Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2024. Halfway through the first month at that. Time flies as they say. And that's my poor excuse for the very long time between blogs. Which, be warned, means I've lots of photos to share with you. So, if you've half a mind to wade through my ramblings, grab a cuppa, sit back and read on.
Last year I planted some holly hocks in a pot. I nurtured them carefully, giving them plenty of water and a feed every now and then. Between a range of bugs and rampaging rabbits (okay, I'm exaggerating, they weren't exactly rampaging) they barely managed to keep their leaves on. This year I moved them under the shade of a tree and lo and behold, flowers. And what beautiful flowers they are.
I'm keen to put some out in the garden and to share the love. To this end, I gathered the seeds from the seed pods. Which are almost as beautiful as the flowers and very interesting to boot.
I like the way they seeds grow in a neat spiral around the centre. Kind of like slides in a carousel (if anyone remembers those!!). Granted the phots aren't great. They're my first attempt at using the macro option on my mobile phone. But hopefully they're good enough for you to see what I mean. Come Autumn I'm going to plant the seeds in pots. I'm hoping to have as much success as S did with his Hoyas. Then there will be holly hocks for all. Wouldn't that be grand.
The holly hocks weren't the first of our plants to flower for the first time. This is a native that we planted out two winters ago. I'm not sure what it is exactly but it is nice to have a white flower. Most of our natives are yellows and reds.
The next photo is of a lilium. What a lovely, cheerful welcome to Spring it made. It's a bit of a showoff huh.
The previous owners of our lovely patch of paradise planted lots of bulbs, including jonquils which flower prolifically and reliably. The flowers are beautiful all by themselves. But this year, we got the added bonus of watching a butterfly supping on their nectar. Needless to say we wasted a goodly amount of time watching it. Our plans to get work done in the garden are frequently undone by the wildlife around here I have to say.
Luckily we did manage to drag ourselves away from the wildlife to do some work in the garden. It seemd like an awful lot of hard work at the time, but somehow that memory just faded away when we started picking and enjoying the fruits (literally) of our labour.
The nectarines were amazing (by all accounts), packed full of flavour and lovely and juicy. We've an early and a late nectarine so we got to enjoy those for a long time. We didn't harvest as many apricots as last year but enjoyed the dozen or so that we did. R was most excited to pick the first of our Satsuma plums. They're his absolute favourite. We also harvested a small amount of cherries, one prune, some mulberries and kilos of blackberries. The strawberries have also been plentiful and the raspberries are just starting to come in. Yay. Vegetable wise we've had more lebanese and bush cucumbers than we know what to do with, an abundance of zuchini and lettuce and we're now picking tomatoes and egg plants. We were getting quite a lot of beans until something munched through the stems of all the plants. We've been busy with things away from home so we haven't had time to plant replacements yet. Oh....and we had some heritage beetroot. Little golden ones, pink stripey ones and an almost black one. We've mostly enjoyed those just sliced thinly in salads. Delicious.
It does look like we spend most of our time in the garden and not doing much else. But we have fired up the woodfired oven a few times. We've mostly baked pizzas and bread in it but we did experiment with a slow roasted pork. Everything has been delicious but it's fair to say we're still getting the hang of making the most of it when we do fire it up.
The oven has to get up to between 500 and 600 degrees celcius to make the best pizzas. It takes a surprisingly small amount of wood to get there and, if the wood is good and dry, only a couple of hours. And as you know, I love a good wood fire (a safe one of course) and cooking in the oven has been a joy.
The dough was made using R's sourdough starter, which is now seven or eight years old. All of the toppings, except the cheese and salami, are from our garden. Which somehow made it taste better.
I will sign off now with a picture of our newly planted, apricot day lillies. The colour hasn't come out all that well in the photo. In real life it's a lovely, deep apricot. The pot is just outside the door, so we see the flowers whenever we go outside and, on our way back in. Lovely.
I will try and post another blog soon once I download some more pics.
