Category: The Garden

The Garden, Foraging and More

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I haven’t updated in a long time and where better to begin a new post, than the garden?

Not a lot has changed. We’ve filled up our ‘Kitchen Garden’ area now and I’ve make a little sign too (I will go into more detail in another post) and added a couple more decorative plants too.

The rhubarb planted earlier in the year has now reached a sort of monstrous climax in its growing. I can’t wait to pick it, but I have to, because we need to leave it alone for at least a year to let the crown establish, or two years if we can control ourselves. Hopefully, then the rhubarb will last a long time and be really productive.

Kitchen Garden in early summer

It’s not just the rhubarb, the whole kitchen garden has started to grow wildly out of control. The dill and fennel are just being ridiculous and all of the mint is greedily occupying any space it can find.  The rosemary has started to surpass the rather slow growing bay tree and the lemon verbena is just starting to show off. All the while the sage has died under the suffocating presence of the nasturtium and the rambunctious pineapple sage which we planted more recently has flourished.

I find this often happens to me. I get seeds or small plants and micromanage their first few months and once they start to establish I tend to leave them alone, then one day I’ll walk out of my door into a jungle.

Well, apart from my deceased sage plant, the only thing that isn’t having a good time is the thyme. It’s been a bit slow in growing and now it’s got hardly any light, not dead though, so that’s a plus.

We’ve planted some thorn-less blackberry plants and three new kinds of strawberries between the rhubarb and the herbs, and they’re all doing quite well.

I also have two rather nice pineberry plants out the back. Frustratingly I thought they’d died when I was growing them from seed, so I just tipped out the plant onto a patch that had been dug up and saved the pot. However a couple weeks later I noticed new growth on the plant and decided to put some compost around the roots. It’s done exceedingly well and I’ve had quite a few (albeit very teeny) pineberries, and they’re very tasty. I’ve been waiting for it to send out little creepers like the rest of my strawberries so I could pot it and move it into the kitchen garden. Alas, it has decided not to send any out. I’ll just have to order some seeds again in the new year.

Lupins, Geums, Delphiniums, Thistles, Lavender and our NEW(ish) DOOR (and windows)!  Early Summer

The weather has been a bit challenging for the other plants in my garden. The delphiniums were just snapped in half with the strong winds earlier in the year. The broken bits made it into a jug and lived for about a week in the house, which was nice. They grew back again, and I cut them back once they died and they came back again but haven’t really flowed as nicely.

The lupins have had an aphid problem this year (as did the nasturtium ). They put on a spectacular show at the beginning of the year though.  I have also added some ‘Totally Tangerine’ geums which set off the purple plants nicely, as well as a couple of violent magenta thistles which the bees love. Another new addition is the buddleja in ‘black knight’ in the front garden.  We’re hoping it’s going to grow well behind a wall and to block out the neighbours a little bit as well as attract a lot of butterflies.

Last weekend, we were excited to discover that a tree that overhangs into our garden is, in fact, Elder. I have to admit that I’ve never paid much attention to the creamy umbels before nor the black berries on it. Paul happened to notice them as we were cutting the grass recently and got just a little bit excited and marched outside with a couple of our plant books and a camera, and I picked off a leaf and used my ‘British Trees’ app to identify it.

Paul in particular is now excited thinking about all the things we could make: Elder-flower cordial,  elderberry and apple pie and the list goes on…

We both really enjoy foraging, or maybe the thought of foraging? As we very rarely do it, although we do have some literature on the subject.

We recently (in July) had a week long stay in Cornwall on holiday and a couple of weeks before we went, we saw The Lost Gardens of Heligan were hosting a foraging event ‘Wild Food Wild Walk; with Emma Gunn’ (from Never Mind the Burdocks) . The event was £20 each but also included entrance to the gardens which is ordinarily £14.50 each anyway. We booked it in advance, afraid that it would be overrun with people trying to go last minute, but we were in for a treat.

Garlic mustard pesto and pickled wild garlic seed pods with Honeysuckle cordial

We got there on the day only to discover it was just Paul and I on the tour with Emma.  It was a fantastic day, the tour lasted around 2 hours and at the end Emma brought out some food she’d made from foraged plants. There was gluten free Hogweed seed, cherry and almond cake, garlic mustard pesto and  pickled unripe Ramson seed pods as well as a honeysuckle cordial, all of it was delicious but in particular the wild garlic seed pods and the cordial. Unfortunately we were so preoccupied with stuffing our faces with cake, we didn’t get a picture.

We also made sure to buy both of her books in the Heligan gift shop before we left and eagerly await the next.

Some of things we ate include: Unripened Hazelnuts (which I actually prefer over ripe ones); Bamboo shoots; Day Lilies; Nettles; Hogweed seed; Navelwort; Primrose leaf; Garlic Mustard; Comfrey; Nectar of Fuchsias; Mallow flower; and Sorrel leaves. There were many other too but I can’t remember the names of a lot of them off the top of my head.

I’n the future I think we both want to have the confidence to experiment a little with foraged foods (whether from the garden or further afield). In particular, Paul is eager to learn to make different cordials – so that’s always a good place to start.

The Great Outdoors

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We’ve had a highly-concentrated flurry of work being done on the house. In the last couple of months, we’ve had more done than possibly the last year. Although this has been good for getting work done it means I haven’t had much of a chance to post an update in a while, but hopefully this will be the first of a few as I catch up.

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Firstly, we’ve had a lot of work going on in the gardens. We’ve finally had the fence in the back garden put up, so next door can’t just wander in (which their dog and children tended to do). And the wall at the back has been re-rendered on the bad parts, and since the weather has been so good recently, I even got round to pressure washing it and slapping on a few coats of paint.

Please excuse my sexy DIY clothes

Please excuse my sexy DIY clothes

We continue to prevail in our ongoing battle with the unrelenting tentacles of ivy which seem to be trying to drown every solid fixture in the garden – but the war continues.

I’ve painted the wall with Sandtex’s ‘Chalk Hill’ it’s a grey so light that’s almost white, but it’s a little less bland. It was a lighter colour than I thought it would be but I’m happy with it, and it’s certainly better than the semi-attempt at graffiti that was there.

We’re having more trouble on trying to decide what colour to paint the fence, however. I like the natural colour but am happy to paint the fence either a cream or grey or green (to match our new front door!) but Paul disagrees.

It’s not just the back garden that’s been getting all of the attention.

I’ve planted some delphiniums in place of where last year’s foxgloves were. One was completely chomped down by slugs overnight and has now been replaced by a new one I bought today (and now surrounded by slug pellets). I replaced one of the lupins that didn’t come back from last year. I’ve also put in a couple of anemones to fill two gaps beside the lupins. But the lavenders are still going strong for now.

A few months after we first moved in, Paul cut down all of the useless bushes along the long patch of soil running down the side of the house. Although it opened the area up, we didn’t do much more with it, until now. We pulled up all of the horrible stones that covered it and discovered that the previous occupants hadn’t bothered using proper ground sheets to stop weeds from coming up, but just used the bags that the stones had come in, and then filled in the gaps with reems of Sainsbury’s plastic bags (classy!).

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Once we’d removed all of that, we dug out the rotting roots, and have started to plan and even plant some new things. The whole raised area is reserved for edible plants. At the moment it’s mainly made up of a lot of herbs but we also planted  a couple of rhubarb plants in February at the shaded end, having successfully grown rhubarb at our old flat.

All of this garden work means we have learnt a few things, and one thing is that the soil is a bit rubbishy. We have a heavy clay soil which makes it really hard to dig down deep but is also very stoney – although we try to pick out all of the stones we encounter it’s made even more difficult by the fact the clay soil solidifies when it’s exposed to the air for too long. We also found that the the area between the old fence we tore down last year and the wall that we can now see, was used as a dumping ground by previous occupants, meaning we found some lovely items, including motorcycle parts, lighters, bottles and bags of retro food packaging. It’s a bit like Time Team, but it over covers a couple of decades, although Paul was quite good at identifying old sweet wrappers and bottles from the 90’s.

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We’ve taken many bags full of stones, bricks, and other crap to the local recycling centre, which they charge for, so it’s been an expensive clean up. But it’s considerably clearer now and today we bought six large bags of soil conditioner and have tried to cover and mix it with our front garden soil in the hopes it will improve the quality and make planting/growing things a lot easier. Fingers crossed. We’ve also ripped out even more of the plants and bushes that were just growing around the place. Thankfully the recycling centre don’t charge for this, because we have taken car-loads of the stuff recently, and although we have started using our beehive shaped composter, it’s already full just with grass cutting.

Despite all of these changes, our garden has been a bit bird crazy recently. We always try and have bird food out anyway, but in previous years the bits we’ve put out have been ignored by the local wildlife. But when we noticed a couple of birds that kept visiting us, we bought some more and then suddenly it’s escalated to flocks of sparrows, at least a couple of blue tits and a great tit, two black birds, a fat wood pigeon, and two magpies. we’ve been having to fill the feeder up every day with suet pellets and seeds (although looking at the floors around the feeder, they don’t seem to like black sunflower seeds, so they are probably getting through it so quickly just so they can get to the bits they actually like). We’ve since purchased a water feeder as well as several other little feeding areas for them all.

Today we’ve bought a sparrow bird house and Paul’s climbed on top of the utility roof to put it in a warm but protected area. We probably won’t see anything this year, but fingers cross for the coming years.

The Times, They Are A-Changin’

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I can’t believe it’s September! How time has flown.  Very little has happened in the last few months, but it was a hive of activity the Monday before last.

On Monday 22nd we had a lady from ‘Hi-tech Drains’ around to find out where the drains in our back garden lead to and two fireplace men who are fitting the fireplace in the bedroom and readying the living room for a log burner.  We had the electrician around again the week before to tidy up a few loose ends.  Now that the bedroom fireplace is fitted, we are ready for the plasterer again and hopefully to start some decorating in the living room too.

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Hi Tech Drains

The drains are the most important as they will affect where the extension can be built. We actually have two manholes in our garden but some of our drains actually use another which we share with a neighbour. The engineer noted how strange this was, but it ‘s only to be expected with all of the other weird and wonderful quirks of the house.

The main drain that we are interested in goes into the neighbours garden which is where it becomes property of Southwest Water because it’s then shared. If it’s shared then there are a lot of rules about building near it but we are hoping that if we divert the water from that particular manhole into another one instead then technically it isn’t used by us and then it’s the neighbour’s private drains and pipes which means that we should be able to build where we like. We will have to check that this is the case though as it’s bound to be more complicated than it really needs to be.

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We had a surveyor around last week who took some detailed measurements of both the house and the markings left by the drain engineer, which the architect will use to make some detailed drawings for us, then we can discuss what we can do in regards to the drains.

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The fireplaces is something that has been needed for about a year, particularly downstairs where the hole in the wall is a constant eyesore and something that makes me really want the work to progress because i was getting very fed up of looking at it everyday. Though I have been told that I’m not allowed a log burner this year because there are more pressing jobs that we wouldn’t be able to afford if we had one put in 🙁

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Paul wasn’t having much luck pulling the tree stump out

We’ve done some work in the garden, too. A lot of work actually, but you wouldn’t know it just by looking. We’ve had countless trips to the dump – which luckily isn’t far from our house. We’ve fully removed the back fence now and waged war upon the ivy which had taken over everything; it’s slowly diminishing but isn’t dead yet. We’ve added a few square meters onto our garden just by removing the back fence and cutting down the bushes.  I did an absolutely sterling job of trimming the hedges that were hanging over from the neighbour’s garden (if I do say so myself). I’ve encountered so many spiders that I can now confidently kill any that are smaller than my little finger nail.

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The face of victory

Paul has successfully managed to pull out the stump of the tree that we cut down. It was tough work which involved digging down a foot or so and cutting through the roots before finally prying it out of the ground.  We also have a series of concrete posts in our garden which we intend to take out – all still strung with thick wire rope and a mesh fence – it’s a pain because the ivy is all entwined and it’s hard work trying to remove it.  We’ve used copious amounts of weedkiller and yet it hasn’t really had an impact on it.

The garden is no longer recognisable as the garden that it once was. Not that it looks good at the moment, just bigger. I do have a few ideas for the garden but it’ll be a long time before they’re acted upon.

A rough idea of the future of our garden

A rough idea of the future of our garden

Within the house, we have made the grim discovery that we have metal door frames throughout. For those of you who are unaware of metal door frames – count yourselves lucky.  Initially it didn’t mean much to me, I just thought we could take them off and replace them with wooden ones.  Metal door frames, however, actually support the structure and if you remove them you need to put in lintels above your door.  In all, the easiest thing to do is to keep them and when we swap around the doors someone will need to use an angle grinder to cut out new holes for the hinges. Hopefully we can discuss that with a builder when they come over next.

In other news, our court case is ongoing and long winded – as we knew it would be. We are determined though to get our hard-earned money back into our possession in order to continue planning our extension. Bad times, my friend, bad times 🙁

After talks with some professionals, it seems that our builders have also under-quoted us which means that the extension is going to be put on hold for a bit longer, we will continue to work towards it but it won’t actually be started for a while now. At least we know now, rather than when it’s too late.