Digging a pond: Or how to hurt yourself in new and creative ways

The digging is complete!! Or at least I hope so. My last slog was from 9pm til 10pm (I’ve been doing my digging after work when I can) and I will be thoroughly happy to leave my spade in the shed for a while. Here’s the result:

Considering it is not that big a hole I was suprised by exactly how much soil came out. Apologies for the bad light in this pitcure, it was pretty late when I took it, but you can kind of get the jist:

It’s not easy to show the depth really but this is my best attempt:

You can see what an awkward shape it was to dig, limited access and a very narrow trench. I managed to scrape my handle constantly on the bricks surrounding the hole and had to get myself into such difficult poses at times to actually get the soil out. I could get both feet in at the wide end but had one leg in and one out for most of the digging.

After a suggestion I am considering turning the bed next to it into pond as well – like so:

What do we think?

Free fruit

The affect of growing your own fruit means that when you see people in supermarkets buying said fruit you either think, “mwahah, I have that in my garden for free!!” or “Please! Take some of mine! They’re free!! I don’t want any more – wahahaha”.

I only mention this because I saw a lady the other day buying some blueberries in Waitrose (so think rather pricey) and I thought, “mwhahaha, I have my own” rather smugly. Ok, so I don’t quite have a punnets worth:

But still, blueberries!! How exciting is that?! Oh, and a couple of tayberries too:

Neat huh?

And as ever, some more strawberries (though with another blueberry pick as well)

I highly recommend growing your own fruit – it’s awesome.

Heave-ho

Just a quick addendum:

I did some more pond digging last night and if anyone needed convincing about the murderous past of my house and the Grave? Yup, I dug up a rib…

Gardener’s delights

A lot of growing has happened since I last posted about my garden on this blog so let me take this opportunity to catch up. I took some photos a couple of weeks ago and took some last night, so I should be able to show you some nice comparison shots.

Working around the garden clockwise we come first to my carrots. These are globular carrots rather that your classic root shape so you can grow them in very shallow containers.

Here they are at the beginning of June:

And here they are now!

As you can see I sewed them in a really peculiar fashion and they now need lots of thinning. I feel bad thinning my plants out after they did so well to grow in the first place but that’s how I ended up with pathetically small and green carrots last year…

Next along are the courgettes. At least, I think they are courgettes – one might be a squash and the others might be yellow or green courgettes – I managed to forget which seedling was which. Well, watch this space!

When they first were planted out:

Now:

In retrospect I think I over enthusiastically planted things there as the right most courgette seems to be invading the broccoli’s territory, whoops.

Next along we have the red onions and white onions, both of who are sharing their space with some extra broccoli plants – I had a lot of those germinate in the end and again felt bad about not planting them somewhere.

Then:

Now:

Next in the bed are the strawberries. I have had an excellent yield this year (see my jam post) and they just keep a’coming… The before and after pictures look the same here so just the one:

My tomatoes look a lot more promising this year – in that they have put out flowers! I have seen plenty of bees about as well so little tommies here I come! These are specifically container tomatoes so have a bushier, squatter appearance.

Lil toms just starting out:

Happy in a pot:

A growbag:

And another two pots (yes, lots of tommies)

These next guys aren’t at all edible but I’m am very pleased with them this year. I tried to grow them from seed last year and failed spectacularly, and you can see from the first photo that I didn’t get a great germination rate this year either:

(The long curly leafy plants, the others are weeds)

Well, now they look like this:

Yes, bigger version of the other picture (and you can see how only one little guy grew in the left pot making them slightly unbalanced.

Has the suspense affected you at all yet? Dying to know what they are?

Well, they are an ornamental grass called “bunny tails”. Hopefully when they finish growing you will be able to see why!

So, we also have cabbages:

Which some garden pest seems to find tasty, grrr. My broccoli I don’t have a good picture of but they are getting munched  by caterpillars – grrr again. Now my nightly watering routine includes lots of squishing too.

Potatoes are as flourishing as ever:

The bed against the fence started off with just my tayberry in there, but quickly got used as space for other bits and bobs. Right to left –

Tayberry, shooting out all over the place with complete disregard for my careful tying and training:

And to the left we have, in order, mini corn (bought from my recent trip to the Gardener’s World fair at the NEC. So much fun and bought some pretty things too, pictures coming up) a jostaberry, a cross-breed of a blackcurrant and a gooseberry who came to my garden from my good friend Deborah, a sweet pea and another would be courgette/squash:

From the aforementioned show I also picked up this cheery orange fellow:

 

An acer – who after seeing growing at Newstead Abbey I have longed for:

An amazingly beautiful rose who smells strongly of lemon sherbet:

And this fantastic hanging basket (not currently hanging) who was, get this, 5 pounds! I have planted some little pinks plants in him already. I will hang him up when I have a bracket but the chimney pot makes a handy resting place:

Phew this is a long post! Well, last but not least my erstwhile attempts at making a pond continue, sporadically. I have dug lots honestly and filled a fair few bags but yeah, it really doesn’t look like it in this shot:

I’m hoping to save most the earth for raised beds but the quality is appalling – its full of rubbish, rubble, glass (a lot of glass), nails, all sorts. I’m amazed anything grew here to be honest.

Well, stay tuned for the next instalment!

A photo guide to making strawberry jam

Once again I found myself in the familiar situation of having a lot of garden produce that needed using, fast. So naturally, when my excess happened to be strawberries, why not make jam I thought? So here we go – here’s my photo guide to making strawberry jam.

Firstly, I gathered a bundle of freshly picked (and not so freshly picked) strawberries. I have these things coming out of my ears at the moment – my strawberry plants have done very well this year. I made this jam about a week ago and once again have collected enough to make some more!

First off all the strawberries needed preparing, so I washed them:

And then set about topping and slicing them.

Next came the mashing. I popped a bunch into my blender and they basically wedged the whole system up. So I tried mashing them a little first as per the instructions. How fine you mash them depends on how big you want your fruit lumps to be. I like smooth jam so once I’d mashed them by hand I then blended them successfully into a fine pulp.

Next to pour this into a jam pan – which I didn’t have, so I used two frying pans. You also have to add your sugar at this point – strawberries are low in pectin (helps jam set) so I used jam sugar.

Simmer this gloop for a bit then bring to the boil for exactly 4 mins, according to my recipe. One of my pans had a loose handle which ment strawberry slop went everywhere which you can see in the photo below:

To test my setting point I used the saucer trick – drop some jam onto a cool plate and push it with your finger – if it wrinkles your jam is done! At that point to siphoned the jam into jars and voila!

(I have two half full jars as I had to do each pan separately.)

And that’s it!

Keeping up Appearances

As promised, here is a post that will probably be rather long but will at least get me up to speed with a little of what has been going on around the old home lately. So, lots of photos and less writing which will please those of you who just look at the pictures..

House update:

I’m planning to paint the front room green, so look out for one of these colours:

I get to grips with tidying and decorating – hang my clock, pictures and arrange some keepsakes:

The kits enjoy the carpet while it is still on the landing. I’m planning to take it up and sand the floor boards down so the underlay has already gone making it rather uncomfortable to walk on.

And Bee gets extra screentime for being simply dazzling:

Moving on to the garden, more always seems to happen out there:

There’s no deny that we had some great weather in April which meant lots of sitting in the garden, cider and BBQs

The pond got dug a little bit deeper:

I plant seeds and things start to sprout:

And Annie came and lived chez moi for a week or so, proving to be an excellent way of disposing of dandelions in the process!

Podcasting…

Ok, so I’ve not been keeping very up to date lately but have a post waiting in the wings, honest. As a small interlude please address your attention to:

http://gameclubuk.blogspot.com

It’s a brand new blog & podcast – shortly to be found in Itunes no less! All about gaming and games, the first podcast is a spoiler cast about Portal 2 and our thoughts on it. Please listen and tell us what you think!

The game is a-foot!

Yes, I’m finally back in the swing of updating my blog again! Sufficed to say that the winter was snowy and cold as I guess it was everywhere, so what better a time to start blogging again than the first inkling of spring?

In this spirit, I have started to dig up my garden, again. This time, for a pond or two!

First things first though, here is a quick look at how my garden is looking now that I have tried to clear most of the dead stuff away and that new plants are starting to sprout.

My strawberries happily survived the winter and rogue plants are starting to pop up in neighbouring borders:

I planted out some red onion sets last week which are here:

The white onions I planted before Christmas and are starting to sprout nicely:

All in all its all pretty fine, if a bit dull and weedy at the moment. Having had enough of weeding for the time being I switched my attention to my planned water feature. I had initially planned to dig up what I have pleasantly named “The Grave” but the fact that the area is solid concrete produces a slight problem. Thus I turned to the bed flanking the grave and decided this was a better bet. A conversation with my brother-in-law over the weekend got my mind to thinking why not dig out the bed adjoined the lower one too – and have a multi tiered water feature?

Anyway, first things first, a little big of investigating.

I had a dig and found that the raised bed is lined with plastic and appears to just be a big concrete trough, which should be quite simple once I get all of the soil out. The bed below seems to just be dirt like normal, though I did have to move the lion.

It turns out that the slab the lion was sitting on wasn’t attached to the concrete supposedly sticking it down at all, so I just lifted it up and found:

Ants!

And bits of familiar concrete jumble:

And horrible things like this…

Nice eh?

Oh hai!

Owning cats is pretty awesome, which by now I think I have probably mentioned several times. Admittedly, not everything a cat does whilst under your ownership is awesome, but you when you balance it out things are, on the whole, pretty grand.

For example, Poppy has now learnt how to sit on the top of the doors. This is a pretty neat trick – she crouched, wiggled her little bum and then launched herself skyward. Naturally, after her first attempt was successful she now doesn’t hesitate to do it and I will often look out from the kitchen to see a tail wave from the top doorframe.

Here she is in action:

Weaby prefers terra firma, most definitely:

(Riding an imaginary bicycle it would seem.)

And continues to win upteen cute awards:

 

A photo guide to making caramelised onion chutney

When I finally harvested the rest of my onions I was rather surprised at just how many I had grown, and it was therefore a wonderful coincidence that I happened to spot a recipe for caramelised onion chutney in the latest Tesco magazine. From this there was clearly only one natural progression – Chutney Time!

I didn’t have quite enough onions but topped them up with a few old ones that had been in the cupboard for rather too long. By far the most tedious part of this exercise was the chopping, as it was a lot of chopping.

So, first off you gently fry the onions til soft in a big pan, or two big pans – seriously a lot of onion!

After a while you add, as best as I can remember, the following:

Red wine vinegar
Balsamic vinegar
Whole grain mustard
Muscavado sugar
Garlic cloves
Paprika
Dried chilli

And let it simmer.

By this point all you can smell is vinegar, and if you are not careful this will permeate the rest of the house and linger for a surprisingly long time. Eventually the whole pot thickens and goes gooey. Time to jar it up!

Ta-dah! Yes, I was surprised that all those onions created only 2 jars but still, two jars of really delicious home made chutney! Yum.