I love Spring

Spring is such an exciting time, warm breezes full of promise, the smell of damp compost in pots on the windowsills, palm-fulls of little seeds. It's a real time of expectation. This year it's especially important to me since I've found out I'm having a baby in the early Autumn! Enough about me though, on to the gardening!

This year I've bought some v exciting sounding seeds from The Real Seed Catalogue and here are my Russian tomatoes (above)! Named Urbikany they are an early tall bush variety. Last year due to the damp we suffered badly with blight, and these toms are apparently faster to mature in our 'glorious' English climate, so they may avoid blight which often strikes later in the growing season.

Other plants sown at the moment are an Italian green knobbly pumpkin, a spherical courgette, a weirdly shaped squash, a cooler climate melon and some butter bean type runner beans. Also I have seeds for sweet violet and a lovely bush sunflower.  This weeks job is get those potatoes in!

More excitement came this week from the first egg from our Crested chicken, Rosie. The Crested are (I think) the same as a Columbine, they are part Cotswold Legbar which is an old free ranging breed with cool pompom head feathers which lays blue/green eggs.  The hybrids are being developed to produce a smaller hen that will lay plentiful blue/green eggs.  I think the ratio is 80% blue/green to pastel. Look it's blue/green, This pleases me greatly as I really really wanted a blue egg layer!

Another brill thing that's happened lately is that Nath's dad gave us some money to buy a space for more chickens, so we purchased an Eglu Cube in pink.  It's very spacious and the hens seem to love it although the oldest ex battery chciken is having a problem getting back up the ladder in the evenings, bless her.

Spring! Better luck this year

So, this blog really had bit a bit sad and lonely for the last year.  After last year's perils of torrential rain and flooding over much of the UK for most of the summer the ground was saturated, the slugs were everywhere. Literally no man standing after planting out your seedlings and leaving them overnight, and as for direct planting, pah!  They even ate all the developing pumpkins off a bought pumpkins plant.  I had even gone to the trouble of applying the trusty Nemaslug! I was not impressed.  But all is not lost, with every new Spring comes fresh opportunity and a new wave of hopefulness that this year there will be a bit of sun....even in England.

Turn the page and we find ourselves in March.  I have high hopes for March, even though a cold snap is promised near the middle of the month.  Undeterred I have made the majority of my seed purchases and made a hefty start to the weeding.  So what am I planning to grow this year?  So far the list is something like Leeks, Tomatoes, Jerusalem Artichokes, Courgette, Runner Beans, Peas, Potatoes, Kale and Chard.  I might end up putting a few patches of extras in though, my seed box overfloweth!  Again I am hoping to combine vegetables with pretty herbs and flowers in my perpetual thirst for an Alice Fowler style vegetable garden (seems I have made it harder for myself with long wide beds).  There are still some plants in from last year; strawberries and chives.  I've also planted this years Garlic (late!) as well as 3 of the biggest cloves of last years Elephant Garlic.

I must also mention that a very sad thing happened at the end of November 2012, Lenny, my oldest Greyhound died.  I am still pretty gutted about not seeing his furry, loving face any more, but consoling myself with the thought that he had lots of love from us, and a good long life full of seaside trips and castles and gardens since he was 8 (when I adopted him from kennels).  I have had him cremated and am keeping his ashes for now, when the others go I will mix their ashes and find a place to scatter them together.
A Greyhound should be free to run with the wind, as they did in life.  R.I P. my lovely little Lenny ♥

Spring Advancement (maybe!)

Well a week or so on and most of my seedlings have sprouted, I have a lot of sweet corn shoots (pictured above) plus tomatoes, peppers, cauliflower, a few onions (for some reason I never do very well with growing onion family seeds). The large broad leaves of the scalloped Squash are now up (pictured below), although amusingly some resolutely stuck their heads in the soil and poked their bums (roots) up to wave at the ceiling. I guess I planted a couple of them upside down (how you tell I'm not actually sure!?).

I have bought and planted a few roots of Bocking 14 Comfrey, which I am hopeful will sprout. Comfrey is a plant that draws nitrogen and nutrients from deep within the soil with its' long roots, it stores these nutrients in it's leaves which can then be used to benefit your plants. You can use it to make a Comfrey tea (cut the leaves and soak them in a covered bucket of water until it smells manure like) to feed to them as liquid feed, or you can add the leaves directly to your compost heap. Maybe even plant it around your compost pile to ensure that the leaking nutrients are caught by the Comfrey and put back. Bocking 14 is a sterile seeded variety of Comfrey, useful for keeping it under control, as a result of this you'd have to get yourself some by buying roots cuttings. I bought mine from eBay, I am quietly hopeful but if they don't do well then I haven't exactly wasted much, the average price is very reasonable. It says plant horizontally though, this fills me with deep misgivings, I killed the Horseradish by doing that (remember kids, always read the instructions!!).

I also just bought some caffeine spray to keep the pesky slugs off my young plants. I'm not naming it yet, it might be crap, so I'll keep that to myself until I've had the chance to road test it on the lettuces!

Here is what the tiny egg from a few weeks ago looks like when cooked. It did have a yolk, just a tiny weeny one!

I'll leave you with a recipe. Nettle Pesto, I tried this last week and it's lovely (if a bit garlicky!). I think next time I'd use a bit less garlic. The mesasurments are in cups, because it was an American Blog I borrowed the recipie from. There is a link to that here - Fat of The Land Nettle Pesto

Nettle Pesto

Ingredients

2 Cups of Stinging Nettles (blanched and chopped = about 6 cups raw)

1/2 Cup finely grated Parmesan

1/2 Cup Pine Nuts

4-5 Large Garlic Cloves

1tbsp Lemon Juice

1/2 Cup Olive Oil

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Method

Boil the nettles for a minute or two to neutralise the sting (you'll still see the hairs but don't worry, they will be soft).

Ball up the nettles and sqeeze the water out.

Add to food processor with other ingredients and half the olive oil.

Whizz it up, and you're done!

The excess can be frozen in ice cube trays

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