Ground Force

I have been feeling rather down about our garden recently - the grass is looking a bit scraggy (I refuse to water it), and the chickens went on a rampage last week and flattened lots of plants. I have also been neglecting the beds a little bit recently (working and doing a PhD doesn't leave much time for gardening!) and we are planning on building a pergola so it feels a little bit in limbo.

In order to make myself feel a bit better me and my mummy went plant shopping at the weekend - spending some of my birthday money from grandma.

A lovely Hibiscus ("red heart") - with big white flowers with a dark red centre, which I have put near the back and hoping it will fill out nicely over the next few months and years.

I managed to find a white Hollyhock which I was delighted about, being one of my favourite flowering plants. It's gone in at the back in the hope that it will spread and get nice and tall in future years. Katy has also given me a pink one which she has grown from seed from one of her plants so hopefully we will get some nice big spikes of flower next year to add to the "family"!



The most gorgeous Delphinium (Guardian Blue) with flowers which look blue but are actually a mixture of blue and purple. Again, at the back, and there are plenty of buds which I'm hoping will open.



Coreopsis (grandiflora Sunfire), which has amazing yellow flowers with a red centre, and has tonnes of flowers, which I am hoping I can keep going by deadheading and picking for cut flowers - the bees seem to love it!



Next to the bright yellow sunfire, I have a Catanache (blue), which has silvery foliage which lots of purple flowers on tall stems. They close up in the evening so I don't have a photo, but they are very pretty and make a lovely rustling sound in the wind.

I also got some little plants to go at the front of the bed - a lovely little yellow poppy, which again has lots of buds which I am hoping will open. It looks everso delecate so I am hoping I don't kill it!



Also at the front is this very pretty Sanvitalia (Inca), which has tiny yellow daisy like flowers. I think it should spread nicely under the larger plants.



Finally, these lovely evergreen bedding plants (Lysimachia Aurea), on the right, which has beautiful light green foliage which looks like it will spread across the ground and provide some nice winter colour.



The produce that we have in the garden is also doing really well. We have some cayenne chillis in the greenhouse, which has HUGE chillis on them. I've done so much better this year at watering and tending them and it really shows. I just need to keep it up now! The tomatoes, which I hadn't intended to grow but just popped up out of mummy's compost! I'm glad they did though, and hopefully August will be sunny enough to ripen them.



All in all I think the garden looks a lot better. Not perfect, I still have a lot that I want to do, not least build the the pergola. I would also like to fill it with more plants including some climbing up the fences on either side to make it feel more lush.

No potato famine here!

This Sunday, Matt had his family visiting while I went off to a friend's wedding. Normally you would expect a family visit to involve tea, maybe a nice dinner or some wine. But oh no, Matt put them to work on the allotment, they had to earn their keep!

They filled the water butt (well needed!), pulled up the spent beans and dug up the early potatoes. The potatoes have suffered from the lack of water and too much heat somewhat and the first earlies were hit by frost so we were sure that we wouldn't get much of a crop. How wrong we were!

The first earlies, which looked very pathetic, produced a nice little crop of new potatoes (Chopin):



The second earlies were more impressive. The kestrels in particular, with their lovely purple splodges, produced some whoppers! One of them will provide us with a nice sized jacket potato to share!



The Condors have produced some lovely red potatoes, which I reckon will be good for fat chips. Yummmmmm!



We need to sort them and store them to make sure they don't go mouldy (we are a bit rubbish at storing produce normally!). Excitingly, we still have a bed of maincrops, which have lots of foliage, so fingers crossed they will produce some good sturdy potatoes for storing. We'll leave them in the ground for a bit longer and keep our fingers crossed that the Blight stays away.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

July is always a busy month for us. Not least because it starts with my birthday and I do like to celebrate as many times as I can (I figure I'm getting to get older no matter what so I might as well have a party!).

Matt and I don't buy each other gifts for birthdays, we buy "experiences"! This year he treated me a trip to the Kentish seaside town of Whitstable to celebrate the final year of my 20s. I have wanted to go for ages and it's only 45 minutes away so perfect for a day out.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather, it was a beautiful sunny day (dare I say a little too hot!) so we really made the most of it. We wondered around the lovely little non-chain shops (bliss!) - Frank is a gorgeous shop with wonderful little gifts, the cheese shop where we bought a selection of Kentish cheeses to take home, Sundae, Sundae which does delicious flavoured ice cream in little boats, and numerous other lovely shops.





We visited the seafood market and treated ourselves to some fish and chips:




We spent a good while wondering along the beach and even went for a swim in the sea!




Here are some of the other highlights:






If you haven't been I would urge you to, particularly on a sunny day, it really is lovely!

Egg count - June

Start of a new month so time for another egg count. We've seen a bit of a dip this month:



This can be mainly explained by Blue, who was laying the most regular beautiful brown eggs, is having a bit of a tough time. A lot of hers come out soft and are gobbled up by the "old girls" in seconds, and the rest of the time she is laying tiny brown eggs with no yolk. She seems fine apart from this so we will just need to keep an eye on her as always. The others seem to be doing ok though, we have 2/3 most days. It's also probably down to the hot weather - I wouldn't fancy trying to squeeze one of those things out in this heat, would you?!

We can't really complain with this month's figure, which averages out as more than 2 a day. We are still selling them relatively regularly which is paying for their food. All you can ask really considering their poor start in life so well done girls!

Broad bean and pea falafel

We have the inevitable glut of peas and broad beans at the moment and we've now had our fill of pea and bean salads. We had our first pea and bean risotto of the season this week, which until now has been my favourite early summer dish, but not any more!

Courtesy of Jamie at Home we discovered the recipe of broad bean falafel, and I have adapted it slightly to use some peas by including a pea and mint dip.

For the Falafel

1kg broad beans (add smoe peas if you don't have enough)
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 chilli
1 tsp cumin
1 small bunch mint
1 sprig coriander
1 tbsp flour

Blend all of the above, adding the flour last. Once blended make into dumpling shape falafel, 8-10 of them. Cook them in a deep pan of oil until brown on the outside.

For the dip

Some peas (couple of handfuls probably - I can't remember how many I used!)
Half small bunch mint
Small pot natural yoghurt
Zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
splash of olive oil

Blend everything except the oil together, adding more or less pea/mint to taste, and a bit of salt and pepper. Splosh oil in at the end.

Serve with pitta and salad, like this:



Absolutely delicious! Try it!

We are doing so well at making home produced meals - we've at least 5 now which are almost entirely from our own garden/allotment. Hurrah!

Cheesemaking

We had our second attempt at cheesemaking today and it was much more successful than the first.



In our first attempt we made lemon cheese, which was fae too lemony so a bit bitter, this time we tried curd cheese. Yesterday we got it going, heating 4 pints of whole milk and the curd cheese starter in our cheese kit, which started the process of seperating the curds from the whey.



Last night we cut the curd and poured it into the cheese cloth, and hung it to drain it. We left it until this evening et voila, curd cheese! It is just like ricotta and absolutely delicious!





We didn't want to hang around to taste our new creation so hot footed it down to the allotment and picked some mini-courgettes with flowers. We stuffed the flowers with the ricotta mix, battered them and fried them (healthy!). Jolly delicious!