Driving Miss Daisy

The sun finally came out. It is amazing how much our spirits are lifted with a bit of bright sunshine. Even the road looks a bit clearer and I did venture out in my car this morning to the next town along. Now I have left my car at the bottom of the hill, so even if it does snow again I won't be quite so trapped.

It is funny isn't it, but as I drove in my car this morning (I did a careful 30 because there is still tons of snow and ice) it never ceases to amaze me that there are people out there pushing you to go faster, even in weather like this. 30 was the speed limit so it wasn't like I was totally dawdling like a maiden aunt, but really, to have someone driving right up to my bumper, lights blazing, in this weather, just makes me cross enough to want to slow down to 20 just to really p him off.

So I did :-)

It's very pretty but.......

.......I'm fed up to the back teeth of it now.

I'm getting grumpy and I'm getting stir crazy. Yes, I love looking out of the window onto such a pretty scene, but I can't go anywhere. I dug my car out just to try and keep on top of things, but it would be foolhardy to attempt to go down the hill in a little ford KA. I will go for a walk in a while to clear out the cobwebs, but oh I wish it would thaw. Tomorrow if it is no better I will have to take public transport to where I need to go, which I don't mind, but it is very very expensive around here (yeah, go figure) and involves that many changes and things that it will drive me mad. It is almost tempting me to walk the 6 miles that I need to travel.

Well, complaint over. It really is very pretty!

My Inspiration.

I thought I would share with you some of the inspirational pictures I find on the web. I tend to copy and save a picture of a garden that I think is beautiful and save it to inspire me. These gardens are all very special and although my own is miles off being as wonderful as these are, with a little bit of help from their inspiration and many many years of hard work and growth I hope my own will one day come close.

I love the stepping stones set into the grass, I am planning something similar as a path to a bench.

More stepping stones and the lovely informality of lupins and hollyhocks.

A relaxing bench at the bottom of the garden (yet more stepping stones).

This beautiful climbing rose is called Piere de Ronsard or Eden Rose.

OK, the house is probably more inspiring than the garden, but the general mood the whole makes is the character I would love.

Some nice higgledy-piggledy planting.

Just wonderful

Dream garden.

A wonderful selection of flowers.

As you can see, there is a real theme in the type of gardens I love, the rambling nature of them, the way plants look as though they have grown wildly where they wanted to (which of course is not true as these have taken very careful planning). No corners, lots of curves. It is always a great idea to get inspiration from photos and I look at them carefully when I am planning something new in the garden. It's worth trying anything, because everything in a garden can be fairly easily reversed if it goes wrong.

Practice really does make perfect.

Those of you who have read my blog regularly for a while will know the ongoing battle I have had with my pastry skills. No one ever showed me how to do it and as a novice pastry maker my first tries were very poor and often I would have (in the past) resorted to shop bought. But I persevered and improved, listened to advice, read cookery books carefully, storing away little tricks and tidbits of information and got better.

Well it just goes to show that if you keep trying with cooking and experimenting you really do improve.

This morning I made this chicken and ham pie and I am very, very happy with the results, the pastry looks good and golden, tastes great and there are no soggy bottoms! Mary Berry would be proud.

I didn't follow a recipe, just made it up as I went along. I roasted a chicken a few days ago so I had plenty of chicken picked off in the fridge, I had slices of ham from my Christmas gammon in the freezer so I thawed out a couple of slices too, made the pastry and shoved it in the fridge, fried an onion, added the cooked chicken, sliced up gammon and some mixed veg from a bag in the freezer. Made a white sauce to bind it all, some sage that I had hanging about and seasoned, that was the filling done, after that I just rolled out the pastry base to fill the pie dish, added the filling and put on a lid, cutting out a couple of leaves with a knife from the excess pastry. 30 minutes in the oven and it is one delicious pie.

This will probably do me 3 or 4 more meals.

I am so glad that I kept on trying because I really feel that I know what I am doing now and will never have to resort to bought pastry again. It is so easy to give up after a few failures.

Vegetable Growing 2013.

I think a lot of us in Britain can quite safely say that 2012 was not a good year for vegetable growing. It was rather disheartening to nurture seedlings and then plants, watch them grow their first shoots and finally produce little or no edible content at all. It wasn't all bad, I had successful potatoes and my apple tree and rhubarb took nicely so that I will hopefully have something from them soon, fingers crossed. but tomatoes were disastrous giving me only about 20 tomatoes from 8 plants, my cucumbers all died before they grew a single one and even my rosemary looks like it lost the will to live.

So onward and upward, 2013 is another year and we can only hope that the weather is a bit better and the vegetables actually grow.

2012 was always going to be a bit hit and miss for me, to be fair. I had only just moved in to this garden when I should have been starting seedlings off and the garden needed tons doing to it before I could get stuff in the ground.
Now I have a raised bed solely for veg growing and plenty of mixed beds that have been inundated with organic matter, manure, soil improver etc. All this will hopefully give my veg a better chance.

So I have been browsing the catalogues that I get regularly. I like Suttons, Mr Fothergills and Parkers and there is no pleasure like browsing the various sections on a cold winters night. It is easy, however, to get swayed by the lovely pictures of veg and to want to grow everything, so this week I got my act together and made a list of what I actually want to grow and eat this year. The is no point at all in growing stuff that you never actually eat, so that gets rid of a certain amount. Also, when space is a premium, I only really want to grow stuff that is pricey to buy in the shops, so I am going for stuff that I enjoy eating but can be expensive to buy. I am sure home grown carrots are delicious, but I haven't got room to grow many and after all a massive bag is less than a pound.

In the end I have whittled my list down to:

Vegetables

Spring onions
Tomatoes
Cabbage
Leeks
Squash
Lettuce
Garlic
Potatoes
Purple Sprouting Broccoli
Runner beans

Fruit

Apples (eventually, may get one or two this year)
Raspberries
Strawberries
Gooseberries
Red and black currants
Rhubarb

I am going to divide my raised beds into sections - a bit like square foot gardening, but because of the dimensions of the bed the sizes may be slightly different. At the moment in the raised bed are some rather sad looking cabbages, that have been in there for an eternity. By the time other things want planting out I will eat what I can from the cabbages and ditch the rest as a poor job. I will try and get the spring onions, leeks, squash and more broccoli into there, and some cabbage if I can. In pots or growbags I will grow my tomatoes and I have some old windowboxes that will be perfect for the lettuce. I had good success with potatoes in potato bags last year so will try that again and everything else will go where it can.

On top of all of this veg I will plant up all those remnants of seeds I have from last year, I have a whole load that were not quite used up and which I carefully stored. Anything that comes from them will be a bonus, there are things like radish and beetroot among other things.

With the exception of raspberry canes, all the other fruit is already planted from last year so we will see what happens there.

If all of the above grow successfully I will be a happy man, but as half the pleasure is in the eating and the other half is in the growing, I will enjoy myself whatever comes of it all.

Brilliant

I wouldn't usually 'steal' someone elses blog post, but I loved this post from Weans Frugal World so much and it does say to pass it on so I'm sure she won't mind. Some of you may have read it already, but for those that haven't I thought it was just brilliant.

Obituary in the London Times

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense
,who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was,
since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will
be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as: 

- Knowing when to come in out of the rain; 
- Why the early bird gets the worm; 
- Life isn't always fair; 
- And maybe it was my fault. 

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend
more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are
in charge).


His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but
overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy
charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from
school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding
an unruly student, only worsened his condition. 


Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing
the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly
children. 


He declined even further when schools were required to get parental
consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not
inform parents when a 
student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion. 

Common Sense lost the will to 
live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received
better treatment than their victims. 


Common Sense took a beating 
when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home
and the burglar could sue you for assault. 


Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed
to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in
her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. 


Common Sense was preceded in death,
-by his parents, Truth and Trust,
-by his wife, Discretion,
-by his daughter, Responsibility,
-and by his son, Reason. 


He is survived by his 5 stepbrothers; 
- I Know My Rights 
- I Want It Now 
- Someone Else Is To Blame 
- I'm A Victim
- Pay me for Doing Nothing 


Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. 

If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority
and do nothing.

Simple pleasures.

In winter everything seems to die off in the garden. Not really true, you just have to look harder and get pleasure from the tiny things.

My first snowdrop, aptly poking through the first snow of the year.

The twinkling lights of the solar powered fairy lights only make it on for about 10 minutes before the battery is dead at this time of year, but for 10 minutes it is very lovely, lighting up the snow.

The snow has it's very own beauty, I sat just looking at it with my morning cup of coffee.

Simple pleasures.