Foraging for sloes

I've never lived in a place where I could walk to so much wild fruit! This year, I picked a lot of sloes - some of them too early, around September - and I actually made sloe sort-of-chutney with them. I combined them with foraged apples and a *lot* of supermarket sugar, and got 4 little tubs like this:

I've now used up one tub, and I've decided that though I will forage sloes next year, and forage even more of them, I won't bother making chutney or anything similar. It needs a *lot* of sugar to make it passable, without screwing your face up and going ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww... but I'm using it in savoury dishes, and that just doesn't seem right.



Today, for instance, was a forage-in-the-fridge/freezer day, and I had some end of packet frozen cauliflower and some slow-cooked dried peas, plus a few cashew nuts. So I threw them all together with a bit of my sloe chutney, sloshed in some water plus a bit of avocado oil afterwards, and ate that as a stew/soup. It was nice, actually, but it didn't need sugar in it!

So next year, I'll forage lots of sloes and make a sloe liquor, frozen into small portions, and I'll put it in whatever I fancy, knowing that its just pure fruit liquor. And before I get some comments about sloe gin - well, I don't drink gin, I'm really sorry! I know I should, with sloe trees being so close, but it just doesn't work for me. I wish it did, the feedback about it sounds brilliant :)

Urban foraging

I've had a fine old time over the last few days doing a spot of urban foraging. Bit late for blackberries, hey? Yes, it is, but that hasn't been what I'm after. I'm after the elusive prey of builderskippus maximus!

There's a couple of building sites near me, and when I go out for a stiff lunchtime walk, to inspect the neighbourhood so to speak, I usually pass one of them - I'm fascinated to see the slabs of insulation go into the cavity walls, for instance, I've popped inside the showhouse on a fine autumn day and been surprised at how warm - hot! - it is.

Anyway, there's still lots of building work going on, and some of it entails taking things out of cardboard boxes and putting the cardboard on that day's skip. And I have a lot of places in my garden that could do with some cardboard mulch - well, all of it. Either its just been weeded, its about to be weeded, its about to be dug up to become border, and in addition to all of that, the whole garden needs more organic material - there's so much clay in this soil that sometimes I don't dig it so much as slice it ... its quite weird, after having been on the chalky soils of the south coast for so long.

Well, there we go. Cardboard! Hmmm, there's a lot of work to be done in this garden, isn't there - still, at least I know its fertile! This pic will be used again, incidentally, in telling the saga of my battle against the sedge .... for now, I'm just admiring the fact that I have good light in this garden, and everything wants to grow.

But thats not all - there were little carpet samples too, at another skip. These are about 15" x 6" - perfect for putting between plants (eventually!), they won't mulch a long strip of land, but they'll do a fine temporary job. I mustn't leave them on too long tho, because they're not natural fibre, and they'll soon break down into my now-organic soil if I'm not careful.

And last but not least, these amazing manufactured stone samples! They're really tiny, I've laid them out on the step up onto the grass. They won't do anything magical except look beautiful in amongst the borders by the house, which will soon be full of slate, pebbles, stones or shells.

A parcel popped through the door

Well, it didn't - I had to go to the Sorting Office, as when the poor thing tried to get in I wasn't here ... but then I was, so I went out, of course. And came back with a parcel from the lovely OrkneyFlowers, I'm sure anyone who reads this blog will know her blog, but just in case, here it is http://orkneyflowers.blogspot.com/.

Well, the parcel contained some dinky little silicon spatulas, as I've been wibbling on about getting pesto out of badly shaped jars - I'm addicted to pesto - and also a measuring cup set, the posh stainless steel type, both of which will come in very handy - OrkneyFlowers' recipe for 15 minute scones is in cups, and these cups will do it proud, indeed.

Best of all, because planted, grown and packed with her own fair hands, is a healthy little plant packed in a toilet roll innard, the piggy back plant, or tolmeia menziesii - she's qualified, is our OrkneyFlowers!

This is little Tolly as he came out of his toilet roll ....

And this is Tolly after he'd been all potted up. He's now sitting on my office windowledge, the only windowledge in the whole house that doesn't have a radiator underneath it, and its on the first floor, so he should be happy with the sunlight, and overlooking his friends in the garden.

Thank you OrkneyFlowers!

Admiration Day!

This is a friend from online who became a Real Life friend! She helped me move into this house last year, ferrying me about hither and yon, and even through her own troubles has always been here to call on. In this pic, she's admiring my beautiful mahonia shrub - I hear that the berries can be made into something yummy, and I seem to have a bumper crop, without doing anything at all except saying hello.

This one came as a bit of a shock tho - I was giving her the tour of what I'd done over the past few months, and came across this little monument to a pigeon - its where I'm creating a proper link between the crazy paving of the patio, and the kitchen wall - this sort-of-trench is going to have membrane over it and then be filled in with slate chips (sitting ready and waiting, re-used from my sister's garden) - but a fox has got here first!

And below is the spot, next door but one to the mahonia, where my little blueberry plants are going to go. The sad little pieces of wood sticking out of the ground are the remains of two packed-in rhodedendrons - I spoke to them before I ushered them out, and they were happy to go, as a rhodie shrub and rhodie tree remain. I've also been chatting to the worms, telling them to leave this piece of ground, as I'm going to be digging there, and I want them to be safe. The black plastic bag, happily for me, is rhodie leaves, which are going to stay in there for maybe a year, and hopefully rot down, like deciduous leaves. What can I say, its an experiment!

Taking back the world

Well, just as I start the blog up again, I've decided to lay off the garden work for a week so I can do my accounts, sob ....

However, this is very green! Honestly!

In the first place, I'm doing *all* my accounts this year - I'm not employing the accountants I've used for 15 years or so. They do less and less work each year, for more and more money, and simply don't talk to me helpfully. Since my income dipped again last year, I thought I'd better take my life in my hands, and actually *look* at the tax return that they've been submitting to the Inland Revenue on my behalf. And whaddaya know, its pretty simple - even for me, and there's overseas money involved too .... I may be crying in my spilt milk that I ever said such a thing, but at the moment, its progressing.

It feels very green to do the accounts myself, oddly - its empowering! I've given away my power to a technician I've never even met, and now I'm taking it back! I'm very happy about that!

And in the second place - because I felt quite lairy of doing all of this myself, I set out all the paperwork in the kitchen. Luckily, I live alone, and don't even have cats at the moment. The window in here is much taller than the one in my office, so I have a beautiful view of the sky and the sunset. And I'm using my kitchen, and the beautiful little kitchen table my sister bought me as a moving in present :)

What can be greener than that? To use what we have, to use our own growing skills, to reclaim our power. I'm chuffed!

What *have* I been doing to the garden?

Well, I've been keeping the grass useable since my sister cut it - thats a big thing! Nobody would ever mistake it for a lawn, but thats okay, I disagree with monoculture in any case :) I've also been getting in the corners that my sister couldn't reach with the lawnmower, making sure that the *layers* of old grass get pulled up, and stopping it encroaching any nearer to the compost bin.

The little flower border nearest the patio is planted up a bit more, and more or less weeded. Its also slightly wider - my ambition is to have very little grass, a la Alys Flowers :) Happily, strawberry plants seem to *love* the soil! So do aquilegia, which self seed everywhere :)

The right hand border is where most effort has been - my mum, when she stayed, spent three quarters of an hour (and remember, she's 85 years old!) bent double over the potententilla at the very end, pulling all the long grass away from underneath it, then weeding it properly, and shaping it too - it looks a lot happier!

I could see such a difference! So I've been working on that border consistently. Digging up some turf to expand it, getting rid of a sedge thats overtaken everything, pruning a blackcurrant bush and some raspberry canes, digging up grass thats growing in the border itself, mulching with anything I could lay my hands on, prettifying a lavender bush, and even, ta-da, planting some mint, which came from my previous house. Happily, in with the mint was some love in a mist, which was on my list to get, as the seeds are edible and I *love* the plant, and thats grown already, tho its a bit leggy because it was so late.

I also planted my beautiful, beautiful sedum in this area - the soil around that will *not* be disturbed :)

The other side, the north facing side, I've left more or less alone till now, but I've just started to cut back two of the shoulder high rhodedendrons ... I didn't even know there were two of them in this spot, the border's so overcrowded, its crazy. I'm reserving that space for my blueberry plants - they're far enough out from the fence that they'll get enough light. Lots of cutting back still to do, including training the tree-height rhodie so that it doesn't kill the cobnut tree. I have a cobnut tree!

There's a very narrow border that runs down the side of the house, just outside the back door, that was completely overgrown with ivy and sedge. It was taking forever just to keep it in check - it was 6 or 7 layers thick. My lovely neighbour, when I asked his permission to really chop it back, actually came round less than a week later, and did it for me! I now have an open aspect when I open the back door, not the lowering gloom of eight feet tall ivy blocking my path to the garden. Lovely! There's a climber of some description that wasn't *quite* overwhelmed by the ivy, with a single solitary fruit, so I'll be watching that with interest - pix coming soon. And I've realised its a fantastic siting for *more* strawberry plants :)

The border of the patio thats underneath the kitchen window has been dug out, to the depth of one course of bricks below the air bricks and the damp course - its going to have membrane and slate put down there, and I may even get to do that this weekend! We'll see, I make no promises, after all its Bonfire Weekend.

I have a single border at the front, and I was just going to give it a really thorough weeding and plant whatever I wanted to plant there. However, its not as weed ridden all the way along as I thought. There's creeping buttercup, true - but there's also a lot of bulbs in there, and no way I want to damage them. So its a bit of make-do there, while I see what's what.

Such a lot thats been done - with quite a bit of help, too, and I'm very grateful for it all. My little garden is a living, breathing entity again :) and I'm very happy about it.

What a long time ...

Directly linked to my last post, sadly - I worked really hard for my mum's visit, and continued at that pace after she left, so made myself ill for the whole of September.

During October - catching up! Which meant, making the garden mine, and its been lovely to do, I'm slowly transforming it from a boring suburban garden, the horticultural version of Tim nice-but-dim, into something a bit wilder and yet not overgrown, where most plants will fulfil several functions.

And since I have no real money to carry on doing up the house, I've changed the name of the blog - I've let go the "DIY and Renovation" part. That kind of work is still going to be included, but its not the sole focus.

There *is* one bit of building/repair work thats going to be done in the house, actually, and thats in the bathroom - a clever friend has told me that all the mould peeping out from the bath panel and the boxing-in of the pipes (which I hate!) is probably because the seals between the bath, the taps and the wall have been gone for a long, long time. Makes sense to me - but its so bad, I can see that the bath might have to be removed, and a new panel put in. I'm pretty sure I'll be getting rid of the boxing too, and in general the bathroom will be having a good old update. Watch this space (well, that space, that one over there ...).