Time to throw out the rule book

~ Cherry blossom in August, with ripe cherries on other branches. Confusing? certainly ~

Every year is a learning curve in the garden and this one is certainly no exception.  I read only yesterday that August is the last chance to trim hedges before the autumn frosts.  I was quite taken aback at this as, for me, the summer has only just got going. Plants such as courgettes, cucumbers, hyacinth beans and squashes that have been quietly waiting for some warmth have suddenly started to shoot away.  The cucumbers are putting on a rapid growth spurt, as are the beans. Canadian wonder beans are producing enough for dinner every day; so delicious as young pods but I had intended to grow these for the red kidney beans inside!

Without dwelling on the weather so far this year, my belief is that the seasons have shifted slightly; I'm optimistically expecting another slow decline into autumn, just as we had last year. Jekka McVicar told me earlier this year that she no longer cuts back her lavender in autumn, preferring to leave it until the air has warmed slightly in the early spring. Cutting it back in a warm autumn promotes new growth and confuses the plant, leaving it vulnerable to winter frosts.  She stated that she no longer relies on the old rules and given wisdom because the seasons have noticeably changed. Coming from someone whose business and reputation relies on interpreting the seasons correctly, hers is an opinion that I take note of.

Global warming is definitely affecting the gardening calendar and we have to make adjustments accordingly. Personally, I'm trying to garden instinctively, being prepared to experiment a bit and remaining stoic about any losses along the way. In this way, I haven't lost plants to water rot or slug damage this year but everything is very behind in it's growth. Except the sunflowers and herbs which are perennial or self-seeded.

If my prediction for the autumn comes true, that would mean 90 or more days of reasonably warm weather before any cold winter snaps visit the garden - bearing in mind that I live in London, in the South East of the UK.  Of course the light levels will diminish as days get shorter, so any planting done now would have to be in the brightest areas of the garden.  I'm fortunate that the veg patch gets a good seven hours of sun/light at this time of year.  The north-east facing walled border gets around 5 hours but the fruit trees planted there partly shade the earth beneath anyway.  (One of my winter jobs is to move a couple more fruit trees, especially as the cherry tree re-established itself so successfully this year.)

I pulled the last of the Little Finger carrots this week - they are by far the tastiest I've grown and I've just received a new bag of seeds to sow a new crop which should be ready by mid-October. The Amsterdam Sprint carrots will keep me going but the taste is not quite as delicious.  I'm also going to put in more dwarf beans (Canadian Wonder and Annabelle french beans), mange tout and salad leaves. It may not work but, on the other hand, my cherry tree thinks it's spring!

Edited to add:  I sowed mangetout, dwarf beans and giant sugar peas 2 days ago on the 8th; this morning, the 11th, they are showing through the soil.  :)

Traybake: Summer Soft-fruit Cake

Faced with a day off work in order to catch up with paperwork and gardening, what did I do? Make cake, of course. Procrastination is such fun.

A mug of tea and a slice of cake is one of the great rewards after a good potter round the plot and as the veg patch is at least offering up soft fruits at the moment, this recently discovered cake sprang to mind today. I haven't done a recipe on the blog for a long time but, I hope you'll agree, this one is worth sharing, especially as the summer may be on its way finally and tea in the garden can take its rightful place once more.

I found this cake via Pinterest; it's originally baked with just blueberries and called Buttermilk Blueberry Breakfast Cake. While my renaming of the adapted cake is not so alliterative, it tells it like it is. This is a cake that celebrates the soft fruit harvest of the summer kitchen garden. I used mostly blueberries, topped up with raspberries, strawberries (and, this time, sweet cherries); with lemon zest, vanilla and buttermilk, it's full of subtle flavours - I also used some of my lavender sugar* for the top crust.

Baked in a square tin, it looks like a traybake; the crisp sugar crusted top yields to a light, moist crumb with bursts of soft fruit.  Because I've now made it twice, I know that it's also heavenly warmed through and served with cream or custard as a pudding.

The original recipe came from this American blog; I've reworked it to grams rather than cups. Interestingly, I first made it to be shared with someone who is dairy intolerant so it was made with dairy free sunflower spread to replace the butter and soya milk instead of buttermilk. It worked perfectly.

Blueberry, etc, traybake cake:

100g sunflower spread or butter

200g caster sugar (keep a couple of spoonfuls back for the top)

Finely grated zest of a largish lemon

1 medium egg

1 teaspoon vanilla (extract not flavouring)

300g self raising flour

½ tsp baking powder

300g fresh soft fruit, eg. 200g blueberries plus 100g strawberries/raspberries, etc

140ml Buttermilk (about half a carton)

1. Preheat oven to 350F or 180C. Cream butter, lemon zest and sugar until light and fluffy.

2. Add the egg and vanilla.  Beat well.

3. Take out a couple of spoonfuls of the flour and gently toss the soft fruit in this.

4. Mix the remaining flour, baking powder and salt together; Add to the batter a little at a time, alternating with the buttermilk.

5. Fold in the blueberries/strawberries/other fruit.

6. Line an 8" square tin with baking parchment, spoon the cake mix in and sprinkle a good tablespoon of sugar over the top. Pop into the oven, middle shelf.  I check the cake with a skewer after 20 minutes and it always needs another 5 minutes. Adjust the time in 5 minute increments for your own oven. (The original recipe calls for a 9" pan and 35 minutes; in my oven this would be a disaster so I err on the side of caution.)

7. Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes before lifting the cake out onto a cooling rack.

---

* Lavender sugar is a lovely thing to have for use in the kitchen, it gives a subtle flavour to cakes, biscuits, etc. Karen at Lavender and Lovage has a nice easy post on how to make your own.

Sun, flower

(Sing along now...)
I got sun-shiiiine, on a cloudy day...
When it's cold outside, I got the month of May...
I. guess. you'd. say... what can make me feel this way?

After the gloom of the slug post, I thought sharing a bit of mid-week cheer was in order (even though, for now, it's still raining here in London).

Two whole days of dryness in one week would be reason enough to celebrate this summer; yesterday was one of those days - albeit pretty overcast - and, on Sunday, we actually saw some blue skies in London. Yesterday evening after work, determined that summer will happen eventually, I took a stroll down to the veg patch to plan what needed to be done next.  Everything looked as it did when I left it on Sunday, perhaps the purple podded were a little plumper but the courgettes were no bigger, the climbing beans no taller. Then - whoop-di-doo! - I spotted that the first of my sunflowers had flowered!  Obviously the Sunday sunshine had worked it's magic.  Such a simple thing, but it definitely cheered me up.

I dashed home to get my camera and had to stand on two wobbly bricks and hold it up high, at arm's length, in the gathering dusk, to get this photo.  I confess I have used Photoshop to deepen the colours very slightly in the top photo to bring out the warmth of the petals.  I could almost believe the sun was shining!

According to online forecasts, the jetstream is moving north this weekend and, in the south at least, we will be basking in, err, 66 degrees Fahrenheit (19 celsius).  That'll do me.

Photo, untouched by photoshop.

---

For more feelgood cheer, try watching (or dancing to) this video by NZ band The Babysitters Circus:

So you say everything's going to be alright now
But how do you really know?
And I know everything's going to be alright now,
Cos that's the seed I sow.

Guess who's coming to dinner?*

The (uninvited) dinner guest

I have the copper trowel, I have the raised beds.  I fondly imagined that, in the veg patch, this would minimise the impact of the plague of slugs being visited on the rest of the nation's gardeners. Not so, as this recent discovery bears witness. I cut a cabbage the other day for my lunch and found this beastie (actually only about 3 cm long) had taken up residence in the not-quite-outer leaves.  I discarded the leaf he inhabited and momentarily mulled over the benefits of pesticides.  The creature was contained in an empty butter tub until he could be safely despatched outside.  I couldn't bring myself to use my best kitchen knife for that purpose, the memory would have lingered long.  I still don't think I'm suffering as badly as others but have noticed that sunflower and cabbage leaves several feet off the ground have been decimated (probably snails) and the strawberries are more like Swiss cheese unless I get the ones high on the stem.

So, what can be done?  I've grown all my peas, beans, courgettes and squash in modules and planted them out as small plants.  They were given the added protection of a litre-sized plastic bottle as a collar and I've also heard that a good smear of Vaseline around the collar is a barrier that slugs won't cross.  The collars were sunk several inches into the ground and seem to have worked although the plants are woefully behind schedule.  I've also recently witnessed a friend stomping on a colony of slugs found under a plank in the veg patch; she was venting her rage at the loss of all her beans and seedlings to the slug buffet but the sludge left by their burst bodies was so revolting as to make me feel a bit ill. (And very glad it wasn't on the soles of my shoes.) There's no denying that this is effective.  Ultimately though I decided to make a Sluginator - it's a wide-necked bottle of very salty water into which I've been dropping slugs as I come across them. I'm not proud of myself but it works. Luckily for me, I live next to a handy railway line where I can dispose of the corpses.

Normally I see two or three slugs in a year.  This year they're out in force, slithering across the paths and pavements in groups and in broad daylight.  I don't care if they do eat rotting veg, I'd like to see less of them.  Not all are harmful to the garden, Defra has a rogues gallery of slugs with info.  On the other hand, anyone who feels kindly enough to know more about them should head over to the Higgledy Garden, or Wellywoman's blog, for a good sluggy read.

Bugs and slugs are accepted as part and parcel of growing your own veg but, yesterday, as I sat through torrential downpour and with rain forecast for the rest of the week, I'm wondering if anyone else is finding this summer a touch apocryphal?  Floods, slugs, snails, blackfly, weeds, no fruit and rotting and/or bolting veg - and, here in London, I've also had fox cubs digging up newly transplanted seedlings and pooing wherever they can get access.  I hope the proper summer comes soon because, frankly, I'm finding it hard to muster my usual delight in the garden.

(*With apologies to Sidney Poitier for using the title of his excellent 1967 film for this post. I've always considered him to be rather gorgeous and in no way does he resemble a slug.)

Not the Hampton Court Flower Show ...

Wildflower meadow in a tray on my balcony!

Today I was supposed to be at Hampton Court for the flower show.  I had my ticket and programme ready and then I overslept.  I never oversleep.  No, seriously, I'm one of those annoying people that leaps cheerfully out of bed at 6.30 a.m. to embrace the day. Today the fates decided otherwise; between yesterday's extended balcony gardening, repotting and moving plants until beyond nightfall, being kept awake throughout the night by workmen laying gravel on the nearby railway tracks and torrential downpours of rain, I was thoroughly befuddled when I eventually awoke around 9.30!  It wasn't too late to go but I just couldn't motivate myself out of my pyjamas.  It was pouring with rain and I thought about the joys of standing in a large crowd getting soaked and decided to save myself the two and half hour return journey and do some more planting at home instead.

As it approached 4 o'clock, the appointed time for the big Sell Off of all plants there, I rather regretted my decision.  The sun was shining, there was no rain to be seen and I'd just read a good review of the Grow Your Own section over at the Physic Blogger that reminded me I really wanted to see Mark Diacono's forest garden display.  *sigh*  (There are just some days when, whatever you do, it won't go right.)

So, to cheer myself up, I thought I'd post about the flowers currently on display in the Veg Patch gardens and have resolved to be a bit more stoic about going next year. I'm sure it will be worth it.

Day Lilies about to flower.

Purple Podded pea flower.

Potato flower from unknown tuber.

White onion. Several appeared this year after an onion was left for seed last year.

Oriental Lily - I think this is supposed to be edible but probably a bit chewy.

Tom Thumb nasturtium: edible flowers and leaves. 

Calendula opening.

Purple podded pea pod.

Marguerites - so fresh and cheerful.

Sage flowers. Edible slightly milder taste than the leaves.

Violas, still flowering in mid-summer, probably due to the rain!

Nasturtium, Empress of India

A corner of my exuberant herb bed: strawberries, lavender, golden oregano.

Borage buds. I've sown seeds to flower at different times to keep bringing the bees in.

Lavender, nurtured from a tiny wind-sown 2 cm seedling found in the soil last year. 

Kale flowers, now eaten.  Yum!

So, less of a veg patch and more of a flower garden on this count! I said last year that I hoped to introduce more flowers into the veg garden; hmm, that seems to be happening okay.  And I haven't even mentioned the sunflowers or red orach or any of the other flowering herbs. I promise, there are plenty of veg in here too!

PS.  As I've typed this post, we've had several heavy showers so I'm now feeling vindicated in my decision (if very wasteful of the ticket. Still good causes and all that ... ).  Needless to say, all photos were taken on previous occasions!

Summer pudding

I'm picking a bowl of raspberries and strawberries every day now but have gone off the taste of the strawbs that I'm growing - more often than not, the flavour is insipid. This is my fourth year of food growing in the veg garden and I've found that if you want to get people interested in food growing it has to taste really good. The strawberries were donated to the Veg Patch as runners so I have no emotional attachment to them (unlike plants that I've grown from seed);  think I'll pull them all out and choose a really flavoursome variety for next year.

With a couple of years of strawberry growing behind me, I've come to realise the mistakes I've made and will put that knowledge to good use in rethinking my strawberry growing area.

First, where to put them: Initially I set the plants out in rows, straight into the ground, in the traditional manner although the space was limited. The area gets around 6 hours of sun or good light in clement weather. They grew well and, in no time, were sending out runners.  My careful rows soon disappeared in a mass of plants - a lovely hiding place for slugs! (I almost picked up an e-normous slug the other evening when reaching for a juicy red berry under the leaves.) It's been challenging to get amongst the plants to separate out the runners as the rows were fairly closely planted.  I've recently read that chopping off the runners can send the plant's energy back into producing fruit, a tip worth considering if you don't need to increase your plant stock.   I've now thinned the patch to two rows, front of border with a foot-sized space between.

Second, accessibility: An unforeseen problem I encountered with having a strawberry "patch" was that children would wade in to get at the fruit, regardless of other plants being trampled underfoot. Bending down for an extended picking would also do my back no favours. I've now relocated many of the sturdier plants to a single row at the front edge of a 30 ft long raised brick-walled bed, about 2 ft high and much more attainable. This situation could have been entirely avoided if I wasn't trying to cram too much variety into my tiny space - on an allotment, the rows would (should) be around 30 inches apart, leaving plenty of room for feet both big and small.

Third, finding the fruit: The plants are very leafy with the fruit growing underneath and therefore hard to spot. I like to get to the fruit before the slugs (and birds) do so it's important to be able to see them. Children (and I) don't want to eat fruit that has been previously enjoyed by the animal kingdom. Plants bearing fruit on strong upright stems will be among my top choices for replacement plants - and putting a thick layer of straw under the plants also helps. I've been growing a few Rambling Cascade plants (from Victoriana) and they seem to have large fruit on upright stems so that's heading in the right direction. So far I've picked only one or two berries from these plants as they seem to be later in fruiting - the taste is semi-sweet and slightly floral.  In fairness, the smaller quantities may be due to being in a slightly more shaded area, although they would, in a normal year, get plenty of sun.

As usual, the garden is teaching me a lot this year. I'm amazed at how much I didn't know when I started. I believed it was as easy as it says on the seed packet - a triumph of expectation over experience. This year has, so far, has forced me to learn about bugs, pests, shifting seasons and now soft fruit.

With strawberries, the essentials are: Buy good plants to start with, plant with the crown at soil level, give them space to grow, mulch with straw or plant through black plastic (to retain moisture, keep weeds down and slugs at bay), chop the top leaves down after fruiting (except on perpetual fruiting plants) so that the new leaves on the crown can grow and, finally, replace the plants every 3 years to prevent disease or pests getting a hold.

I owe my rapid learning curve to the RHS website. Good videos, recommended varieties, top tips and recipes are just a click and a link away.

Perennial Cauliflowers, my growing year

Almost a year ago I was intrigued to discover that Victoriana Nurseries in Kent offer plug plants of a perennial cauliflower that they call 'Cut and Come Again' and which are described as producing up to ten mini heads from each plant.  I imagined that these would be tiny 'designer' heads of cauliflower when I planted the plugs 90cm apart in my walled fruit border. The reality was slightly different, but the journey to maturity was fascinating.

It's a source of amusement to me that, rather as the fashion industry has to have 'this season's colour', now that veg growing is the trend du jour there are seasonal topics here also.  Last year it was edible flowers, with some supermarkets offering tiny salad bags of flowers at exorbitant prices. This year's buzz seems to be perennial veg, as mentioned in numerous books and magazines. Shortly after I planted the cauli plugs, I was invited to a little soirée of gardeners and garden writers and managed to silence the room when I mentioned that I was growing perennial cauliflowers.  Gracious, what a novelty! Perennial veg!  So, yes, just once I have managed to be on the forefront of something trendy although, of course, perennial veg is not new at all. Martin Crawford, Director of the Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon and best known for creating his forest garden, has written a book on the subject which I'll review this week because it's worth knowing about.

I've also come across this vegetable in Alys Fowler's book 'The Edible Garden'. She describes it as an old-fashioned cottage garden vegetable and writes:

'Perennial broccoli is actually a cauliflower masquerading as broccoli. Each spring it produces a small, central cauliflower; cut this off and it sends the plant into production of many broccoli-like side shoots.'

The only known variety is called Perennial Nine-Star Broccoli (due to the number of side shoots) which is the type supplied to me by Victoriana Nurseries.

It's recommended to place the plants in a sheltered position although they proved to be extremely vigorous in the funnelling winds of the veg patch fruit borders. They needed staking as they grew to be over 4 ft tall and, if left to go over and flower at the end of the season, can reach over 5 feet and be an absolute bee magnet.  Mine were well over 3 ft in width, which somewhat surprised me as the planting distance is advised to be 90cm. To get round this, I kept whipping the very large lower leaves off - they were drooping and providing shelter for wintering slugs and snails anyway.  The plants will go on producing for five years so it makes sense in the fourth year to save the seed from one plant and then start at least one new plant each year for a continued supply.

These plugs were incredibly easy to grow, one small hole dug, a bit of mulching and a bit of staking - obviously the hard work had been done for me by the suppliers! However, having spaced them according to the enclosed instructions, I realise now that those recommendations are fine for a field or allotment but not when the plants are sharing the space with fruit trees. It all started to get a bit overcrowded by April but that's okay as I'll try and move a couple of them now that they've been cut back, all bar one (keeping the bees happy).

I was fascinated to see that the caulis all grew at different rates, planted north to south in the same soil.  The most southerly plant (in a 7 metre row) grew fastest, largest and produced a head before the others.  Some of the plants produced mostly florets, the largest produced just the one cauli head. I suspect the reason for this is the British weather - a warm winter followed by lots of sun, lots of rain... hardly the typical spring conditions needed by the plant.  The heads and florets came thick and fast once the plant started cropping (as did the grey woolly aphids).  I had plenty to offer friends and neighbours but would have preferred a longer cropping season because the secondary shoots were extremely delicious, whichever way they were cooked.

Victoriana sell the plug plants in sets of 5 which would satisfy a family of 4 (or more) cauli lovers for at least a month - more if the weather permits. (I had nearly two months of pickings.) You do need to watch out for woolly aphids, be prepared to squirt them with an organic spray and give the florets a good wash in water with a splash of white vinegar added to dislodge any bugs.  Strangely, the pigeons didn't seem to bother with the plants beyond the occasional peck at the leaves, perhaps because someone keeps chucking bread crusts for them. In another situation, I would net the plants for protection.

What I have enjoyed most is the sight of veg growing in the middle of winter, the availability of freshly picked stems in early spring and the ability to harvest just one or two stems if I fancy a few steamed cauli florets for a snack lunch. If, like me, you're partial to a bit of cauliflower, this is the plant I'd recommend growing - plant it once and, with an annual mulching of the soil, you're set up for spring veg without further ado.

If you're interested in growing perennial cauliflowers yourself, plugs can be bought from Victoriana Nurseries here.  I planted mine at the end of July, probably a tad late, but still reaped the rewards in the following spring.  The warm extended autumn last year no doubt contributed to the plants' excellent growth up to the cold snap in early 2012 and therefore a good subsequent harvest.

I photographed the plant's development throughout the year - who could resist photographing a monstrously huge plant in December when all else is dying off? I've chosen 12 photos which chart the progress and have squeezed them into 4 rows.  Apologies for the smallness of each frame but you'll get the general idea!

Cauliflower plugs planted 22 July 2011.
Photos from left: 8 inches high 6 weeks after planting; 15 inches high, 9 weeks after planting; right pic taken 2nd December, plant now about 2 ft tall.

Frozen caulis in early Feb 2012; shoots forming in the leaf bracts mid-March; statuesque plant by early April.

First 4" head beginning of April; sprouting shoots end of April; still edible but starting to 'go over' early May.

Cloud of bolted florets by early June, which had turned to flowers by mid-June. 3 week old stump resprouting.

The last flower

So, here it is.  The only poppy flower I'm likely to see in the veg patch this year.  Extremely windy weather made conditions for taking photos quite tricky but, having spotted that this very last flower had opened, I knew I had to grab the opportunity to record it with a photo.

You can see that the petals have already suffered by being battered around but I'm pleased to get this shot, regardless. It was taken in the early evening, the skies were gloomy and rain threatened so lighting conditions were pretty dire! I had to use a very fast shutter speed combined with flash to freeze the flower as it was whipped around in the wind, together with lots of patience and balancing steadily for this hand held shot! A macro of the centre would have been nice but impossible, given the conditions.  I haven't been down to the garden yet today but I expect the flower is now just a stalk.

This will have to do until next year.

One puff of wind and it's over

So much for keeping a daily eye on the progress of the coral poppy...  I went away last weekend and returned to find that the plant had flowered and then dropped its petals in that time! Must have been quite a show; there were half a dozen of these fuzzy seed heads, leaving two buds still to flower.  One had opened this evening - I found it being wobbled around by high winds.  I wonder if that will still be there to photograph tomorrow morning?  With one left after this, and a busy Saturday planned, I feel the window of opportunity is closing rapidly!  Do they flower twice in a year? I hope so!

I'll leave the seed heads but I bet they'd look lovely tucked into a vase of flowers!

Oh, this is not good...

I know nothing about growing fruit, even so I was horrified to see that the little fruit on one of the Morello cherry trees is in an advanced state of brown-ness. This is a stark contrast to last year when I was able to snap ripening red fruit for the blog. I have no idea what might be the cause of this, so if anyone has any suggestions, they would be much appreciated.

The tree has also, rather suddenly, become infested with blackfly. The apple trees were similarly infested a week or two ago and, on the advice of an organic gardener at Camley Street Nature Park (where they grow apple trees on a moored barge, how exotic!), I mixed Ecover* washing up liquid in a ratio of one part soap to 10 parts water, poured into a spray bottle and squirted liberally over the bugs on the tree. This appears to have worked, to a larger degree. I was told that Ecover works more efficiently than other washing up liquids as it contains a plant based ingredient which covers the insect with a waxy coating, depriving it of air and, thus, life.

Whether it's the blackfly that have caused the disastrous demise of the cherries or an excess of British weather (more likely), Operation Squirt will be top of the agenda on Sunday when I return from a visit to family on the coast. I should also add that I'm not averse to a bit of manual squishing (preferably with gloves), in accordance with the advice given by Monty Don.

---

* Ecover is a brand of environmentally friendly cleaning products, widely available in the UK. The washing up liquid uses plant-based ingredients rather than petrochemicals which is why it's believed to work better than other liquids as an organic pest control.

Caught in the rain.

Twenty four hours of rain has been great for the veg; I wish I'd put out some tubs to catch some of it. I popped out earlier in the rain to sow another patch of parsley and noticed that one poppy bud had started to split open. Time for a photo!  I love the way the  raindrops are just caught on the hairs and the petals are pushing out of the bud.  Looks like it will be a beautiful colour too.

June, so soon?

I'm hugely relieved to have an extra day off work this weekend.  Dare I say that I won't be celebrating? Much as I think Her Maj is a wonderful, decent, long-suffering and hard-working woman, I have too much to do to make time for jollifications and revelry (never mind the ensuing hangover!).

~ End of May veg patch; this quarter looking very lush in the sunshine! ~

My feet seem to have hardly hit the ground in May; between work and garden, my cup has indeed runneth well over (leading to many post-midnight bedtimes, so exhausting...). I've been potting on seedlings in the mini-greenhouse or starting them off, weeding in the veg garden and harvesting cauliflower sprouts, kale, cabbage, herbs; transplanting raspberry runners, moving strawberry plants, topping up raised beds (and potatoes in sacks) and filling large pots for overflow veg, squishing or squirting blackfly on the broad beans and fruit trees, and, finally, sowing flower and radish seeds outside - and, of course, watering, watering, watering.  More or less the same as every other gardener, I imagine!

So, apologies if this is boring and more to aid my memory than blog interest, a quick recap of where we're at in the little London veg patch:

Chillies, capsicum and bell pepper seeds sown into modules at the beginning of April, two to a module, all germinated successfully and (because I hate to waste a perfectly good plant) all potted on successfully in mid-May into J. Arthur Bower's seed and potting compost (recommended by Which? garden as the top compost in their trials last year).  Total: 3 Purple Beauty bell peppers, 3 Orange bell peppers, 4 Chilli Corno di Torro Rosso, 1 Hot Banana chilli, 2 Chilli Guindilla Roja and 3 Hamik capsicum.  One way or another, it will be a hot summer!

Purple podded peas have gone out a few days ago; courgettes, sweetcorn, popcorn, mangetout, kidney beans and dwarf french beans to follow before the weekend is out.  The Lazy Housewife bean (growing in the safety of my balcony at the moment) is about 3 feet tall, much to my relief.  Borage seedlings have been planted out under the fruit trees, several Violet de Provence artichokes have gone in at the back of the walled border (yum, looking forward to eating those!) and radish seedlings have appeared amongst the broad beans only days after the seeds were sown.

Nasturtiums (3 varieties) are growing well, californian poppy seedlings have been set amongst the herbs, orach, calendula and geums are adding a pop of colour to the sea of green veg, and a Coral poppy bought last year is now looking very gorgeous - can't wait until the flowers unfurl as this will be the first year of flowering!

My efforts of last year are still rewarding me: Hearted cabbage is still waiting to be eaten and I'm picking tender kale leaves for lunch and for the freezer as those plants look as though they'll flower soon. I've discovered a fabulous River Cottage recipe for kale: simmer the leaves with finely chopped garlic until soft, drain and chop finely, pile onto toast and adorn with shavings of parmesan. Quick and delicious!  One word of caution though - caterpillars!  I carefully picked over the leaves, then left them in a sinkful of water.  After about 10 minutes I found 8 tiny caterpillars at the bottom of the sink. A further soak in a water/cupful of vinegar mix netted another 4 caterpillar babies. And I thought I had good eyesight!

The perennial cauliflowers are a story in themselves and I'll post about them this week.  They've now spectacularly sprouted, some have flowered and look beautiful, others were covered in grey aphids so have been chopped back to the ground - and are beginning to resprout!

My teenager just asked if he could help me in the garden (think Bob a Job week, accelerated to millenium rates of pay).  After a quick think about what still needs to be done, I've said yes; despite what felt at times like re-enacting the Labours of Hercules in May, there's still a border to clear, 2 walled beds to dig over, strawberries to move, seedlings to be planted, bean towers to be built and 2 raised beds to be constructed and filled.  Yes, I will be more than happy to have his help ... I might yet stand a chance of enjoying a chilled glass of wine while standing back to watch the veg grow on a warm summer evening!

Enjoy the Jubilee folks - I'm off to celebrate being in the garden!

I love the colours of the kale and red orach next to each other! 

The bee, the borage and the netting ...

Pigeons are greedy intelligent creatures.  I've spent a disproportionate amount of time this year devising a means to keep them away from my seedlings and from nesting on my herbs (they seem very particular to thyme, must be the woody stems).  Shouting at them and banging the door used to work quite well in previous years but as there are now at least 8 pigeons (or more) who regard the balcony next to mine as their home, stronger measures were called for. I devised a means of completely closing off my balcony with fine gauge garden netting and now they patrol the ledge on the other side of the net looking for any gaps that they might squeeze through.  There are none; I have pegged the net down on my side and closed the sides with taped loops.  Hahaha!  (Sorry, but it really has driven me to distraction over the years.)

The system was completed about 4 weeks ago and I've been a tad anxious as to whether bees would be able to get through the netting. Although I live on the second floor, they have found found their way up here in the past.  This evening, as I watered my seedlings (completely crusty after a day's photosynthesizing in the sun) I heard a very welcome droning sound... 

"The Bees are Back in Town ...  "

This little guy made it through the netting to get to the borage nectar and, having checked around for further goodies (interestingly, didn't stop at either the rosemary flowers, the broad beans, the violas or the strawberries), he then zoomed off back through the netting. Isn't nature amazing?

Borage: it's almost Pimms O'Clock

Borage flowers are one of the unmistakeable signs of summer.  Borage is one of the prettiest summer herbs with both edible and medicinal uses and easy to grow from seed. Once pollinated, the flowers develop large black seeds (the size of peppercorns) - be quick to gather these if you don't have the space to let the plant self-seed.

Growers of the herb know that the flowers can be frozen in ice-cubes and used to glam up summer drinks; they have a slightly sweet cucumber flavour that goes particularly well with Pimms, that quintessential English drink favoured by Wimbledon devotees. In her book 'Good Enough to Eat', Jekka McVicar suggests sprinkling the flowers into a salad, crystallising for decoration on cakes or adding to chilled summer soups; she has a nice recipe for mixing the flowers (stamen and pistils removed) with creme fraiche and layering this with a fruit purée for a lovely summer pudding.

The whole plant is edible: freshly picked young leaves have a salty cucumber taste and can be eaten as part of a salad, or with cream cheese and tomatoes in sandwiches. They're very bristly so are best chopped finely and mixed with other leaves if you're going to use them for this.  Both leaves and flowers can be used to make a nice refreshing tea which is said to have a slightly diuretic effect (not dissimilar to normal tea or coffee).

This is the same plant which is elsewhere known as Starflower (you can see why) and whose seeds have a high concentration of Gamma Linoleic Acid, a valuable oil used to regulate female hormones.  For me though, it's best use is as a companion plant.  Bees absolutely love it so it's a great herb to grow next to your beans for an increased yield. It's also attractive to blackfly which could be off putting unless you grow some as sacrificial plants.

I have a tray of borage, grown from seed, ready to go out into the veg patch but, just in case those didn't work out, I also have two bought borage plants growing on my balcony. A few days ago I noticed that these had produced clusters of buds:

24 hours of sunshine later and warmer temperatures have coaxed the flowers out, first pink then turning a beautiful deep blue.

I have gardener Naomi Schillinger to thank for these seeds.  I admired the borage growing in her garden last summer and she swiftly removed a handful of seeds and popped them in an envelope for me.  Naomi has done marvellous work with her neighbours' front gardens and the tree pits in her local streets;  check out her inspirational blog or if you can get to North London, she's participating in the Chelsea Fringe.

The broad beans are also beginning to flower and I'm on blackfly watch for the broad beans in the veg patch.  I spotted a couple on one of the plants this afternoon but I'm afraid that aphids are building in numbers elsewhere - I just hope that the ladybirds can keep up with the feast!  For some reason, I thought that my pink Karmazyn beans would produce pink or red flowers but, no... Unless something dramatic is about to happen to these creamy buds!

Ch-ch-ch-changes....

I hope no-one is taken aback by the new look of my blog - although it may not be too obvious as I've left the header photo alone (for today). As I sat enjoying the view across my seedlings and out of the window to the sunshine dappling on the leaves of the trees outside, it occurred to me that I've been getting bored with the look of my blog for a while.  The new look will hopefully give it a fresh springtime feel without making old friends think that they've come to the wrong page.  Well, it's still me;  I'm still here. Change is good. (And now with translate option!)

Shoots and leaves

I only just started to sow my seeds at the end of March. Does this make me badly organised? Maybe, but hopefully not.  Remembering that last year the early warm weather was followed by cold, wet and windy weather before we properly got going with the British Summer, I decided to delay so that I didn't have to keep plants hanging around indoors.  Last year I nurtured beans and sweetcorn inside, hardened them off and planted them out in early May; I lost the lot that very night due to gales and lashing rain.

This year I'm determined that my work won't be wasted;  seeds for my Lab Lab (Hyacinth) beans went into modules on Monday, germinated Wednesday and are unfolding their first leaves today. Impressive. It's the same story with the round cucumber, Crystal Lemon, that I'm growing.

The pea family are now out in the mini-greenhouse on the balcony ten days after sowing. I'm only growing a few of each so that I can fit lots of variety in to the available garden space; so purple podded peas and yellow mange-tout are destined for the veg patch and a bush type dwarf pea (and dwarf beans) for the balcony. For would-be growers without gardens, I'm pretty sure that both of those could be grown in containers. (If interested, the dwarf peas, Tom Thumb, came from Jungle Seeds and the dwarf beans, Annabelle, from More Veg.)

Galia Melon, Antalya. Suited to outdoor growing in UK

Elsewhere on the windowsills, two types of courgette, red kidney beans, dwarf french beans and butterbush squash are up and running but the trailing courgette and spaghetti squash are still to reveal themselves. Globe artichokes will have to wait until I've cleared a space for them (another long walled border filled with honeysuckle and ivy), chilli and bell pepper seedlings have all been potted on and melons are looking stronger each day.  Amongst all these, do I have a favourite? You bet. This bean has more than a touch of magic about it:

This is Lazy Housewife, a heritage bean donated to the veg patch by Matron over at Down on the Allotment. She very kindly sent half a dozen beans last year, all of which were killed in the aforementioned May gales. I was dismayed and not a little disappointed that I'd wasted these precious beans. Amazingly, going through my seed box a few weeks later, I found one last seed in what I thought was the empty packet.  I carefully sowed it and it germinated successfully. I planted it out and managed to kill that one as well (I stuck one leg of the wigwam through the root *hangs head in shame*). So that was that, then.  My second chance was blown... or so I thought until I looked again this year and saw, like Mary Poppins carpetbag, that the packet had offered up one last bean!  This one has to work; as a heritage bean, I really want to have some seed to keep at the end of the year. I'm keeping a very careful eye on it...  it's looking good so far, don't you think?

Edited to add: Although this sounds like quite a lot of work has been going on, this is by no means the full list.  I forgot to mention the sweetcorn, blue popcorn and red/white/blue sweet peas I'm growing and I've yet to go back to the seed box to see what needs to be sown in the next round - better get going then!