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.....

Cheerful Geums

Last week’s wind and torrential rain was bearable because of the wonderful Jubilee celebrations.  This week’s wind and rain is bearable because the tall geums on the front bed are holding up well to the ‘wintry’ weather, thanks to some carefully positioned plant supports.  They are standing proud and punctuating the gloom with a mass of frothy, orange fizz.

We love geums because they deliver.  They are hardy perennials with evergreen or semi-evergreen leaves which mean they provide useful ground cover in winter. They are promiscuous and seed themselves around which means we get free plants and although they hybridise and the seed does not necessarily remain true, this is part of the joy of this plant.  They throw up new colours and forms so it is fun searching for that elusive offspring which might be a winner.

As long as they have plenty of moisture, geums are unfussy and if we keep dead heading them they just keep on flowering into the autumn.  We like the hot colours best – bright orange, pink, red and yellow – but there are more subtle shades available, with single of double blooms.  We have decided to add lots more varieties to the garden and this year we have planted some dusky pink ones for a change.

Geums tend to have a mound of foliage and flowers either on spikes or just above the foliage so we have placed some geum borisii, which are no more than a foot high at the front of a border.  The taller ones on the ‘hot’ bed at the front of the house – I wish I could find the plant labels - add movement (especially in these winds!) and we can glimpse the plants behind.  There are some forget-me-nots which have migrated from our neighbour’s garden and although we would never have put orange and pale blue together, we are always open to nature’s suggestions.

After about 4 years, the clumps of geums can be divided to revitalise the roots.  I have read that they can cope with light shade, so we might experiment and plant them in different growing positions.  Meanwhile, the skies may be grey but our borders are full of pizzazz. Long may it continue!