My Kitchen Garden

Chelsea Flower Show it isn’t, but these two raised vegetable beds are giving me a great deal of pleasure.  It’s not like I’m going to be able to be able to feed the family exclusively on vegetables grown in here, but that was never the intention.  I just wanted to be able to  grow some of the things we eat, and be able to pop out from the kitchen for truly fresh ingredients.  Okay, we are not there quite yet, except for some of the herbs, but things are actually growing and I am disproportionately pleased.  

Admittedly the cauliflower and broccoli have not been a success, unless I was trying to feed the snails, who have somehow managed to eat all the top leaves off the plants.  All I have been left with is forlorn green stems.  When I asked about organic pest control for snails I was told the only thing I could do was “squish ‘em”.  As the very thought of that sends a shiver up my spine (and frankly it’s not terribly organic either!) I’m going to skip growing cauliflower and broccoli this year.  I’ve got some sweetcorn to put in instead.  More herbs are on their way as well.  And guess what I found when I went out with the watering can the other day?

Yep, that’s right, I’ve got little green strawberries coming on my strawberry plants!  I’ve never grown strawberries before and it seems they are actually going to provide me with fruit!  For someone who has never so much as pretended to have a green thumb but who loves gardening, well, it made my day! 

Are you growing any fruit or vegetables this year?

How Does Your Garden Grow?

March is going out like a lion here today, with blustery cold winds and grey skies. It feels more like autumn than spring. But despite the fact the birds are shivering outside on my bird feeder, my garden is reminding me that spring is definitely here and the good weather is coming. I noticed this morning that there are flowers forming on my tulips:-


and that before long my hyacinths will be in bloom.




Even the aquilegia are coming through beautiful bright green.



Soon they will be covered in delicately elegant blue flowers.

We have a four day weekend here in England to celebrate Easter and I’m hoping to get more done in the garden. The weather is not predicted to be nice until Sunday, but that won’t stop us going to the garden centre to choose some new flowers for when the sun finally does come out. Hopefully on Monday it might be warm and dry enough to plant them!

Time In The Garden

Spring has definitely sprung here, and I could not be happier. There is something about the way the air smells and feels that just makes me feel so grateful to be alive. One of my favourite spring flowers are crocus, and I was thrilled to see these little guys popping up in my garden the other day.



Last week, my friend S came to stay for a couple of days. She is an amazing gardener. A few years ago she helped me landscape the garden in our previous home and I was so happy with it. I chose most of the plants for the meaning they had attached to them. For example I chose nasturtiums because my Mom used to talk about using them for pretend dishes when she and her sister played tea parties when they were little and trilliums because they are the provincial flower of Ontario, the Canadian province where I was born. I’m going to do that in this garden too. I like my plants to have meaning. There’s a lot of ground to cover though as this garden is nearly double the size of our last one, and our last one was pretty big!

All the gardening aside, it was great to spend a couple days with S just pottering around in the garden. It had been ages since we had a chance to catch up and now we live so far apart I really miss her! She brought me some very pretty bulbs in colours I love, including some gorgeous purple gladioli (which my Grandma used to grow) and six amazing tree lilies, some pink and some yellow. I admired the tree lilies in her garden last year so she brought me some of my own. I’m really excited for them to start coming through. They can grow to be ten feet high!

Since S’s visit, I’ve been working on gradually adding a few more plants including some evergreen clematis to grow up the trellis between the main garden and the kitchen garden. They will all have white flowers. I’ll grow some sweet peas between them. I love sweet peas. I’m also waiting for my Rocket Gardens - a veggie one and a herb one. They do baby plants you can just pop in the soil for an instant garden - perfect for my raised beds, tucked away in a tiny corner of the garden, which look very empty at the moment. There’s just one lonely rosemary plant in there at the moment.



Poor thing, I hope to get some company for it soon! I do have some seeds that I must get planted too. I’ve been waiting for the warmer weather but it seems to have arrived so I’d better get a move on.

In the meantime, I am going to enjoy watching my lovely flowers pop up (including my bleeding hearts which are just now slowly waking up - their little red shoots gradually curling their way out of the soil).

I love spring!

Manic Monday

My husband has taken today through Wednesday off as tomorrow is his birthday and our 19th wedding anniversary. We are all really looking forward to celebrating. Yesterday we celebrated with my husband’s parents. I took a nice roast of beef and all the trimmings and cooked it at their house, as well as taking a birthday cake. I made the cake from one of my Great Auntie Margaret’s recipes, as part of my Family Food History and Recipe project. It was delicious, and I’m looking forward to blogging more about it later in the week.

Although we had planned to have a day out today, we couldn’t because there was just too much going on. The work on our gates that I blogged about on Thursday didn’t get done to schedule, so they were coming back today to finish off. That meant we could really only go out in the morning, so we drove through the countryside to our favourite local garden centre and chose a few plants for the garden. I’ve got a really big L-shaped garden, with so much space to fill the plants I chose today will hardly make a dent, but I’m very pleased with them.

I’ve also got a two new raised beds as a kitchen/herb garden. I found a beautiful rosemary plant, but as it is the first plant I’ve chosen for this part of the garden it looks like it might be a bit lonely at first :)



We chose some three evergreen clematis to grow up the trellis that will screen the kitchen garden from the rest of the garden. Here’s one of them. They all have white flowers, so I’m hoping it will be really pretty. I’m planning to grow some sweet peas up the trellis as well.



I think my favourite of the plants we chose today were these two gorgeous Hellabores. They are also called Lenten Roses because in England they bloom during Lent. I think Lenten Rose sounds so much prettier than Hellebore!



I need to go and wrap presents and bake a birthday cake now - I’m really behind in my preparations for tomorrow!

I have posted a Recipe of the Week today after three weeks without one. I’m sorry it’s been such a big gap, but it’s been a busy time. Anyway, I hope you like this week’s recipe - it’s easy and quick, but also just a little bit special!

Back to Normal

or as normal as it ever gets around here :)

The hole in the sidewalk outside our gate has now been filled in and we are just waiting for the nice men with the machine that lays the tarmac to come along and make it look like a sidewalk again. Oh, and take away the very stylish orange barriers they put around it :)

I can’t believe it is Wednesday already. It has been such a busy week so far. One thing I am inordinately proud of is finally getting the bookcase in the study sorted out. I’m almost embarrassed to show you, but last week it looked like this.



There were things on that bookshelf that I had literally just stuffed on when we moved over two years ago and not touched since. Now it looks like this.



It needs to be styled and dressed of course, but I’m just pleased that it is finally tidy! I got three bags of things to put in the garbage and recycling off it - none of which were beautiful, useful or seriously sentimental. I’m nearly there with the study actually, and if I keep up at this pace I might be able to post some photos of the whole room before long!

We are in serious danger of getting organised here. All three of our cars have been serviced this week (and the oldest one got a new clutch installed), plus we’ve arranged to have the gates at the end of our driveway electrified in March. This way we don’t have to keep opening and closing them by hand - and it will stop people from turning round in our driveway which seems to happen multiple times every day and really irritates me! In fact, we are getting so organised, I’m just about feeling like I might be able to start actually decorating come the spring.

Plus there is my garden to work on. Now that it is all landscaped, it needs some plants. We’ve got a really big L-shaped garden (if you have some time and would like to see its transformation from grassy expanse to a landscaped space please click here, here, here and here.) Right now, my vegetable garden looks like this:-



This is a view of part of the established garden which you can see if you stand with your back to the vegetable garden.



And this is a view looking up the side of the ‘L’, taken actually standing in the established garden you can see above.



There are a lot of empty flower beds, and even the established garden has been widened so it needs more planting. It’s quite a project, and I’m feeling very excited about it - particularly the vegetable/herb garden.

So there is no shortage of things going on here! Plus next week my son is off to Spain on a college photography trip, and I am tagging along to San Francisco on a business trip with my husband. I love San Francisco and I’ll definitely be blogging about my trip here and also on my food blog Recipes from the 21st Century Housewife’s Kitchen.

Hope you are all having a good week too!