An embarrassment of salad

What is the collective noun for salad anyway? An embarrassment? A glut? A gluttony of salad? I'm continuing with Veg Plotting's 52 week salad challenge (and I'm still feeling smug!)

This sunny March loveliness has been enjoyed by the salad plants in my polytunnel as much as it has been enjoyed by me. The plants are simply basking and putting on leaf faster than we can eat it. I've taken to forcing gifting huge bags of salad leaves on to horrified grateful friends. I've thought of putting a sign at the bottom of the drive saying 'salad for sale', but then I thought 'salad for FREE' might be better. Finally I settled on 'HELP'!

This is a BIG salad!

Can you see where I picked it from?

So many leaves! Lovely land cress, leaf beet and chard.

I've become quite brutal in my picking, whole plants scythed off and the bigger leaves composted, but it only seems to encourage leaf production. One thing is clear: I HAVE to do this again next year.

In the meantime I've been planting seeds for salad futures; chervil, tomatoes, chilli peppers, salad onions, coriander, rocket, broccoli raab, radishes. I'm not sure when the winter salad plants are going to call it a day (they've been producing leaves since December) but I don't want to be caught on the hop when it does all come to an end. I've got some lovely baby tomato plants from Aldi - a mini plum type (no variety given) and my weeding of the bed for the onion sets revealed buried treasure in the form of potatoes (Charlotte) missed during last year's harvest. Today's lunch will be new potato salad and erm... salad!

52 week salad challenge - January

I had plans for this month's post for the 52 week salad challenge set by Michelle at Veg Plotting. Since the beginning of January I've been picking lots of lovely salads from the polytunnel - giant red mustard, chards, beetroot leaves, spinach, lettuces, rocket, winter purslane, sorrel and land cress. There's always a bag of salad in the fridge and I've been feeling pretty pleased with my polytunnel and its plants.

Admittedly we have been having a mild winter. Inside the polytunnel it's been springlike and warm and the plants have been growing on happily. It all seemed much too easy.

Inspired by VP and the other salad challengers I thought that for the first post I'd see what I could find in my garden. Things were delayed by busy-ness, power cuts and a fault with my broadband so I set aside today to have a hunt for edibles in the garden. Then I hit a snag...

Perhaps a couple of leaves from the tough and trusty cavelo nero? Hmm. Perhaps I'll go back into the polytunnel...

It was a bit gloomy inside, because of all the snow on the outside, but the plants are happy enough. Picking a colander full from this bed (and the rest on the other side of the polytunnel - I really did plant lots) is as easy as opening the fridge.

I don't feel like a proper 52 week salad challenger, in fact I feel a bit of a fraud. Others are scouring their gardens for all sorts of cleverly found wild goodies. I'm just reaping the benefit of accidentally planning, last year, for a challenge I didn't know I was going to do this. I must try harder! Perhaps when the snow thaws...

Bread bakeathon #13 and winter planting

The next bread from my recipe-by-recipe bake through of the River Cottage Bread Book was ciabatta. It's a bit of a palaver to make but the results are well worth it.

It's a really wet dough involving a mix of flour and semolina and you ferment it for three hours. Every half an hour or so you add a slug of olive oil and fold the dough up, lovingly, like a big soft blanket. This gives you a silky soft dough which is pretty impossible to handle. The only way to deal with it is with prodigious quantities of semolina to stop it sticking to your hands, the work surface and the dog. Daniel Stevens talks of bake stones, linen cloths and the like but when I tried that last time I lost all of the air from the dough transferring it between them. This time I proved it on the tins and it was more successful.

The result is six lovely little loaves, delightfully crispy on the outside and pillowy soft within. We ate the first ones hot from the oven, torn open, drizzled with a little olive oil and stuffed with grated mature cheddar and sliced home grown cucumber. The next meal we had them sliced into fat fingers, dipped into extra virgin olive oil and then into home made dukka. Divine. If I wasn't baking my way through this book recipe by recipe I'd make more ciabatta but I have an agenda and next on it is breadsticks.

The Delfland Nurseries Organic winter plants arrived on Tuesday all neatly snuggled into two brown cardboard boxes. They consisted of the winter vegetable selection (nine star broccoli, spring cabbages Duncan and spring hero, calabrese pacifica, perpetual spinach, bright lights chard, giant red mustard) and the winter salad selection (winter purslane, corn salad, land cress, lettuces winter density and Arctic King and wild rocket). Today with children out and husband working late I dodged biblical rain and headed into the polytunnel for a planting session.

After a bit of determined dibbing we now have neat rows of winter food - brassicas at the back, little salads at the front - all lined up like soldiers in the new big polytunnel and ready for the worst winter can throw at it. A polytunnel is quite coddling for some of these varieties but past experience has taught me that they hate the wet we get here no matter how good they are at surviving the cold.

My mini cucumbers are still going strong - astonishingly considering it's almost November - I think they like the new polytunnel too.

Guilty cake, bread bakeathon #12 and a lovely thing

This is carrot cake but it's also a guilty cake too. I made it yesterday after a particularly shouty morning before the school run. Brian's been on early shifts this week (why can't criminals stick to 9-5? Then he could work normal hours...) which left me outnumbered. On Friday after a shower interrupted by BANG, BANG, BANG on the door and MUMMMEEEE and then getting dressed which involved the door being slammed back on its hinges so the other one could go MUMMMEEEEE at me, starkers, and complain about the previous one I got, shall we say, a little stressed.

It ended with the eldest saying "calm down Mummy" in an irritating Michael Winneresque way (is anything guaranteed to have the opposite effect to calming?) But we made friends, I took them to school, then I made cake.

It's a honey-soaked carrot cake from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Everyday and I've just had a great big slice of it for Saturday breakfast. Breakfast is the best time of day to eat cake. Your appetite is unblunted by previous meals and you've got the rest of the day to use up the calories and there's not much difference between cake and toast and marmalade, except this particular cake's got nearly a pound of carrots in it which makes it one of your five a day.

While the cake was baking and as it was a chilly day which makes it a good idea to have the oven on (since turning on the oil-fired heating is Banned) I made the next instalment in my Big Bread Bakeathon. This is focaccia from the River Cottage bread book and is something I make regularly because it's so lovely with a bowl of veggie soup. I'm not sure mine would come up to Paul Hollywood's exacting standards on The Great British Bakeoff but it's delicious and is a big family favourite. We ate it with roast butternut squash soup which is, basically, autumn in a bowl.

While I was baking the postman arrived with an unexpected parcel. Inside it was a 'Peter's Seedling Pot Maker'. You use the top punch part to wrap newspaper around and then press it into the die part with a little water which fixes the base of the pot. This is perfect for seedlings as you can plant them out in the pot (which then degrades) without disturbing the roots and checking the growth.

The lovely thing about it is that it was made by my Dad who has taken to woodturning at his new home on Mull and the even lovelier thing is that the top part is made from wood from a tree that grew here on our little farm on the Preselis. Paper potmaking can now be a nice indoor winter activity for me ready for the spring sowings. In the meantime it is sitting in pride of place on the mantelpiece.

Gardening, swearing and sewing

Yesterday we grabbed the bit of sunshine and used it to help us finally finish tensioning the polytunnel. This was achieved with much swearing. I now know (having watched that wonderful bit on Fry's Plant Word where Stephen Fry and Brian Blessed swore like TV chefs while inflicting pain on themselves) that, when one has hit ones thumb with a hammer (again and again) saying f@ck and b@ll@cks helps with the pain.

Anyway we achieved our objective, the far right hand corner of the tunnel no longer flaps so I'll stop nagging Brian about it anxiously when the wind blows. I cleared out the tomatoes too, made the happy discovery of a tennis ball-sized butternut squash and started getting ready for a delivery of winter plants from Delfland Nurseries. I had intended to grow my own winter plants but we were delayed so long by the weather that everything backed up (and suddenly it's October!)

I've also got my leeks tucked up for the winter under a nice thick mulch. Note the handsome chaps in the background? Those are the cockerels. We keep squeezing them in the hope that there might be some meat on them and then using the fact that there isn't to put off the inevitable. When the four of them are in full voice at the crack of doom, it's quite a racket, but a cute racket that I quite like. (I CAN'T keep four cockerels, I really can't!)

I've also been turning an old pair of Ikea curtains into cushions; a housewarming one for Dad and Pat, a cupcake one for R7 and a horsey hearts one for H9. I was inspecting the remaining pieces of material recently (the tab top and hemmed bottom) and wondered, if I sewed them together again, they would fit the dining room window. They did.

I used a piece of scarlet ribbon to hide the join, bordered by gingham ribbon from eBay and finally edged one side of the panel with some lovely pom-pom trim I bought from Nellie Dean at the recent craft fair in Maenclochog. The result? One re-purposed curtain for less than £10 (and plenty of spare bits of ribbon and pom-pom trim for other things.)

Abundance

July seems to be the month of abundance in the garden. I have an abundance of good things - garlic, onions, potatoes, herbs, broad beans - but also an abundance of unwanted things - slugs, couch grass, brambles. Ah well, presumably you can't have one without the other and at least the brambles bear fruit!

One of the biggest successes this year has been the sweet peas. The plants have now formed themselves into a massive hedge underneath which are hidden the five wigwams I built when I put the plants in back in the spring. The plants are smothered with blooms and it's rather fabulous.

My sweet pea hedge

The varieties are: Anniversary, Mrs Collier, Matucana, Black Knight and Midnight (all seeds from Sarah Raven). I wish this was a 'scratch and sniff' blog because the fragrance from this many sweet peas at once quite knocks your socks off. 

Matucana

Anniversary

Meanwhile in the polytunnel another plant has rather taken over and I can't bear to weed it out because it is so beautiful.

Dill

This is Dill Mammoth, again from Sarah Raven, who says it's a good acid green filler for flower arrangements and that it 'freely self sows'. It certainly does that. I love the huge green umbellifers in big bunches in a vase and have it in mind they might make a nice motif for future sewing projects. My plan is to distribute the seedheads in the garden in the hope of more 'freely self-sowing' but this time not just in the polytunnel (where it a bit of a thug, beautiful but thug nevertheless).

The three word Gallery

Tara's inspiration for The Gallery this week was the 'your day in three words' feature from Simon Mayo's radio two show (which I listen to most evenings while I'm cooking dinner).

So my The Gallery three word Wednesdays are:

Polytunnel skeleton completed

"All" we have to do now is make the doors, dig a one foot deep and wide trench all the way round and put on the polythene cover.

Gorgeous sweet peas

R7 and I planted five different varieties last September and they've been flowering their little socks off for about a fortnight now. Here we have (little vase): Anniversary, Mrs Collier, (big vase) Matucana, Black Knight and Midnight (all seeds from Sarah Raven.)

Off with their heads!

Poor old common Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris). I'm very mean to my purple Aquilegias - come the end of May just as the poor dears are setting their seeds, I chop off their heads. I have had this thought in my head for a few years now that if I cut down all the purple ones, I'll encourage all the pretty other colours - the whites, pale pinks, deep reds - to grow instead. Invariably the blooms are still smothered in white-tailed bumble bees when I do this so I leave the tub on the lawn like a big vase until the bees had had their fill. This means they set their seed and I now have a trail of Aquilegias along the footpath from the garden to the compost heap where they have dropped their seed on the way.

Lovely Nora Barlow is allowed to seed to her heart's delight. She has a dwarfing effect on the mixed up offspring that results so they don't tend to fall over and sprawl all over the garden like the big thuggish purple ones. We affectionately refer to any that we fancy as Nora Barlow offspring as 'Gary Barlows'.

There were hundreds of white-tailed bumble bees on the blooms yesterday as I was snipping away. Aquilegias are a major feature of my garden at this time of year and the bees are obviously doing well on it. I tried to count but gave up in the 150s. They are friendly little bees and don't mind sharing a bloom. I leave the stiff stalks behind to support the peonies which are tight-fisted buds at the moment.

Finally a bee movie - I took a picture with the camera on the wrong setting and this was the brief result - a buzzy little bee.

Life in the Preseli Hills

It doesn't look much yet....

It's raining so I can pause and tell you what Life IS in the Preseli Hills at the moment.

When wondering what on earth it is I do all day I can only conclude that I am currently a full-time gardener.  I'm clearing an area 12 feet by 20 feet plus three feet all round in which to put up our second polytunnel. The bits for that arrived on Thursday along with two lovely books on polytunnel gardening which I'm trying to avidly read but every time I pick them up something intervenes.

Clearing the area requires wielding my Chillington hoe and hoiking out barrow loads of nettle roots. The patch is where the hens have been for the last decade or two and the soil is deep and rich and fertile. Nettles are always a good sign as they love to grow on the best ground.

While I dig three of the hens chat happily to me and Mrs Broody chuckles to the ten fertile eggs she's sitting on. I peer into her broody pen and she looks like a big fluffy cushion with a beak.

One of the interruptions to my polytunnel reading has been regular visits by a flock of sheep - a mix of white and black Mountain sheep - which are hell bent on joining us on our small farm. They should be on our neighbour's land but since he only has cattle fencing the inevitable keeps happening. This morning they broke through our fence again (they always break things on the way in) so Brian is now an hour late for work and has spent a couple of hours chasing sheep and putting in new fence posts. Our own sheep are quietly eating the lovely grass in our other fields and growing (the lambs) or recovering from lambing (the ewes) and don't need much looking after at the moment.

Another daily thing is to bring in the ponies. Bullseye has to come in during the day so he doesn't eat too much spring grass and get laminitis so Itsy, who can get hugely fat just looking at spring grass (I know how she feels but in my case it's cake) stays in with him to keep him company. Pippin who is not inclined to either fat nor laminitis stays out in the field on her own (much neighing) or, because she's old and wise, she gets to wander around the farmyard and hayguard eating lots of lovely lush grass (and hopefully not escaping into the garden).

When I'm not doing all of the above I'm pulling bracken from the eight acres of hay meadow. We can't spray (organic), or mow (no mower) or do any of the other bracken treatments that are supposed to work, so we're weeding it by hand. Actually Mum's done most of it so far as I've been distracted by other important things (like a Tweetup with Lins, Chris and Kath) but there's plenty still to do. (If anyone feels like popping over to give us a hand I pay in cake, roast chicken dinners and chicken curry suppers!)

In other moments I'm planting seeds, pricking out seedlings and potting on the bigger plants. I have lots ready for the new polytunnel - including cucumbers, melons, squashes, tomatoes - the little polytunnel is bursting at the seams. Its new role is for propagation and the growing will be done in the new polytunnel. All I need to do is to finish digging it and then put the thing up... other things allowing of course!

Garden jewelery

The Alchemilla Mollis and the Fennel were wearing their diamonds this morning.

The Gallery: April

This week's theme on The Gallery is April - a month that meant so many things this year: A long school holiday augmented by two double bank holidays and two 'snow' days; lambing; That Wedding; chocolate and Easter egg hunts and Devon with fabulous friends, good food and lovely donkeys.

I can only choose one photograph and this one perfectly illustrates the abiding memory of this April with its seemingly endless sunny days. The garden and the fields are parched and there's been a fresh wind mostly keeping the temperature down but we had one day which was still and a real scorcher.

That day was still enough for me to lie on the floor and photograph the tulips and it was too hot. Fabulous.

Man 1, Rodent 0

The rodent that has been terrorising my polytunnel is no more. His list of crimes included eating all of my F1 cucumber seeds, a tray of pale courgette seeds, melon seeds (twice), sunflower seeds (twice), sweetcorn seeds (an entire packet), Big Max pumpkin seeds (entire packet), butternut squash (five seeds out of six) and Turk's Turban squash (also five seeds out of six).

Evidence.

He also had a jiffle about with his paws in a tray of Cosmos seeds and had a look at some Verbascum seedlings.

By way of defence we suspended the seed trays on a plank from ropes in the middle of the polytunnel. So the mouse climbed the polytunnel poles and shimmied down the ropes to get to the (second batch) of seeds.

There is one word for that rodent, bastard talented .

The bill for his crimes is massive. He has set my gardening year back by at least four weeks, probably more. At least it wasn't too late to buy new seeds and replant but not if the rodent existed to eat them all over again...

He was, officially, Enemy Number One. I issued orders that he must be apprehended.

The Commander in Chief set five traps, four of the 'snap your little rodent neck' sort and one humane (preferred) live trap. I tip-toed around the polytunnel trying not to turn into one of those cartoon Tom and Jerry mouse-trap on fingers, toes and nose scenarios.

Last night the rodent selected the live trap as his punishment of choice and sat in it fatly and glossily waiting for the Commander in Chief.

What happened next is hazy but the C in C claims that the terrorist rodent put up some 'resistance' during which the rodent 'ran down the curtain and joined the choir invisible'. It was then buried, not at sea, but somewhere known only to the C in C (I suspect he might have given it to one of the cats to demonstrate the dereliction of its duties) and we will not be releasing pictures of the corpse.

The C in C then had to face his kangaroo court martial at 6am at which he was found guilty of major disobedience for damaging the criminal and his punishment is to dig enough well-rotted manure to mulch the entire garden and build the new polytunnel.

Today (sigh) for the third time I will be planting courgettes, melons, sunflowers, pumpkins and butternut squash. I'm bringing the seed trays into the comfort and safety of the house in case of revenge attacks by the rodent's relatives or friends.

It's a pig's life

Summer holidays are hard work. In the past week or so we've been to Cardiff to spend our Disney vouchers and see a real live Darlek at the Doctor Who Exhibition, we've hunted dinosaurs at the Tenby Dinosaur Park, we've crafted, we've played vets and poorly ponies, we've made a holiday jar in the style of Pipany, we've been out for a barbecue, in for lunch and dinner with friends, we've gardened, we've torn our hair out over slug, wind and rain damage, we've eaten courgettes (well, just the one), cabbages and cucumbers galore.

Sometimes the sun has shone and we have poured out of the house onto the new lawn to lie on the cool grass, gaze up at the fluffy white clouds in the blue sky, bask in the warmth and just be.

Even the guinea pigs can't stay awake under those circumstances.

Mouse convicted of seed pilfering

The rain has stopped! There was a brief window of sunshine here today in which to pop out and marvel at how much the grass has grown over the past week. Other marvels include my courgettes and lettuces which have really been working hard at adding lovely succulent leaves.

Maisie the Exmoor pony has settled in well. She is adorable. Bullseye, my Section A Welsh pony has taken to licking her (starting at the back toes, working upwards, don’t get too high - squeak!). Perhaps, since she is brown, he thinks she is made of chocolate? If so I might have a lick too!

They ended the rodeo of meeting each other by crashing into the fence, snapping the wire and breaking a fence post. Brian discovered the crime and the three perpetrators who were whistling and looking the other way, feigning innocence. There was not a mark on any one of them, of course.

They have now moved from their posh quarters in the big field where there was rather too much grass for three fat ponies, to a much smaller and less grassy field. It boasts an old green lane, now a bridle path, so that should provide plenty of interest for the inquisitive Maisie. She has already encountered Mum and Polly dog on the path. Sniffing of noses ensued (dog and pony only, not Mum!) and Polly licked Maisie on the nose. Awww!

But it might be a little too much of a sociable situation for some of the walkers that come through, so I think we’ll have to put a bit of horse leccy fence along the lane to protect hapless ramblers from an over familiar Exmoor pony.

On Saturday Cylch Meithrin held its fundraising car wash in the village which was, as usual, both fun and lucrative. We raised £123.50 after washing about 25 cars and two mountain bikes. We offered to wash the hunky bikers’ muddy legs too – but they wouldn’t let us! Three people paid us not to wash their cars. Perhaps they were customers from previous years, or maybe they spotted a three-year-old scrubbing at filthy paintwork with a kitchen brush and thought better of it. I can tell you, from experience, that Audis are the easiest to wash and Citroens the worst. The mountain bikes were the fiddliest, but, thanks to strategic Lycra on the owners, the most fun!

In the garden I have been flat out weeding, planting, weeding and weeding. War has been waged against massed ranks of slugs and a little brown mouse. The former were lured to a happy end with the offer of unlimited beer, the latter (not our friend from Y Mochyn Drwg over the hill) was given the option of a traditional snap trap or a comfy humane live trap, baited with parmesan. Unsurprisingly the mouse shunned the snap kill and opted instead for a cheesy snack and a night of cooling its toes behind bars. The following morning it appeared before a kangaroo court where it pleaded guilty to several counts of seed pilfering (sweetcorn, pea and bean, having a 100% success rate in the sweetcorn). Judge Brian donned his black cap and was about to sentence poor brown mouse to death, but the convict was rescued by the three soppy females in the jury who insisted it should be deported. “Don’t you dare kill it!” bellowed the jury. Mousie was taken to the hay meadow and released on to one of the banks. She’s probably on her way back now, to her nice, warm polytunnel.

Slugs should learn from the above. I have no compunction about stomping on a slug shouting ‘take that you b*****d!’, but mousies get more lenient treatment because they are so darned cute. If there was such a thing as a cute slug I wouldn’t show it the bottom of my wellie, but they are such odious creatures even soppy old me has no trouble dispatching them.

Talking of wildlife I heard my first cuckoo on Thursday 10th May and the following night I encountered a toad on the path outside the front door. I was letting the dog out for a pee at the time and he hurtled down the path and disappeared into the dark. Silence fell, apart from ‘pat, pat, pat’. What was that? I fetched torch and camera and found a little toad with an ‘uh oh, I’m toast’ look on his face. But I told him how beautiful he was and that he was welcome at any time in the garden. Plenty of slugs, I informed him - so long as they are not all in the ‘pub’ drinking the free beer that is!