Christmas stuff

Hello everyone,

Today I am talking about Christmas (some of you may be appalled and would perhaps like to return to this post in about 3 months time, but you'll be sorry......) HEHE

I am notoriously a bit of a scrooge at Christmas time, let's call it too many years of miserable family members, put together in a room, screaming children who are so materialistic that they don't appreciate anything you give them, or understand the magic of the season, who only want the latest future landfill craze that lasts 2 minutes before it is broken or cast aside.

So it is with great happiness that this year will be different. I am not going to be there. My very very good friend (the American one who came to stay with me last March, (remember, when the weather was good, seems such a long time ago) is working in Germany this year and she has nothing to do between 18th December and 28th December and no one to do it with and so I have invited her to come and stay with me, for a traditional British Christmas, one that will not involve endless hours of shopping, screaming spoiled kids or any sort of misery, if I can help it.  The joy of this particular friend is that she is wonderful with food, both cooking it and eating it. She is non materiel and will enter into the true spirit of the season with me.

So with no time to spare when it comes to proper traditional food preparation, I got on with it today. I am going to be wholly traditional and cook everything from scratch and much of it in advance, trying to find the frugal way of doing things.

So with that in mind today I started preparing my Christmas cake and some cherry brandy.

Now I made cherry brandy a year or so ago and it was one of the best and most worthwhile things I have ever done. So delicious to drink, the cherry's themselves becoming a delicious desert ingredient.

I won't repeat the recipe, because here it is from a past post, only to say that it is well worth trying:
Cherry Brandy

So having bought a bottle of very cheap Aldi brandy, I decided to start on my Christmas cake. Now I have to admit that I was inspired to do this, it being years since I made a Christmas cake, by a new blog I have been reading called Being Penny Wise (and I recommend it). Mrs Penny Wise over there is making a Christmas cake using the cheapest value ingredients, to see how it comes out. Well, I am all for this so thought I would do the same.

This is her post on the subject.

Now, we all have our slightly different ways of making cakes, so I will be doing my own version, but basically the premise is the same, using value dried fruit, value brandy, value flour, etc I will make a lovely large cake for as little money as it is possible to do.

So today I put 2 packs of value dried fruit (1KG), asda in my case, into a bowl and added the remaining brandy (after making the cherry brandy) for it to steep in for the next week. After this I will make my cake and show you how it turns out.

So it is going to be a season of good food, prepared well in advanced (well come on, how many of us actually like supermarket shopping in December and horrendous last minute panicking?), home made well thought out presents (yeah, need to start thinking about that) and a celebration of the true joy of the season.

Will I finally get the Christmas I have always wanted? Let's find out.

gardening help please

My lovely azalea has a very very nasty attack of mildew. All this damned wet weather! Now I have been to the garden centre and thanks to their non advice found myself trying to work out what was best to do for myself.

As you can see, it is a very nasty case.

So, all you much more experienced gardeners than me, it is time for you to come into your own with much needed advice. I have been spraying it with an anti-fugus plant spray that says good for mildew but it hasn't yet made any difference at all. How long should I keep this up for? All webites advised to remove any fallen leaves and destroy them as this will put the disease back into the soil and continue the cycle. One website said to remove all the infected leaves from the plant, which I am happy to do if someone can verify that this is indeed the best course of action! It will make the plant look pretty awful for a while, but I guess it is going to lose its leaves for winter soon anyhow.

Anyone had anything similar? and have you managed to sort it out/find a solution? Any help is very very much appreciated!

I'm away now until Sunday, so just keep those suggestions coming in. I will gratefully read all your comments on my return.

A cascade of violas.

I have mentioned this book before as my current favorite gardening book and I can't recommend it highly enough, if you are a very experienced gardener it is maybe not for you, although I think there are good ideas for everyone in there, especially the novice who wants to create lovely looking garden ideas.
It is called Sweet Peas for Summer

and she approaches gardening ideas a bit like a recipe book, a list of 'ingredients' and a method.

This week I did one of her ideas which is a cascade of violas.

You take three pots of different sizes and fill them with compost, fitting each pot inside the bigger one. Violas are dead cheap at the moment and a pack of 20 plugs cost me just £2.70. I then filled all 3 pots with them and can't wait for them to all grow and flower, creating their cascade.

These of course are done with the brilliant pots that I got free from a kind person on freecycle, so this little project really did cost me just £2.70. I filled the bottom of the pots with some of the stones from the ground for crocks and then put in some of the turf that I have saved from my many other gardening projects and just filled the top sections with good quality compost. I will show you an updated picture in a few weeks to see how it is looking.

Putting the veg to bed.

It has been a busy few days in the garden. I was away working over the weekend so missed all that golden opportunity to garden in the sunshine, instead, I have been in and out dodging rain.
I have been creating a raised bed vegetable garden area and it was hard work (usual stones in the ground problems.

I started by digging the area out and removing the turf and then digging deep to fit the raised bed posts into the ground.

I dug out a trench that I was to fill with gravel, both to make it prettier and also because I heard that slugs and snails don't like to go over gravel - anything to keep them off the veg after the year of it I have had with them!

I put in a liner so that the weeds would not come through the gravel.

Then I added some stepping stones around the back, made use of some of the massive stones that I have pulled from the ground, and began the process of filling in with the small stones.

I put cardboard in the bottom of the bed to help the grass down until it rots and then added a lot of compost. A few plants around the outside to soften the edges (more to come in time)

And finally I planted my cabbage and cauliflower, I have been growing most of these from seed for a very long time and some of them have succomed to being eated alive by caterpillars and slugs and snails. hopefully they will recover a bit. Cabbage is my favorite veg, so I hope that I will have some for Christmas.

A job well done.

Arrabiata Sauce for no cost and harvesting crops.

Today I made a large batch of arrabiata sauce and I had to share because with the exception of a a could of cloves of garlic it cost me absolutely nothing!

I used a couple of my home grown onions, small but perfectly formed!

A couple of cloves of this wonderful French garlic which I picked up for a song on a french market.

Fried it together with a couple of dried chillis, the last of my stock which I grew and dried last year.

I bottled these tomatoes last year, they were the left over from what I had grown and, following instructions very carefully (didn't want to die of botulism, as was suggested if you didn't do everything by the book) I got them perfectly preserved. I pulled off the seal and opened them up to be met with a lovely scent of tomatoes!

These are pink peppercorns, which I harvested from a tree in the South of France. I dried them for a couple of days in the sun and they are so delicious. Ground up a few and added them in.

Finally some of my thyme that is growing outside. I recently thought that it had died, but I think it was just unhappy and was contemplating suicide. I have brought it back from the brink and it is flowering happily now.

Left to to simmer for an hour or so. Delicious.

Other garden news:

It won't be a big tomato crop, and I would really like them to start ripening, but at least there are some good looking ones.

Chilli plants finally coming on, need them to as I used up my final dried chilli for the sauce above.

I had a lovely big crop of Nicola Potatoes, this is the ones from the ground and this:

is from the potato bags. Much better crop in the bags it seems. They are delicious and I have immediately planted some more potatoes for Christmas.

Finally I have a kitchen light! I was beginning to hate the bare flex I had dangling. I had planned on getting this ages ago, but it was £40 from Amazon and there was no way I was going to pay that. Couldn't find one cheaper so over the last few months I have been doing online surveys that pay you in amazon vouchers and finally had enough to get it for free. A few phone calls to me much more practical brother and I managed to successfully wire it in and get it working, first time! Finishes off the kitchen beautifully.

Digging for victory

Hello everyone, after my rather long absence I am back and raring to go. I have been feeling so tired and jaded the last week or so and it has taken me a while to get back into the swing of things but September is going to change all of that. I have been spending so much time in the garden, really trying to make an impact and I must say that it is looking lovely. 

My border is lovely, not that I can take much credit for that as all these plants, bar the rose at the end and the apple tree at the front, were there already and have come into bloom. I am going to replace the fences in the next few days/weeks not because I mind the nice old looking ones, but because every now and again when I am out there there is a crash as yet another rotten piece of wood falls off. One strong wind and the whole lot could go as it is completely and utterly rotten.

My apple tree has taken beautifully and goes from strength to strength, who knows, maybe I will even get an apple or two next year! I am not touching the rhubarb as I have been warned off doing this in its first year, but oh, it is so tempting to nick some for a nice crumble. the stepping stones are actually massive stones that I dug out of the ground (now you see why digging a new bed takes me so many hours!) I will do something with them.

I kicked off my wellies and took a well earned break.

I have dug out this bed and added 2 climbing plants that will reach up to that trellis given time. On the far left is a clematis montana Elizabeth and on the right is....... oh, dear, I can't remember and I lost the tag!

Another picture of the same border (how did that happen?)

On this trellis I have painstakingly dug out another bed and this is another clematis, this one called star of India.

This small corner bed took me about 7 hours in total over 2 days, yes it really did. The man who lived here before me had piled all the stones that he had ever dug out of the earth into a pile here that had then started to grow its own life forms. I filled over 17 bags with rocks! My poor car didn't know what had hit it when I transported those to the tip.

Today I finished digging this bed and it has finally reached the end and matched up with another bed. Now the fun bit will start, choosing plants.

This was when I had not quite got to the end. From left to right, a honeysuckle, mombretia (transplanted from elsewhere in the garden), jasmine and clematis star of India.

yet more bed digging.

The border from the other end.

Close up.

Still haven't got the arch (and not sure I can actually afford one right now, but one day it will be there for the lovely red climbing rose to climb over.

Digging, digging, digging........

I have put together a raised bed, which is not yet in the ground, I will put some winter veg in here, got some cabbages and cauliflowers that are almost ready for planting out.

And after all that work, i am so tired, it is an early night for me!

Thanks for being patient!

Oh and Blogger seems to be behaving itself, in fact, all these photos downloaded in record time, first time! Got to be good news!

I haven't disappeared, honest.

Hi all,

Sorry about my overwhelming lack of posts this week, haven't been in a very posty mood. Also blogger has been playing up something rotten, giving me warnings about being logged in at another location (not true) and not uploading pictures for love nor money. I have lost a post of two which has made me more despondent and commenting on your entries has become a battle of wills between me and computer blog land, me usually losing after 20 attempts. What the hell is going on here?
After a lovely day of sunshine yesterday, the heavens have opened. I am desperately trying to find a time to dig one of the back beds out because I have some clematis to get in but yesterday was taken up with mowing the lawns and entertaining family who called in for the day.
Anyway, suffice to say, I will be back soon, when I can get some pictures uploading and sort my life out a bit.
I am still reading your blogs, I promise, but lack of comments is just a blip in the system, sorry.