It’s a year since I last wrote a post and I realise that I am moving away from my blog. However, I don’t want to leave WordPress without a goodbye.
Actually, this might not be a goodbye. I might change my mind. But right now I’m moving away from the online world and increasingly engrossed in my crafts.
I set up this blog when my daughter had just started school. I was a 24/7 single parent with lots of time on my hands and little adult companionship. Now, my daughter is nearly 18 and, whilst there are still periods of loneliness (Christmas and New Year is always a killer), I am generally feeling a lot more fulfilled these days.
I hope you are well and enjoying life, whatever you are up to. The best of luck with all your endeavours and see you around.
The Story of Wool Told in Murals, Henry Marvell Carr RA (1894-1970) on display at Salts Mill, Saltaire
Do you notice how sometimes time can be fast and slow simultaneously? August seemed to stretch on for ever and now suddenly it’s September. Hurrah!
Autumn is making its approach with cooler, darker evenings, rosy apples and too many events to attend. Though not strictly an event, we hadn’t been to Helmsley for almost a year and I was itching to pay a visit, so that was yesterday’s main port of call.
Usually, we buy pastries from Thomas the Baker in the market square and find a suitable perch to eat them from. This time, we did indeed by pastries and my favourite Donker bread rolls (a light rye bread). We also made it to Cinnamon Twist, now a stall on the market which sells other unusual bakes, such as cheese and fennel scones. (Note to self, must try scones in our new oven.)
We made a departure from tradition, however, by lunching at Helmsley Walled Garden. My baguette was the tastiest I’ve ever eaten but the waitress was unable to provide a baker I could purchase from, so if I want a repeat I will need to return to the Garden restaurant.
A hardship that will hardly be. The restaurant is in the glasshouses which still have functioning ventilation windows, which fascinated me as we ate. As did the decoration on along the walls.
As you can see in the above photo, the glasshouses not only keep guests warm but enable the growing of grapevines. Indeed these vines have produced an abundance of fruit, which I noticed other guests picking for themselves.
This scene has got me thinking about whether there is any way I could have a glasshouse running along the south side of my house. I’d been thinking of a pergola to grow vines on but a glasshouse would be so much more useful.
Daydreams aside, I was delighted by various sights in the Garden, where we wandered after our lunch. There were a few empty patches waiting for redevelopment (for example, a dye garden) and areas which I had not noticed previously or which had been changed since our last visit.
Ponds have been added.The composting area was a new discovery.This fountain and seating area are not new but watching the water is quite mesmerising. On this occasion, I learned that my daughter is going to have a big garden with water features when she leaves home.These yews have been given a new hairstyle. Don’t they look splendid with their busby hats?
Following my post ‘Herbs for Health’, I duly got my garden fork out yesterday and dug up a number of dandelion roots and, after giving them a good scrub, put them in the dehydrator. It’s a shame I had dug out some of the biggest roots in the summer, as they had now produced lots of little ones where the root had not been completely removed.
The internet threw up a number of recipes, which were all basically the same and none of which I followed. For a start, once the roots were dehydrated, I got the pestle and mortar out
before roasting them.
I didn’t think I could roast them, anyway, since my oven doesn’t work. Then I hit on the idea of using the breadmaker
and was pleased with the outcome. In fact, a whole new world of possibilities has opened up but I will explore these another time.
One of the recipes I’d read on line suggested six tablespoons of dandelion coffee for a cafetière (presumably a big one), which stuck me as excessive. In any case, there wasn’t enough ground and roasted dandelion root, so I decided one spoonful would have to do.
Also, I felt that a good place to start would be to heat the coffee up in milk in the manner I had seen tea being prepared in Pakistan.
Upon taking the first sip, I felt that something was missing and toyed with the idea of adding some sugar or honey. I didn’t want to go down the route of adding unnecessary refined carbohydrate to my diet, though, so opted for ground cinnamon instead.
And most delicious it was. So, where am I going to find more dandelions?
Yes friends, in spite of my best intentions, it is many moons since my last blogpost. So, what have I done with all this time?
Well, one big thing I’ve been doing is attending shows on behalf of the Weavers, Spinners and Dyers Guild. The last event was in Malton, North Yorkshire, for St Clement’s Day.
NB I learned that St Clement is the patron saint of blacksmiths.
Visitor to St Clement’s Day celebration in Malton, learning how to weave on a rigid heddle loom.
I’d travelled to Malton on the train and was glad to have done so. The snow on the roads was passable but it was nonetheless quite grim outside. Certainly not one for generating much solar energy at home.
However, thetraineline.com informed me that since I had started counting three years ago, the train journeys I’ve made have saved 78kg of CO2. That doesn’t seem much either but it all adds up.
So, there we are. A short snapshot of life in 2024. A few more people have been inspired to join the Guild and/or take up weaving, spinning and dyeing. I have many WIPs* but at some point they may finished and written about.
In the meantime, I’ll drop into your blogs to see how you are doing.
Emails from various quarters alerted me to the fact that Fruit Works Cooperative* were having a sale of all their trees last Saturday. In the end, I couldn’t resist and came home with a Victoria Plum.
At the moment, there is no space in the back garden for this new tree. However, later in the year, I’m going to take out several trees, potentially, not least because it would be better to have more variety.
In the meantime, the plum tree needs to be kept well watered in its pot. This is principally why it is by the back door: it cannot get forgotten, which so frequently happens to other purchases.
* Fruit Works Cooperative has the aim of encouraging people to grow their own fruit so that they have at least somewhat more control over their food.
I feel that at the moment the range of food I grow is too limited. This is in part because the soil/location is unsuited to vegetables, on the whole, but we just don’t need so many apples.
Another consideration is age. Whilst at the moment I can prune trees and get around the garden no matter how uneven the ground, there will come a time when all of this becomes more of a challenge. Or maybe not, but one just never knows.
I am back again after another long absence. For the first time in two years, I have opened my blog up to the public, so I might just be blogging more often from now on.
It’s been a while since you will have seen the back garden. Over the last couple of years, the trees have filled out and now little else can grow down there.
The bay tree is going to get a haircut soon and at the end of the summer the crab apple is going to be chopped down completely. It’s a good space to be in, though, when the sun is beating down, which does happen from time to time!
If you hadn’t already noticed, there has been a hiatus in my blogging, so I apologise for not reading any of your recent posts. Cyberspace can be a great space but now my daughter is old enough for me to rebuild my life (and the pandemic is no longer in the way), I have less time for online pursuits.
I’ve also had less time for gardening, which might be why the amount of produce I get from my patch appears to have gone down considerably in comparison with previous years: just £100 approx for 2022. When the garden was full of strawberry plants, I was getting double the amount in monetary terms.
Diary used to record garden produce – mostly empty pages last year.
The best bit of 2022 from a gardening perspective was the first crop of hazelnuts. If you have room for a tree which produces nuts, I would definitely recommend you plant one or two. Fresh (hazel)nuts from the garden are so much nicer than something packaged from a shop.
At a rewilding visit I attended last September, one of the other visitors was displeased that I was taking the nuts for myself rather than leaving them for wildlife. Fortunately, not everyone who is interested in rebuilding nature takes the view that it is either us or nature! It is hard to balance genuine human needs with the needs of the rest of the planet but for anyone who can get it, there is an interesting series on BBC Radio Four this week: Rethink Climate.
I take the view that we are damned. Currently, without my car I would have to continue living in cyberspace, as there is little opportunity for me to engage with people who I like and have something in common with in my locality. Even if the public transport existed to get me there, I would hardly be able to travel with my traditional spinning wheel. There is of course a partial solution to this in that there are now portable wheels but I’d still be relying on a lot of taxis.
So, where do we go from here?
Globe artichokes at my local organic farm last autumn.
Well, I did my first bit of ‘hard’ labour in a long time today.
Around this time last year, I metaphorically put a date in the diary to empty the bin for finishing off compost and transfer less ready compost from the dalek to it. Of course, one can never fix an absolute date for these things, since it depends on, not least, the offering from the sky.
However, today it was sunny (ish) and warm (ish). I was also feeling a tad anxious, so work with a spade seemed a good way to manage my thoughts.
As mentioned in my last post, the tomato plant in the raised bed at first glance appeared to be in the way of sowing broad beans. Then I thought of a workaround, which I followed through. I’ve now therefore got four rows of beans covered with the remnants of the aforementioned bin.
It was harder work filling up the bucket with compost from the dalek and transferring it across the garden to its new bin. This compost was seriously compacted and very dry at the bottom. So, I filled up the kettle and gave the new bin a good soak. No doubt the neighbours must have been bemused, if they were watching. (NB The water was cold.)
Anyway, the worms. I’ve never seen so many Brandling worms in one place. The bottom of the dalek was teeming with them, so I have no doubt about the quality of the compost they have been making.
I’d always thought of elephant garlic as a waste of space. Until I realised this week that it might actually save me space.
The reason for my reticence had been down to how much garlic I thought one bulb could produce in comparison with the typical soft- or hard-neck varieties. In truth, I don’t have an answer to this question (yet) but there is an increasing lack of space in the garden and an increasing demand in the kitchen.
My daughter loves garlic and, as a consequence, we get through rather a lot of it these days. I once wrote that we were self-sufficient in this area but these days I spend some money on it every month. So, as long as the elephant garlic covers our culinary needs for three months, we should at least break even.
Yesterday, I inspected the tomato plant in the raised bed to see if it were possible to take it out and plant next year’s broad beans. Well, no! The plant is resolutely ploughing on. Indeed, it is looking very healthy, so I’ll leave it be and consider other options.
Meanwhile, across the other side of the bed, I noticed that there was room to plant the garlic where I’d cleared the spaghetti squash. The vine had started to die, which seemed to suggest that the squash could be harvested, and now the garlic can get on with doing its stuff instead.
First things first, it’s great to go back to naming my posts with an original title rather than a themed one. So, hopefully, you’ll already have guessed that I’m pleased with my crop of pak choi.
I’ve tried to grow it twice before. Once when I was a novice gardener – I sowed it to over-winter and it really didn’t grow very much. Then last year it hardly germinated before it was eaten.
This year, having learned from previous mistakes, it’s more or less the way I want it. I like the stalks more than the leaves and this is is what I seem to have got. The snails have got in regardless of the sheep’s fleece mulch but now the plants are maturing, they can take as much of the leaf as they like.
Perhaps it would have been better to have thinned the plants sooner so that they could thickened out. Still, they can start doing that now, all being well. The risk of the crop being obliterated by cabbage white caterpillars is past (?), so the netting has come off, which means there is no excuse not to do some picking.
The netting is actually now needed to protect the woad I recently sowed. Having learned that woad likes a damp bed, autumn seems a better time of year to sow than spring. Logically, this must be the case because the plants are biennial and will disperse their seed in the late summer/autumn of their second year.
I’m hoping that the woad planted this spring will do just that in due course. I have got halfway through making dye from it and can see I will need lots and lots more for the project I have in mind.
In the meantime, I am on the lookout for a rigid heddle loom to complete a weaving project. I’d borrowed a loom from the WSD Guild but had to return it for another member to borrow. It was great to have the loan of it for six months, though, in order to get an idea of whether weaving is the right thing for me.
And here I am! It’s the last day of the garden tour with news that the garden is flourishing, now it has been raining.
The nasturtiums were non-existent until about a month ago. They’d been sown originally to ward off cabbage white butterflies but clearly this can only work if they grow when the insects are around. Thank goodness for modern netting to protect vulnerable plants, although the woad (behind the tree and mulched with fleece) did seem to manage without either.With the heat and drought, I honestly thought I had lost both the globe artichoke and the cardoon. The cardoon started to regenerate recently, however, so just now I braved a look where the artichoke had been planted and was pleasantly surprised. It’s too late for any flowers to develop now but maybe it will get watered next year and develop some then! One plant that seems eminently capable of surviving, and producing, without any watering is the autumn-fruiting raspberry. It has doggedly plodding on since July, offering a handful of raspberries here, a handful there.
Yesterday, we made our annual trip to a cereal farm in the Yorkshire Wolds for their open day. In the past, it has been quite nippy by mid-October but it was 16.5 degrees C at lunchtime yesterday and if it hadn’t been for the autumnal light and leaves it could easily have passed for a day in September.
When I was in China twenty years ago, the students remarked that spring and autumn seemed to be disappearing, with now only summer and winter as distinct seasons. This year, I have felt that the same is happening in my part of the world. So, ten years from now, I wonder what I will be observing and reporting?
On the penultimate day of my 80 days series, there is quite a lot of excitement.
When I popped out to see if any apples were laying on the ground, two Ribston Pippins were neatly waiting for me. Then as I bent down to pick them up, I knocked another of its branch, so decided to pick all of them. This is the first year the Ribston Pippin has produced a proper crop (last year, the four small apples did not taste like Ribston Pippins), so this is the first cause for jubilation.
Next I turned round and saw a baby squash on a plant which had struggled all summer to stay alive but nonetheless wound its tentacles first round the hazel tree it is next to and then the currant bush. I doubt the squash will get to full size but there is about a month left before the likelihood of frost, so who knows.
By comparison, the squash which formed back in the late summer are slowly ripening. I’m not quite sure what I will do with the spaghetti-like interior – will it disintegrate if cooked like pasta and will I end up with a mound of ‘pasta’ my daughter rejects? Fortunately, my dad has shown an interest in trying one out.
Back to the current excitement, after noticing the new squash (and another baby one), I saw a spider running across its web between the aforementioned hazel tree and currant bush. It disappeared before I could take a photo but, when I looked again, the spider was back and this time with food. I’m hoping the insect it is shrouding in silk is a wasp rather than the honeybee I had seen about.
All in all, autumn is starting well. The night time temperature is forecast to be in the mid-teens Celsius, so that should keep the garden sweet for a bit longer.
Growing out of chaos 