These garlic plants also produce edible scapes – curly green stems that taste like a milder garlic. Imagine pesto made with your own homegrown ingredients! Plus, hardneck garlic is nature's little time capsule. Properly stored, it can last for months, ensuring you have a steady supply of fl...
Brick tea comprises not only what we call tea leaves, but also the coarser leaves and some of the twigs of the shrub, as well as the leaves and fruit of other plants and trees (the alder, for instance). This amalgam is steamed, weighed, and compressed into hard bricks, which are pac...
The garden is still feeding me with all the usual winter veggies. I have even just picked, what may be the last harvest of tomatoes. But I’ve learnt to expect a few more ripe red tomatoes in amongst the thicket of weeds and herbs where self sown plants do well in the cold weather,...
The ‘Diggers Club’ guide tells me that the soil temp for tomatoes must be above 16oC, but I’ve never bothered to go out side with a temperature probe to test the soil temp to find out. Early September seems about right and the plants grow, albeit quite slowly at first. In years ...
Not all our garlic plants mature to a full supermarket size. We get quite a few small knobs that are a bit tedious to peel, but the flavour is still all there.We can get through up to 300 knobs of various sizes of garlic in a full year, and that isn’t always quite enough to ...
There is ash made from all sorts of plants. Mixed tree ash, Pine ash, chilli plant ash, chrysanthemum ash, ginkgo ash, even calendar flower ash! I’m stunned. So much work! I know what I’m looking at, because we burn plant material to create ash back home and sieve it and dry ...
The stones look nice anyway, regardless of whether the plants grow or not! After the soil was shoveled into the new beds, Edna the chicken, who had been helping me all day, came along and decided to help me some more by scratching a lot of it out again. I had to make some ...
The garden is still feeding me with all the usual winter veggies. I have even just picked, what may be the last harvest of tomatoes. But I’ve learnt to expect a few more ripe red tomatoes in amongst the thicket of weeds and herbs where self sown plants do well in the cold weather...
They are the first of the summer vegetable plants to come on. I make an effort to pick the small emerging fruit as soon as it flowers. I pick the fruit with the flower still on and use them for stuffing. I stuff them with a mixture of mostly ricotta, but with added gorgonzola, ...
The garden is still feeding me with all the usual winter veggies. I have even just picked, what may be the last harvest of tomatoes. But I’ve learnt to expect a few more ripe red tomatoes in amongst the thicket of weeds and herbs where self sown plants do well in the cold weather...