Recipe Tuesday - Blueberry Muffins

A few years ago, at the bottom of the garden, we planted 3 blueberry bushes.  This year, they’ve come up trumps!  Yesterday, DH and I harvested 1.6kg of ripe blueberries and there are at least as many still on the bushes.  While I am hoping to freeze at least a kilogram, this morning I decided to make a double batch of blueberry muffins.

(The above photo was taken after I’d removed 250g for the muffins.)

After flipping through some recipe books and the BBC Good Food website, I decided to botch together a recipe.  (Why?  Because most of the ones I looked at required the addition of yoghurt or nuts or bananas.). Anyway, it worked!  This is my recipe.  I made 24 - the doubled quantities are shown in brackets.

Blueberry Muffins

Makes 12 (or 24)

Ingredients

1/2 cup vanilla sugar*. (1 cup)

2 cups plain/all purpose flour (4 cups)

1 tablespoon baking powder (2 tablespoons)

1/2 teaspoon salt (1 teaspoon)

1 cup milk (2 cups)

1/4 cup oil (1/2 cup)

1 egg, beaten (2 eggs)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (2 teaspoons)

125g/4oz blueberries (250g/8oz)

1 tablespoon plain flour

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200C (425F).
2. Line the cups of your muffin pan with either silicone or paper liners.
3. In a food processor or mixer, combine the first 4 ingredients and give them a quick whiz to distribute the salt and baking powder.
4. Add the milk, the oil, the egg and the vanilla extract.  Blend until combined.
5. Place all but 12 (24) blueberries into a bowl.  Sprinkle over the flour and stir with your fingers until all is combined.+
6. Gently stir the flour coated blueberries into the muffin mix.
7. Fill each lined muffin cup 3/4 full, topping them up as evenly as possible if there is muffin mixture left.
8. Top each muffin with one of the saved blueberries.
9. Bake in your preheated oven for 20-25 minutes.
10. Remove from oven and decant onto a cake rack to cool.

Notes

* Vanilla sugar is easy to make at home.  Just bury a vanilla pod in a jar of castor sugar and leave it for at least 3 weeks before first use.  Replenish the sugar each time you use it.  The vanilla pod will continue to give off flavour for years.

+ Dredging your berries with flour will stop them sinking to the bottom of the muffins.

Enjoy!!!

Earth Day 22nd April 2024 - What On Earth Can I Do About It?

Global warming is now hitting home.  Dubai Airport closed last week because of flooding.  Dubai, and the rest of the Gulf States, received 18 months-worth of rainfall in less than a day on Tuesday 16 April.  Sea temperatures have risen 1.5C, causing mass bleaching of coral reefs world-wide, with knock on consequences for sea life and the human food-chain.  Spain has been experiencing a drought FOR 6 YEARS!

What the hell can I do about it?  Me?  One person.  Or my household of two????

I first learned about climate change and global warming when my flatmate dragged me along to the public session of a conference, in January 1989.  My takeaways then were: organic gardening; plant trees; recycling; buy unbleached paper products (preferably recycled); go solar powered; support wind farms; use public transport where possible,; drive fuel efficient vehicles but cycle for shorter journeys; and that the mainland Europeans were considerably better than Australians at this stuff.  

When I landed in Copenhagen 4 months later, and saw their rubbish bins with multiple recycling slots for paper, tins and plastics, I was convinced that the latter point was true.  Britain was a disappointment.  No segregated rubbish bins, to split genuine waste from recyclables.  It was 10 years before most local authorities offered households recycling collections for their rubbish.  When ordering office supplies in 1991, it was difficult to buy any recycled paper products - they just didn’t exist - and it took decades for things to improve.

It’s been 35 years since that conference in Australia, and Climate Change is now hitting home.  We can’t just blame governments - the largest contributing factors are the small, incremental decisions that individuals make.  What I’m setting out below are my thoughts, my manifesto, for the changes that we can ALL make to save Planet Earth.

1.  Do Not Waste

In 2020, when asked if he could give one piece of advice to future generations, Sir David Attenborough said “Do Not Waste”.  That is the essence of the Earth Day mantra:

• Reduce your consumption
• Reuse items instead of buying replacements
• Recycle everything possible

Think about it for a minute.  Pretty much everything else I’m about to write boils down into those three words.

2.  Don’t Waste Food

According to the 2024 United Nations Food Index Report quoted in The Guardian, annually about a fifth of all food produced on Earth is wasted, 600 million tonnes of which is wasted by households!  When you think that approximately 730 million people are going hungry every day, that means that the rest of us have to answer for one hell of a lot.

My suggestions to minimise food waste:-

• Meal Plan, so that the fresh food you purchase gets incorporated into the meals you are cooking.
• Turn leftovers into another meal.  Leftover cooked veg can be incorporated into a frittata.  The carcase of a roast chicken can be made into stock.
• Your freezer is your friend.  If you realise that you can’t use it before it shrivels up/turns to mush/grows exotic fungus, freeze it.  Or cook it and freeze it to eat later.  Unless you plan to use it within 2 or 3 days, freeze meat on date of purchase and defrost it in the fridge.
• Buy your fruit and veg loose, not wrapped in plastic.  They’ll last longer.  Produce stored in plastic tends to sweat and the sweat spots are the first places mould will grow, even if you decant them when you get home.
• Store food properly.  Bread lasts longer if stored in a plastic bag in the fridge.  Onions are best left on the counter.  Potatoes need to be stored in a dark cupboard, away from onions (or they’ll sprout). 
• Ignore “Best Before” dates.  They’re more indicative of the predicted lifespan of the packaging, than they are of the product.
• Ignore “Use By” dates.  If it smells OK and taste OK, then it should be fine to eat.
• Eat the whole animal.  If you are a meat eater, then don’t turn your nose up at eating offal. Haggis is delicious, even if it is made from liver, heart and lungs of a sheep.  Seriously, if you eat pâté, then you’re already eating liver.  Respect the animal.  It died to feed you.
• Compost the fruit and veg trimmings that can’t be eaten.  

3. Ask Yourself: Why Am I Buying This?

Do you need another lipstick or are you shopping just because you are bored?  Don’t shop for entertainment.  Whatever you purchase won’t fix the gap that you’re trying to fill.  If you do need to purchase an item, is it the best one for the job?  Does it fulfil all your requirements?  So many times, when we purchase something on the “it will do”; it never does.  Would something you already have do the job instead? 

Instead of trying to fit in with an influencer - who is paid to sell you things - work out what is important to you and to the person you want to be.  Devise your own style and stick to it.  Fast fashion is just flogging you badly made stuff, which won’t last.  Don’t waste precious resources trying to keep up with the Jones’.

4.  Drive The Most Fuel Efficient Vehicle

Do you really need an SUV?  No. Particularly not when, most of the time, there’s only one person in the car.  

Back in 2000, when I bought the Toy, the first priority was to get the most fuel efficient vehicle on the market. That was the diesel VW Lupo, although I bought the cheaper, “SEAT Arosa” version.  Toy averaged 62 miles to the Imperial gallon.  (That’s 4.5 litres, not the American gallon of 3.7 litres.)  Lucky-Car averaged slightly less - at 57mpg - but the replacement to the VW Lupo was horrible to drive, so I went for the Skoda version of the next model up, the Fabia.  

When I think of the number of times Lucky-Car drove through France or up to Scotland, carrying 4 adults plus their luggage, in one small car and still managed over 50mpg… Do you really need an SUV for the school run?  

5.  Do You Really Need to Drive?

The majority of car journeys within the UK cover less than 2 miles. Surely you can walk that distance?  Or cycle it?  Even in my lymphoma-depleted state, I can walk the 1.5 miles to the local Lidl in less than 30 minutes.  (We do that walk regularly.). 

If I lived in the Netherlands, I’d probably cycle everywhere.  When my current employer moved to their new office 7 miles away, the first thing I did was to check out potential cycle routes.  Sadly, there is no safe route.  Only the suicidal would cycle the last mile to the office, down a very busy, narrow country road.

What about public transport?  Surely this should be considered before driving?  I’m lucky to live in London, to have the Tube and reasonably reliable bus services.  Public transport is often not an affordable option in the UK.  You’d need a second mortgage to live in Reading and commute by train into work in London.  In other European countries, travelling by train is quick, cheap and reliable.  Sadly, not here, where 3 decades of privatisation have delivered nothing but higher prices, multiple cancellations and delays.  Most of the time, it’s cheaper to fly to Manchester from London than it is to take the train.

6. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Spend wisely.  Don’t complain about climate change and then use toilet paper pulped from virgin wood forests!  Buy recycled.  Consider what is in the products you buy and from where they came.  Don’t buy potatoes shipped from Egypt, if you can get ones grown in Essex.

Buy secondhand and don’t be ashamed about it.  Every antique is at least secondhand - if secondhand is good enough for Lord So-And-So, then it’s good enough for you.

7. Vote

2 billion people are going to the polls this year.  Vote for the candidates who will invest in infrastructure, make public transport affordable for all, change building regulations so that all new builds have solar panel roofs, force water companies to control sewage instead of discharging it into the rivers, etc.  Voting is your chance to choose someone who will do something!

- Pam

SitRep2015: How did I do?

At the end of 2014, in this post, I set myself 15 goals for 2015.  Here is a quick summary of how I did.  (Challenge first then result):-

1. £50 February.  We nearly made it.  As detailed here, we spent £58.83.  I will definitely try this challenge again.
2. January is for finishing Projects/WIPS.  This is more difficult to measure because I didn't list the unfinished projects in the original post.  I think they included my Deco cardigan - still needs buttons - and the Woolly Nanette Tee - finished but the ends still need weaving in.   Let's just call this goal a fail and be done with it.
3. Lose 15lb in 2015.  As detailed here, I succeeded in losing 7lb almost permanently, but I reckon I lost at least 5 of those pounds on 3 separate occasions.  Partial win.
4. The 2015 Fitness Challenge.  Fail.  I'm still a slug.
5. The Feed Me Gardening Challenge.  Almost total fail.  Gardening got away from me this year.  The only thing I managed to grow were courgettes and they were from two plants donated by DH's boss.  Maybe next year will be better.
6. The 2015 Knit from Stash Challenge.  Almost a complete success.  I say almost because I had to buy two extra balls of 4-ply Blue Faced Leicester in order to complete my latest project, It Cannot Fail to Please from A Stitch In Time.  I was really good until October, when  I slipped at the Knit & Stitch Show and purchased two balls of Toft Alpaca Sock, 8 balls of Drops Alpaca and two balls of Jamieson's Soft Shetland.  Only the last has been knitted to date; I used it to make a hat for Dark for Christmas.
7. The Fashion on the Ration Challenge.  To be honest, while I know I blew this one out in July when I bought a load of lingerie, I stopped tracking before then and don't know how many points I really spent.
8. Learn French.  I have worked my way through 2 lessons of Duolingo every morning this year and, according to to the app, am now 7% fluent in French.  While I am far from being able to sustain a conversation, I know more French now than I did after four years of classes in high school.  I'll continue with Duolingo in the new year.
9. To Throw a Fabulous 50th Birthday Party.  Big win.  I had a great party.
10. To Read and Finish 15 Books in 2015.  Not quite a win.  I read 13 books, not 15.  Virtually every book I've read this year was on the Kindle app on my phone or iPad and a lot of them were free or cheap, thanks to joining the BookBub mailing list.  (I now have hundreds of books thanks to BookBub.)  Please, Amazon, update the app so that we can tag the books we've read and easily find them.   
11. To move into the back bedroom.  Fail.
12. The wardrobe challenge.  Fail.  I'm still waiting to make the big trip to IKEA to buy new wardrobes so that we can outfit the back bedroom and move.
13. To make something of my new job.  Success.  I'm not quite back to the same point as I was with the previous role, but I'm close.  I've made friends with two of the business's senior people and, as of tomorrow, I will have a team of project accountants reporting to me again.
14. To blog 26 times in 2015.  Fail.  Somehow, though, I remembered the target as 15 times not 26.  Once I post this, it'll be 15 times.
15. To write that book.  Fail.  Although I have started.  Twice.

So that's a quick review of my 2015.  How did you do with your 2015 resolutions/challenges?  Do tell!

Wishing you a fantastic 2016.

- Pam

I am not superwoman

Please, can people remind me that I am not Superwoman.  I'm just an ordinary, forty-mumble woman who works long hours, hates housework, loves cooking, gets far too little sleep, knits whenever she can and gardens far to infrequently to call herself a gardener...

Seriously, I'm having problems remembering that I have limitations.  You'd think, given this is me I'm talking about, that I'd know that I have limited time, limited energy and numerous calls on my time.  But no.  It seems I have a severe blind spot.  Today, I took myself to the garden centre to buy veg plants* to grow in our two metre-square raised beds.  Within 10 minutes had to talk myself out of several purchases, because a) I have no where to put them, and b) in order to make somewhere to put them, I'll need to put in in several days work of work in that wilderness I call a garden.  Not a chance right now, Pamela, not a chance!

But... But.... BUT!!!

No.  Walk away from the Eglu... You haven't got time to keep chickens.  But it's cute!  No.  But we could save loads of money on eggs... And feed the chickens on sunflower seed-heads so they don't cost a lot of money.... NO!!! 

In my head, I obviously think I'm Barbara Good from The Good Life. 

- Pam


PS:  The only way to resolve the Podcast app problem was to delete the app and reinstall it.


*  Since I obviously didn't have time or the inclination to start any seeds from scratch this year, the only way those beds were going to get plants into them was to buy partially grown ones.  I bought tomatoes, peppers, a cougette (zucchini), onions and bok-choi.

A time of reflection

Did you have a merry Christmas?  Or was it just so-so?  Mine was excellent, thank you, although it felt strange working right up to Christmas Eve.  For the last four years, I've managed to take the last few days of before Christmas, but not this year.  Still, I have had the time off between Christmas and New Year - a much needed break.

For me, the time between Christmas and New Year is always a time for reflection and goal setting.  What did I achieve last year?  What do I want to achieve in 2012? Etc, etc.  It's that whole "New Year, new me" thing.

In 2011, I set 8 goals:-

• No stash enhancement (I've gone cold sheep)
• To conquer the garden
• To do the Lincoln 10k
• To finish the year with no UFOs
• To get pregnant (yes, this cancels out other goals)
• To knit 1 pair of socks every 2 months
• To knit 6 sweaters
• To lose 25lb in weight

So how did I do?  On the whole, not badly.  To summarise:  cold sheeping failed spectacularly.   We did manage to remove the non-hedge trees from the back garden so it no longer needs to be napalmed, but it is still far too wild and unruly.   I walked the Lincoln 10k dressed as a French Maid and we raised about £1,000 for charity in the end.  2011 is going to finish with the same two UFO's it began with (a shrug from Verena that just needs to be sewn together and my Hibiscus for Hope socks, which had to be suspended while I knitted the Sunray Ribbing top from A Stitch in Time because I wasn't sure whether I'd need to frog them for the yarn).  No, I didn't get pregnant.  And I lost 15lb in weight. I actually managed to knit six sweaters in 2011, as well as the second half of a seventh, so that goal was well and truly met (I'll put up photos eventually).  As was the one to knit a pair of socks every two months - I completed 6 pairs, almost finished a seventh and re-knitted one of the Hibiscus for Hope socks.

For 2012, I have a whole new batch of New Year's Resolutions goals:-

1. To really work at having a decent veggie garden this year.  I'd like to be able to feed us from it for days/weeks at a time.
2. To use things up.  I have a stockpile of "stuff":  make-up, fabric, cross stitch stuff, yarn, even cooking ingredients.  As Gigi Knitmore once said, "There's no point in saving things just in case the Queen drops in. Use it and enjoy it".
3. To only buy yarn from a) charity shops or b) if it is less than £3/ball.  Oh, and the yarn budget for 2012 will be £60 for the year, no more. I've tried going "cold sheep" and not buying yarn and all that happens is that I'll be good for months and then go mad.
4. To be tidy.  I have the messy gene - I can put a pen on an empty table and it'll look like a bomb hit it in 2 minutes flat.  I can't do neat but I can do tidy.
5. To be more organised.  No more forgetting things or procrastinating and putting off things that need to be done.
6. To buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2012 (underwear, socks and stockings exempted).  Ideally, I'd like to buy them from charity shops - I've had really good luck recently and scored 3 brand new suits for less than £10 each.  (I have far too many clothes anyway, so need to wear some stuff until it wears out.)
7. To lose at least another stone (14lb) in weight.  I want to lose the spare tyre that has settled on my midriff.
8. The nebulous fitness goal:  to strengthen my body by working out/lifting weights three times a week.
9. The not-so-nebulous fitness goal:  to be able to run 5k/3 miles without stopping, and to achieve this before my birthday in August.
10. To knit another 6 pairs of socks and 6 sweaters in 2012.  And to make them from stash yarns.
11. To blog more.  I didn't post nearly enough this year.

What about you? How did your 2011 New Year's Resolutions do?  Did any last beyond January?  Are you planning on doing any for 2012? 

I'd like to wish you all a very happy New Year.  May your resolutions be achieved and all your dreams and wishes in 2012 come true. Here's hoping 2012 will be a kinder year for all of us.

- Pam

To the woman who taught me horticulture in year 9

I wish I could remember your name.

Our weekly 1 hour sessions seemed a bit like a waste of time - we suspected that we were really cheap labour for the school (remember all the times you had us digging in the kindergarten garden?  I do. That soil was root-bound and rock yard).  You really didn't inspire us to become gardeners.  However, you did teach me some useful things: how to graft roses; how to grow plants from seed, prick them out and pot them on; how to prune. 

Now, I wish you'd taught us more of the useful stuff and used us less as a workforce.  Soil improvement would have been useful.  Composting would have been useful.  Pest control would have been useful.  We learned none of those things. 

Why didn't you teach us about growing vegetables and maintaining a vegetable plot?

- Pam (OK, I'll concede your attempts at getting us to dig did help this morning when I turned over the plot)

Sit-Rep 2010 - June & July

Apologies for the lateness of this Sit-Rep update.   It's not my fault!  In the last week of July, DH put a tank of diesel in the Toy for me and I've waited two weeks for him to tell me by how much I needed to reimburse him.  (Proof that nagging doesn't work - I must have asked a dozen times.)  Anyway, here is my update.  My last update is here.

STASH  Maintained cold sheep up until the day that I visited KnitNation on 31st July, when the lovely Sarah at Brownberry Yarns sold me 6 beautiful skeins of Artesano Alpaca Aran in a denim blue (photo to follow - I have a KnitNation Report to post).  I bought their last six skeins in that colour, right out from under the nose of another knitter.  At the time, I wanted 8 skeins because I'm a bit worried about the yardage (6 skeins = only 864 yards/790 metres), so I've ordered 2 more from Brownberry but couldn't get the same dye lot.

In other Stash/Kniting news, I've knitted another skein of Heathland Hebridean into the Brown Cable Cardigan (almost finished the second front).  I didn't mention, last time that I started the second skein of the Wagtail Mohair half way up the back of the Mohair cardigan, which is now almost complete - I've got less than half of one front to go, plus the edging.  Two skeins of Phildar Shoot went into a 5 Hour Baby Sweater for a colleague, which left me with 3/4 of a skein - that yarn was a charity shop find in 2009.  The leftover Cherry Tree Hill yarn from my sister's Zig-Zag socks went into a pair of fingerless mittens using the same zig-zag pattern.    And I've finished off another skein of sock yarn.  So that's 5.5 skeins for a total of 15.5 skeins.   Doesn't seem like a lot, given the amount of knitting involved.

GARDEN  Guess what my birthday present from was this year?  A terracotta strawberry planter filled with compost and three strawberry plants!  The plants are thriving and have given us a handful of strawberries (it is very late in the season).  One of them has already put out a runner, so we anchored it in a spare hole in the planter and now I have four plants.

On to the rest of the garden.  Didn't get a huge number of broad beans - while I was a dedicated squisher of blackfly, they won several battles.  The butternut squash is taking over the world, as are the tomatoes.  Most of the onions are doing well and the two broccolis which survived from last year have thrived (they were last year's failure-to-thrives that somehow survived being neglected in pots over the winter).   Some of the peppers and chillies are doing well but a couple of the jalapenos are just sitting there 3 inches high and sulking - in their case, I'm wondering if they were getting waterlogged in their grow-bags.  The rocket did well, then bolted and now is setting seed.    We've harvested two of the three potatoes and they were heavenly.

On the failure side:  I planted out some pak-choi and it died in the sun.  I doubt the garlic harvest will be that good but at least, now, I know what I've done wrong - garlic needs a freeze early on to prosper.  The courgettes failed to thrive, as did the runner beans; the plants didn't die; they just didn't grow any bigger.  I think watering may have been an issue, since June and July were both dry months and, although we watered every night, I don't think they got enough.  About 3 weeks ago, I invested in a soaker hose, which seems to be helping.

As well as buying and planting out my garlic before Christmas next time, the other thing I need to do is to get some fresh seeds.  The broad beans were grown from old seed, which may have been a factor in their not growing many beans.

FITNESS  Weight Watchers?  What's Weight Watchers?   Let's not go there, shall we?  I'm still attending Pilates and Yoga classes, but I need to add some aerobic exercise pronto.  At least I've located my new running shoes (bought at Christmas).

OVERDRAFT Paid back a combined total of £233.02 for June (£127.76) and July (£105.26) which gives a total pay back of £970.18 for the year.  Although I'm glad to see the balance is decreasing, I know is has slowed down a lot.  There are two main reasons for the slow down:  I've set a couple of new savings goals (next year, I will pay cash for my Chelsea season ticket for the first time ever); and I've increased the amount of money that goes into our joint account, in order to cover more of the shortfall from DH's unemployment.  I already know August will be a bad month for paying back the overdraft:  KnitNation fell into August's spending (it was after payday) and I've already run through my entire "Money To Live Off" budget.  The only hope for August is that I won't spend so much money on diesel for the car*, so the balance of the diesel accrual can be offset against the overrun.

SOCKS  As suspected, I didn't knit a complete pair of socks in June; instead, I did the Zig-Zag Fingerless Mittens and about half of one sock.  I finished those socks in July - they're my typical Use It Up Socks made from the leftovers of the self-patterning sock yarn and some Lisa Souza Sock! in ecru.  Hopefully, I can catch up in August.

- Pam (photos to follow)



* For my trips to Site, I habitually offset one tank of fuel against the money from my mileage claim since I use approximately one tank extra that week.  Since I'm going to site more often at the moment, it's possible I won't spend as much of my diesel accrual as I would in a more typical month.

Monday ramblings

I'm sick.  Again.  This time, it's laryngitis.  (Oh, great.  I have a concert in two weeks.  Fanshawe's African Sanctus.)  No cold symptoms, just a sore throat that started on Friday.  Thank heaven for sick leave - I've taken today off (croaked out a message on my boss' voice-mail this morning).  May or may not go in tomorrow.

I'm more worried about the approaching concert than missing work.  We've only got 4 rehearsals to go, so I really need to attend tonight. But I shouldn't go, since I don't want to pass this onto someone-else and I can't sing a note at present.  However, I feel a bit guilty missing another rehearsal (we are only allowed to miss two rehearsals per concert and this is my second).   At least I've sung the African Sanctus before.

In the meantime, I've almost finished the Baby Surprise Jacket.  Since I've never seen one in the flesh, it required a small leap of faith to follow instructions when I couldn't visualise the results.  It's such a puzzle figuring out which seam goes where. But now that I've only got a dozen rows to go, I can finally see how it fits together.  It's amazing.  I'll photograph it when it's off the needles (before assembly) and you'll see what I mean.

On the garden front, I've just  placed my orders for this year's vegetables:  seed potatoes, onion sets, shallot sets, garlic bulbs, tomato seeds, jalapeno seeds, runner beans, and butternut squash seeds.  I have some seeds leftover from last year, which I'm going to try before buying replacements:  broad beans, sweetcorn, courgettes/zucchini, pak choi, bell peppers and broccoli.  The broad beans are already in their starter pots - I planted them two weeks ago and six out of the 9 have emerged.  Maybe, this year, I can grow a "Victory Garden".

- Pam

This gardening lark is harder than it looks

If it was 1942 and we were reliant on the produce from our garden to get through the lean rationing years, then I think we'd starve. This has been a far from successful year for my gardening. I'm not sure what I did wrong, although I'll make some guesses. Feel free to contribute.

The onions and the garlic

At the start of March, I bought a bag of 100 onion sets. I planted out 50 in April, which was a bit late but it was the first weekend when it wasn't raining. By mid August, the "flags" (the onion leaves) had fallen over and died off, so I unearthed them. Out of 50, less than half survived. Of those that survived, the majority were smaller than a golf ball. I really don't know what I did wrong - they were watered every night that it didn't rain.

The garlic were cursed from the start. I bought three starter-bulbs (what do you call them?) at the same time as I bought the onion sets. I had to bin most of the cloves before I planting out - they were covered in mould. Instead, I planted out some sprouting garlic that I had in the veggie basket. From 12 cloves, I have just unearthed 5 marble sized bulbs of garlic.

Did I plant the onions and garlic out too late? Was that the problem? Or didn't they get enough water, even though they got 2-3 watering cans worth every night?

Broad Beans

I know I planted the broad beans out too late. From the first batch of seeds in April, I got one seedling. The seeds were old. So in early May, I started again and planted them out 3 weeks later. In early June, we got the big invasion of black fly - at the first sign, I got online and ordered ladybird larvae.

The larvae arrived over a week later. From the look of things, most were dead before they got here. We carefully decanted them onto the broad beans, but the damage had been done. We got maybe a dozen beans from the crop. (Two years ago, I planted out the same number of bean plants and got a couple of pounds of beans.)

I'm going to try potting up some broad bean seeds now and over-wintering them covered in fleece. Maybe that will work and beat the black fly?

The courgettes

I mentioned earlier in the year that only one courgette survived (the other was snipped off at ground level by some nasty bug). For a long time, I thought the plant wouldn't survive. It just sat there for weeks with two or three small leaves and didn't get any bigger. Finally, it came good but unlike the first time I grew courgettes when they started cropping in June, this one didn't commence cropping until the start of August!

The sweetcorn

Eight corn survived planting out and grew. Six of them formed cobs. I managed to harvest three. I caught a fox eating the rest!

The potatoes

I had high hopes for these. We finished earthing up at the end of June and they had a healthy crop of leaves growing until a couple of weeks ago, when they started dying back. Tonight, DH and I unearthed our crop. Twenty potatoes. None larger than the palm of my hand and most of them smaller than a golf ball. What did I do wrong?

Fennel and pumpkin

I thought I got the timing for the fennel spot on, since I planted it out the day after they told me to on Gardeners' World. From two 18-inch drills of seeds, I got two seedlings and, nearly three months later, neither is more than three inches high.

The pumpkin is even worse, so doesn't deserve a section on its own. [sigh]

- Pam (So what did I do wrong?)

All gardened out

I have come to the conclusion that the purpose of gardening is the journey, not the arrival. That it was better to view the physical effort of gardening as an end in itself and to enjoy it for itself, because what gets delivered at the other end can be so damn frustrating!

Earlier this week, I planted out the broad beans. Yesterday, I earthed up the potatoes for the fourth and final time.
And today, we've spent the afternoon extending the vegetable patch.

DH did most of the hard labour: lifting turf, breaking up the hard soil below and loads of digging. Amazingly, since it's right next door, the new patch is less like heavy clay and more like real soil (I have a theory: I reckon the new patch is where the Anderson shelter was during WW2 so they shipped in soil when they filled it in, whereas the old patch is unimproved clay.)

We dug in a bag of compost, in an effort to improve things further, before planting out the sweetcorn and butternut squash I've been growing in the kitchen. Behold my cornfield, with onions behind.


The newspaper is a weed-suppression trick I read about in The Lazy Kitchen Gardener by John Yeoman. Take 3 or 4 editions of a multi-sectional newspaper, fold each section into half or into thirds then dump into a bucket of water for at least 5 minutes or until sodden. (You are making papier mache.) Lay out to form a lattice. Plant your seedlings in uncovered areas and water in well.


The newspaper eventually rots down into the soil.

The first time I attempted the newspaper-trick, I laid the newspaper down in sheets and then discovered that it is really quite tough so planting the onions through it was really quite hard. Then a couple of weeks later, I looked outside to find that some of the sheets had shifted and torn. Couldn't figure out what had happened - once dry, it forms quite a hard shell on the ground and it didn't lift up in the wind.

The cause was squirrels! About a month ago, I looked out the kitchen window one morning to see a squirrel shredding the newspaper and whisking it off to form bedding for its nest. They stole about half the newspaper I'd used to cover the old veggie patch.


- Pam

Frugal Friday - Frugal Gardening and Horse Manure

For the past three years, I've attempted to grow a vegetable garden. Last year, it was potatoes and tomatoes with a couple of pak choi and one purple sprouting broccoli; the year before, it was courgettes/zucchini, broad beans, two sweet corn, and bell peppers. My success rate has been pretty dismal - I did get broad beans but the sweet corn were still born (I didn't know, then, about how they pollinate). Something ate the leaves off the bell peppers before they'd been in the ground five minutes. The tomatoes were doing well and I was looking forward to bottling some home-made tomato sauce, until the night I came home from work to find the vines had turned black. (Like everyone-else's crops last year, they'd got blight.) Even my success-story courgettes have a one-in-three plant survival rate.

This year, I'm growing potatoes, approximately 50 onions (bought as "sets"), 12 garlic, six broad bean plants (only two planted out so far), one courgette (I planted out three), 8 or 9 sweet corn (not planted out yet - I think the 9th won't survive), and 3 butternut squash. It's raining, so no photos of the garden, but here is a shot of the "nursery" beside the big kitchen window:

Corn to the left; broad beans and butternut squash in the middle; just planted sunflower seeds to the right. The blue trays are the ones the supermarket sells mushrooms in. The clear plastic, 3-inch pots are yoghurt pots.


So far, I haven't spent a huge amount of money on this year's vegetables: I've purchased fresh corn, courgette, sunflower and broad bean seeds. (Around here, packets of seeds cost between 69p and £2.) The other seeds are survivors from last year. The onion sets were £1.95 for a bag of 100 from the shop in Kew Gardens. Whilst I was there, I spent another £1.90 on three supposedly "disease free" garlic bulbs, only to find them riddled with that grey mould when I went to plant them out. Therefore, my garlic comes from a couple of bulbs bought for cooking, which sprouted whilst I stored them in the shed. The butternut seeds were rescued from the innards of a butternut squash I used in a stew.

My main expense comes in the form of organic peat-free grow bags, which I buy for the compost they contain. At £2.46 each, they are the cheapest way I can buy a peat-free growing medium for the pots/potato tyres and they're the largest bags I can lift at the garden centre (I think each grow bag holds 40 litres of compost). On Wednesday, I lugged home four. Grow bag compost is what that seedlings are growing in.

Also on Wednesday, I purchased a packet of seeds of a variety of late summer sprouting broccoli. When the corn gets planted out on Sunday, I'll fill their blue tray with compost and try growing them. I could have bought seedlings, but they weren't that healthy.

Our soil is my biggest problem. In some places it is impregnable. (I planted a couple of lavender once, only to have one die because its roots couldn't penetrate out of the hole in which it was planted.) One of the gardening books I read suggested growing giant sunflowers because they have really tough roots which break up hard soil - sort of nature's rotavators. Hence the sunflowers I'm attempting to grow.

My other great-white-hope for our soil is our compost bin, a.k.a. The Dalek. And that is the source of today's Frugal Friday tip:


Locate your nearest stables and collect some free horse manure to compost.

Two weekends ago, we took a couple of flexi-tubs, the big fork and spade, and popped into the local stables. For a "Please Ma'am, may we raid your manure heap?", we collected enough horse manure and discarded bedding (wood shavings as well as straw) to half fill the Dalek. It cost us 15 minutes and a smile. I'm tempted to do it again, to fill the Dalek up completely, and then get a second compost bin. Heaven knows, we need the stuff!

- Pam

Frugal Friday - Growing Potatoes in Tyres

Years ago, on an episode of Gardener's World, Bob Flowerdew demonstrated his method of growing potatoes in tyres. I remember watching fascinated, thinking "one day, I'll try this". It didn't use much space, didn't seem to need much equipment and (important for me) didn't require a whole lot of effort.

Potatoes, Bob explained, need to be earthed up so that you get the maximum crop. But in a regular garden, that requires space. Bob used tyres to earth up his potatoes, stacking a new one on whenever the potato stems got tall enough and filling it in with compost. When he unearthed the potatoes in the autumn, Bob got 100-odd from just one stack.

At the bottom of my garden is a semi-barren patch where I've spent the last five years fighting weeds and brambles. Everything is covered in weed suppression cloth. The soil is like iron (about an inch down, it's pure clay. They used to make bricks around here). This is where I am growing my potatoes.

This year, I'm growing two tyre stacks worth. The method is simple. For each stack, you need four tyres (in total) and a sprouting potato. Place a tyre on the ground and fill it with compost / a grow bag / soil (if your garden has decent stuff). Bury the sprouting potato in the centre of the tyre, just below the surface of the soil, and water well. Water daily.

They grow fast. Here are the potatoes I planted three weeks ago, which I earthed up on Monday.
As you can see, they've grown a lot. We've had a little bit of rain this week (Monday evening, Tuesday) and a lot of sunshine. The ones in the foreground were more than ready to be earthed up again. I wasn't so sure about the ones at the back, so I plonked the next layer of tyres down and measured them up.

(The tyres are worn out ones I begged from the local tyre shop. They were free. I only took four the first time, so this afternoon I went and got some more.)

I decided against earthing up the one at the back. There weren't enough leaves peeking over the top. If I earthed it up now, it would struggle and possibly not develop as many potatoes.

So I just earthed up the front one, packing the soil under the rim of the tyre as well as filling in the centre. I'll continue earthing up the potatoes until the tyres are stacked four deep.

Not sure if you can see from the above photo, but the second batch of tyres is larger than the first. They must have come from a bigger vehicle (I didn't have any choice this time - the tyre shop only had four in their "to be disposed of" pile). You can get a better idea from the photo below.

It isn't as precarious as it looks. Next time, I'll use all the large tyres in one stack and the smaller ones in another.

The frugal part? The tyres cost nothing and the potatoes effectively cost nothing (they were sprouting in the veggie basket). To fill them in, I'm using up a 100 litre bag of "soil improver" (a.k.a. compost) purchased from the garden centre last year for three or four Pounds. Next year, when the Dalek compost bin has done its job properly, I'll use compost.

- Pam (looking forward to home grown spuds)

Garden wars

I'm shattered. We've spent a long weekend doing what can only be described as "gorilla gardening". Every year we go through this: hacking down weeds, trimming the shrubs back by two thirds, and yet nothing changes. This morning I found dandelion weeds growing through the weedproofing barrier I laid last year over the vegetable patch. The tenacious little bastards had pushed their roots right through the pores.

In two weeks time, all our efforts will be obliterated and warfare will have to start again. I have ivy wars. Battles with the blackberries over territory. I buried the bindweed under black plastic for two years and still it grows!

I'm at a total loss. I don't know how other people win the garden war. How do you get from weekly battles with the weeds to having a neat garden you can be proud of? This year has been particularly bad; we've had very few weekends where you could get out and just mow the lawn. It has rained a lot and the hot weather has only just arrived. In less than two weeks, the grass and weeds grew over a foot.

[ sigh ]

All I want is an easy care, low maintenance garden that grows some fruit and vegetables. Is that too much to ask?

- Pam

Garden photos from 2 weeks ago

Whilst I was hunting for the photo of the courgettes, I thought you might like to see some roses. This is part of our "hedge" between our garden and next door's. The non-existent wall at the bottom right is next-door's responsibility.


And a close up. Beautiful, aren't they?

Here are the courgettes. We've eaten all the ones visible here and there are more growing:

And last, but not least, my very first broad bean! Look carefully, it's on the left parallel to the stem.

- Pam (proud gardener)