It goes on a bit, doesn't it?

The Duke of Medina Sedonia probably hoped that strength and strategy would bring victory to the Spanish Armada in 1588 but it was the English stormy weather that helped to defeat his Spanish galleons.  He came up with the phrase: ‘Rain, rain, go away.’ My thoughts exactly.

I have tried to stay positive and not moan about the rain because we gardeners depend on it to keep the plot bountiful, the grass green and the reservoirs full.  Also, I have always felt there is a certain romance to rain.  As a child, I remember sitting in a caravan on a windswept campsite, reading my Enid Blyton book and listening to the pitter patter of the rain on the roof.  It made me feel cosy and safe inside, especially if there was a mug of cadbury's cocoa too.  There have been times nowadays, when a trip to the greenhouse means I can steal a crafty sit down and listen to the same comforting drip, drip, dropping.
 
However, you can have too much of a good thing and the novelty of wearing an anorak in the garden, in summer, has worn off.  My half full trug of produce last week has long since gone and shockingly, I am missing the pain from my usually seasonal  'watering can arm'. The garden is now a designated marsh area and the rose buds are mouldy.  The chickens looked miserable when I let them into the corral today and their little claws sank into the mud.  (Does anyone know where I can buy chicken wellies?)

But there is nothing we can do, except salvage what there is from the veg plot - and hope.  I have covered the lettuces with cloches to stop them from rotting and I lifted the onions and put them on the greenhouse staging to dry off.  The beetroot has perked up a tiny bit and the runner beans look happier now they have finally managed to crawl up the canes, away from the ground, though need a lot of encouragement to keep going.

Yesterday, Doc seized on a sunny window of opportunity and cut the grass which was so lush it was in need of a re-style rather than a trim.  I have never seen Doc drive the ride-on mower quite so fast and with every approaching grey cloud, he put his foot down even harder on the accelerator pedal.  His strimming skills improved considerably too and I am wondering if there are any strimming competitions he could enter .  Perhaps he could win us a holiday in the sun.  Fortunately though, the weather held, he finished the job and there is now a sodden, seven foot high pile of clippings at the end of the garden.  (Send creative ideas on a postcard, please.) 

It has been pouring all day today and surprise, surprise, the forecast says it will rain again tomorrow.  I will soon run out of indoor jobs because there is a limit to how many times I can clean out the cupboards and put the canned pulses in date order.  I must try and cheer myself up.  I must think of Gene Kelly, gloriously happy, sloshing his way down the street in that wonderful and iconic 1952 film musical.  He did not care about soggy socks and wet lettuces.  'Dum, de dum, dum, dum de, dum de, dum, dum......I’m singin’ and dancing in.... the rain........’

A trug half full

Activity in the garden has been restricted lately.  Weather stopped play which is disappointing but that’s how it is and we have to make the best of it.  I cannot remember a summer quite as wet as this.   I have never seen patches of standing water in the orchard.
Since we live on a hill, we are safe but there is so much water that our neighbours’ run off from their already saturated lawn has joined our run off.  Consequently, we now have a stream running down the garden path which we are trying to think of as our new water feature.

However, it was warm and sunny today.  It has not rained but the ground is still saturated and my boots squelched around the garden.  The fruit and vegetables are as disappointing as the weather.  This is not a good year for any of the root veg and the butternut squash are non-existent.  

But it is not all bad news.  Today, I achieved half trug full of delights and there is nothing like scarcity to increase my gratitude.  We may not have a glut of courgettes but there are two little yellow ones which are perfect for the pasta sauce.  The mangetout are growing very well and I keep them in the fridge to nibble in between meals instead of biscuits.  Last week we had a big bag full and I made a stir-fry and we still had some left over the next day, to lightly steam.  We ate them with some fish and our own fresh parsley sauce.

The star of the trug has to be the blackcurrants.  I was checking out the lettuces (attacked by slugs) and strings of jet black tiny beads caught my eye.   Before you could say vitamin C, I had abandoned slug hunting in favour of gathering a necklace or two of these wonderful gems.  The sun was on my back and the blackcurrants were warm and fragrant.  I spent half an hour in blissful solitude, listening to the birds and at one with nature.  Weather beaten I am not.

Get ready for the Goosegogs!

Gooseberries are so English.  Only we are mad enough to delve amongst the treacherous thorns to pick them and have an upper lip stiff enough to cope with a pH equivalent to battery acid.  

Gooseberry bushes grow well in our climate (in spite of the gooseberry sawfly) and they are comically attractive, with their pale green or blush red fruits covered in bristles and silvery veins.  Doc and I have a love hate relationship with them but somehow the fruit garden would not be complete without our bullets.  We have purchased ‘dessert’ gooseberry bushes which gives the impression that the fruit can be nibbled straight from the fruit bowl.  I am not sure about that myself. 

After a few dry days and nicely swollen, un-netted fruits I thought I had better put on my leather gloves today and forage in the undergrowth for some of the gooseberries. The wet weather seems to have done the gooseberry bushes good because they have deep, lush green leaves, un-molested by any pests and there is a really substantial crop.  From one bush alone I have picked 6lbs of good sized fruits.

Goosegogs make tasty, quick crumbles if you use a bucket full of sugar but with a bit of effort and friends or family to inflict them upon, goosegogs can be made into more interesting desserts.  I quite like to make this Gooseberry and Frangipane Tart for a crowd, as the pastry and filling help to dilute the corrosive effect of the fruit and the roof of your mouth is more or less left intact.  The finished tart serves more ladies than it does rugby players.

You will need a pastry case, baked blind in a 9 inch (24 cm) tart tin.  I use ordinary shortcrust pastry but you can use sweet shortcrust pastry if you prefer.

Frangipane Filling
7 ozs (200 g) butter
7 ozs (200 g) caster sugar
6 large eggs, beaten
3 ozs (80 g) plain flour
9 ozs (250 g) ground almonds
Beat butter and sugar until pale and creamy, then add the eggs slowly, beating well. Stir in the flour and ground almonds. Spoon the frangipane into the pastry case.  (If I have some, I often spread a couple of tablespoons of gooseberry jam or jelly into the pastry case first.)  Stud the top with fresh gooseberries and bake in a moderate oven (Gas mark 4, 180 C) for 30-40 minutes.  Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve warm with cream flavoured with elderflower cordial.  This tart freezes well.

Gooseberry Fool
This recipe serves 4-6 people but it needs to be served with crisp biscuits such as shortbread or brandy snaps.  Serve it in stemmed glasses.

2lbs (900 g) gooseberries, topped and tailed
4 tablespoons elderflower cordial
2ozs (55 g) granulated sugar
½ pint (284 ml) cold water
For the custard
½ pint (284 ml) single cream
½ pint (284 ml) double cream
The seeds scraped from 1 vanilla pod (or you can use vanilla essence)
4 large egg yolks
4oz (110 g) caster sugar
1heaped tsp cornflour

Put the goosegogs, sugar, elderflower cordial and water into a non-stick saucepan and simmer until the gooseberries are soft.  Drain off some of the cooking liquid and reserve.  Blend the cooked goosegogs to a smooth puree, adding more liquid if necessary.  (I sometimes sieve the puree to remove the seeds and make it even smoother.) Cool the puree.

Mix together the egg yolks, caster sugar and cornflour and put aside. Put the cream into a non-stick saucepan with the vanilla seeds, over moderate heat. Scald the cream (get it hot but not boiling), remove from the heat and whisk into the egg yolk mixture. Tip the mixture back into the saucepan and heat gently, stirring continuously, until the cream is thick enough to coat the back of your wooden spoon.  This will take longer than you think – about 20 minutes. Long, slow cooking time is necessary to prevent the custard from curdling. Cool, covered with greaseproof paper to prevent a skin forming on the custard.

Layer the goosegog puree with the custard in the glasses and decorate with a fresh gooseberry and a sprig of fresh mint or elderflower.  Chill before serving.

If we did not grow gooseberry bushes, where would babies come from?

Digitalis Purpurea

Today, I bought the last two packs of plant stakes from our local garden centre which shows just how windy it has been lately. For the first time ever, I have managed to support all the taller ornamentals, including some of the foxgloves and the borders and beds are benefitting from the height and structural impact the loftier perennials bring.

The foxglove is a poisonous wild flower which produces Digitalin, an important drug in the treatment of heart complaints.  There are several stories about how it got its common name.  Apparently, bad fairies give the flowers to foxes to wear on their paws so they can sneak up on the chicken run....

We gardeners love the foxglove for its distinctive spires of spotted, purply-pink bells which the bees are attracted to.  They like semi-shade, are biennial and seed readily which is essential to keep them ever-present in the garden.  If the newly emerging plants are too dense, I just thin them out to a more sensible spacing. To colonise other parts of the garden, as soon as the seed is dry, I scatter it thinly and it comes up the following spring. Foxgloves particularly like the hedgerows and we don’t discourage them because they have usually finished flowering by the time the hedges need cutting.  We have white as well as purple ones though there are modern varieties which I would like to try.

I only have one gripe against the foxglove.  Sometimes they don’t grow straight.  They twist and turn and then look lopsided.  Why is that, I wonder?  It is so annoying!  I am afraid this one is going to get the chop!

Honeysuckle Creme Perfume

I am feeling nostalgic this week.  I have been day dreaming about those long hot summers of yester year when we wore shorts and sleeveless tee-shirts.  There was an ‘expert’ talking on the radio today and she assured me that this unseasonal weather is in fact typically seasonal.   I refuse to believe her.  I have worn my sandals twice this summer and it is most annoying not to be able to feel the grass tickle my feet.

Anyway, the honeysuckle at the front of the house thinks it is summer.  When we moved here 8 years ago it was a straggly old thing in the privet hedge and was completely swamped by the ash tree on the boundary with the footpath.  It also received a major hair cut every time the hedge was trimmed.   But, a couple of years ago we decided to rejuvenate the ash tree by having it pollarded in the hope this would encourage it to smarten up and become more attractive to look at from the kitchen window.  Our friend, the Tree Man, said it would take a couple of years for the tree to regenerate and indeed it has. 

For the first time the ash tree looks nice and during the period when it was busy with some serious re-growing, the honeysuckle has been set free.   Doc has taken care to trim the hedge around it and this year, the honeysuckle is a mass of yellow and pink flowers.  In the evenings, it has a wonderful scent which fills the air and follows us down the garden path to the back of the house. 

Honeysuckles are associated with the English country gardens and yet they are strangely exotic. They are unruly, they scramble and drape themselves up trees and pergolas with unmemorable foliage but when the flowers emerge, the scent almost knocks you off your feet.  So sweet and heady is the perfume that you feel intoxicated with only one sniff.

When I was about twelve years old, my mother said I was old enough to choose something from the Avon catalogue.  She distracted me from the page with the red lipstick and encouraged me to try some crème perfume.  The following week, I was so excited about its impending arrival that I rode my bike up and down the street for an hour, checking the Avon Lady’s progress with her deliveries.  When my turn came, it was like opening a jewel box.  I had my very own little pot of Honeysuckle perfume.

Needless to say, I did not use my crème perfume sparingly and when my nanna called she did not mince her words.  She said I smelled like ‘a tart’.  Thus began a rather stilted conversation between me and my mother, which I won’t go into here.

So from then on my love for honeysuckle was secured for life.  We have 6 different ones dotted around the garden, including an evergreen one which grows in the shade, as well as a new shrubby variety.  As for the one at the front of the house, we don’t know its name but we do know that it has been waiting a long time for its special moment to shine.  I do hope this year’s show of flowers is not its swansong.

 

The Perfect Meadow

I fell in love with meadows before they became fashionable. I grew up in the 1960s and whilst my mother did the housework I went out to play with my friends.  We rode our bikes along quiet country lanes edged with blackberry bushes and made our makeshift dens in cornfields dotted with red poppies.  We created daisy chains and waded through waste high grasses, soaking up the sun and eating homemade blackcurrant jam and Cheshire cheese sandwiches. 

Re-creating the ‘natural’ wildflower meadow is popular at the moment. The idea is that a boring patch of lawn can be simply transformed into a wildflower meadow which provides cover and food for wildlife and requires far less maintenance than a traditional lawn.  All you do is buy a few packers of wild flower seeds and broadcast them over your lawn and you will have a wonderful display of wildflowers to provide interest from early spring to the end of summer.  

Unfortunately, re-creating a natural meadow that reappears year after year is anything but simple.  For a start, there is usually too much fertility in your lawn to allow wildflowers to establish themselves.  You can try mowing, scarifying, strimming and starving the lawn to reduce the nutrients available and hope that the vigorous grasses and weeds lose their grip on the soil.  However, this is not as effective as killing off the grass completely and eradicating thugs such as dandelions, thistles, nettles, dock and couch grass.  If you don’t like chemicals then this means covering the lawn with black plastic or matting for a year or two.  Some experts recommend you then remove all the top soil before planting with a special grass and wildflower seed mix or more expensively, laying wildflower turf.

You can’t throw out your strimmer and mower either because the meadow will need cutting and the time of year you cut it, will determine the types of wild flowers that will grow. And remember too that wildflowers have their buddies and don’t take too kindly to interlopers. Moreover, whilst you may start free of thugs, they will creep back in and within a few years you will have lost all the wild flowers.  Even yellow rattle which is reputed to help keep the grasses under control, is not foolproof.

Poppies grow in cornfields because they compete equally with the corn but it is the ploughing that brings them back year after year.  Like many wild flowers, poppy seeds only germinate in ground disturbed by ploughing or animals eg sheep. So don’t forget to scarify, will you?

Managing a meadow takes time, effort and persistence and Doc and I do not have unlimited time.  There are other new things we would like to do in the garden too and since we have a garden with a view of the natural landscape and enough wild life to fill a zoo, we have decided to be realistic keep our ‘meadow’ simple. 

We have allocated a couple of small open, sunny areas in the orchard where there are already snowdrops and bluebells.  We are lucky that the grass in the orchard comprises of original meadow grasses rather than 'lawn' turf and the plan for next year is to cut the grass to within an inch of its life - after the bulbs have flowered - and kill off any thugs.  We shall experiment by adding some wildflower plugs such as cowslips and I have some red campion (which is pink!) in another part of the garden which might do well. 

Meanwhile, we are leaving these areas un-mown for the rest of the season, to see what grows and whether or not we would like a smaller or larger area.  So far it looks promising and we like the contrast between the mown grass and un-mown grass.  We shall keep an eye on it and see what happens. Already we have some poppies, daisies and some orange flowers which we have not identified yet.  It is all looking very natural, especially with the rabbit holes and dandelions.....