Rain, rain go away

This is the view out of the bird watching window today...

Although not conducive to the best bird photography you'll ever see, it has however seen a flurry of activity today. The garden has been teeming with birds all day long. Infact, probably the busiest I've seen all year and as a result I've managed to add two birds to the 2009 list.

Probably something to do with the fact that I put out a nice yorkshire pudding and some left-over stuffing from yesterday's dinner – Mr Blackbird is enjoying that immensely!

So in no particular order, the list today is: (all linked to RSPB bird identifier for more info)

Blackbird (Male and Female)
Goldfinches
Robin
Dunnock
Wren (new visitor!)
Magpie
Pete the Pigeon (garden regular)
Blue Tit
Great Tit
Grey Wagtail (new visitor and very very chuffed about this one :-)

Welcome Back

I know it seems that the only birdie pictures I ever post on here are Goldfinches, it's probably true but they're so small and perfect, and look at all those wonderful colours. Just beautiful.

Anyways, if you recall back in the summer we had a wonderful little Goldfinch family, Gary and his Mrs and then six or so weeks later a whole family, three babies I think it was. Well, they were regular visitors for about two months or so and then 'poof' – they disappeared. I just assumed they were off on their summer holidays to Africa on winter migration. But ah-ha the RSPB bird identifier came in handy again. Not all of them migrate, about a third of them stay here in the UK over winter, so of the 300,000 or so Goldfinches in the UK there's very likely to be around a 100,000 that stay put.

Well jolly good show, is all I can say. The piccie above was of just one of them, we had six on the feeders yesterday. Now all I need to find out is where they went for that two month period? The only thing I can think is that with all the autumn berries around they didn't need the seeds from the feeders?

My my what a big clove you have!

Ok, I admit. Right now this clove of garlic, well, it looks like any other clove of garlic. But, oh my goodness. This garlic isn't just any old garlic, this is Elephant Garlic. And by jove, it sure is elephant. I've never seen anything like it!

Here's a shot of it against a normal sized garlic clove.
Now can you see what I mean! It's huge! Technically it's more of an overgrown leek with garlic tendancies so I'm guessing it's going to be milder than your traditional stuff. But hey, what the heck! That's what having a vegetable garden is all about, trying your hand and stuff and seeing what you like best!

We bought ours from Morgan & Thompson

Last year we planted the garlic in March time and we've only just realised that really that was way too late. It should be planted now. Apparently garlic likes a bit of cold weather to start of with, so we'll be getting them in this weekend I reckon.

Of course, planting it so early means we really have to think about what is going where this year. It's good practice to rotate your crops so you're not planting the same thing in the same place year in year out. Our garden is so incy wincy teeny tiny I don't think we'll have much of a choice where to put things. We've learnt a huge amount this year, especially when it comes to giving things space, so we'll be sure to plan our garden much better this time around. As for where the garlic is going... well we'll see what takes our fancy at the weekend!

Birdie Feast

Our good friends over at the RSPB are running a Feed the Birds Day – over this weekend 24-25 October. In the winter when food is pretty scarce many birds are forced to come into our gardens.

http://www.rspb.org.uk/feedthebirds/

Here at the little gardeners we have a regular supply of food out for our little feathered friends, and we have some regular visitors, Gary our resident Goldfinch has taken his Mrs on their holidays to Africa, we're hoping he'll be back next year. (that's one of his little babies in the top piccie)

The RSPB have loads of tips on what you can do to help the birds and are running loads of events over the weekend. I tried my hand at making some fat balls. Pretty simple, melt some suet or lard in a pan and pour over yummy birdie ingredients. I used peanuts, sunflower seeds, some dried fruit, dried mealworms and wild seed. About 1/3rd fat to 2/3rds ingredients. Give it a good old mix and pop into your containers of choice. I put a piece of string in mine to hang it up although I'm not sure it will hold.... we'll see. Anyway, it smelt disgusting but I'm sure the birdies will love it! Hopefully we'll get a Siskin or a Redwing having a nibble, how exciting would that be!

The RSPB have a great list of household scraps you can put out, dead easy and cheap as chips. You can follow them on Twitter here

Now the clocks have turned back, it's dark so early I won't get to do my little bit of bird watching when I get home from work :-( Just at the weekends now.

What do you call a man under a pile of leaves?

Russel!

Our garden looked a complete shambles this morning. Our neighbours have a Sycamore tree and it's well and truly shedding it's summer canopy. So rather than let them get blown away by the wind we collected them up to mulch them down and use as some good compost for next year. I managed to get a good dustbin bag full today and looking at the tree I reckon I could probably get another 2/3 bags from it.

And god forbid, whilst I was leaf collecting, what did I see? SLUGS. Little baby ones, three of them. They'd better not even think about eating my swedes. I will not be a happy bunny.

Where of where has the flavour gone?

OK, I admit these don't look the most beautiful of carrots but we've never let that put us off before. We'd already devoured our baby carrots which, even if I say so myself were probably the best we'd ever tasted. So, obviously we were looking forward to their older cousin being just as sweet and juicy. But no?! We dived straight in and quite oddly, they taste of, well, pretty much nothing? We're quite baffled by the lack of flavour...

Not quite sure what to do with them, maybe then can add some crunch to a salad? They're definitely not going to do anything else!

The Tomato Glut Preserving Post

Wow, we sure did have a bumper tomato year. Just before we went on hols we picked everything that was ripe (and some that wasn't) and we had a bumper preserving Sunday. We wanted to preserve them in a number of different ways and decided to do some bottling and then to make a couple of chutneys.

So here goes...

We ended up picking about four kilos, a mixture of yellows and red with a few greens thrown in for tang. First on the list was the traditional bottling. I was following the instructions from Preserves: River Cottage Handbook No.2, great little book.

http://www.rivercottage.net/ShopProduct334/PreservesRiverCottageHandbookNo2.aspx

It's a pretty simple process really. All you need is some airtight jars, I used Le Parfait, some sugar, a roasting tray and a tea towel.

Firstly you'll need to make up a batch of syrup which is simply some sugar dissolved in water. I made a light syrup which is 100g sugar in 600ml of water. You can add honey, alcohol, spices, herbs etc to your syrup to give it some added interest. I made a batch of plain syrup and then added my spices to the various jars so I could have a good mixture of flavours. Below is the basil pot but I also did thyme and chilli options.

Preheat your oven to 150c and stand your jars in your roasting tray which is filled with water at a depth of about 3cm. You'll need to put either a tea towel or a wad of newspapers in the bottom to stop the jars touching the bottom of the tray otherwise they'll crack in the heat. Cover with the jar top and rubber ring but don't fasten them just yet.

60-70mins for jars up to a litre and 70-80mins for 1-2 litres jars. Once out of the oven clip the lids on and leave to cool.

Don't they look delicious! Kept in a cool dark cupboard they should last up to a year. So that was bottling, think all in all we've got about 8 jars of varying sizes. Next – chutney! I love making chutney and jams but this is the first time I've been lucky enough to make it with homegrown ingredients! Two types, a yellow/green combo and a red spicy paprika.

OK, starting with the red spiced chutney. Ingredients are:

• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 red peppers, halved, deseeded and finely chopped
• 1 red chilli, deseeded and diced
• 1kg (2lb 31⁄2oz) ripe tomatoes, chopped
• 450ml (3⁄4 pint) malt or white wine vinegar
• 350g (12oz) soft light brown sugar
• 100g (31⁄2oz) raisins
• 1 level tsp black mustard seeds
• 2 level tsp smoked paprika
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1⁄4 level tsp ground cloves

Easy peasy to make. Whack everything in a large pan, stir togther and bring slowly to the boil. Simmer for 1.5-2hrs until it becomes chutney consistency. Job done! This is really nice and smokey, will be brilliant with a strong cheddar or if you're a meaty eater maybe some gammon (although I'm guessing at that as I don't think I've ever eaten gammon!)

Next up was the yellow/green combo. It was really just a recipe for green tomato chutney as I couldn't find one I liked for a yellow variety. The yellows are quite tart anyway so I just reduced the amount of sugar a little to compensate.

Ingredients are:

• 2lb green tomatoes chopped
• 8 oz onions chopped
• 1 lb cooking apples peeled & chopped
• 8 oz dried fruit
  
• 8oz brown sugar
• 1 pint vinegar spiced or malt
• 2 tablespoons mustard seed
• 1 inch fresh ginger peeled & finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon

Again, pretty simple as before. All goes into the pan and simmers uncovered until a nice sticky consistency. Probably about 3 hours. Into sterilised jars and seal.
I managed to get all the ingredients for the chutneys without gluten or wheat in so these are all ceoalic friendly. The thing that nearly caught me out was the dried fruits as some of them contained gluten, from what exactly I don't know? But I managed to get some in Waitrose that were gluten-free.

As with most chutneys they improve with age so keep in the cupboard for a few weeks before using. Managed to get five pots of each so we'll probably give some as presents for Christmas, that's if we can bear to part with them!

Bee Nice

There we were, last Saturday digging around for a few potato's when we noticed this fella, looking very sorry for himself indeed.

We'd read a fair bit about exhausted bees and we reckon this was what we had before us—basically the little guy has run out of energy and can't fly and if nothing was done, eventually he'd die.

Little Gardners to the rescue! We rushed indoors and dipped a little sheet of paper into some honey and he lapped it up. We left him to sunbathe on his white sheet of paper and went indoors for 10 minutes or so, when we came back outside he'd flown away.

We both feel quite pleased with ourselves, the bees need all the help they can get at the moment, populations are crashing in the UK and every little helps. Bill Oddie would be so proud :-)

Holiday Time!

Well folks, it's that time of year once more. Holidays! And it couldn't come at a better time if you ask me! Off tomorrow for two whole weeks of bliss!

I have a super post on preserving as that's mainly what I've been doing this week with our huge glut of tomatoes. I'll save that for when we're back. But for now here's a little glimpse of the little gardeners production line that's been going this week :-)

See you in two weeks!

Merveilleux d'ail!

Mmmmmmm, look at all the garlic wonderfulness! We're off on our summer hols next Saturday so the garden received a lot of TLC this weekend. We tried to harvest as much as we could before we leave everything to fend for itself.

I would say the garlic has been pretty successful this year. To be honest they just got on with it, no fuss at all. We just duly watered and fed them and they've been no trouble at all. They could be a little bigger but for our first attempt we're pretty chuffed.

They've probably been ready to pull for a couple of weeks or so. They're ready when the leaves start to go yellow and dry, the same deal as the shallots and onions. We're going to let them dry out for a couple of weeks and they should be ready by the time we're back from our travels.

Prize Carrot

We pulled a good amount of baby carrots yesterday and wow, look at the size of this beauty! He's our biggest carrot to date! Not quite up to world record standards though.

Joe Atherton holds the record for the world longest carrot, a staggering 19 feet and 1.96 inches (5.841 metres), grown in 2007. Think we have a long way to go....

And fancy some carrot jazz? Check this fella out

Snack Attack

A couple of weeks back one half of the little gardeners was left sofa bound after an injection in the achilles tendon, nice! One lovely friend, Jenny, came over with a bounty of supplies which included a rather fetching plant from Greenwich Market labeled a 'snacker'.

A quick read of the label tells me it's a mini-cucumber plant, how brilliant! It had a few little baby ones on it already but my they grow quickly! Literally from a small cucumber, maybe the size of a childs little finger into what you see above in about 4 days (photographed next to a cherry tom so you can get the idea of scale). Quite impressive if you ask me!

So, Jenny, thank you very much, we had one for dinner this evening in our salad. I'm sure a little girl I know will be more than happy to devour a few so we'll save the next one for stinker!

Here's the website if you want to read a little more.

http://www.snacker.nl/2008/index_en.htm

Food Glorious Food

We had a bumper harvest last weekend and both lunch and dinner were supplied courtesy of our blooming garden. First on the list was some juicy tomatoes.

A whole kilo of the beauties! I know I keep posting pictures of tomatoes but we're incredibly proud of them, and come on, who wouldn't be! So lunch consisted of a generous handful of freshly picked tomatoes, some sliced buffalo mozzarella, freshly torn basil (also from our garden), balsamic vingear and a little seasoning. Otherwise known as an Italian Caprese salad. This is the recipe that got me hooked on tomatoes in the first place so only fitting to make this our first dish proper.
Yum, it was deelish, so much so I think we might have it again today. You can't beat it. It really is the bees knees of a salad. Hands up to the Italians for a job well done.

A few hours later, rumbling tummys, we kicked off dinner, we had a couple of beetroot that we'd pulled and wanted them to be the stars of the show.
What better way to cook beetroot than roasting. Nice and slowly, easy does it. So in goes, beets, shallots, new potatoes, garlic, rosemary and thyme, all from the garden.
Roasted for an hour and then some baby carrots from the garden right at the end for the last 20 minutes.
Doesn't look alot for the hour and a half work we put into it, but my goodness was it tasty. We put it all into a wrap with some greek yogurt mixed with a little parsley (which is our favourite dip at the moment) The beetroot was soooooooo sweet, the shallots all gooey and sweet and the potatoes divine with the rosemary and thyme. This was probably one of the best wraps I've ever had.

Roasted beetroot is the future.

Incy Wincy

I'm afraid this post doesn't have a picture to alleviate you from the visual banality of lines and lines of text, but for good reason I might add, you'll thank me for it, honestly you will.

Over the past 3 weeks we seemed to have had an influx of the eight-legged variety. It started off with each tomato plant harboring one, just little ones. I let them be for a while and now I've decided to start killing them all because I don't want to pick my tomatoes incase I have a spider crawl all over me! I've become quite a dab hand and squishing them with the snail picker which I might add must be the purchase of the century, multiple usage implement now.

So, the little ones by the tomatoes, yep, they've gone but the ones we're seeing in the garden now, they're very gradually, day by day getting bigger and bigger. Obviously they're coming from our shed, the darkest, web ridden place on earth, it's the Greenwich equivalent of a 2000ft deep cave in Borneo, probably...

So these big ladeez have been hiding in the shed all year and now they've done their hair, put on some lippy and are out and about parading themsevles for Mr.Spider. I don't like it. I don't like it one little bit.

And isn't it strange that the bigger a spider gets, the more freaked out you are about squishing it, as though it's going to turn round and start reasoning with you about the merits of an arachnid killing spree. I can see it's point, it's not like it's going to solve the worlds problems, Isreal and Palestine are not suddenly going to become best friends because there's no spiders left in the world, it's a silly thought and one not worth pursuing in the slightest. But ah-ha, then again, there's nothing like a common goal to get the peace process going...

Actually, I'm abit of wimp, I'm just gonna leave it there and hope it goes away! Or maybe I'll just throw lots of little bits of dirt into it's web so it runs around after them all and dies of exhaustion. Now that would be evil. MwahahahahahahHAHAHAH!

Pah – Moth Balls!

Well, look at this chappie. It seems our Basil is the popular place to be! I found her minding her own business on the Basil in the kitchen. Not sure what sort she is, could be Brown Rustic (Rusina ferruginea) as seen on the quite brilliant UK Moth ID site.

http://ukmoths.org.uk/show.php?id=3163

It has weird little spikes all over it if you look closely. Anyway, she's not laying any eggs on my lovely basil for her offspring to chomp their way through! So off she went, into the garden.

Tomatoes – Again!

One half of the Little Gardeners has been out of action this weekend due to a cortisone injection into my achillies tendon, ouch! But I just about managed to get some shots of our sumptuous tomatoes today. The reds are coming along nicely and we now even have some yellow's that are ripe and ready to eat which is great news.

Down with the Beets

Look at our lovely beetroot! We've only just noticed that you can see the tops of them now! I know it sounds silly to say, wow I can see the top of my beetroot, I mean, not exactly exciting is it? But when I think back to when we first planted these, tiny little seeds, all those months ago, to think that it could be this big now is pretty exciting to me.

The strangest thing though... we have a stowaway beetroot, whose shacked up with the spring onions!
We have no idea how it got there! The only possibly explanation is that a seed blew from the packet when I was planting them, but the timeline seems off, it's a little behind the others but maybe that's just to do with the fact that it had to germinate outside whereas the other fellas had a nice warm windowsill in the kitchen.

I'm tempted to pull one and have a little baby beetroot in a salad tonight. But maybe a couple more weeks so they can plump up abit more.

Can't wait for borscht soup.

The Sweetest Things

My my my. I've never tasted carrots so sweet, so delicately flavoured, so perfumed, so peppery. Every little crunch an explosion of orangeness.

I can guarantee that I will definitely, absolutely, most wonderfully be growing carrots every year.

The Hungry Caterpillar

Well, would you look at this cheeky chappy. Low and behold our Basil has been munched again! All of our Basil is indoors to try and stop it continually being bombarded by our little crawly friends and somehow this little fella has stowed away on the tray and has been happily munching away night after night.

I first noticed that a couple of the leaves had been eaten and thought maybe it was a couple of ants, as at first there wasn't too much damage. Then Saturday morning I came downstairs and he'd literally taken the tops of about 12 plants!
Look at the poor things! So I had a little scout around and the hungry caterpillar was hiding right at the back (well technically he was anything but hungry after a night of feasting on our Basil!). He was duly popped out into the front garden where he can much what he likes, plenty of weeds and ivy out there. Although I doubt they taste as good as young fresh basil! Well I hope he enjoyed it while it lasted.

The Basil seem to be recovering and I can see a few little green shoots this morning so hopefully they'll be fine. If anyone is Basil muching round here it's going to be us!

The Potato Saga Continues....

We harvested most of our potatoes this weekend just passed. Not because we wanted to, ideally we would've left them until August time but out of our 12 or so plants not one of them looked even remotely healthy. Originally we were just going to dig up the one plant we had in a container to see what was going on...
This is what the foilage looked like. On first glance it just looks like he's been munched a little (well a lot really...) but all of our plants were displaying similar traits and seeing as this plant was nowhere near the main patch we were a little worried that maybe our seed potatoes had been harbouring some sort of disease so we investigated by pulling this fella and this is what we found.
Euw. What's that? Well we had a look in a few books and we think it's Potato Scab. We're not sure which type though, there's the Common Scab or the Powdery Scab. We think it might be Powdery Scab. Here's a more detailed shot.
Still edible though which is good as it just affect the skins, just need an extra bit of peeling. Bit of a shame as I was looking forward to making some potato wedges but nevermind. Anyway, on pulling this lot we were now thinking that maybe our whole patch was suffering from scab so we decided to pull some plants from the main patch. Now this patch had been decimated, I mean truly decimated, we thought maybe by snails but honestly I can't see how a few snails could possibly cause this much devistation... but maybe they can?
As this was our first year of growing we didn't really plant the potatoes in a way that made them very accessible (lesson learnt for next year). Ideally we wanted to pull the plants at the back but we couldn't get to them! So we had to go for a couple at the front first.

We didn't really hold out much hope as a lot of the stems had actually withered away. But the first couple of plants had a few potatoes, some of a fairly good size. Not quite bakers but a good roasty. And surprisngly no scab, which was good. But the problem we did have that as huge as these plants once were, at their peak nearly 5ft tall they only had maybe four or five potatoes each. Very odd. So we thought that seeing as most of these plants were not going to survive much longer then what the heck, let's pull the majority of them and leave the healthiest ones to hopefully crawl along to August when we can hopefully get some bakers off them.

So there you go. Our first year of potatoes. Not terribly successful. But then again, not a complete disaster.

This time next year.... watch this space.

Carlsberg don't make deformed radishes. But if they did...

Possibly the ugliest radish ever? Maybe? I would say definitely. I know as organic gardeners you'll get a few mis-shapen veges and there's n0thing wrong with them but I dunno.... this just seemed a little wierd to me, it had roots starting to grow out of the fruit body.

Sorry. We couldn't bring ourslelves to eat it.

If anyone else has some deformed vege pictures, send them over, would love to see them! There's gotta be some funny carrots out there somewhere...

Bumper Harvest!

Check this out. We had a huge harvest yesterday! What a great looking bunch. In no particular order we had: lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, french beans, spring onions, parsley, chives, shallots and potatoes. A small selection can be seen above. Those carrots, they may look small (give em a chance! they are the baby variety) but my word they pack some flavour, they were divine, some were flowery, almost perfumed, some had a hint of pepper not unlike a radish but I can safely say all formed some of the best carrots I've ever tasted and we've got a load more outside!

Yesterday was probably the biggest harvest so far and we were both really chuffed with everything we'd picked. This is the best bit of the year, when all your hard work starts to pay off.

Long may it continue!

Red Red Red!

Horrah! Look at these beauties! Remember we were having trouble remembering which colour tomatoes we'd planted in the hanging baskets, well I would say this is pretty much conclusive evidence! I think a salad is on the menu for lunch today!

Corainder Seeds

If you've been reading our blog you're realise we've had abit of a non-Coriander year this year. When I say non-Corainder, that's abit of a fib, not completely, I mean we do have some Coriander, just not really edible Corainder. Our plant was looking wonderfully healthy but still a little on the small side so we decided to leave it a couple of weeks so it could flesh out a little and wouldn't mind being munched by us so much and in that time it decided it would run to seed. Ho hum... well not as bad as it sounds becuase Coriander seeds can still be used in cooking, particularly in middle-eastern receipes, curries and the like. Super.

It seems we harvest the seeds when they're just starting to turn to brown, cut the stem at the base of the plant and hang upside down in a brown paper bag until the seeds have dried then you can just shake them off the plant.

So all is not lost.

To Eat or Not to Eat

This is Borage, looks wonderful doesn't it. We planted these from seed, originally for the bees as we'd read in a few places that they're rather fond of these lovely purple flowers. It also happens to be an edible flower, you'll find the seeds in the herb section at the shops.

We thought they'd be dainty little plants but my goodness, they're rather thick and ungainly and I'll be honest, not that pretty as a plant. The flowers look lovely but they're tiny in comparison to the rest of the big huge thick stalked body!

So the question, to eat or not to eat! And when do you eat them? After they've been pollinated? It would seem silly for us to take all the time and effort to grow these for the bees and then gobble them all up before the bees get a look-in!

A google or two later...

• obviously, never use pesticides or any other chemicals on flowers you intend to eat.
• pick them just after they've opened and early morning is best when their water content is at it's highest.
• remove the stamen and pistal if any (the long wavy bits in the middle with pollen on the end) it's mostly the petals that are the edible part.
  
• wash carefully in cold water, adding a small amount of salt will help get rid of any insects who've made a home there.
• place them on some kitchen paper and allow to dry naturally. once dry they'll last up to 3 days if stored in the fridge.

Borage apparently has a cool cucmber taste and is great for punches, lemonades, G&T's, sorbets, chilled soups and dips.

Not that I ever need an excuse for a G&T...

The Prince's Rainforest Project

OK OK, so not technically a post related to our garden but it is a garden of sorts and an important one at that.

We watched Charlie delivering a great speech for the Dimbleby Lecture series on BBC last week. It was well scripted, expertely delivered and passiontely believed in. I think Charlie has sometimes been seen as a bit antiquated, he regularly speaks out against modern architecture and agricultural practices but he actually makes alot of sense, I think he's sometime seen out of context. He has some brilliant ideas that marry old and new.

Here is one of his current projects, please sign up.

Thanks

A Golden Touch

Some small compensation in light of yesterdays news about the potatoes is that the tomatoes have started to ripen off! I was getting a little worried as these fellas here have been growing for about eight weeks now. We still can't remember whether the ones in the hanging basket are the yellow or red variety but I would say from this picture maybe the yellows? We had trouble last year with the tomatoes not ripening but it seems that all is good this year.

If you do have trouble with your tomatoes not ripening there are a few tricks you can try;

• Put them into a paper bag with a ripe banana. The ethylene from the ripe banana will start them off.
  
• Store them in a cardboard box, in a cool moderately humid room. Cover them with newspaper and they should start to ripen off. Try not to overcrowd them as this might cause bruising and they'll start to rot.
• You could always make green tomato chutney, never tried it but is meant to be delicious!

So, hopefully the news this week will continue to be good, we'll have some lovely juicy tomatoes to eat with the lettuce that looks due to harvest this week and the potatoes will make a miraculous recovery? We shall see, watch this space.

Utter Devastation

My goodness. Our poor potatoes. Only last week I was telling everyone how healthy and green they were and look at them today, what a sorry state they're in.

Oh, and who per chance do you think the culprits are?! Our ever friendly garden snails who for some reason, seem to have it in for us.

I'm pretty gutted actually, I mean some of the plants are just decimated. And this has happened in the space of about a week. They've been munching at the leaves below everything so we hadn't really noticed what was going on and then all of a sudden there's a big gaping hole where literally the plants at the back have collapsed. I think we'll loose some, two plants if we're lucky but maybe more. Not sure what to do with them because if they've got potatoes under the ground they'll just rot. So I guess we'll have to dig them up, not going to be easy though because they're right at the back.

I've just picked out about 25 snails and was going to put down some organic pellets but I think I'll wait until the thunderstorms finish.

I hate these things more than ever now. I thought I'd got them under some sort of control but it seems they've just moved to a different part of the garden.

Yeah. So pretty gutted right now. And I'd really really like it to stop raining please, the snails don't need anything else to tempt them out of the dark danky holes they live in. If you could sort that for me that would be great. Thanks.

Flowering Coriander

Oh dear... this isn't what Coriander is meant to look like, is it?! Well I've just being doing a little research into it and this is what I found out.

• It's actually an annual plant so will usually germinate, flower, and die in one year
• It has a tendency to run to seed if stressed; this is where it flowers prematurely and develops seeds instead of growing lush foliage.
• It also doesn't like full sun as the heat triggers it to seed, I guess the incredibly hot past two weeks haven't helped then....

Oh what a shame, we were waiting for the plant to get abit more foilage before we started to pick at it but instead we've just waited too long and it's seeding. I've read in a couple of places that you can cut it right back which may help or alternatively we could collect the seeds as they can be used in cooking too.

We've got another 4/5 plants growing that are only small at the moment so maybe we'll use this one for seeds.

The leeks get a makeover

Believe it or not there is a row of leeks in this picture, you'd never guess! They've been overrun of late with nyjer seed from the bird feeder. I'm afraid Gary the Goldfinch is a little messy and the seeds get everywhere, give them a few days, some nice bright sunshine like this week and they thrive. This was our nyjer jungle just an hour ago, after about three weeks without a weed. So on come the gloves and hey presto, look at the leeks now, pristine!

Amazing what an hour can do. Give it three weeks and it'll be back to the first picture again. I've always had this issue with bird seed but never found a way to get round it. Our feeders are on a pole and we thought maybe putting a conical contraption at the bottom of it to catch the seed could maybe help but then the wind just blows it all around the garden. I guess it's just one of those things you have to put up with if you want to feed the birds. I'm not complaining, I love watching the birdies from my window, an hours weeding seems a small price to pay.

Oh and in the picture as well you can see lots of garden canes which we've dotted around the leeks to stop the local cats from digging them up. Works really well.

Busy Bees (and Wasps)

We only moved into our house in September of last year so the current plants in the garden were abit of a surprise, none more so than the wonderful rose we have growing along the whole length of the garden fence. It's just beautiful, I thought for the past 2 weeks that it's actually our neighbours! But no, it's ours and lovely it is too.

It's absolutely bursting with flowers and the bees and wasps are having a brilliant time collecting little bundles of pollen.


You can see the little balls of pollen on his legs. I'd never seen this until a few weeks ago, they actually carry it around on their legs! Brilliant. So I was standing outside this morning watching them all go about their business and wondering whether you could see when a flower has been pollinated. On a closer inspection you can, it's pretty obvious, well I think anyway.

Here's a shot of flower that's had it's pollen collected.

And here's one yet to be harvested.

Well that's what I think anyway? I would say this is a pretty good assumption? Either way, our little buzzing friends are being kept busy and very happy they are too.