The Good Life...

..if you don't count Saturday standing out on the allotment in torrential rain picking raspberries for tea. We feel very Tom and Barbarish these past few weeks. We have been almost self sufficient in fruit and veg (we don't intend keeping any pigs). ..we have had peas, beans, beetroot, radish, lettuce, courgettes,cucumbers, tomatoes, red cabbage, gooseberries by the thousand, strawberries, blackcurrants and now, our Autumn bliss raspberries. So, it will be back to making jam in the next few days as our nephew has a partiality for raspberry jam. We are also going to be digging up our Red Desiree potatoes and the corn is coming along nicely, must be our scarecrow, Zak watching over them. Then later we shall have our very own plums, apples, swedes, parsnips, onions and leeks and perpetual spinach which we have just planted out. We have also risked a second crop of peas which are almost mature and Reg from further down the Hill says that they will more than likely mature before the first frosts and they will be o.k. As he has won firsts for so many of his beautiful veg, we believe him. Yes it is the good life if you don't count the pesky slugs.

Pond - ering

After walking to our plot yesterday afternoon and seeing squashed dead frogs on the driveway, I decided to do my bit and have a good look round for something I can use for a little tiny wildlife pond on our plot. John of number one plot, said a little washing up bowl or the like would do plus a few plants to keep the water clean and clear which I could have from him and, as we all know, frogs too. I fancy the odd newt though or something like. I have seen the said newt at the back of our plot under our greenhouse when I moved an old damp brick, he may just need a home. I haven't found the perfect pond yet but I know Hall's Garden centre have a real good variety of tiny ones. I love the one in the picture don't know where to get it from yet. I have a new quest!

a nice little haul

We had a lovely surprise when we started harvesting today we came home with a basket full of tomatoes, cucumber, beans ,red cabbage, a few raspberries that we hadn’t eaten on the way round and of course, yes you’ve guessed, courgettes. Alison on the front of our plot asked us to pick what was ready on her patch while she is away and so we had a second crop of beans, great they are a different variety to ours, thanks Alison. Julie was hidden in her fruit cage picking red gooseberries which we sampled and they were sweet and a lovely flavour and they didn’t make you run about sucking in your cheeks either! We also ran into JB, plot number one and his granddaughters and all had a chat about the show this Sunday which was nice. He was also trying to off load frogs today, he has a glut...so if anybody should need any you know where to go!! Well, now we are home and I need to do something with the red cabbage, which weighed in stripped down at 5lbs. I shall braise it with apples, onions and sultanas ready to go with those autumn casseroles, with the next one I shall probably do pickled red cabbage and there will be one for my friend Cara who loves them. Tonight I think we shall make a tomato, courgette, onion and basil sauce to go with pasta for tea and tomorrow we shall have beans with - well everything there seems to be more than I thought...

P.S Molly is also having courgettes for tea as I notice Felix has put some in their with their salmon packets

Eggstra special

My ultimate fantasy in food is a perfectly cooked soft boiled egg. Simple as it is I just love them. It has taken me a very long time to do the egg justice, but after seeing the Julie and Julia movie I got out the Art of Mastering French Cooking by Julia Childs and first thing I learned was how to boil the most perfect egg. I thought after all my experience in the kitchen I should know this but did it her way just to see. It was perfection. We had bought some very large eggs from Amerton Farm,( near Salt) fresh as a daisy, we know this because we were looking at the hens that laid them across the courtyard. The timing is crucial apparently, no egg timers - just know the size of the egg and lower it into salted boiling water (the salt in the water was a tip my grandmother taught me, it stops them cracking) then time them. Six mins for very large, five and a half for standard and five for ordinary smallish ones. Then run them under cold water to set the whites. Well mine came out just like you see in the ads and the yolk was a wonderful deep golden yellow mmmmm' lovely stuff. I'm going to try some more of her ways of doing things. I was impressed and I may move on to the French stuff too. I won't be doing 365 recipes in one year though, like the girl in the movie, she must have been crazy. I'm not crazy?

Lost...Where?

Now everyone that knows us will understand when I say we got lost yet again, but NOT when I say on the way to Nuneaton. A small trip we planned would take twenty minutes took us two hours. We enjoyed seeing the red tractor in the cornfield the first couple of times but then we panicked - yes - lost in the countryside. No signs, no one to ask, here we were again! We carried on as you do and eventually found a Post office cum village store. Hope restored. "Where are we?" the reply "Not sure all the roads around here are very long but if you keep on the one straight out of the village and don't give up you'll be somewhere". O.k! I half expected her to have a meat cleaver behind her back and direct us to the mincing machine but we made it out o.k. Down the very, very long road to somewhere and found we were going to the Astley Farm Book Barn just where we wanted to be. WOW! We're getting much better at this lost and found stuff. However, next day we did get lost inside Dobbies.

The Darling Buds of Summer

My teeny weeny little garden has produced flowers with all its might this year. Each geranium has nine glorious heads on them, the yellow begonias are non stop, my bucopa has spread everywhere, my wild purple geraniums have bloomed like never before, the coniasta is covered with tiny buds waiting to burst open into tiny pink flowers, our viola have the prettiest faces ever. My window boxes are spilling over, the honeysuckle is filling the air with perfume and I have just added, for a bit of whimsy, a black eyed susan to match our yellow door and to creep up the wall as my seven foot square garden seems to be running out of space. It may be pocket sized, but I do love it so.

Goosegogs Galore!

My arms are cut to ribbons today, but I don't care because I harvested 21 pound of gooseberries from my two tiny bushes yesterday and put them in my new found fruit collecting basket. It was well worth battling with the thorns. All of them are sound, big fat goosesgogs. My problem now is, what am I going to do with them all? We have shared with our neighbours half of them which still leaves 10 and a half pounds to make giant crumbles? enormous cobblers? invite everybody I know round for a gooseberry fool, plus strangers. or simply jam some, freeze some and cook some. What's a harvester/gatherer to do? What a lovely problem to have.

A Quacking Afternoon

Since Sunday it has been all excitement over in Kenilworth. The duck brood behind the flower pot started hatching and within hours eight little ducklings had emerged ready to take their first dip. They waddled off much to Lesley and Angela's horror down to the brook and didn't come back. But, the next morning another duck arrived with nine ducklings headed straight to the other ducks nest and took it over. Since then she has stayed and we were invited over yesterday afternoon to see them. What a really, really wonderful sight to see them dipping in and out of all of John's pools and each one having a different personality. The brave one that run off, the one that hurled itself off the bank straight into the water, the shy one who waited until Mom went into the water and called it. It was a truly delightful summer afternoon in that garden watching their antics. Then, just before we left, Mom brought the whole brood up to the top of the garden to see what we were doing. Nobody over in Kenilworth has had any sleep this week though they have all been on duck watch.

Speechless - well almost!

If you go down to the lottie today be sure of a big surprise just like we had .... with a little help from our friends down at the lottie we are now so proud to be joining such good company as Haydn, Julie, Fran, Eileen, Chris and Reg and to say we have won shared first place for Best Half Plot. We haven't done it alone. We have had some of Julie and Chris's beans, Reg gave us some fine baby red cabbage seedlings, Tony and Alan always make the path between us look better, Mike and Jason gave us advice when we were getting started with our tomatoes, Lionel helped by telling us when to put out our peas when we were nervous because of the weather, my brother Terry helped us lay a path which was given to us by our friends Pam and Paul and our friend Sarah gave us some cucumber plants. Barry's advice will be sadly missed by us. We have never had a garden, so have never grown food before coming to the Hill. Boy! Are we glad that we came here, the kindness, help and cheerfulness is never ending. It certainly makes you try all the harder each year when all those around you are working away. Although we are ecstatic about being "best" we won't run around the plot with our tee shirts over our heads - promise!

Lucky Finds

This week I found myself at a counter buying a pair of 1920's style cushions "Soleil" and "Hotel De La Plage", which is really unusual for me as I always shop to a list but I fell in love with these two cushions and greed took over! I needed them, I wanted them, I had to have them for my bench. They were a find in the Cancer Research shop so I didn't really feel guilty. I was only just passing on my way to the St Giles book shop where I found a book for my cousins, who have been lucky again this year to find the return of members of the family of ducks they raised last year. Alas, they aren't any brighter though for she laid her first eggs in the flower border - they went! Now, a second clutch very close to the house behind Lesley's flower pots. Maybe she'll be luckier there. The book I found for them was Jemima Puddleduck who was also daft as a brush. Another find down the lottie was what seems like a ton of strawberries all sound, large,red, ripe, plump and juicy. Now that is a find!!
P.S. I do love my cushions, they make me feel happy and as if I am on holiday.
P.P.S As I was sitting on the bench with my new cushions I overheard a father saying " It's really hot today" and his little boy answered, "not as hot as the Equator" and then proceeded to tell his dad why, in minute detail. When I looked up the child was all of six - amazing what they find out these days.