It’s been a beautiful day, sunny and settled; perfect for making progress with the veg beds. We’re concentrating on getting our failsafe regular crops in. Broads beans last week, Vivaldi potatoes, beetroot and perpetual spinach today. We also sowed a row of radishes but I wouldn’t describe them as failsafe, perhaps because if they do take and don’t get perforated by flea beetle we invariably miss them at their best.
We’ve cleared all three of our raised beds including the one with the leeks in. The freezer is now full to capacity after Barbara managed to fit in several bags of chopped leeks. It’s hardly the time of year for leek soup so hopefully we’ll find something else that we can make with them.
These three fragments of pottery which we found while digging the lower veg bed must date from well before our house was built in the late 1930s. Perhaps they were mixed in with a wagonload of night-soil (contents of a privy) that was dumped on the field in Victorian times.
Cross section of edge of a blue and white platter?
The blue and white design was the first to catch my eye. It was only when I took a macro photograph of the crazed white potshard that I spotted that it too has spots of blue glaze on it. A cross section reveals that both shards are made of the same kind of clay and are the same thickness. Both are very slightly curved so I think these are both pieces of a semi-rectangular, tray-like platter.
The earthenware has an almost imperceptible curve on it too. Perhaps it was part of a large jar or bottle.
A view of the cross-section appears to show that it was made of two distinct layers of clay but in close-up you can see that the outer, darker layer fades towards the lighter inner layer. Is this an differential effect due to the way it was fired in the kiln?
It appears to have a light grey glaze on its outer surface. Perhaps it was slip-coated.
A sparrowhawk swoops down across my mum’s leafy back garden and perches in a tall fir, its head hidden amongst the branches as I draw it. In a neighbouring garden the tall lime trees have yet to start springing into leaf.
At this time of year everything seems possible in the garden. There’s still time to plant whatever we want to grow. Perhaps if I spent as much time gardening as I do getting myself inspired by reading about it and watching Gardener’s World, I’d get a bit further.
Veg beds as they were in 2009 and 2012, which, as we try to keep to a three year rotation, is pretty much what we’re aiming for this year.
I’ve enjoyed two recent books which offer different approaches to which varieties of vegetables to grow and how to grow them. Kew on a Plate takes the view that for taste we might try going back to the heritage fruit and vegetables that predate the standardised, high-yield varieties required by the supermarkets. There’s been a tendency to go for varieties with a long shelf life, which are tough enough to survive transportation, but that doesn’t always go hand in hand with improved taste. But things are changing and most supermarkets are now making efforts to offer a range of locally grown produce.
The book tells the story of the project to reestablish the Royal kitchen garden at Kew. One problem that the gardeners had was with the heritage soft fruits which attracted the attention of grey squirrels, foxes and probably even a few human visitors who found them just too tempting.
Raymond Blanc devised the recipes, often inspired by his memories of the kitchen garden of his childhood in a village in Franche-Comté, eastern France.
In Grow for Flavour, James Wong takes a rather different view. For instance he reminds us that it’s not always true that heritage varieties are the tastiest.
He looks at simple ways to boost flavour, for instance by cutting down on watering. Overwatering results in bigger fruits and vegetables but often at the cost of diluting the flavour.
Trials have demonstrated that it’s possible to get improved results by deliberately putting a plant under a modest amount of stress, by tricking it, for instance, into thinking that it should start producing more fruit or into protecting itself from attack by pests, sometimes producing bitter-tasting compounds which result in a more complex flavour.
Grow for Flavour seeds are available from Sutton’s who also produce a Stacks of Flavour Crate Collection with all you need to grow salad leaves in three weeks, or if you’re more patient, a Pizzabox Crate in which you can grow the entire topping for a pizza in 8 to 10 weeks – blight resistant tomato, basil and oregano (pepperoni not included). You can even have your crate personalised with a message.
The lime trees in the gardens of Victorian villas in Horbury are characteristically tall and columnar in shape. When they need to be replaced the tree officer for the local council requests varieties which have a similar shape; Tilia cordata ‘Rancho’ or Tilia cordata ‘Green Spire’.
Ornamental heathers are now bringing some early spring colour into gardens.
After this winter, I’m right out of practice with botanical subjects so, determined to make a new start, on the first of March I dug this weed up from one of the veg beds and put it into a three inch pot to draw in close-up.
I tried going for a looser approach with pencil and watercolour but felt that I was losing my grip on its appearance.
The pen and ink study made through the magnifying lens of a desk-lamp gave me definition but became too tight.
This last, loose drawing with an ArtPen is less of a botanical study but is in the sketching from life style that I feel more at home with.
A neighbour’s cat watches intently through the hawthorn hedge from its vantage point on next door’s concrete coal bunker.
It pounces and chases a brown rat, coming close to catching it. The rat looks healthy enough but it has been behaving strangely, roaming about in the afternoon sunshine, showing little concern for danger. For a while it stopped and was nibbling at the edge of the frosty, still mainly snow-covered lawn. Perhaps it has eaten poison bait put out by one of our neighbours and it’s now feeling thirsty, which seems to be one of the symptoms of rat poison. Ponds are currently deep frozen so perhaps it was quenching its thirst with ice crystals.
The leek bed might be looking neglected and weedy but it’s still productive. Looking down the garden I could see that some of the plants were starting to bolt, starting to send up flowering shoots that are tough and solid.
The garden shades colour that I used for the raised beds is a pretty good match for them.
These leeks gave us our lunch – two bowls of leek and potato soup – with a bit left over for tomorrow lunch and we stashed four bags of chopped leeks in the freezer, enough for another twelve portions.
Wall moss - the sporangia are curled, ready to grow up from the cushion.
Grass in the meadow area.
It’s my final day of taking five black and white photographs a day but this time I didn’t get the chance to go further than the back garden. The mossy lawn, overgrown pond and garden shed didn’t look very inspiring but as soon as I saw the honey fungus on the path I began to focus in on the grassroot jungle of the meadow and the moss garden on the sandstone rocks surrounding the raised bed.
We’ve got an impressive crop of leeks but some are going to seed and there’s mildew on the leaves. Time to make some soup and bag some ready-prepared in the freezer.
The back lawn is more moss than grass down by the pond and the pond itself has been in need of clearing of duckweed since the summer.
Come to think of it, every bit of the garden needs a clear-out for the winter, including the greenhouse, where a few ripe tomatoes still hang on the vines.
The big black and white tomcat swaggers through the meadow. A new addition to his territory is a bonfire night rocket. Not quite as impressive as landing a probe on a comet.
Welsh Poppy
Mid-November and there’s still a lot in flower and a lot of spring flowering shrubs and flowers appearing early.
Most poppies have seedheads that resemble pepper pots; the Welsh poppy has slots. They remind me of Gaudi’s cathedral towers.
It’s been a beautiful day, sunny and settled; perfect for making progress with the veg beds. We’re concentrating on getting our failsafe regular crops in. Broads beans last week, Vivaldi potatoes, beetroot and perpetual spinach today. We also sowed a row of radishes but I wouldn’t describe them as failsafe, perhaps because if they do take and don’t get perforated by flea beetle we invariably miss them at their best.
A neighbour’s cat watches intently through the hawthorn hedge from its vantage point on next door’s concrete coal bunker.
These leeks gave us our lunch – two bowls of leek and potato soup – with a bit left over for tomorrow lunch and we stashed four bags of chopped leeks in the freezer, enough for another twelve portions.
Mid-November and there’s still a lot in flower and a lot of spring flowering shrubs and flowers appearing early.