Post Comment Love 13 - 15 October

Hello there, and welcome back to this week’s #PoCoLo - a friendly linky which I co-host with Suzanne, where you can link any blog post published in the last week, posts which are older will be removed from the linky. We know you’ll find some great posts to read, and maybe some new-to-you blogs too, so do pop over and visit some of the posts linked, comment and share some of that love. If you were here last week it was great to have you along, if you’re new here this week we’re pleased you’ve joined us.

This week we’ve been making the most of the unseasonal October weather while it lasted. We’ve been painting the trellis around our heat pump, which in my photo this week looks like it’s shaping up like a 1980s tracksuit! Don’t worry, it’s all ‘black ash’ now and it’s made such a difference. It’s been a lot of work too, as what you can’t see from here is that the trellis diagonals are ridged.

MOH started while I caught up with some gardening, and this was how far he’d got when I joined him. He has done most of it but over three days we’ve got the three trellis outsides done, the four posts and part of one panel inside. And then we ran out of paint, so later we’re off to replenish our supplies.

The nicer weather also saw me join MOH on a bike ride to our local farm shop for lunch and a more scenic route home, it wasn’t as sunny as it had been the days before, but that was probably a good thing!

Yesterday there was a much more autumnal feel to the day, which reminds us we’ll need to contact the developers to have our lesson on how to work our heating - when we moved in in the summer, they rightly said we’d probably forget it all! Now that the weather looks to be turning I think I’d like to have that knowledge for when we need it.

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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?