Taking a close look

Here is a little collection of close-up photos taken in my garden over the last few days.

The simple beauty of the daffodil is hard to beat...

The Golden Hop is growing rapidly, and you can already see the glorious contrast provided by the fresh yellow leaves against the deep Burgundy stems. These things grow at a rate of about an inch a day!

The apple tree's buds are opening quickly too.



This is Euphorbia - with a stray Dogwood twig that didn't want to be left out of the picture...

The Comfrey is poking its head up too. I only let this grow in the least attractive part of my garden, underneath the "Fish" tree, surrounded by compost bins. It survives in places where any other plant would fail.

This is Sprouting Broccoli "White Eye", beginning to form some shoots. It is a fair way behind its Purple cousins - which suits me fine since it extends the harvesting season. I just love the complex "swirly" nature of the leaves in this picture.

This is a little leaf of my new fern "Dryopteris Erythrosora".



And this my new Cornus Kesselringii.

Here is the last of my Cavolo Nero plants. You may recall that I deliberately left this one so that it would produce its flower buds, just like Sprouting Broccoli. You can see how the little shoots form in the leaf axils. The picture makes them look quite big, but in actual fact they are tiny, and all the shoots from the whole plant will probably only add up to one serving for two people.

This is Red-veined Sorrel. I grew it from seed last year (it was marketed as a Baby Leaf Salad ingredient), and I now have several clumps of it. It grows very slowly, but it's worth the wait.

Finally for today, here's the little Pulmonaria that "volunteered" itself last year. It's still tiny, because it is growing right under the big Bay tree, where it gets hardly any light, but I think it is very attractive. I may decide to move it to somewhere better...



Isn't it strange that this plant produces flowers of two different colours? Not flowers WITH two different colours, which is common enough...

Broccoli with chorizo and boiled eggs

This is another brilliant way to eat Purple Sprouting Broccoli, which is at its best in my garden right now. This is a recipe idea from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's book "River Cottage Everyday".

Basically all you have to do is skin the chorizo (or any other nice type of sausage), cut it into bite-sized chunks and fry it until it is crisp (about 10 minutes); boil some eggs (they should be fully set, but not really hard-boiled - perhaps about 4 -5 minutes); steam some broccoli (about 3 minutes), and combine the whole lot, serving it with whatever you consider to be a suitable accompaniment - maybe some nice bread, some pasta or some rice. The only difficult aspect of all this is to co-ordinate the cooking of the three main ingredients so that they are ready at the same time. Sprouting broccoli cooks really quickly and it is easy to over-cook it. For some reason it also seems to go cold very rapidly once cooked, so I would recommend getting everything else cooked and ready to go first (don't forget that peeling the boiled eggs may take at least a couple of minutes), then cooking the broccoli at the last minute, and serving it immediately.

Here's a picture of the main ingredient, shortly after harvesting... This was about 400g.

Here's the finished dish (hurriedly photographed before being devoured...)



This recipe is very easy to do, and the taste combination works really well. I would think that it would also be fine with bacon instead of the chorizo - or even black pudding!

P.S. Thanks to those of you offered their advice to me on the subject of photographing blue things. And just in case you were wondering, the vivid purple colour of the broccoli in my first picture above is NOT artificial!

Some new arrivals

Last week I took delivery of some new plants. This is actually a fairly rare event for me, since I tend mostly to grow things from seed. In some cases this is impractical though, and it makes more sense to buy mature plants from a nursery. My supplier in this case was the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery, situated in Lostwithiel, Cornwall (I'm showing loyalty to my Cornish ancestry here...). I have been very impressed with this company. Service was good; value-for-money was good; quality of product was good.

The three plants I bought were a Cornus Alba "Kesselringii" (back), a Buddleia Davidii "Royal Red" (left) and a Dryopteris Erythrosora (right). They were supplied in 8"  / 20cm pots, and were all priced between £6.50 and £7.00.

The Cornus is particularly impressive. Its stems are a very dark red colour - almost black - and the young leaves are bronzy red/yellow

The Buddleia is a nice compact specimen, but not very pretty to look at just yet, although it has plenty of young leaves coming on, and I'm confident it will look nice later in the year.

The Buddleia is often known as the Butterfly plant because its flowers are very attractive to butterflies - and this is one of the reasons why I have chosen it.

The Dryopteris (I think I'll just call it a "fern" for the sake of simplicity) is looking a bit ragged, but that's hardly surprising at this time of the year.

You'll notice I have planted it in that nice new terracotta pot I bought on our trip to Gosport. I think it looks very handsome in it.

The fern has lots of coiled-up buds ready to unfurl. They look a bit like lurking snails!

So these three are all installed in their new homes alongside some of the more well-established residents.

Whilst planting them I also took the opportunity to re-pot my olive tree into a bigger container. It has been over-wintering in the garage, but I think the weather has improved enough for it to come outside now.You can see it at the back of this group, directly in front of the covered barbecue.

I have put the Olive tree into a plain terracotta container, since I think this looks suitably "Mediterranean", and fits in well with the style I'm aiming for on my patio. It looks a bit of a mess at present with the table cluttered-up with propagators, but when the weather gets good enough for us to be able to sit outside I will get it properly organised. The other plants in this group are Lavender, Sage, Thyme and Chives (oh, and the new fern).

Photographic Blues

It is well known that photographing blue things is difficult. Why?

I would like to understand this so that I can make suitable adjustments to my technique - if indeed this is possible.

The other day I photographed some "purpley" Iris Reticulata at the base of my Crab Apple tree, and the colour-reproduction seemed just fine, but when I photographed them again a few days later they appeared much bluer. Similarly I photographed some Hyacinths that we bought as cut flowers, and the photos made them look really blue, whereas they were actually a deep "lilac" colour

Is it something to do with the levels of natural light, or the quality of the light? A while ago I took some pics of the Crocuses in my garden, at a time of low light levels (I remember saying they were reluctant to open up) and they looked like this:

When I photographed the same group of flowers on a day of bright sunshine, on the photos they looked a completely different colour - almost mauve rather than blue (which is how they look to the naked eye).

Today I photographed this little flower, (is it an Anemone Blanda?) which has self-seeded next to my path. In my photo it appears to be bright blue, but "in the flesh" it is pretty much the same colour as those Crocuses. When I took the photo it was late afternoon and the sun had gone down.

Can anyone help me with this matter? Any advice you can give would be gratefully received!

Re-vamping the front garden

For a long time I have been wanting to do something about the front garden of my house. Well, the term "garden" is a bit of an exaggeration actually. It's just a tiny patch, but it has given me a lot of grief. Over the years I have struggled to make it look respectable. The little area of grass has never been any good - full of moss and weeds despite the addition of copious quantities of various chemicals - and it's not a good place to grow anything much because it is very exposed. For a few weeks every year the Crab Apple tree looks nice (it flowers in late April), and the miniature daffodils and irises can normally be relied upon to create a nice splash of colour for about a month in the Spring, but the rest of the time the whole thing is a liability.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have now finally got round to having this area properly sorted out...

You may remember this photo I posted a couple of weeks ago, showing the daffs and irises (and the little sticks to stop people trampling on them). But just look at the scruffy grass...

This is how it looks now...

Much neater! Unfortunately I think the Iris Reticulata have been done away with by the workmen. I was out at work when the task was being done, but Jane tells me that one of the workmen said "We have managed to keep the daffs, but I think the bluebells (sic) have had it"... I may have to plant some more in the Autumn.

This is what the whole area looks like now:

The light-coloured areas (where the grass was) are 20mm shingle, laid over a weed-suppressing membrane. We have had a line of paving stones laid alongside the drive so that when you get out of a car you don't step into unstable shingle. This will be a great improvement on the muddy "grass" that used to be there!

To the right of the front door I have a large plant-pot sunk into the surface, and into this I can easily slot a pot of whatever plant I have that is flowering at the time. Right now it is daffs, but later on I will replace these with Geraniums or something. This will help to make the area look a little less austere.

And I've just had another nice thought -- I can get rid of the lawn-mower and free-up some space in my shed. For the last few years (since I had the grass in the back garden removed) it has hardly seemed worth getting the mower out to cut those paltry 5 or 6 square metres of grass out at the front, which was another reason why the area tended to look less than picturesque!

The cloches come into action

First thing I want to say today is that I was very touched to receive so many messages of goodwill on my Birthday from my blogging friends. Thank you all very much!

I received lots of lovely gifts too - including a very comprehensively-featured carrying case for my camera and all its bits and pieces; a couple of photography books; some more plastic mini-greenhouses, etc. Also through sheer coincidence I received some plants that I had ordered about a month ago, including a very handsome addition to my Cornus collection - Cornus Kesselringii, a black-stemmed variety. Finally, this week saw the completion of a task I had long been anticipating: - the removal of the tatty apology for a lawn outside the front of our house. This has now been replaced by brickwork and shingle in the same style as the main part of the back garden. I'll write a post about this soon...

*********************************************************************************

I have put my new cloches into action for the first time now - I used them to protect some newly-sown beetroot and parsnip seeds. Actually, the cloches have been in place for the last couple of weeks, helping to dry and warm the soil. So I had to remove them temporarily while I prepared the raised bed and then sowed the seed.

I realised that the cloches are wide enough (at 45cm) to accommodate two rows of seedlings, working on the assumption that the cloches will probably be removed when the seedlings get to about 15cm tall. So, with two cloches side-by-side, I can put 4 rows of plants in one raised bed. Here's a pic of my two rows of parsnips going in. Actually it is one-and-a-half rows of parsnip ("Panache" this time), and half a row of Hamburg Parsley, which appears to be closely related to parsnips. I have never eaten or grown Hamburg Parsley before, and I am growing just a little of it this year in order to see how it performs and whether it is nice as a kitchen ingredient.

The photo doesn't really show the shallow drill that these seeds are sitting in, but it is about 2 inches deep. As you can see, the parsnip seeds are quite big, and it is perfectly practical to sow them individually when you are only dealing with a small quantity. They are very lightweight too, so choose a still day for sowing or they may blow away! You will probably say that I have sowed the seed too thickly, but I know that not all of them will germinate, and even if they do I can thin them out when it becomes possible to see which are the strongest ones. Ideally, parsnips should be spaced so that the roots do not touch when they are fully grown, so I would allow about 8 - 10cm between seedlings, after thinning.

As well as the parsnips and Hamburg Parsley I also sowed two half rows of beetroot - Boltardy and Red Ace. I think you will see from the next photo why it was two half-rows rather than one full row. I intend to sow two more half-rows of beetroot when one of two things happens (whichever is the earlier) - I acquire a fourth cloche, or the weather warms up a fair bit more.

Can you see what's missing???

After watering-in the rows of seeds, I replaced the cloches, and it's now just a question of waiting to see how the seeds perform. I have sown these seeds about 3 - 4 weeks earlier than I would have done if I did not have the cloches. This, in my opinion, is exactly why you buy cloches - to extend the growing season. And of course, in my case, to stop the foxes digging up the seed-bed!

Fleet Pond

This post is about the town where I live - Fleet, in Hampshire, UK, and its pond.

The name Fleet is derived from the Middle English word "flet" (or "flete"), itself derived from the Old English "fleot", meaning river or stream. A prominent feature of our local landscape is Fleet Pond, an area of wetland surrounding a sizeable pond. Almost a lake in fact - by English standards, that is! In the 9th Century AD the pond was known as "Fuglemere" (wild fowl lake), and was probably a place where the local gentry went to shoot water-fowl. The pond is also said to have supplied fish to monks in the city of Winchester, although this is hard to credit since Winchester is about 20 miles away and probably had its own more convenient ponds.

One of the major factors affecting the development of our town was the construction of the railways, in the 1830s and 1840s. Fleet is on the line from Portsmouth to London, via Basingstoke, and it was not long after the railway opened that Fleet had its first railway station. It was built near the pond rather than in the town centre, because it was thought that lots of people would travel to Fleet specifically to enjoy the area of natural beauty around the lake. I have read that it became a favourite Sunday picnic destination for people living in the suburbs of London. Today, the railway station is still a significant feature of the Fleet landscape, and many of the town's inhabitants commute daily into London (about 50 minutes on the train).

I thought some of my readers might like to see what Fleet pond looks like. It's a bit "off topic" for me really, since my blog is primarily about my garden, and if you're not interested in reading the rest of this post, then fair enough, stop here. I hope you will return again some other time...

On a recent day off work I took a stroll around the pond, camera in hand. This is what I saw. The Pond is quite a substantial body of water, and plays hosts to a lot of birds, such as these swans. Many of them are adolescents, presumably ones born here last Summer.

In the background (on the left) of the next photo you can just see a line of Cormorants sitting on a log. They show up as black dots against the light brown reeds. There are also lots more in the trees on the little islet to the right, which is obviously a favourite roosting place - see how the trees are white with Cormorant guano!

The Pond is surrounded by areas of woodland and dense reed-beds. The cover provided by these is a major attraction for wild birds. In times gone by I expect the reeds were also popular with people, who would have used them for thatching their roofs. They grow to a height of about 8 feet.

Reed-bed

Close-up of a flowering reed

In some places the reeds have been "managed" - in other words trimmed-back to stop them taking over completely. The open patch in this next photo looks like firm ground, but I can assure you it is VERY boggy!

There are also a fair few bulrushes to be seen, although at this time of year they do look a mite tatty.

There are paths all around the pond (you can walk the whole way around it in about an hour), and in some places a proper made-up walkway.

There are lots of places where you can get down to the water's edge, to enjoy the view, watch the birds (or take photos...)

There are fishing platforms

There are places from which you can launch boats (the sign says "No powered craft. Life-jackets must be worn)

There are a number of viewing platforms, some of them at water-level, some of them raised for more distant viewing

 Around parts of the Pond there can still be seen a number of  WD (War Department, now Ministry of Defence) markers that delineated the boundary of the Government land.

Of course I saw lots water-birds, like this lovely Swan

And these noisy Canada Geese

And this diminutive Coot. You can clearly see his bald pate. Have you heard the expression "Bald as a coot"?

If your eye-sight is really good you may be able to see in this next picture a Great Crested Grebe. A lovely bird, very graceful; a very speedy underwater swimmer; fairly common in our locality.

Not all the birds I saw were water-fowl. I think these are sparrows of some sort. Yes, there are TWO birds in the photo. Their camouflage scheme is pretty good, isn't it?

I also saw some beautiful plants, like this Lesser Celandine, positively glowing in the bright sunshine

And this rather more restrained clump of Ivy covering an old tree-stump

Bringing it all into perspective though, let's not overlook the proximity of the Industrial Estate (buildings in the background of next photo) or of the railway (the station car-park is behind the brick wall at the right of the photo)

So that's Fleet Pond. A wonderful facility, full of interest, and above all open to everyone - for FREE. Long may it stay un-developed, to enrich our lives.