Elephants and Yarn

We had a lovely productive weekend, a fab visit from a good friend and her boys on the Saturday and a day out in the garden getting sorted on the Sunday.

We chopped back our over wintered habanero chilli plants to get rid of some of the aphid damage from last year, there's already new growth on one of them :)

Then we braved the very cold weather to get the elephant garlic planted and replace some of the polythene panels on the greenhouse.

Abi found some garlic cloves in the old bed that had started to grow so we've relocated these.

Hyuge elephant garlic cloves

Abi being shown the ropes by Steve. I think he has some hopes of sending her out to do the emergancy repairs this year ;)

My pretty purple sprouting broccoli, nearly time for picking :)

One finished greenhouse ready for some hard work this year.

The rhubarb just starting to peep through

The morello cherry tree has lots of buds on this year.

The horseradish root is looking nice and healthy too.

One solitary chive making it's way up from what I thought was a dead root ball. This is from the original chive plant which was planted from a shop bought herb in 2007 :)

In other news, my new obsession is yarn. Really, I'm obsessed. I know it, I'm embracing it ;)

I've been purchasing some lovely hand dyed yarns from the interwebs, they come looking like this

To get them into a workeable centre pull ball of yarn I purchased a Nostepinne (although I got mine from Ebay for a smaller sum than that ;) ) I've spent a good portion of today playing with it and have wound 6 skeins of yarn into balls.

It was very therapeutic to do, and although I have now been offered a long term loan of a wool winder I think I might continue with the Nostepinne for small amounts of yarn.

Now I just need to persuade Steve that he needs to make me a swift ;)

The Good Life

Well, I always wanted to be Felicity Kendall ;)

Busy busy busy busy. I am absolutely loving this time of year, all the harvesting and preserving. I've developed an addiction to chutneys and relish that have seen all of our tomato glut used up, and have my recipe for chilli jam ready to go for the red chilli glut..when they decide to ripen.

The red onion that we left to seed had two good seed heads mature. As well as seeds, little cloves/sets seem to have developed. They look pretty funky and hopefully mean we'll get a good harvest next year :D





Catnip and Peppermint crumbled and stored.



Lavender hung up, chives frozen and sage, oregano, rosemary and thyme hung up too.



Abi showing off her funky wellies.



Squash and aubergine update

Toby update ;)

Caterpillars trying to eat my PSB :(



The two potato plants we planted recently seem to be taking off :D I'll cover these up as the weather cools down.



Some repairs made to the polythene panes

Curious cat

Abi helping with the weeding



Mutant red onion :o



Time for tea! Lovely Lovely Teapigs English Breakfast, I think I'm addicted. I have a code for 20% off, if you'd like it just email me, or leave a comment and I'll get back to you.



Jalapenos - more on these later ;)



Nosy child ;)



Because the banana trick worked so well on the tomatoes, we're trying to hurry up some red chillies to make jam with using the same method.



Jalapenos ;) Jarred up in white vinegar and the some of the seed harvested for next year.





Home made piri piri ketchup :) Cheap ketchup + sugar +birds eye chillies = Nom




The dehydrator arrived! So dried and stored the lavender ready for the hops to mature.




The hops are doing really well :) The lupulin glands are maturing and should be ready to harvest in a fortnight or so





Homemade apple rings :)



And the first habanero harvest. I picked the smallest ripe ones ready to chop and store in oil. They spent 4 hours in the dehydrator first to break down the flesh a little.

Om nom, the first 1/4 tsp of this is in a large batch of chicken and mushroom massala, will update on the effects next time ;)