Baby broad beans, busy bees, not red currants, and other stories

Posted by louisa on Friday 27 May 2011 in growing | 4 comments

Last night, when I got back from my almost-dusk walk with Lily-dog, I spent a good 15 minutes tying broad bean plants to their bean poles. I did the same job a few weeks ago but the broad bean plants had decided to have a bit of a grow since then. Somehow though, when I was busy with the beans last night, I failed to spot an array of these bad boys almost the flowers:

I’m not alone in getting overly-excited about the first spotting of each different type of fruit/veg, am I?

I turned around from taking that photo to spot a bee getting busy on my not-red-currants:

I got the not-red-currants in a batch of super cheap soft fruit from Aldi in January, along with some raspberries and black currants. I’m guessing they were mislabelled and I’ve got raspberries where I thought I’d have red currants and vice versa. The not-red-currants:

Raspberries? Could be blackberries as blackberry canes were in other sets – but seems a bit earlier for blackberry fruit. I’d prefer it not to be blackberries as we’ve loads of wild ones nearby but whatever, I’m easy. I’m surprised to see these fruiting this year though, whatever they are.

In my life

Posted by louisa on Thursday 26 May 2011 in meta | 1 comment

I’m not really one for memes but I do like these quick summary ones that Debbie does:

Outside my window the sky has been mostly grey but lower down, the vista is green, green, green.

I am thinking about what our younger drama group would enjoy doing for their summer showcase this year: something to challenge & stretch them as well as be fun. I’ve been looking for scripts and feeling half-inspired to write something myself (but not for performance this year – too short of a time frame!).

I am thankful for the rain – and John’s help getting the washing in when the showers started.

From the kitchen pate on toast for lunch, pasta with tuna & tons of veg for dinner. Surprisingly few snacks!

I am wearing my big green hoodie. Not flattering but warm and comfy.

I am creating some 3D room designs and working on some ideas for artwork for our soon-to-be new utility room. (We’re finally converting the coal hole we found last year – expensive but it should be very much worth it.)

I am going to bed very shortly as it’s nearly 11pm and

I am reading Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld – one of my favourite books. In a parallel universe, I am American and went to boarding school – and Sittenfeld stole my diary. Such attention to detail and wonderfully drawn characters.

I am hoping that I can write something half as good as that one day.

I am hearing the builders singing along to the radio and making jokes. (Well, that’s what I was hearing for most of the day, right now I’m hearing a cat meowing to get my attention.)

Around the house there is a lot of dust!

One of my favourite things an almost-dusk walk around the woods with Lily-dog. We met some ducks, the chocolate lab with the white splodge on his nose and a very excitable cocker spaniel. Two horses – one white, one brown – were in the field, contrasting to the yellow-speckled green blanket underfoot.

A few plans for the rest of the week I want to try to get into the garden to build something tomorrow and also pot on/plant out some more plants. I’d like to go to the Saltaire Arts Trail over the weekend if possible but I’m also aware that we have work to do here and at the house we’re finally (hopefully) selling. I would like curry to feature at some point in the forthcoming long weekend too. Mmm curry.

What’s going on in your life?

This week’s meal plan

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 24 May 2011 in weekly meal plans | 0 comments

A late start on this one since we were away – I did write a meal plan for our camping trip but since we cut it short and rain-stopped-bbq-play another evening, it seems a bit pointless to post it. It was very useful to have though to know what we should with us.

Tuesday lunch – bread & ham
Tuesday dinner – chicken risotto with salad

Wednesday lunch – pate on toast (for me); ham sandwich (John)
Wednesday dinner – pasta with tuna, sweetcorn, olives & chillis

Thursday lunch – curried egg mayo with bread/toast
Thursday dinner – (John out) leftover risotto (hopefully!) or jacket potato, with salad

Friday lunch – samosas with salad
Friday dinner – warm chorizo & poached egg salad, with new potatoes

Growing faster, growing slower

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 24 May 2011 in growing | 3 comments

As I mentioned in my camping post earlier today, I spent the whole day before we went away playing in the garden so my plants would hopefully be ok home alone for four days and to catch up on everything I hadn’t done the previous weekend.

It was a good day – I weeded, I dug, I potted on, I planted out and even though I told myself I wouldn’t, I sowed more stuff (more salad/lettuce and some beans). I was a bit nervous about the stuff I planted out (a few courgettes, a few achocha and pumpkins – one of which is pictured above) because I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on them over the weekend but I desperately needed the space in the greenhouse. Everything seems to be doing ok today. I also planted out the hop seedlings Su sent me (thanks Su!) – they’re settling in well too and I’m hoping they’ll be a climbing layer for my mini-forest garden.

In the greenhouse, I also potted on a good number of tomatoes into their final pots – and realised quite how many more tomato pots I’ll need (although I do hope to plant some outside too). I think tomatoes are the only thing I’ve over sown – I’ve got too many of them really but not too-many too-many so it’s manageable, and there is really no such thing as surplus tomatoes, is there? I can almost see the tomato plants growing and they surprise me every time I see them because they look so sturdy, healthy and tall enough to block out the sun… ;)

Along with the tomatoes, some of our crops are going much better than I expected: our potatoes have shot up and I’ve had to earth them up twice already – I’m near at the top of some of the bags/pots. Our squash (summer squash – courgettes/zucchini – and winter squash, butternut and pumpkins) are looking very healthy indeed, hence planting some of them out the other day. The cucumbers (particularly the first batch) are flowering, the buds forming on our rapini/broccoli raab and the achocha (achocha! *jazz hands*) are climbing their way up everything around them (again, hence planting some of those out before they ensnared the whole greenhouse).

But other things though are taking a lot longer to do anything. I’m genuinely shocked that we haven’t had any lettuce or salad leaves from the garden yet* – at this rate we might have potatoes before a head of lettuce – and as I lamented on Jono’s blog the other day, our radishes are pathetic (this isn’t a new thing, they always seem to stagnate for some reason). Our leeks shot up but don’t seem to have done anything for the last fortnight (I know they’re slow growing but they seem like they’ve stopped growing…). Everything’s growing in decent compost and I don’t think it’s a case of overcrowding/too small growing space for any of those things but I’m going to pot on the leeks just in case and I’ve started more salad in new pots, sown incredibly thinly, just in case that is the problem.

How does your garden grow? Is your growing on track for this year?

* We did buy some growing salad trays from the supermarket a month or so ago, and have been regularly pillaging them for cut-and-come-again leaves but we’ve really just been keeping them alive rather than growing-growing them.

Camping in Cumbria

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 24 May 2011 in admin | 3 comments

Apologies for the lack of posts of late – we had four days camping planned for over the weekend and I spent Thursday preparing the garden for four days by itself, so was too tired to post that evening. I’d hoped that I’d come back with lots of post ideas – frugal holidays! ace walks! foraging! exciting stories of catching our dinner flyfishing! – but it didn’t quite work out as planned… We had one fine evening but after the 24 hours of constant rain and strong winds that followed, we decided enough was enough and came home.

We’d been wanting to try camping for a while – neither of us had been camping for more than a decade but it seemed cheap, Lily-dog friendly and could be somewhere pleasantly remote (three things we like in holidays). A couple of weeks ago, back when it was still sunny and warm, I booked us into Low Wray campsite in the Lake District, using Eurocamp. It would have cheaper to have booked directly with the campsite but since it was our first time, we decided to go with Eurocamp — it’s the camping equivalent of renting a fully equipped self-catering cottage and meant we didn’t have to buy a whole load of equipment for an experimental, possibly-one-off trip.

Low Wray is a lovely woodland site – right next to the lake on the Western shore, about four miles south-ish from Ambleside, surrounded by grazing land. It’s owned by the National Trust and aside from the (newly refurbished) toilet blocks & gravel paths for cars, it does feel like you’re camping in a copse in the middle of nowhere. There are some lakeside pitches, some woodland ones (including some pretty remote/hidden ones and the Eurocamp block) and some more meadowland ones (including a tipi field). A really nice place – and I would recommend it if you like camping.