Just Keep Moving, Just Keep Moving, Just Keep Moving...

The title of this post is what I have been singing in my head all of last week into this, why? Because life's pace of late has been mental, some how I have filled my time with numerous projects and if I don't sing that song in my head I might feel like I have lost the plot and throw in the towel.

But really life is good and I have my health and my family are all well and accounted for, so no more moaning, I have to JUST KEEP MOVING...

So what did I get up too last week in the garden, I will let the pictures tell the story...

Tuesday 13/04/2010

The Tulips are still enjoying the April spring sunshine.



The Hyacinths blooms are properly open.

A hybrid Wood Anemone, blooms for the first time from some free bulbs I got last year.

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On the left is Heartease which has flowers throughout out the winter into this year and has a fresh batch of blooms on it. And on the right are the first of the wild Violas in my garden to flower (its really weird, my wild violas always flower weeks later than my surrounding neighbours, who also have wild violas in their gardens).

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On the left are the blooms of the wild strawberry plants in my garden and on the right is the waterlily that lives in a deep bucket (yes I know, I know, I need to finish the big pond, hopefully this year) slowly coming to life.

Time to give the lawn it's first hair cut.

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I got quite a bit of lawn clippings so I removed some of the wood material from the compost bin which I added last week when I tidied the flower beds and layered the clippings properly with the dryer materials, resulting in a full bin.

Saw lots of mini beast while cutting the lawn.

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Picture upper left of a broken bird's egg, shows the birds are not dragging their feet re: nesting, wasp in the middle picture and a lacewing in the bottom picture, which is very encouraging to see so early in the season as their young gobble up the nasty plant sucking aphids which plague us gardeners.

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I also took a peek into the ponds again and was pleasantly surprised to see a small clump of frog spawn, aww, so the frogs hadn't turned their noses up to my filthy pond/s after all, oh bother, now I'll have to clean it without jeopardising the spawn, see what you get when you procrastinate, that teaches me, doesn't it!!!


To end the day I was lucky to find some descent parsnips to pull and some almost to far gone purple sprouting broccoli, which I baked together with the 'Celebration' winter squash from storage. The parsnips center was woody but was easily removed while preparing for the roasting pan and there was still enough root left to enjoy.

Winter Squash: Celebration

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This is a bush variety and as such doesn't take up much room when it is growing (approx the same amount of space as a courgette plant). The flesh was a little dry but this maybe due to the long time in storage. It was not overly sweet but the flesh was dense and starchy, roasted beautifully, tasted great with the other veges, I will grow again, and hope for more than one squash from the plant.

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Thursday 15/04/2010

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Another lovely sunny spring day and some tulip blooms which I accidentally cut down when I was tidying the flower beds last weekend are opening.

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The Peacock butterflies are still about.

Its time to clean the pond and above are two of the three froggy inhabitants I disturbed while doing the task. the small clump of spawn was it seems only the tip of the iceberg and there proved to be not one but two large clumps of spawn in the pond, which made cleaning the pond even trickier.

Here is the pond all cleaned of old leaves and some excess winter sludge. I choose not to change the water and simply topped up with fresh rain water from the butts, I also tidied up the plants in the boggy perimeter of all their old dead and woody foliage.

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Saturday 17/04/2010

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I worked on preparing the legume bed for sowing seeds direct, there is a trellis for peas, four wigwams; 3 for french beans and 1 for borlotto beans, and behind the wigwams on the right is a A frame for my runner beans. This was my set up last year but in another 'L' shaped bed, which worked well so I'll be repeating it this year.

To prepare the bed I dug in three buckets of well rotted compost and three buckets of well rotted spent rabbit bedding and dropping based compost. If you remember from my posting on the tidying of the flower beds , I showed you a picture of the compost bin having a huge mushroom pile in the cooked compost side. Well the pictures above are what I found when I dug into the compost, it is well laced with the fungi's 'root' system, which I hope will continue to thrive in the vege beds and lend theirselves to a beneficial root symbiosis with my vege plants, which should lead to a better uptake of water and nutrients by the vege plants, you can read up more on this sort of thing here, have you ever noticed sometimes when you pull up a weed like dandelion or even a dense growing grass that the roots and surrounding soil has a coating of white stuff, well that most likely is fungal growth in a symbiotic relationship with the plant you have just dug up. OK science lesson over, I will leave you to research the topic further if you wish.

Here are some other mini beast I saw on Saturday...

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More Ladybugs.

And I finally caught a bumblebee on camera.

Sunday 18/04/2010

Hubby wanted me to go to the cinema with him but I wanted to get some tasks done at the allotment, so I gave him a choice of helping me at the plot for a couple of hours so I could get my jobs for the day done quickly then accompany him to the cinema or go alone.

Hee! Hee! guess what he choose.

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I first got him to loosen the soil in the bed in the picture on the left which was part of a foot path and as the weather warms up and as there has been no rain in the last couple weeks the soil is starting to set like concrete. Once the soil was loosened I set to weeding while I gave him the task of digging in some manure into the bed you can see him digging pictured above which is for the brassicus.

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By golly I don't know why he won't come out in the garden or the plot more often, he got both jobs done so quickely he was even able to weed out the main central footpath.

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So with the smaller bed weeded, I watered the emerging beetroot and carrot seedlings, and we cycled back home, I would have loved to also sown the parsnip seeds but I had other tasks at home to get done before going to see the show, so I'll sow those later this week.

PS. I have updated my other blog, check it out if you would like to catch up on what else has been demanding my time.

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And I know I have been quiet on the blog reading front (but if I don't limit my computer time I won't get anything done). I will play catch up and read and comment on all my blogs I like to follow as the week progresses.

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Day 18 & 19 of the Advent Season

'Feathered Pencil Friends' are what the girls got out of their Advent Calender on Friday, these are so simple to make once you have the materials, for quick drying use hot glue.
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The bible stories now tell the journey of Jesus' adult life, which are generating a lot of questions.
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Empty Lollipop Wrappers.

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Oops! I forgot to take a picture of the kids sweet treat out of the Advent Calender on Saturday.

Scotch Bonnet Chili Peppers

Saturday evening into night I finally got around to tidying up the conservatory which meant cleaning up the recently aphid infested over wintering plants. In doing so I also harvested all the usable scotch bonnet peppers to make a some chili jelly (hopefully). The chili plants on the left as you can see were badly infested, along with the Greek basil. I trimmed every thing back to about 6" including the not so badly affected Vietnamese coriander, washed them all in a weak solution of soapy water and gave everybody got a light watering to keep them ticking over. Hopefully the basil and the chili plants will make it through the winter, the lemon grass (which was not trimmed back and had no aphids) and the V.coriander I think will be just fine.

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I find icicles fascinating, ever since I was a little girl in the hot West Indies I have longed to see the icicles I would read about or hear about over the news that sometimes maimed/ killed people in the States during their freezing winters.

I am yet to see monster killer icicles but with the recent cold weather I am finally seeing fairly decent size icicles forming. and I can't help photographing them. The one in the center above is the same one on the left but a few hours later when it has grown some more.
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The Trini song today I think goes perfectly with the themes of the bible stories of late. It is parang influenced and I hope you all enjoy it.

Crazy - Put JESUS In Yuh Christmas

Where Does The Time Go????

Gosh! I thought that as the days grew shorter and things slowed down on the gardening front, I would find myself with too much time on my hands, with lots of time for blogging and dabbling in crafting activities. How wrong was I??

This last week I haven’t had time to not even smile at the garden, so there is no present updates on that front and to make matters worse Wednesday and Thursday there was a lovely break in the weather with lots of sunshine and mild temps and I couldn’t even get time to fit in a visit to the plot, BUMMER!!! (My hubby was home all week as well so I would have been able to go on my own and leave the bambino home, *^%%^^$& !!!)

So what kept me so busy you are probably wondering? Well I had a commissioned jewellery job to complete for a friend, which if I was not unwell a couple of weeks ago I would have completed a while back, as it is the cold made me lose a week plus some, which meant many a 2 O’clock to 4 O’clock morning bedtimes this past week.


She wanted some dragonfly brooches for her teachers and something for the two male teachers.




I attempted some very snazzy cuff links (for the brave male in your life/ for the lady who wants to jazz up her borrowed/ owned male shirt) and was really pleased with how they turned out. I thought I would have had some leftover for the blogshop after showing her them on Saturday but she took the lot. So after this blog update its back to the loft for more creating.

Since I was stuck in the loft for long hours each day last week I decided to take a few photos to show you all what I have to look out onto when I come up to breath.

See I told you we had some lovely gardening weather this week down my way (seen while sitting).

This is if I stand and look out the window.

And when I stick my head out of the window this is what I see ( I love touching the lumps of moss).

Other things that kept me busy was the kitchen, the weekend before last I was busy turning the green tomatoes I picked previously into chutney, golly there was a lot, I also did a small pot of apple jam. The tomato chutney was made following the Glutney recipe from River Cottage Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This recipe is certainly a fail safe recipe for garden veg gluts and I’m always pleased with the outcome. The apple jam was made simply by equalling the weight of the chopped apples with brown sugar and I added some spices such as cloves, bay leaf, nutmeg, cinnamon, and mace. Stewed it down till it reached setting stage and bottled in sterilised jars. End result was 15 jars of chutney and 4 jars of apple jam.

Well I know it doesn’t seem that much but the above mentioned stuff along with everyday life and a husband recovering from some minors surgery (not to worry he’s fine, went back out to work today), my last two weeks have left me time poor and shattered, thankfully I made it to bed early Saturday and Sunday night so I’ll be feeling good as new soon.

Oh! by the way check out what I harvested from the greenhouse on the 21st of Nov, how cool is that! This is the result of my ‘Extending The Tomato Harvest Period Experiment’. I’m afraid I didn’t label the posts I mentioned it in before and now I can’t even find them to link back to. So I’ll try to briefly explain what it was/ is about. In latter part of June I took the removed side shoots of the outdoor grown tomatoes and rooted them in water in the greenhouse. As they grew they were potted up into pots at least twice before ending up in their final black bucket pots. I also restricted their growth to a cordon style and to a particular height of no more than roughly 3ft/ at least three trusses of flowers. The whole idea was to see if I could extend my outdoor tomatoes by growing their clones in the greenhouse which should crop a little later and longer because the plants are protected by the elements when the weather change for the worse. So far so good the autumn was uncharacteristically mild so that was definitely to the plants benefit. And as of right now there are ripe tomatoes outside in the greenhouse waiting to be picked. A couple of cuttings even made it inside on to the kitchen window sill but I kept these in much smaller pots which forced them to concentrate on ripening the fruits quicker. So the question remains home picked Christmas tomatoes? I’ll have to wait and see.

I almost forgot to update you on the progress of my South American root veg. the Yukon has had lovely tubers on them since October but I’m yet to harvest any and as of last week the oca has begun to grow tubers, nothing yet noticed on the ulluca though.

Anyhow! Here are some more photo updates on my pass blog hiatus period.

What I Got Up to in The Garden October into November.

Beds were cleared and weeded, the compost bin overflowed quite a few times as a result.

Tender plants were moved from the greenhouse to the conservatory (chili plants, sweet potato, Greek basil, lemon grass and Vietnamese coriander) and from outside into the greenhouse (the South American root veges: Yukon, oca and ulluca). I also moved my succulent hanging basket (which sits as the center piece of my vege garden mini pond) that I started this year into the greenhouse, for although the plants are hardy, there is quite a lot of water retaining crystals at the base of the basket. This would definitely cause water logging over the winter which may cause me to lose some of the plants.

The mini meadow area was strimmed down (I removed the seed heads carefully first) then the area was raked quite roughly to remove some of the faster growing grasses which opened up some bare soil. Then I distributed the seeds from the saved seed heads and the seeds I saved from the field poppies that grew elsewhere in the garden this year evenly over the area (some of the wheat and oat seeds were already germinating with the warm wet environment of mid October). I then netted the are to prevent the birds taking the seeds.

In October month I was still fortunate enough to be harvesting a few summer crops, with some like the runner beans giving of their last right into November.

08/10/09 - A continued bumper harvest of plum tomatoes made me a second batch of chunky tomato sauce.

09/10/09

12/10/09

15/10/09 - The very last of the patty pan squash and sweetcorn (eaten as baby sweetcorn and baby squashes) included in this harvest.

15/10/09 - The last of the container grown potatoes, a main crop variety.

15/10/09 - WHAT THE !!!!!!!! a little aubergine. It never did get much bigger than this, I ate it anyway :)

The borlotti beans shelled and chucked into the freezer because as you can see from the green beans not all got to dry on the plants or in their pods.

23/10/09

03/11/09 - The last harvest of the runnerbeans.

03/11/09 - A combination of outdoor and greenhouse tomatoes.

09/11/09 - Still harvesting outdoor and greenhouse tomatoes, picking enough to keep the two tomato bowls filled.

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Other developments in the garden has been the self seeding of the 2008 over wintered parsley plants. As you can see the mild weather has encouraged a plethora of parsley seedlings in this years sweet corn bed and where I wanted them in the cracks of the brick footpath boarding the beds.

Well I think this blog post is more than long enough so I’ll end it here and will try to complete my October into November updates over the next couple of days.