Category Archives: Garden

Mostly garden pictures and maybe the odd poodle

Goldfinch collection

Every port taken

The best shot we could manage from the kitchen!

Feed the birds, tuppence a cake

These silicone moulds are pretty good for making your own bird cake.

Melt fat and pour over a mixture of the things your local birds like eating. Mine have sunflower seeds and hearts, niger seed for the goldfinches, chopped peanuts, and an assortment of seeds and bits and pieces. Fill your silicon mould up. Leave in a cold place. Outside the back door in our case. They froze so fast they have got this cute snowflake edge!

Pop the cakes out and serve on your raised veg bed, or punch a hole through and string them up somewhere and keep putting out water, the birds will really appreciate it.

The dog food company where we order the dried dog food decided to send Zeb a free advent calendar. This is a new one on me! He of course, thinks it is a great idea! What will the pet food industry think of next?

On the first day of Christmas there was tripe for me!

Outside the back door

I'm still standing, yeah yeah yeah

It may be the 1st of November but this Chinese broccoli is looking very enthusiastic and the cardoons are sprouting like nobody’s business. I am tempted by Robin’s tweet to pick a few stems and see if I can turn them into food. I always thought you had to tie the plant up in brown paper and blanch the stems for many weeks and I have just left them to be gloriously ornamental and make flowers for the bees.

How do you cook these Robin?

This week’s task is to plant the new garlic and replant some of the giant singles that we raised earlier in the year by mistake. I’ve been eyeing up DocFugawe’s winter garden which is a long way away in Oregon and thinking that we should have tried some of those good looking greens he has, but it’s probably too late to sow new stuff now. We’ll have to make do with the chard and the broccoli.

My last handful of beans and friends

There is also a row of teeny tiny leek babies which need transplanting. If I write this down here, I might actually do it this week. Promises, promises.

Not garlic but cucumbers! A gifted plant produced enough baby cucumbers for a whole jar of pickles!

I have learnt that garlic needs to have a month at a cold temperature in order to divide into cloves – if you plant it and it doesn’t get that cold month, then you just get one big bulb. We have a whole bunch of those which we have been eating, and they are fine. The bonus of getting that wrong is that you can apparently re plant them at the right time of the year and then they will turn into properly divided big garlics in due course.