Pink and Purple

In August Project Spectrummers are concentrating on pink and purple and I thought I'd gather together some pictures of pink and purple flowers from the year so far. Although I'm not a fan of pink in many situations, the garden is one place I really enjoy it and I'm sure you've figured out that purple is one of my favourite colours (it does battle for the podium with red).

Green Peas

It's June and that means Project Spectrum moves along to green so I pottered out into the garden with my camera and found the very green story of a pea pod...

 First there is a beautiful flower...

... then a beautiful plump green pod...
















... and then some greedy so-and-so scoffs the peas and discards the pod. How rude!















I'm afraid in my garden the peas rarely make it as far as the kitchen, they're munched right there and then in the garden. If MrK is lucky he gets some, but mostly not.

I foresee leafy lunches

My veg patch is springing in to life. The onions and peas are positively raring along and I have seedlings of various salad stuffs:

These are giant red mustard seedlings. They're a really pretty colour which doesn't convey brilliantly in the picture. I love to grow things of various colours; thinking about the look of the garden and food on the plate, as well as just practicality. One of the gardens I worked on in the past had a huge ornamental potager and that's definitely influenced how I like to grow my veg, probably up to and including the raised bed look of my plot now I come to think of it.

I'm growing more salad this year  which may just be a roundabout way of making more compost as we're not big salad eaters at the moment. I rarely lust after a cool leafy salad in the way I do a bacon and egg sandwich, even though I do like salad when it's there in front of me on the plate (though not as much as the bacon and egg sarnie it must be admitted). But maybe this year will be the year of the salad. Who knows?

Would the sunshine please Fuck Off?

In sunny Essex it's, well, sunny right now and has been for days, nay weeks, and probably will be for days or weeks more. We haven't had significant rain since February. We're in a drought. I'm sprinkling the lawns already. I've been wearing shorts, hats and lots and lots of suncream out there. The May flowers are starting already and the soil is cracking. And you know what I'm hearing a lot?

Oh isn't the weather lovely oh I wish it would stay this way forever!

Gah!

I'm hearing from farmers that if it doesn't let up soon the wheat crop will be drastically effected. I bet people won't be so damn sunny when the price of bread goes up later this year.

People are so divorced from the soil that they cheer for a drought during the time of year most important for the plants getting growing large and strong. Don't get me wrong - I'm enjoying a cold beer in the evenings, reading in the garden, but I'm also anxious about the state of the soil and the plants I'm in charge of. It's easy for people to go 'ooh isn't nature ferocious' when a tsunami has just wrecked Japan or they found their driving skills insufficient for 6 whole inches of snow (I coped last winter in a Peugeot 106 on icy single-track country roads ffs) but when their food crops are being threatened they're like ooh sun! giggle

Bah fucking humbug is all I can say.

Herby goodness!

I got home from work today and planted up some more of my herb garden. It's coming along really well after my kindred's study group was cancelled on Sunday and I made a trip out to Place for Plants instead. When I got to the till I was really glad I hadn't bought the £100 boots I'd been lusting over on Saturday's shopping trip!

This is only a sample of my purchases. Once you include the pot it wasn't far off the sexy boots in price.

The herb beds surround the three 4'x6' veg beds, giving me 40 feet of 2' wide border, forming three sides of a rectangle. The area closest to the house has the most used culinary herbs; oregano, chives, parsley, sage and thyme, plus lavender because I want to walk right past it as often as possible!

The long side has lemon balm, sorrel, feverfew, catmint, bergamot, sweet cicily, chervil, salad burnet and pennyroyal. Lovage and lemon verbena will be added soon. I have also planted a honeysuckle to clamber over the arch which leads into the 'ornamental' garden'. I'll be sowing chamomile, marigolds, savoury, borage, coriander and nasturtiums here and in the veg beds.

Out in the wilds of the ornamental garden, which I'm hoping to get in order later this year or next at the worst, are rosemary, fennel, angelica, sweet woodruff, hyssop, valerian, vervain, lady's mantle, southernwood and wormwood. This year the annual herbs will be occupying spots in the herb beds that might later be taken by vertical cordons of cherry and plum, and maybe some autumn fruiting raspberries. Decisions on extra herbs vs fruit will be taken later in the year!

Slice of Springtime Heaven

This was a good chunk of yesterday afternoon:

That's a pile of my favourite veg and herb gardening books, tea and some lovely March sunshine. I've not been quite 100% and had spent a good chunk of the morning cooking and knew I was in for a late night. So decided it was in my best interests to chill out, rather than getting stuck into the garden. A good couple of hours later and I had a list of herbs to grow, along with lists of plants and seeds to buy and bits that needed moving in the garden, and a little plan of the herb beds.  

The books are:

Food from Your Garden by Reader's Digest which is my bible of veg gardening. My parents had it as I grew up and I snapped up a copy from a charity shop. It's old fashioned and fantastic with lovely illustrations. It also assumes you have at least as much space as a full size allotment and says amusing things like 'for a family of four, two 12ft rows should be sufficient'. I love it.

Organic Kitchen and Garden by Ysanne Spevack, Christine Lavelle and Michael Lavelle. A great book which is half gardening, half cooking. The gardening section has a lot of general info on organic methods plus directories of veg, fruit and herbs with cultivation requirements, timings, spacings etc. The book I usually go to first. 


Allotment Month by Month by Alan Buckingham. To be honest all the info in this book is in the others, in fact they have more info, but I bought it because of its month-by-month arrangement which makes organising myself that bit easier. 


Grow your own Drugs by James Wong which is a fun book I still haven't made anything from. 


Jekka's Complete Herb Book by Jekka McVicar which is my herb bible. There's no magical information, obviously, but otherwise it's just great for someone like me who dabbles - I don't need great textbooks of info and Jekka strikes a good balance here. I can see how a dabbler like me could get by with only this one book. Obviously it isn't my only book as I'm a bit of a book fiend, but since I bought it, it's often the only one I open.