Through the garden gate

This week I am joining with Sarah at Down by the Sea for her monthly garden slot--'Through the Garden Gate'. In this slot you are invited through the gate into my garden.

This is the gate which leads out of my garden, but I thought I would show it to you as I rather like this view. Of course the photo  was taken in the summer, but it's good to remind myself in the dreary winter months when there's not much colour in the garden that things do get better.

As we move through February and into March I am now looking forward to new growth in the garden. I am also thinking about new projects and plans I have for this year.

It's taken me a few weeks but I have finally finished clearing the borders of all the dead plant material in both the front and back gardens. The work never ends though, I'm sure in a week or two I will be starting again with the weeding. As I worked in the borders I noticed areas which needed re planning, some of them I have been thinking about for a while and am not sure what to do about them.  They keep getting put off each year.

In the front garden there is a bed where at the end of last year we removed a couple of very old and tired looking hydrangeas and lots of crocosmias. Crocosmias are really difficult to get rid off so I know they will keep reappearing . But I now have a big space in this bed and I'm wondering what to plant there.

At the moment I am enjoying the spots of colour coming from the tete a tete daffodils, but as I look around I can see other flowers just starting to open up. There's pulmonaria, anemone blanda and vinca-- lots of blue. Also there's a euphorbia with yellow bracts providing a bit of brightness in the shady areas. The back garden has a lot of shade and I have to work with that and just see what will grow. Spring  is usually a good time for these areas, before the trees get into full leaf.

cyclamen and snowdrops in a shady spot

Here's another gate in my garden. it leads into what we call the woodland garden.  There's only one tree, a lime tree but it's big and so the area gets very shady in the summer.  I've got three white foxgloves  to plant which a gardening friend grew from seed.  I think they will look lovely in the woodland garden later in the year.  In the meantime the daffodils and crocus are looking good.

The last of the parsnips

 
I dug up the last of the parsnips from the allotment last week and had just enough to make some parsnip soup.

A few years ago, out walking near Settle we stopped for a soup and sandwich lunch at a pub.I didn't realise until after the order had been placed that the soup was curried parsnip. This did not appeal to me at all as I am not a fan of curry, but by then it was too late to cancel the order. I was very pleased to find that the soup was really delicious.

I have since found a recipe for curried parsnip soup and it has become a favourite in our house. With just a hint of spice it is a very warming winter soup.

Curried Parsnip Soup

40g  butter
1 medium onion skinned and sliced
700 g parsnips, peeled and finely diced
2 or 3 small potatoes (optional)
5ml curry powder
2.5ml ground cumin
1.4 litres chicken or vegetable stock
salt and freshly ground black pepper
5 fl oz fresh single cream (optional)

paprika to garnish

1. Melt the butter in a large pan, add the onions, parsnips and potatoes, stir round to coat in the buttery juices and cook very gently with the lid on for about 3 minutes.
2. Stir in the curry powder and cumin and cook for a further 2 minutes.
3. Add the stock, bring to the boil, reduce heat and simmer covered for about 45 minutes until the vegetables are tender.
4. Cool slightly then whizz in a blender until smooth
5. Return to the pan. Adjust seasoning, add more stock if it is too thick. Add cream if using, reheat very gently. Serve sprinkled with paprika.

NB. The potatoes help to thicken the soup, but if you like a thinner soup you can leave them out

Garden calling

The garden has been calling me for a week or two now. But I have been neglecting it and giving all the attention to the allotment. Not that this time of year and the current weather conditions are really gardening weather. But a gardener will always find something that needs to be done. Having spent most of January doing jobs around the allotment I decided that I needed to give some time to the garden. The garden does tend to take second place to the allotment, but it's good to see that it can look after itself for a lot of the time.

In the autumn I cut back some of the very messy looking dead plants and left the rest--the grasses and seed heads, to give some interest through the winter and provide homes for insects and food for the birds  I decided that now was the time to finally cut back these plants and get ready for spring. I was glad to cut the grasses down, there were bits of dried grass blowing about all over the garden. Not sure if that was the result of the winter storms or Holly the cat who likes to roll about in them. Holly supervised as I worked and was probably a bit miffed that I had destroyed her playground. The birds might feel a bit more secure now that she can't hide behind clumps of plants as she likes to do, ready to pounce.

The garden looks a bit flat now, but soon new shoots will be appearing and the empty areas of the borders will fill up. As I cut back I discovered some treasures-- snowdrops, narcissi, crocus. I also found a lovely pink hellebore flowering for the first time since I bought it from a charity plant stall two years ago. The  hamamelis, otherwise known as witch hazel is now flowering. It's yellow spidery flowers are a welcome bit of colour at this time of year.  I  potted up some tete a tete narcissi into small pots to display on the garden table.  These can  be seen from the house and look brighter every day as a few more flowers open up.

As I worked on the borders, Richard dug out some compost from the compost bins.  He managed to fill an old dustbin. My next job after I have finished clearing all the borders of debris will be to mulch the borders with compost or leaf mould, but I will need more than a dustbin full of compost for that.

Seedy jobs

The weather is showing no signs of improvement and I wonder if it will ever stop raining. As the wind was howling outside and the rain battering against the windows at the weekend I decided a good rainy day activity would be to sort out my very untidy box of seed packets. It took nearly all day, but I now have a neatly filed box, a seed list on computer and a long list of new seeds to buy for this year. Very organised, I thought!

Holly was keen to stop me from working

 I will need to be starting off seeds very soon and I am so pleased that our allotment greenhouse is now fully assembled and it looks great. I couldn't wait to get something in there and before Richard had cleared away all his tools, I had put in some trays of spring cabbage seedlings which I started off late summer and seemed a bit slow to grow. They had been living in the shed.  I'm  sure that before long I will be running out of greenhouse space.  This little greenhouse will not be big enough for all the growing we will be doing, so Richard's next project is to build a bigger growhouse type of structure next to it. This is what he was planning to do all along.

My next job is to go shopping for vegetable seeds and get some seed trays washed.

Pottering around the plot

strawberries all over the place

At the allotment in the last few weeks whilst Richard has been putting up the new green house, I have been pottering around doing other things. Pottering around is about all I can do at the moment with the damp weather. 

The fruit bed badly needs sorting out. The strawberry runners are all over the place, but the ground is still too wet at the moment to do any digging up. I managed to tidy up the strawberries in the bath and that looks much better.

a bath full of strawberries

The rhubarb which had been on Helen's old plot got dug up before Christmas and I left the crowns until I had more time to divide and pot up. They have now started to show signs of new growth, so I spent some time splitting them up into smaller plants and potting up. I was amazed at how big and woody the roots are. I have planted some on the allotment and given some away to friends but there are still rather a lot left.

just a few of the rhubarb plants

I didn't get chance to clean out the wildlife pond in the autumn, so that's another job I've done in the last couple of weeks. Armed with rubber gloves I got down on my hands and knees, scooped out the leaves, dead plant foliage and some of the silt from the bottom. A week later there was even more silt so I was back doing it all again. The silt is coming down the drain into the pond from the plot above us and with all the rain we have had recently there is  more coming down the drain than usual. I know that a certain amount of silt is needed for the pond creatures, but this is a bit excessive, I want a pond not a bog.  So my next plan is to empty the pond of all the plants and rocks, so that I can get more of the silt out and then start again with a fairly clean pond. That's if it doesn't rain too much.

murky overflowing pond

A wet plot and a new greenhouse

A new year on the allotment and there's lots to plan and look forward to. Now we just have one allotment to look after there is a sense of relief as we go down there and walk past the old plot. I must admit though there was one moment last week when we arrived at Plot 8 to find water pouring out through the gate and puddling on the beds and paths that I wondered if we had chosen the wrong plot out of the two to keep. But after scooping out the debris from the drain at the top of the plot, the water started to clear a bit. A couple of days later it had all cleared and we had a reasonably dry plot. With all the rain at the moment it will never get completely dry. 

With bad weather around there's not a lot can be done on the allotment but  this is the time of year when less urgent and  maintenance jobs can be done. It's the time to mend the fence or build new compost bins.  On our plot, as well as sorting out the drains, Richard has started work on building a greenhouse. This is a small greenhouse which we got for free from our grandson's school. The door was bent after damage from vandals, but that was easily put right. We spent a cold day last November in the school playground dismantling it. Since then it has been stored in our garage waiting for suitable weather to assemble it.

Finally the storms and heavy rains have eased off and given way to drier, colder weather.  Knowing that in a few weeks time I will be needing space to start off seeds under cover, Richard got started on the greenhouse. It is going where the old plastic growhouse was and the winter storms very kindly saved us the job of taking it down ourselves! The original base had started to rot so we replaced the wood. It's a bit of a puzzle remembering where all the pieces go back together, but Richard seems to know what he is doing, so I'm letting him get on with it. I'm sure he'll have it finished in no time.

Goodbye Plot10b

 It's New Year's Eve and as always people look back on the year just gone and wonder what lies ahead. The last year has not been a good one for me and I'm glad to see the back of it.

At the allotment though, things have been good. Today we did our final clearing up on Plot 10b getting it ready to hand the keys over to the new tenants. And I find myself looking back, not on the last year but the last three and a half years since we took the allotment on. I think we are glad to see the back of plot 10b too and are looking forward to having just the one allotment to look after now.  But although it's been hard work we have enjoyed making it into a workable allotment, it's been a great challenge and we've learnt such a lot.

Some before pictures:

It was my daughter Helen's plot, but we all mucked in to help when she took it on. It was in a terrible state, it had been used to keep chickens and had not been cultivated.  People told us the soil would be good because of all the chicken poo, but we found no evidence of any soil enriched by chicken poo, just heavy, wet, solid clay.  There were three chicken sheds and a big cabin.  We kept two of the sheds and used the materials from the other two to make compost bins, raised beds and a growhouse. Richard did all the heavy building work, Helen's husband David dug beds over and made bonfires of all the rubbish. Helen and I weeded, dug over and made plans. The grandchildren helped when they felt like it or just had a great time playing in the mud.

About nine months later as Plot 10b was starting to look good, I was offered an allotment myself next door but two to Helen's.  So we started the hard work all over again. It was a different sort of plot, but still another big challenge. In the last year though, Helen's work commitments have increased and she is not able to give as much time to the allotment, so she decided to give it up and help me with mine when she is able to.

Allotments are hard work and we feel pleased that we have transformed such a derelict piece of land into a useful growing space. Because we recycled a lot of materials already on the plot we had very little expenses too. We hope now that the new tenants will have a good start to their growing year. We are looking forward to concentrating our efforts on Plot 8.

Thank you to all who follow and comment on my blog. I wish you all a happy and productive growing year in 2016.

Plot 10b looking transformed: