Edging made from decking boards

We have new edging round the beds in the garden.

It's made out of decking boards with wooden pegs screwed to them to stick them into the ground.

The first part of the project involved going to B&Q while the cheapest sort of decking boards were on special offer and buying a surprisingly large quantity of it. We needed more than would fit in the car on a single trip. In the next phase, my husband cut the boards into the lengths we needed for all the places where the full length of the board was too long and to go round the curved area of grass.

Then he stained all of the boards and the wooden pegs black and left them to dry. The logic behind the staining was that it should prolong the life of the wood. The logic behind the choice of black was that we already had some left over from the wood store and it should look good with that.

Finally, he screwed the stakes to the backs of the boards. We decided the side with the lines scored in them should be the backs (facing the beds), as we think grass would otherwise be likely to get stuck unattractively in there when we strim.

It looks particularly impressively neat round by the shed, where the narrow pieces of stone that weren't really wide enough have been replaced by large slabs and the beds have been sectioned off from these by boards.

My other half then reseeded the parts of the lawn that had gone bald or changed shape (he neatened up the shapes of a few of my beds and made lines straighter and less prone to random-seeming changes). It's about as late in the year as you can sow grass, so fingers crossed it starts to grow.
In other news from the garden, all of my cosmos is finally in full bloom.

It spills over the lawn and is a bit of a mess and I'm under strict instructions not to plant it again next year, as it refuses to flower for me until late September and gets huge in the meantime, but for now it is lovely.
Also, my biggest squash has unfortunately split and fluffy, white mould has got in, so I no longer have the delightful question of how to deal with cooking and eating a vegetable that huge. The cracks only spread to the top of it a few days ago, but when I turned it over there were even bigger cracks. I think it may have been like that for a while. In case it's related to all the rain we've had recently I took the other squashes inside to store for winter. They're currently providing a festive display on the dining room table. I am still keeping the cracked squash for seeds though. The person who gave me the seeds in the first place said the cracked one was bigger than hers ever grew!

Also, a couple of mushrooms popped up in the grass. I took this as a good sign that we have healthy fungal connections throughout the soil.

Honesty for flower arranging

Honesty is not the most attractive plant when it is growing. It's a biennial, which means it takes two years to complete its life cycle of growing, flowering and producing seeds. For the entire 15 months it was in the garden (it started in spring one year and completed its cycle in summer the next year), my husband complained that I had planted a weed. Here it is with its little serrated-edged heart-shaped leaves looking like a weed as a seedling:

Here it is at its absolute peak:

Here it is in May after it has flowered and started producing seed heads. Its leaves look a bit like nettles and its flowers are light-pink and look like weeds. I didn't think to take a photo of it when it started flowering before the seed heads appeared, but it didn't look any more attractive.

  It looks even worse from a distance:

However, looking like a weed comes with the advantage that it also grows like a weed. It's prepared to grow absolutely anywhere, even in areas with barely any soil that are always in shade. And it is worth growing at least as a once-off, so that you can use its seed heads as dried flowers. To do this, you need to leave it growing in the ground until the plant dies and dries out and all the leaves have fallen off. I harvested mine in early August this year. I had picked a couple of stems earlier because they were in the way of the shed door, but they went mouldy rather than drying out nicely. It may be possible to pick the stems earlier, but if you do, you'll need somewhere nice and dry to store them.

When you harvest it, you next need to remove the dull beige outsides of the seed head to reveal the shimmering moon-like interior. I found that the best way to do this was to bend the seed head near to where it joins the stalk of the plant. This released the outer skin of one side, which you could then just peel off. You need to do the same for both sides of the seed head, as there is an outer skin on both sides.

You can then arrange these in a vase like you would arrange any other flowers, only without water and they will shimmer in the sunlight.

How big your display of flowers will be depends on how big the plant grew and much you've picked. Some of my plants grew more than a metre tall. Ideally remove any snails you see on them, as the snails eat the seed heads as well as the leaves, leaving the dried plant less attractive

Misty morning reveals beauty of spider's web

It was a misty October morning when I looked out of the backdoor and thought "nah, this is not going to be a good day for drying washing, but wow, look at that spider's web on my sage and marjoram, it looks amazing in the morning mist".

It had barely been visible in the sunlight:

Incidentally, I was wrong about the laundry. The sun burnt through the mist, but by then it was too late to put a load on. Ah well, these things happen.

Autumn vegetables

Autumn has come to the garden. I got back from holiday to a garden that was in decline.

In the sunshine it still has a certain something, especially as the cosmos plants have finally flowered (late as ever in my garden), but in the chill of early morning it looks rather bleaker.

The corn is now brown and old. My courgettes have produced one last, huge courgette, but stopped flowering, so there will be no more there. The cucurbits (squashes and courgettes) are also uniformly covered in a dusting of powdery mildew and many patches are bare where I removed leaves to try and prevent the mildew from spreading. Interestingly, the only places the cucurbits aren't consumed in mildew are where the plants have crept into and up my bean stalks. I'm not sure if there's something protective about the beans or if it's being off the ground they like. I will try to remember to give them supports next year so they can lift themselves off the ground.
My purple beans  also fell over in the winds of the storms while we were away, and my sunflowers lost a number of stalks and seed heads to the storms.

However, all was not lost. Despite having toppled to the side, the purple bean plants are still producing plenty of beans. My squashes are finally turning from deep green to ripe orange.

It is the season for harvesting, so there is plenty to eat in the garden yet. Last night, having finally finished off the latest crop of beans I was wondering what except chard (which I like much more to look at than to eat), I could possibly eat with my dinner. It was then that I had an aha moment. All those things I'd been ignoring all summer because they were too small were finally ready to harvest. So I pulled out two beetroot and two carrots.

I've been growing multi-coloured carrots this year, but it so happens that the two I pulled out were both a pale yellow. They tasted every bit as carroty as orange carrots, especially as I cooked them the way that retains flavour the best: remove the stalks and peel, but otherwise leave whole. Boil for 15 minutes, then chop once cooked.

I peeled and quartered the beetroots and roasted them along with my potatoes. Finally, I selected the smaller, fresher beetroot leaves and cooked them just like I cook chard. I cut out the stalks and chopped them into 3 cm lengths, then roughly chopped the remaining leaves. The stalks I boiled for 6 minutes (in with the carrots for the last 6 minutes of their cooking time) and the chopped beetroot leaves I boiled for 3 minutes (also in with the carrots). They turned the water a bit red, but seem not to have had any impact on the colour of the carrots themselves. In case you're wondering, the meat is roast gammon and I made a cider gravy to go with it.

Cider gravy recipe (serves 4 with a thick gravy, 6 or 8 with a thinner gravy):

1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp cornflour (=cornstarch in US English)
1 small bottle of (optionally low/no alcohol) cider
Optionally some of the juice that has collected in the pan from any meat you are roasting

1. Melt the butter in a pan over a low heat.
2. Add the cornflour and stir to form a paste.
3. Gradually add the cider about 1-2 tbsp at a time. Keep stirring until the gravy is smooth each time before you add any more. Keep adding cider until you have a consistency you like. Once you have reached a consistency you like, turn up the heat and keep stirring until the gravy bubbles. Once it has bubbled, check whether you still like the consistency. If it's too thick now, add more cider as before.
4. Optionally add 1-2 tbsp of the juices from any meat you were roasting and stir in.

Grass doesn't need watering in the UK

Grass is a survivor. We had the longest rain-free heatwave I can remember in my life this summer. The grass became brown in patches and dry all over. It looked like it was a goner. But I didn't water, because I know grass is a survivor. And because water was scarce in the heatwave and I didn't want to waste it on grass when we had so little to go round. The rain started again in early August. And my lawn sprang back to life. It's now September and my lawn is almost entirely healthy green again.

After the rain

Before the rain

My beetroots and my chard also loved all this rain and the extra growing time. 

My cucurbits weren't so keen. Every time it rained, powdery mildew afflicted some of the leaves. It started with just a few spots.

These were often just on the back of the leaf, so unless you know to look from the mild discolouration on the front you didn't notice unless you turned it over.

Eventually it spreads to the whole leaf.

My initial policy was to remove all these leaves and destroy them (they can't go on the compost heap, as the powdery mildew would stay in the compost).

But more and more leaves were becoming afflicted. Every time it rained leaf after leaf would be affected, especially the older leaves. Getting rid of the leaves was becoming a nuisance and the plants were putting all their energy into regrowing the leaves and hardly any into making new courgettes. All except one, it turned out, which was hidden under the sage until my other half protested its messiness and chopped it back.

It's a bit big to be eaten in most courgette recipes, but will make a lovely soup.

So I've now got to the time of year when I'm not fighting it any more. I'm not chopping off any more leaves with mildew and am letting my courgette beds recover from the devastation I caused to the courgette beds with all my cutting, albeit with a dusting of powdery mildew over the top.

I fight this battle every year, each year knowing that there will come a point when I give up and let it go. Cucurbits are strange plants. They need a huge amount of water, but if they get it from rain, then they tend to succumb to powdery mildew. Only in environments carefully crafted by people, with water from a watering can instead of the sky, are they happy.

Fruit is ripening in the garden

Fruit is ripening in the garden. Despite it only being early August, the apples on my dwarf Katya apple tree are ripe enough to eat already.

I know, because one fell off and I tried it. I'm not going to pick any more just yet though, as I think the fruit could have been both sweeter and larger, so I'm hoping that's what will happen to them over the course of this month.

I had my first raspberries this week too, as an accompaniment to some American pancakes with yogurt.

I've also been producing a lot of courgettes. This one reached the size of a marrow before I had time to use it.

They creep up on you so quickly. One day you think you haven't got any courgettes and the next day you notice that there had been one hiding there the whole time and it's now huge. The courgettes are now a lot easier to find, though. The rain brought a lot of powdery mildew with it, so I had to remove a lot of the courgette leaves to get rid of it. If you leave any leaves with even tiny spots of it, it spreads until the whole lot is covered. The courgette patch is now looking pretty bare, but the individual courgettes are easier to pick out. Interestingly, so far this year powdery mildew has mainly affected the courgettes and barely touched the squashes.

My banana peppers have also ripened, but were a bit of a disappointment. Even ripe it tasted like a boring, shop-bought green pepper. I'm hoping it has some further ripening to go.

I can also report that my sweet corn is not quite ripe yet, the hairs (the silk) at the top probably need to go browner than that. According to this website, I should have been paying more attention to when the silk first appeared, as corn is usually ready 20 days after that. I need to puncture a kernel of corn and look for a milky liquid inside. Clear liquid means I'm too early and no liquid means I'm too late. I guess that means we need to eat the corn soon. Especially as it definitely tastes better when I eat it too soon than too late.

And finally, here's a picture of a bee enjoying one of my sunflowers, just because bees and sunflowers make me happy.

After the rain

The dry heatwave finally broke yesterday afternoon with a thunderstorm and tumultuous rain. The dustiness has gone. The garden feels fresh. Moisture is still in the air, making it cooler. The earth is damp and the lawn has already started to green back up. The smell of the rain itself has gone, but there is a smell of freshness and vegetation hanging in the air.

After the rain - 28 July

Before the rain - 27 July

Funnily enough, the storm did not completely refill my pond, but it did fill up a fair amount of my two water butts, so I have topped the pond up with my watering can using the rainwater. The pond smells badly of sulphur when disturbed, so something is probably rotting in it. I need to clear it out when I get time.

The reason I was out taking photos yesterday is that my sunflowers have finally flowered! They're facing the wrong way from my perspective, as they face away from the house, but they're still lovely.

They're much shorter than last year because I planted them late and left them in pots for longer than I should have. But actually they're already a good height - well over 5 foot - and I expect them to continue to produce more flowers and grow in height for a while yet, so their relative shortness right now is no bad thing.