Beheading the king

We have lots of lovely blossom on our "orchard" allotment - but the gusty winds mean there's little bee activity.



So I headed out with a paintbrush to help with pollination - hopefully my dabbing between blossoms will be "fruitful" come summer.

Damson blossom is almost gone, but there's still plenty more apple and pear flowers to open, and the cherry blossoms are holding on tight - fingers crossed for balmy (rather than barmier) weather soon.



I also followed a tip from my gardening idol Bob Flowerdew and pinched out the King blossom - the larger one in the middle of the group of blossoms


Apparently this helps avoid ending up with one large, often misshapen, apple, and instead will give us a better crop overall.

Does feel mean though, when the flowers are so pretty!

Stay fruitful

Tulip magic

My lovely, blowsy tulips are at the end of their loveliness now, battered as they've been by the torrential downpours (drought? What drought?) and fierce winds.


I found one stem bent over and broken by this weather, but even though it was a little past its best, the colour and sheen of the petals deserved to be enjoyed for a few days more.



There's a clever trick my friend Sarah shared with me, whereby you stick a pin through the base of the tulip flower - and the result is? The petals stay intact.

Even when this bloom finally shrivelled,the petals remained firmly in place. And I gained an extra week's enjoyment of this sunny stunner.

Stay pretty

Digging for Victory

Three consecutive weekends of digging have transformed Lottie 2 from this....

Through this...

To this...

And (almost) finally this

Not pretty, as the cardboard is waiting on a load of manure/compost to cover it, but it definitely feels like a huge achievement.
We started by rotavating with our ancient Merry Tiller: if you are faced with totally overgrown, weed infested, neglected solid clay ground like this, don't let the doom-mongers put you off rotavating. They'll tell you that you're going to chop up weed roots into a million tiny fragments, that you're spreading weed seeds, that you're creating an impenetrable solid layer of soil. Your response should be "but it's already totally solid and full of weeds and I want to get planting" and just do it.
I dug up the docks first: their huge, deep roots required spades and forks to get out, which started breaking the soil up a bit. These were fed to next door's hens and rabbits, causing much excitement. It's said that docks will grow back from any part of the plant, so they need destroying not composting.
Mr M then rotavated three times. After each go, I went over the ground with a rake, taking out clumps of grass, bindweed roots, nettle clumps, and other perennial weeds: small bits, yes, in many instances but the thing is, I could actually see them, and get them out easily.
Finally, I dug out potato trenches: this stage of hand digging broke up the soil and uncovered yet more bindweed. Planting spuds in trenches with compost and mulching them up over coming months with grass cuttings will add nutrients, but also will improve the texture of the soil. The bare ground means I can see weeds sneaking out of the ground and pounce on them, and when we dig up the potatoes we'll also get even more weed roots out.
So rotavating isn't simply a magic solution of churning over the ground once and sowing delicate veg seeds and all will grow like Topsy. It does still require a lot of manual labour, (three weekends of it in this case) and you need to stick to big stuff like tatties in the first round. But it does get you workable soil that's cleared for you to be able to get things in the ground, without which it's easy to get discouraged when faced with a neglected, weed infested plot like this.
Amazing weather was great impetus, as clay soil like ours is basically workable for three weeks of the year between sticky gloop (winter) and concrete (summer), so I had to take full advantage of this dry, warm spring.
Potatoes, blackcurrant bushes and onion sets planted, now I can enjoy the onset of rain that has inevitably come with the start of the hosepipe ban.
One of the best parts of gardening is being able to appreciate a break in the sunshine for a good downpour!
Stay muddy

Quiet cake

As Mr M retired early with his painful wisdom tooth last night, and I had (yet more) rhubarb waiting to be baked, I needed a simple recipe I could make quietly without recourse to the electric mixer.

I used my trusted super-simple-cake base, adapted from a Polish apple cake recipe I was given a couple of years back, with a crumble topping taken from a Martha Stewart recipe.

Heat oven to 170- 180C gas 4-5

3 eggs
1 cup sr flour
1/3 cup cornflour
125gsm butter, melted
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
Ginger/cinnamon/mixed spice
6 or so sticks rhubarb sliced plus strawberries if you have them. Alternatively use slices of apple

Mix all ingredients except rhubarb together

Pour into lined cake tin / deepish tray

Top with fruit

Top that with crumb topping (from this Martha Stewart recipe)

6 tablespoons (about 100gms) unsalted butter, melted
1 cup plain flour, (spooned and leveled)
1/2 cup soft light-brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Whisk together butter, brown sugar, and salt. Add flour and mix with a fork until large crumbs form. Sprinkle over fruit

Bake for 50 mins - check topping doesn't burn towards end - you may need to cover with loose sheet of tinfoil after 30 mins




Stay sweet

Extreme dress refashioning

This evening, out of nowhere, my mother gave me her 1971, Nottingham lace, wedding dress. With the specific instruction that I'm to cut it up and refashion it. Because "lace is in isn't it this year?"
Which is wonderful, mindblowingly generous, and not a little daunting!
There's a full length skirt of lace, plus collar and sleeves, with pearls.


In fact, looking at it now, it makes me smile to see the elements from her dress that I must have subconsciously had in mind when designing mine, despite our very different weddings.

However I cut it up (which will take a bit of loin girding to do), I'm keeping the muddy hem.

Because it's a sign that great marriages do indeed start with a rainy wedding, which is what Mr M and I had (and that I'm not alone in not getting my wedding dress cleaned yet!)

Stay pretty

Easiest ice cream

This evening involved yet more fun with rhubarb. (I am aware that this blog is turning into a rhubarb fest at the moment but that's all that's growing at the moment on our plot). However, it does also celebrate my first strawberries of the year. Not from the plot, but thanks to Waitrose, they are fairly local (just one county across).

The recipe is made super easy thanks to a simple no egg recipe, an ice cream maker and a mixer.

Now don't feel I'm already betraying my self defined thrifty ethos: we inherited the mixer from my lovely late mother-in-law, while the ice cream maker was payback from 15 years of American Express points. I originally hoped to have enough points to fly To New York and back by now, but as it is I think I have enough a one-way ticket to Belgium. So I decided to cash in and get the most fun thing I could have free with my points.

You could easily make this though by just freezing the mix in a tupperware box, and taking it out of freezer to stir at intervals.

Start by chopping the rhubarb into chunks and simmering it on low heat on the hob, with a splash of fruit juice (whatever you have to hand) and in the meantime hull half a carton or so of strawberries, chuck them into the mixer and give it a good whiz round. It makes a beautiful red purée.





Let the rhubarb cool, before it's added to the strawberry mixture. Then add 75 g of castor sugar, 200mls of double cream and whiz again.





Taste (mainly because it's delicious and you deserve a treat for all this effort!) and then simply pour into the running ice cream maker. Let the ice cream maker do the rest of the work about 20 min or so. The result is beautiful - the closest I've yet got to Sicilian strawberry ice cream (though Mr M will be final adjudicator of this). The rhubarb simply seems to heighten the strawberriness. In fact, if you live with a Rhubarb Rejector, you could possibly pretend it's just strawberry ice cream!



Eat immediately, or store in freezer.

Now I just need it to stop freezing outside and for the sun to come back out!

Stay sweet

Rhubarb reward

Another weekend of digging and allotment 2 is planted up with spuds, and my arms ache like they'll drop off. Now to wait to June, when we dig up the treasure of home grown new potatoes, one of the joys of grow your own.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying fruits of no labour with the rhubarb that grows so well there. One of gardening's mysteries is how a plant that sulks on allotment 1 despite cosseting for 3 years is thriving on the new allotment right next door where it's been overgrown with nettles and docks for at least 5 years (to covetous glances from us and the occasional poaching, ahem)

I've been experimenting with this cookie recipe for a few weeks. It's a good right-I-need-to-bake-NOW recipe, as you melt the butter in a pan, avoiding need for prior prep, and you can measure out each stage while the previous one whizzes round in the mixer.
The original recipe is from a cookbook that's appeared on my shelf (Christmas present? Impulse purchase?) called Cupcakes and Cookies, by Sara Porter & Stuart Adlington, and makes a great chewy choc chip cookie (and the chewiness, for me, makes them definitively a cookie rather than a biscuit).
For these cookies, I replaced the choc chips with chopped preserved ginger (the stuff in jars) and finely chopped (small stems sliced lengthways then sliced) rhubarb. A generous handful of each. If you'd like to make some, here's the recipe I used for the dough, into which you mix the ginger and rhubarb.
Heat oven to 170C/325F/gas 3
250g/9oz plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
1-2 tsp ground ginger, to your taste
Sift these together in a bowl and put aside
170g/6oz unsalted butter melted over medium heat
200g/8oz dark or light brown soft sugar (I only had dark, but given the choice for this recipe would prob go with light)
100g/4oz caster sugar (unrefined preferably for flavour)
Whisk these together in mixer til well blended
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 yolk (freeze the white for future meringues or meringue frosting!)
1 whole egg
Beat these into the butter and sugar mix til light and creamy
Mix in the flour etc from stage 1 (or hey, wait til now to measure them out)
You'll now have a soft but sturdy mix that you'll need a bit of elbow grease to mix the chopped ginger and rhubarb into, but give it a good mix with a wooden spoon or spatula to get the pieces fairly evenly combined.
Line 3 baking trays with baking parchment and blob a generously heaped teaspoonful onto the tray. I get 9 per tray, although they do tend to meet up at the edges a bit. Don't squash the dough down - the cookies will melt and flatten out of their own accord in the oven.
Cook for 15 mins, by which time the edges should look cooked, but the middle still soft. Cool on the trays for a few mins, then transfer to wire racks.
They smell heavenly: you just try to resist!

I couldn't! Here's the evidence! http://cinemagr.am/show/2147752
I've had fun with the FREE app, Cinemagram. It's a super simple way to add animation to photos with instagesm stype filters: this was my first ever attempt. I can see how it could be very addictive!
Stay sweet