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Little House by the Railway Line
2009 Goals
- Learn to make yoghurt
- Pickle walnuts
Make marmalade- Perfect my granola bar recipe
- Grow green beans to eat
Grow spinach- Grow peppers and winter squash
- Save seeds from peppers and winter squash
- Knit lots of dishcloths
- Finish my hidden stars quilt
- Make napkin rings
- Finish cardigan back
- Learn how to do water-bath-canning
- Knit a pair of socks
Preserved this Year
- February: Marmalade, 10 1/2 standard jars, 2 tiny jars
- February: Blatjang chutney, 6 jars
- March: Caramelised onion chutney, 6 jars
- June: Elderflower cordial, 5 jars
- June: Strawberry Jam, 7 standard jars, 3 tiny jars
- June: Elderflower cordial, 4 1/2 jars (2nd batch)
Projects in Progress/ Planned
- Navy and pink lap quilt
- Hidden stars bed quilt
- Sampler cardigan
- Amish Alphabet Cross-Stitch
- Knitted scrap blanket
- Planned: summer blouse and skirt
Scripture Memorised this Year
- Psalm 8
- Psalm 103
- Romans 12
- Romans 13
The Garden at the Beginning of July
While I've been slacking in my blogging over the past few weeks, the garden has been growing like crazy. I thought it was probably time for an update on how things are doing.In the Main Bed:
Our main vegetable bed. There are strawberries here permanently, and we've planted beans, squashes and courgettes there as well.The courgettes and squashes are producing flowers now. So far I've only seen male flowers on the courgettes, but I'm not too worried as apparently that's normal. We have three courgette plants this year - I planted 6 seeds, four of them germinated and were planted out, but one appears to have withered - it's just a stalk with one leaf on it and doesn't seem to be doing anything. Three courgette plants in more than enough, though, so I'm not worried. The squash plants have really taken off. They're growing in all directions, and I have to keep checking that they're not twisting tendrils round the bean plants, because I think that would suffocate the beans. There are lots of flowers now, both male and female, and I hand pollinated a couple of the female flowers to make sure the seeds produced are true to type. Those flowers have nearly died away now, probably hastened by their rubber bands. I've marks the squashes with wool round the stem.
I noticed earlier in the week that we actually have little tiny beans. I'm not sure how easy this picture is to see, but there are a couple of beans in it:
Two tiny beansHowever, last night I was out watering and noticed that some of the beans are rather bigger:
A bean that's big enough to eat!I suspect we may be able to start eating them next week, which is very exciting!
Vegetables in Pots
I've also got a few things growing in pots, owing to lack of space in the bed more than anything else. I've got four large-ish pots of leaf beet (chard - perpetual spinach) growing, and they seem to be doing ok. They actually seem to grow better if I cut some of the leaves of and eat them.
Vegetables in Pots
I've also got a few things growing in pots, owing to lack of space in the bed more than anything else. I've got four large-ish pots of leaf beet (chard - perpetual spinach) growing, and they seem to be doing ok. They actually seem to grow better if I cut some of the leaves of and eat them.
I've also got peppers and chillis growing in pots. The pepper is actually in our bedroom, on the windowsill, chiefly because I need to keep the pepper and chilli separated so I can save the seeds. It's got a flower or two on it now, which is exciting. The chills (2 plants, in the mini greenhouse) also have flowers:
The tomatoes are starting to produce fruit, too. We've got three plants in a "hanging basket" bolted to the fence a few feet up, and they're growing very well. Lots of trusses of flowers, though only three tomatoes have appeared yet. It's a Siberian variety, a yellow cherry tomato, which I'm hoping will make ripening more likely. So many of our friends grew tomatoes last year that simply never ripened.
The "basket" with three tomato plants in it.
Tomato fruit growing and (hopefully) ripening
The Herb Garden
At the other end of the garden, on our patio, most of my herbs sit in pots. We have chives, marjoram, lemon thyme, golden thyme and ordinary thyme in a herb pot, parsley in a pot and a third pot containing mint.
Mint, growing like mad and thinking about taking over
Parsley
This is one of my (ordinary) thyme plants. I'm really impressed by this, as I grew it from a cutting taken from my mother's garden in May. There are three of them, and they seem to be doing really well.
We also have a basil plant. This is amazing - it was meant to go outside (according to the label on the plant when it was bought), but it promptly withered and appeared to have died. There were maybe two leaves left, both brown, and we thought it had had it. We're not sure why - lack of water / too much water / not enough sunlight / too cold are all possibilities. Anyway, we shoved it in the greenhouse, and a few weeks later it looks like this:
The "basket" with three tomato plants in it.Tomato fruit growing and (hopefully) ripeningThe Herb Garden
At the other end of the garden, on our patio, most of my herbs sit in pots. We have chives, marjoram, lemon thyme, golden thyme and ordinary thyme in a herb pot, parsley in a pot and a third pot containing mint.
Mint, growing like mad and thinking about taking overParsleyThis is one of my (ordinary) thyme plants. I'm really impressed by this, as I grew it from a cutting taken from my mother's garden in May. There are three of them, and they seem to be doing really well.We also have a basil plant. This is amazing - it was meant to go outside (according to the label on the plant when it was bought), but it promptly withered and appeared to have died. There were maybe two leaves left, both brown, and we thought it had had it. We're not sure why - lack of water / too much water / not enough sunlight / too cold are all possibilities. Anyway, we shoved it in the greenhouse, and a few weeks later it looks like this:
Garden Tragedy
Last weekend G and I were very excited, watching a female blackbird fly back and forth from a bush in our garden with nesting material. The nest wasn't tremendously well hidden, so we could see it without too much difficulty when we were outside. G informed me the other day that the bird was sitting on the nest, and we hoped there would be babies hatched soon. A little late in the year, but sometimes they have second broods, and there's plenty of summer still to come.Yesterday when I came home, I went out into the garden to water the plants. On the garden path, next to the watering cans, lay the female blackbird, on her back, with flies crawling all over her. Horrible. When G came home later he got rid of the body, and then we discovered there were too little blue eggs in the nest. Abandoned. There was also a third eggs, smashed on the floor beneath the nest.
Of course, being the crazy person that I am, all my instincts are telling me to bring the two little eggs in and try and incubate them. But I know perfectly well that that's impossible, and even if they did miraculously hatch I could hardly feed them semi-digested worms and teach them to fly, so we're leaving them out there.
We think the bird was killed by a cat, because there are feathers all over the garden and the nest has been knocked about a bit. The cat probably jumped up to attack the bird; an easy target sitting on the nest and reluctant to fly away, and there must have been quite a struggle, as there are feathers and bird excrement all over the garden. And then the wretched cat had the gall to not eat the thing when it was dead!
G and I were both incredibly sad, though.
In other garden news, I think the squash plants are on a mission to take over the garden and bury everything in vines.
My Herb Garden
Over the bank holiday weekend, we took the opportunity of Saturday's glorious outside weather to work on the garden. My husband's parents were staying, and my mother-in-law is a keen gardener and knows what she's doing, so she helped a lot.We started by having a barbecue lunch (not much like hard work, but jolly good fun nonetheless!):
In the morning, while I was preparing the salads and marinating the meat/veggies for the kebabs for lunch, my husband and his parents had trotted off to Homebase with our Garden Centre tokens, and came back with lots of goodies: herb plants mostly, but also a new blue pot, and some potting soil. While my husband and mother-in-law were sorting out some of the bigger plants at the back of the garden, I planted the herbs.
This pot was one we already had, and we'd repotted the chives and the marjoram into it a couple of weeks ago (because the pot they were in fell apart). I added golden thyme and lemon thyme on Saturday. There are still a few empty holes, and I've taken some cuttings from my mother's thyme plants and hope to be able to fill the gaps with that.
Here is my new basil plant. I've now moved it to a sunnier part of the garden.
This is three new plants of curled parsley, in the new pot. Doesn't the pot look lovely!
And this is the mint pot, which we already had. I added another mint plant, the trailing one at the front, on Saturday. Apparently it's Morrocan Mint, so it may taste very slightly different.I also have large Rosemary and Sage bushes, that have been established for some time, but I forgot to take pictures.
Just for good measure, I photographed the seedlings again:
Courgette (zucchini to the Americans) and Buttercup Squash. They're doing really well, as far as I can tell, so I'm looking forward to lots of these later in the year.
And the green beans. I planted 18 seeds, and 17 of them have come up. Yay!
And here are the strawberry plants, covered in flowers. I did find one absolutely minute green strawberry - shouldn't be long now!A Garden Update
I've been rather scared to look at the plants in my little greenhouse lately, fearing that I'd find even more had been eaten and decimated. G said the other day that of those we sowed first, only one tiny tomato plant remains - very disappointing. I think I'm going to go and buy some slug pellets. The vegetable bed is a raised bed with concrete / gravel surround, so I reckon if I put them all round the bed on the concrete / gravel, there's no danger they'll get into the soil, and if I buy organic ones it won't be so bad.Anyway, last night I went out to take an egg box to the green bin, and peeped in. Not at the old seedlings, but the new ones. Look at my beans!
I planted 18 dwarf green bean seeds, because I could cheerfully eat green beans till I'm blue in the face, and we've not had much success on them the last two years, owing to the slimy snails. I would really like to get a decent crop of them this year. There are two seeds in each of nine pots, and it looks like at least 12 of them have sprouted and come up. Woohoo!
I also looked quickly at the top shelf of the greenhouse, where my peppers, tomatoes and squashes are, and was quite surprised by the squash seedling I saw:
The leaf growth appears to have brought the seed-husk up with it. I've never seen that before (not surprising, I'm a very novice gardener). G says it's fairly common, and the seed will just fall off as it grows, but I was fascinated. None of the other squash and courgette seeds seem to have come up yet, but they've only been there about 10 days so there's time yet.
I didn't photograph my pots of leaf beet (chard), but they seem to be doing okay too. I've got three pots from the first planting, which are visible just outside the greenhouse in the pictures, and are doing jolly well, and a fourth, larger pot that we planted 10 days ago. There are a few tiny shoots beginning to peep through that one too. It won't be too long, before we need to thin the pots out, and I'm guessing we can eat the thinnings.
There are loads of blossoms on the strawberry plants, too. Roll on the fresh strawberries!
Saturday in the Garden
For once, my husband and I had no actual plans for Saturday (as in, no plans to go somewhere or visit people or entertain people). This happens so rarely for us that it is very noteworthy, and since the weather was absolutely glorious, we decided to spend the day in the garden trying to sort things out.I put beer traps out for the slugs and snails on Friday night, but I'm not sure as yet if they're working. I don't really think they are; I'm sure there was more damage on Saturday morning than when I set the traps on Friday evening. So I've sprinkled table salt all over the ground around the greenhouse too. If the problem persists, I shall ask my husband to let us spend some of our Garden Centre vouchers on organic slug pellets. I really don't want to lose everything to the slimy creatures!
We had a jolly productive day, I think. I planted more peppers, chillis and tomatoes to replace the ones that have been eaten - it's probably a little late in the year for them to have any hope of ripening, but I was feeling desperate. I've also planted courgette and buttercup squash seeds (6 of each - if they all germinate and produce we'll be begging people to eat our food!) and 18 dwarf bean seeds. The greenhouse looks so pretty with all the pots with their smart white labels standing upright. I did the planting entirely on my own this time, without my husband giving me directions - I may learn what I'm doing in the garden eventually.
Meanwhile, G sorted out the shed. Threw out a whole load of rubbish - bits of copper tubing, a golf ball, a large cardboard box and so forth. We moved various plants around the garden - moved the mint into a nicer pot and got rid of the violets it was sharing its pot with, then moved the other herbs (chives and marjoram - no idea what happened to the others) into a new pot as well, because when we tried to move theirs it fell apart on the patio! The new pots look much better, and we liberated a large plastic one in the process, which I've filled with more chard seed.
We also opened the top of the compost bin for the first time this year. We stopped adding to it in late autumn, to give it a chance to rot down. I was a bit perturbed when we lifted the lid, because it looked like nothing had rotted. It appears that sweetcorn husks and cobs to no decompose! When we took those out what was underneath looks brilliant. We didn't actually get around to digging it into the bed, though - I think we're waiting till the tulips have finished before we disturb the soil too much.
While G had everything out of the shed, he got out his worktable and drill. For ages, I've fancied those jars you can get for sprouting lentils and whatnot in the kitchen, with the lids full of holes for drainage. But, they cost so much - it didn't seem like a sensible thing to buy if we're not going to use it all the time. So I saved a couple of peanut-butter jars with plastic lids, and on Saturday G carefully drilled them full of the smallest holes he could manage. I'm really pleased with them! Now I'm doing a careful experiment, with whole green lentils in one jar and split red lentils in the other, to see which work best and taste nicest.
Snails.....
I'm now looking mournfully at my pictures of the pots with shoots in all of them. I checked this morning when I taking the chard pots out (we're trying to harden them off so they can come out of the greenhouse), and there are two pots that now have no leaves on the shoots. The snails are back.....Tonight, I'm going to set slug beer traps. Probably in the bottom of the greenhouse in the hope of deflecting the wretched things. I hope it works.......
The Garden is Growing!
I now have shoots in all my plant pots!! There were just some tiny ones in the chard pots when we went away, and nothing in the others, but now look at them! Peppers and tomatoes
Chillis and peppers
Chard (perpetual spinach)
I noticed a few flowers on the strawberry plants too. We're hoping to get the rest of the seeds planted this weekend, and get the table out of the shed so we can eat supper in the garden. I love this time of year!
Chillis and peppers
Chard (perpetual spinach)
Springtime in the Garden
Yesterday evening I finally got round to planting a few seeds. I'd been meaning to do this for days but hadn't got round to it. I'm not sure working full time is very compatible with trying to keep house, especially when you had Sunday school and Youth Group and Bible study into the mix - not enough time!Anyway, I eventually got round to it yesterday. My husband and I attacked our tiny shed, which has become extra cluttered with some planks of wood he retrieved from the Anglican bell tower, and is consequently a bit of a disaster area at the moment, and managed to locate the plant pots and the trowel. We couldn't find any seed trays, though, so hopefully that won't matter too much.
I planted the two types of peppers, the tomatoes, and some chard last night. This is the first time I've planted anything (last year I did a bit of watering and harvesting, but my husband did all the "difficult" bits, and G hasn't grown those before, so we've no idea what we're doing. I figure we'll never learn how to do it properly if we don't try, though. Better to do it wrong and learn than not bother at all.
So three big pots of chard were planted and 3 little pots of the other things. The plan is ultimately to put the tomatoes in hanging baskets (when we get our hooks back off the birds, who are currently eating from the seed feeders suspended from the hooks), and put the peppers in the bed / on the windowledge / in our "greenhouse". I'm not really sure where would be best for them, so I'm sort of planning on doing lots and seeing what works. I put 3 or 4 seeds in the little pots, and maybe 10 chard seeds in each big pot. G moved the greenhouse to a sunny position and watered the pots while I prepared supper.
Here is our greenhouse in about as sunny a spot as is possible. The pictures I took this morning, in the early morning mist.
And inside the greenhouse:
We only appear to have five seed pot markers, so I've labelled all the chilli peppers, and two of the tomatoes. I'm hoping that even if they get moved in the greenhouse and we can't remember which are which, I'll be able to work out which is the third tomato. I'm fairly sure the chilli pepper and sweet peppers won't be distinguishable for ages, though, and I want to save seeds if I can, so I really wanted to keep those clear.
I've planted an Orange Bell pepper (middle row), a Nigel's Outdoor Chilli pepper, and a Galina Siberian early sweet yellow cherry tomato. And some leaf beet, no idea what sort of variety. They're all from realseeds.co.uk.
It was a bit of a race, getting it done yesterday evening before dark. We only just managed it - it was pitch black when I went in to do the food. It wasn't cold though, so that's a blessing. Must remember to water them frequently, and I've put "cheap beer" on the shopping list for this week to ward off slugs and snails when they start to grow.
Seeds and Garden Planning for 2009
I just got the seeds in the post that I ordered last Friday! I found a company on the internet, called Real Seeds, who specialise in real, non-hybrid seeds that you can save the seeds from that grow well in the English climate, and after much discussion with my husband, last Friday we ordered what we wanted to try this year.
We have two plots in our garden; one for flowers and one for vegetables. We also have blackberries across the back fence, and a patio with pots on it. One of the pots has herbs in it, and the others have nothing/weeds. The vegetable patch is three-quarters full of strawberries. Last year we grew courgettes and green beans in the remaining quarter. (We did try to grow spinach, too, but it bolted and flowered and died before any of the leaves were bigger than a centimetre or two, so that wasn't much use. I later decided it may have preferred to be somewhere less sunny.) The plan for this year is to cut back on the strawberries so they only take up half the bed (there were too many for us to eat anyway last year), and try and grow more vegetables. We've still got courgette seed in the packet we bought last year, and bought a new packet of bean seeds late last year while buying food.
I really want to try growing a winter squash, as I love them. They also strike me as being very easy to store over the winter - no preserving required! So we've ordered a Burgess Buttercup squash, which sounds like a good one and said it is good for smaller plots. That will go in the vegetable bed with the courgette and the beans. I'm going to have to hand pollinate some of the squashes to make sure I can save the seeds, but that's okay.
Then I really fancied trying to grow peppers and chillis, so we ordered an orange bell pepper and a chilli that purports to be early enough to grow unprotected outside in England. I think I'll grow the chilli in our "greenhouse" (it's about three feet high, metal frame with clear plastic covering and we move it round the garden to follow the sun), and try and grow the pepper inside, or possibly in the vegetable bed. I may try both, to see what works best.
That was all we were originally planning to order, but there was a minimum order value, so I've also got some cherry tomatoes (which we've heard of people growing in hanging baskets). it's a Siberian yellow one, which we're hoping will actually ripen. So many people we know grew tomatoes this year that simply never got ripe. And finally, I decided to have another go at spinach - or rather chard, as apparently "perpetual spinach" is actually called leaf beet and is a type of chard. Probably in pots on the patio.
I'm very excited, and a little concerned that none of this will work. If I actually get any good at vegetable gardening we may put some vegetables in the flower bed, but for now it seems best to leave the established shrubs in place while we work things out.
I'm looking forward to Spring!
Watching the Birdfeeder
On Sunday G put up our seed feeder in the garden and filled it, and the birds studiously ignored it until Wednesday. I think it usually takes them a little while to find the feeder each year when it's put out. When we got up for breaksfast on Thursday it was a little less than half full, and G had to refill it this morning.I do so enjoy watching the sparrows eating from it while we eat our toast and cereal in the morning.
At the bottom of our (not very big) garden there is a passage we can use to get the wheelie bins into and out of the garden, and then another fence between the passage and the railway. Behind that fence is a lot of scrub - and elder tree and lots of blackberry thickets and so forth - where the birds like to hide. Because the fence at the bottom of our garden is quite a bit lower than the fence between the passage and the railway, we can see both fences from our back windows. The bird feeder hangs on the garden fence at the bottom of the garden (in amongst our blackberry plants).
The sparrows always come in clusters to feed on the feeder; there are either no sparrows at all, or there are 15-20 of them. But they don't go straight to the feeder. They hang out in the scrub and then, one by one, will come up and sit on the higher fence and look at the feeder. I like to imagine them encouraging each other to fly over to the feeder: "Do you think it's safe?" "Maybe - it was before" "Alright then, you go and see" "No, you go - I went first last time" "What, me! I might get caught. You go". Then suddenly, one will fly over the passage to the garden fence and hop on the feeder, and be shortly followed by several of the others.
Because there are only four ports on the feeder (and when they've eaten too much, the top two become useless), there is often competition between the birds to get on it. Sometimes, when all four are occupied, a fifth bird will fly around, hovering close to those on the perches and occasionally resting on their backs to make them move. It's very entertaining to watch.
I haven't yet tried to get any pictures of the birds feeding, which I'd like to try, but I imagine it would be quite difficult.
Starting the hedgerow harvest
We have a blackberry bush growing against the fence at the bottom of our garden. It's a thornless blackberry and produces very big fat berries. (Unfortunately that makes them more prone to burst, so picking them is far messier than picking the wild ones, but I think that fact that my clothes don't end up stuck to the bush makes up for it - so there's a plus and a minus to both the cultivated and the wild sorts). I picked as many as were ready on Saturday afternoon, filled an ice-cream tub with them and made dessert.Yesterday was the marvellous bank holiday Monday, so we had the day off work, which was wonderful. Especially since G had been away the week before and he was very tired after the weekend. We decided to go for a walk nearby, and took a carrier bag with us, just in case there were any berries. I knew that most of the wild berries were still hard and green and small. But we reckoned without the sheer quantity of bushes. Even if there are only a couple of ripe berries on each bush, a whole two-hour walk lined with bushes on both sides of the path yields a LOT of berries!
So, this evening I'm hoping to make some Blackberry and Apple Jam to add to our stores. We've only got a pound of sugar so we need to go to the supermarket in our lunch break to top up.
Also harvested yesterday was the bulk of our green bean crop:
Not that many, as the slugs and snails seem to have got most of the plants. I think ALL the leaves have holes in them, and some of the actual beans seemed to have been eaten as well. But there's enough to get a meal or two out of, so I'm really looking forward to using them.
My courgettes appear to be baby marrows....
I went out to the garden this morning to pick off the rotten stump of courgette I'd seen there earlier in the week, and discovered that there was not one, but two fully grown courgettes busily getting larger on the plant. I think these may technically have turned into marrows (25cm is apparently the magic length, and these are 24cm and 28cm)
I'm not sure if that mean's I'll have to rethink the week's menu a little.
There is another courgette, not very big (about 3-4 inches long, I think) there, and a couple of flowers that should produce more. This is all very exciting for a complete novice gardener such as myself.
First Fruits
We picked the first courgette from the garden today!!! Very exciting (especially after the morning's damson disaster).
We won't be able to eat it, and I don't suppose it'll keep in the cupboard to two weeks, so we'll either give it to my mother (who's coming round to pick up a steamer and drop off some of my post) or to the people whose house we're going to later.
Courgettes and Green Beans
I went out to look in the garden this morning (while I was waiting for the potatoes to boil so they'll be alright in the supper tonight) to look at the vegetables we've been trying to grow. The beans look very successful to me, although there is a danger some may become ripe for eating while we're away next week. Hopefully not all though (and my thought was that if they become over-ripe, that probably means we can get the little beans out and plant them next year, which means we may not need to buy more seed).I took a look at our lovely big courgette plant. All it's beautiful big orange flowers have fallen off, probably as a result of the torrential rain yesterday. However, there are two lovely, but still rather small, courgettes growing where the flowers were, and several flower-buds visible that show future promise. Unfortunately one of the courgettes that we'd seen at the weekend appears to have been half-eaten by a snail, which was a bit disappointing. Hopefully that was a result of it being on the ground - the other two are higher up the plant. Depending on how fast they grow, I may be able to greet Greg back from camp (he's staying a week longer than I) with stuffed marrow. His response to that prospect was "and the day after, and the day after, and the day after that"!!!
Gardening
We've been out in the garden this evening, as it was such a lovely day. Picked some more strawberries for dessert (and may I say again how much I enjoy having really fresh strawberries on an almost daily basis - I think I'm getting spoiled) and looked over the plants in the mini-greenhouse.One of the three courgette seeds that were planted has grown. Greg thinks the others were too damp, but one's plenty anyway. So, we planted that one out in the vegetable bed.
Of all the beans that were planted, about three germinated and grew, but all but one had been eaten. We found the culprit - a large fat snail clinging to the underside of the metal frame. So we got rid of the snail, moved the greenhouse to a sunnier spot, and planted more bean seeds in all the other pots. We've got one that looks like it might establish itself properly, so that's encouraging. Just got to keep checking there are no snails and kicking them out, I guess.
About Me
Hello! I'm Jo, I'm 26 and I live in a small house in England with my husband. I work full time in an office, and in my spare time I help out with Sunday school and the church youth group. When I have time, I enjoy reading, cookery and crafts, and I'm trying to learn about the garden.
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