I'm 'obsessed'."

I decided to concede that I may have been a bit unreasonable, but maintained that in the finest traditions of journalism I shouldn't let the facts spoil the story. 

I think I got away with it.

So now look what's happened.

I rest my case.

"I married a Colorado Beetle" shock!

What is so fascinating about potatoes?

Suddenly, the house is filled with strange, perforated bags of wizened looking brown things. Blight-of-my-life appears to have become obsessed with growing potatoes. There's even a tray of the things perched on the bedroom window-sill, where I am reliably informed that they are "chitting".

Chitting? I'm not even sure that this is a real word, but apparently it's what you need to do to help your seed potatoes get ready for being planted, so they produce a good crop of brand new potatoes.

How this is supposed to work I have no idea, but at present they're all just sitting there, with little, stumpy, sprouty bits poking out, looking like the world's least attractive flower arrangement.

I'm sure that the end result will be delicious and well worth waiting for, but I have to confess that I find it slightly unsettling sleeping in the same room as the little beggars.

I can't think why.

.