Veg Plotting

  It's time to start documenting the heart friendly recipes I've created or adapted over the past few years. First up is the aubergine bake I made last week which gave us two yummy hearty meals served over a couple of nights with a large salad. Here's the recipe card I created as the original recipe  I adapted is looking rather tired and scrappy with scribbled notes and well-thumbed use! I hope you enjoy this simplified version; it's especially nice as a summer recipe when aubergines and courgettes are in abundance. I rescued some chopped aubergines and courgettes from the freezer for a lovely throwback to summer days to help cheer up our January blues. Let me know how you get on 😋

I do love a foliage wreath on our front door, and as a result I've accumulated an enormous stash of decorative bits over the years saved 'just in case for later', to include: a straw ring; tons of cones; various baubles; ribbons; and other bits and bobs. They've threatened to jump out of the basket on the top shelf of my study for quite a while now, so it was high time I did something with them instead. The result now adorns our front door to welcome us home; it's all from my saved bits, plus a crochet sleeve added to the straw ring for protection and for easier decoration. I'm quite pleased with the result and NAH particularly likes the jingling of the added bells whenever we open or close the door. I even had enough left over to make a smaller wreath for indoors - this one is on the door into my craft room/study. - with another crocheted sleeve to hide the wirework circle I'd stashed away in the cupboard... ... and then there are the fused glass stars I ma...

It's the final day of this year's National Tree Week today and I want to celebrate the tree which stopped me in my tracks recently. At other times this has been a very big week for me, having organised and helped to plant thousands of trees in south Wales as part of an Earthwatch project in the 1990s. Those days feel like they're part of another life, but it's good to be reminded how important trees still are to me, simply by just being there.  The pictured tree is towards the end of my walk into town and I must have walked past it hundreds of times, but for once I saw it properly for the first time. It was just as the different combinations of colour from green through yellow and orange to red were at their finest which helped to catch my undivided attention. It's not the tallest specimen in the world, but wow, it really helps to soften the brutalist concrete of the shops behind it. Then I looked at the leaves more closely, and realised it's a liquidambar aka...

I repotted the house chilli - now in its fourth year - recently. There were chillis to harvest and straggly growth to cut back first, and now it's back on the windowsill it struck me it looks a little like bonsai... without the need for daily attention. I think the self watering pot is the key to my plant's longevity in the face of the scant attention I give it. As you can see, there's plenty of promise of more chillis to come. This is just as well as I'm planning to learn more about fermented foods in the new year and it looks like chillis will feature a lot in my future. After that, I expect I may need to start again... still four years is pretty good for a plant which is usually grown as an annual. I think it's earned its keep 😊 Have you kept a chilli plant going? How long did it last?

We had a lovely time at Avebury Manor 's sculpture exhibition on Saturday and my friend W  kindly sent me this jolly photo from the day afterwards. When I saw it I giggled at how my chosen outfit picked out the colours of the Orangutan sculpture we found dangling in one of the trees, so it just had to be added to my irregular  series,  Separated at Birth today. I'm giggling again at how appropriate the series name is for this particular subject, seeing we're such a close relative to primates. It's lovely to have some humour back on the blog again - for those of you confused by my labelling, this series gives a nod to a series of the same name in Private Eye , where they deliberately label the items featured the wrong way round. I see they've now renamed the series Lookalikes, which you can see here .

This time last year I was mourning the loss of the huge box ball by our front door due to box moth ripping through the whole of Chippenham. Much to my surprise I found the pictured cyclamen , still green and alive despite 15+ years of being completely covered by the box. A silver lining to my problem! Earlier this year I created a small bed surrounding the box's stump and planted some grasses and a couple of ferns, both tough as old boots: they need to be as the ground was hard and unyielding. I've also added a couple of hellebore seedlings I found self-seeded in the gravel path in the back garden* and added a thick layer of mulch a) to keep the lawn weeds at bay, b) to lock in some moisture in this extremely dry patch, and c) to kick start soil formation. The cyclamen has found a new lease of life, pretty much doubling in size in terms of its ground cover over the summer and now it's rewarding me with its pretty white flowers which help to brighten up this north facing pat...

We're back from a tour of the middle Rhine area, having travelled there by train and then making a base for ourselves at Boppard, just south of Koblenz. We had a lovely time exploring the beauty of the area, thanks to the local tourist tax of 1.50 Euros per night giving us the freedom of local buses and trains, plus free entry to the informative local museum. On our final day we headed upstream to the small town of Bacharach, a former capital of the region and full of old timber framed houses like those you can see in the above photo. It was also festival time, with the streets bedecked with colourful flags and other decorations, the central one giving a clue to us being in the heart of the wine making area, with vineyards stretching impossibly steeply up the valleys either side of the river. No wonder wine production continues to be mainly by hand in this area. We could see the first hints of autumn* along the river valley, though daytime temperatures and sunlight were distinctly ...

How's your veg growing this year? Here at VP Gardens , it's one of the strangest of seasons, particularly where the cucurbit family are concerned. I have no squash forming at all, and my cucumbers refuse to grow beyond an inch in size. Courgettes, on the other hand, are pumping themselves out like there's no tomorrow. How come one from the same family is prolific and the others aren't, despite all of them grown on my sunny patio? It's a mystery to me. It means I've added another quick and easy seasonal recipe to my courgette glutbuster repertoire: courgette tzatziki. It's perfect for a summer lunch when the usual cucumber glut hasn't materialised. Serve with plenty of warm or toasted wholemeal pitta bread, and this recipe serves two generously. Ingredients 1 medium courgette, grated Grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon + 1 tsp lemon juice 1 tbsp fresh mint, chopped + enough extra reserved for garnish - use what you have to hand which is more 'traditional...

There's been a phenomenal fruit set on my apple tree - a combination of early warmth at the right time for pollinators followed by plenty of rain means June drop hasn't really happened here this year. I thinned these recently alongside dozens more and removed a couple of others with brown rot (see next photo). I think there might be more of that to come this year, so I'll be keeping an eye out and keep my fingers crossed it doesn't take a more determined hold.  As you can see from the photo below I picked lots of fruit of a good weight and I pondered over  on Insta whether I could make an early batch of apple jelly from thinned or June drop apples when they're of such a reasonable size. My garden books and internet search gave me conflicting advice: on the one hand 'it's OK', and on the other 'oooh you shouldn't do that as there's a  risk of illness from a fungus which isn't destroyed by cooking.' Hmmm. I'm so glad I posed that...