My garden in September

The month I’ve spent some time pottering about the garden, and mostly cutting the lavender bushes - there are a lot!

My houseplants needed some attention and it was good to spend some time separating and potting on my promiscuous aloe vera - as you can see it yielded a good few plants. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but even so. I’d also taken some cuttings from my Maranta leuconeura or prayer plant - that’s the one with the colourful striped leaves. The cuttings rooted well in water and so with the roots developed I plunged them in soil, after first dusting in rooting powder for good measure.

They’re all still doing well, so that’s good - though I do need to find new homes for at least some of them as I’m not sure I need quite this many - I planned to put some on our doorstep in good weather, and then forgot in the recent warm weather, so I’ll try again. I’m thinking as long as it’s not absolutely torrid weather they’ll be ok, and should go, though we don’t get a lot of foot traffic past our door!

Elsewhere in the garden the potted border has coped with the continued mixed weather mostly well. I’ve a couple of plants with some dieback, and one of the trees in the external border is looking a bit crispy. Despite the amount of rain we’ve had recently during dry spells we’ve been dumping water on it to try and help it, though I’m not sure it’s really helping very much. We’ll have to keep an eye on it, and hope it improves rather than worsens.

The pots have fared better nestled amongst plants in the border, which is what I hoped. Some I will plant in the ground where we have some empty spots where the previous planting had failed.

As I’ve already mentioned it’s been a month of cutting our lavender bushes - from memory I think there’s at least seven of them, so it’s taken quite a while. But they look better for it, and another bonus is that our garden waste bin has smelt divine. Next year I hope to cut some of the flowers and dry them, but that’s for next year.

We’ve spent some time trying to get more organised in the garage, or at least get some of the tools organised after getting fed up of stepping over or walking around them as they lay on the floor. The result is probably the most organised our tools have ever been, I’m hopeful they’ll stay this way too!

The grasses in the outside border (and by outside I mean outside our wall) have also started to do their thing - this one looks especially fluffy! Others appear to be shedding grasses, and I vaguely remember seeing Monty Don ‘comb’ his hands through grasses to thin them, so I’ve been doing that with mixed results. I need to look up how to care for them properly though!

Also in the outside border is this wonderful berry-laden pyracantha, when I took this picture the berries were ripening and the yellow berries are now the brightest orange. It’s a favourite plant of mine, and I’m so glad we have one here - especially as it saves us buying one as I didn’t bring any of these from London.

It’s been another month full of the elements, luckily some warm weather as well as rain and wind. I’m always pleased to capture raindrops on leaves, and those on this alchemilla is no different. The raindrops just glisten and just make me smile. The wind makes me smile less so, twice now our large parasol has blown over despite the base being filled with water. Needless to say the parasol part was safely stored in the garage ahead of the severe wind warning ahead of Storm Agnes.

We continue to have mushrooms growing in our lawn, we think it’s a thing with relatively newly laid grass and it looks as if our neighbours also have them. They appear randomly across the grass rather than in a single spot. At the moment they’re more annoying than an issue, but we’ll see how it goes, and see if there’s anything we should do to prevent them reappearing.

October is already here, and the weather is already not always autumnal - but surely autumn must be just around the corner now?

Bagels, cream cheese & jam

Back in the day when MOH and I got together, and when we were ‘commuting’ between our respective houses one of MOH’s specialities was a bagel, cream cheese and blueberry jam. Something I’d not had before, but it was quite a hit. Initially this became a staple weekend breakfast, but over the years somehow it’s fallen off our radar, and I’m not really sure why.

Sometimes though life reminds you of these things, and circumstances even align. That’s exactly happened last week and resulted in a throwback breakfast, and very tasty it was too.

MOH had a planned trip to London, and as he would when we lived in Greenwich he stopped off at Brick Lane for some bagels. They really are the best, and I’ve an inkling that it was when we tasted these bagels (or beigels) that the shop bought bagels fell out of favour - there really is no comparison, trust me.

While MOH was in town I tested out my new preserving pan with the blackberries we picked from the local hedgerow following a recipe I’d tried before. I’m quite partial to a blackberry jam it seems, and had written about two on here before. This time I opted for the blackberry and lime jam, which simply adds lime zest to the jam mixture.

We picked about half a kilo of blackberries and that turned into two jars of jam - as you can see one’s a little larger than a usual sized jam jar, and there was also enough to fill a ramekin which we’d keep in the fridge and use immediately.

MY HOMEMADE BLACKBERRY & LIME JAM PICTURED ON ONE OF MY NEWEST SUSTAINABLE ‘KITCHEN TOWELS’ MADE FROM MY WONKIEST PATCHWORK BLOCKS AND OLD TOWELS SEWN TOGETHER. PRETTY AND PRETTY USEFUL TOO!

So with MOH bringing home the bagels, and my afternoon jam making - all I needed was some cream cheese, which fortuitously I had in the fridge. (It’s a great fridge standby and as well as on bagels, it’s also good for pasta and to make a quick cheese sauce for cauliflower cheese or lasagne - and it usually has a long ‘use by’ date too).

So Brick Lane bagels, cream cheese and homemade blackberry and lime jam (not the blueberry jam we used to have, but close enough) and what a breakfast it was. The jam even solicited unprompted praise from MOH, so a result!

Isn’t it great when circumstances align?

My garden in August

Well August was a funny old month, bringing all sorts of weather with it. Sun, wind, rain - and plenty of that, though I think we stopped short of hail and snow, I think. It’s been another month of getting to know my garden, and sadly suffering the loss of a plant we brought with us.

One that we’d had in a pot for a while, but clearly wasn’t happy with everything nature had to throw at it - we were surprised, but I think it was the wind that the rosemary most objected to. But it was a good prompt for me to move the pots back into the border to give them some protection from the sun and the wind, and to help them conserve water as when the sun’s out it’s been pretty warm.

I don’t think this one’s coming back!

In happier news, other plants have thrived. New ones have started to flower, and a yellow antirrhinum has self seeded itself amongst one of the (many) lavender bushes, and it’s been great to see the garden do its thing.

The pot of mint which I’d cut back before we moved sprang back into life and has at least tripled, as mint does. It too though was feeling the demands of being exposed in the warmer weather, and was starting to wilt a tad. Not wanting this, or any of my other plants from London to suffer the same fate of the rosemary meant the pots are all nestled among the more established plants. Though the morning after I’d moved them all I did wonder where they’d gone!

During August I had a week on my own at the house, and it was great to spend some time getting things straight(er). I’d planned to spend some time in the garden, but the weather scuppered me on my first home alone afternoon. Hmmmn.

The acer, outside our back front door, has had a mixed month. There’s been plenty of bright red new growth leaves, but there’s also been a few crispy and more battered leaves, though thankfully this one has picked up with some more regular watering.

We’d got out of the habit of watering the pots, which wasn’t such a good thing when the weather warmed up again. The outside tap on the side of the garage was a bit temperamental, and if you weren’t ready for it it would give your knees a quick wash as you turned it on. To combat this I bought a short length of hosepipe - because of course we’d left our surplus hosepipe behind as we didn’t think we’d need it - and it soon tamed the unwieldy flow of the tap.

It wasn’t all wind and rain though, there were days with blue skies, cloud and sun and plenty of time to sit and admire and enjoy them too. So it’s not all bad at all, in fact it’s rather good.

The tiny crab apple tree continues to do well. I think it won’t be long before the crab apples are ready to harvest - my plan is to make some crab apple jelly (what else?!) when the time comes. But until then we’re enjoying looking at its branches which are laden with fruit.

The olive tree in a pot is also thriving. Previously it was bald on one side where it had been deprived of sunlight on all sides. Here, it’s on the corner of the path and gets sunlight from all around. I’d cut this back a fair bit for the move, but we’ve got new growth that’s easily 30cm or so. It’s still leaning a bit, but not everything can be fixed in a couple of months.

Last month I shared plans to tackle the buddleia which was growing and growing and taking over one of the borders outside the gate. I’d hoped to pot it on and save it, but when I started to cut it back once the flowers had gone I realised that if I gave it a severe prune then it would probably be ok to stay where it was.

So that’s what I did, and it seems to have gone OK. Which is good news as the amount of bees and butterflies that visited were definitely worth keeping it for. I also know that it aims to self-seed as much as it can, so next year I’ll be ready to pot on some of those seedlings, which were starting to make themselves at home throughout the gravel, along with the weeds!

I’ve a feeling that weeding that gravel will become one of our biggest jobs in the garden, the one that’s never ending but also quite satisfying. You know the sort!