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Little green apples

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It's been an amazing spring for blossom which turned into an amazing summer of fruit, even the usual June drop did little to thin my apple crop with up to six fruit left on each fruiting spur. This combined with the hot dry weather means the trees are suffering, so it was time to give nature a helping hand this week by thinning my crop. It always feels hard to reduce this bounty but I know I and the trees will benefit in the end with larger, more juicy fruit for me to enjoy. I removed all the damaged or severely misshapen fruit, plus any extras to leave a maximum of one fruit per spur. I must have removed hundreds of apples! Some people recommend a gap of around four inches between fruits, mine are around two. When I've done this in previous years I've always wondered if I could use this earlier crop of fruit, especially as many of them are of a fairly decent size. Some light googling reveals I can, with apple mint jelly or a pectin starter for future jam making given as th...
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'Moonfire' is back!

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Regular readers know my fondness for Dahlia 'Moonfire', but not that it's been absent from my garden for the past couple of years. I'd managed to successfully overwinter it in the ground for over 20 years, but that's always a risk which eventually found me out. Oh, how I've missed her. How could I resist those firecracker blooms when they winked at me from the plant stall at Chippenham's market last week? Not I - a small exchange of cash ensued and I bore her triumphantly home. I was so pleased with my purchase I even stopped on the way to take the above photo in the Donkey Field! I've always known this dahlia as 'Moonfire', so I was surprised to see her called 'Sunshine' in some of the plant catalogues earlier this year. It turns out that this was the name given by the original breeders in the Netherlands in 1993, but a stray seedling made its way to the UK before commercial release, where it was named 'Moonfire' by Chris Sander...
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Postcard from Italy

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I'm just back from an amazing train trip across Europe to Lake Garda in Italy. The alpine scenery along the way was breathtaking and it was great to have a ground level view of the mountains instead of the more familiar overhead one. NAH and I managed several refreshing swims in the Lake bobbing amongst the ducks, plus trips to Verona and Venice as well as ferry trips around the lake, which is huge. So huge, even a trip on the pictured cable car up Mount Baldo (the tallest mountain on the lake at 1760 metres) wasn't enough to take it all in. My heads still there, but I'll be back soon with more garden related stuff!
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Sweet pea summer

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I'm loving the sweet peas I've started picking this week. They're such an easy and bountiful plant to grow, though it nearly didn't happen for me this year, as lingering long Covid meant I got terribly behind with all things garden. Luckily there were trays of seedlings on offer a couple of months ago when I went shopping at Lidl which was an opportunity too good to miss. I just about had enough energy to improvise a couple of supporting tripods from bamboo and plonk them in a couple of my grow pots going free. These are usually part of my patio allotment, so it was great to find an alternative use for them. And here they are, the flowers now gracing the vase my aunty Lily gave me decades ago. I had no idea on the colours or scent on offer and I'm pleased to find plenty of the darker shades and scent I love in this selection. It's been mentally uplifting to have such a positive result from a much darker time earlier this year. I've wanted to grow flowers for...
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Pesky pests

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What a quiet spring we had pest-wise here at VP Gardens , apart from hordes of aphids which obviously like the dry sunny weather we've had. Thank goodness I've learned patience over the years to leave them and sure enough the small garden birds targeted the roses and carried off beak fulls to feed their young voraciously calling for attention at the bottom of the garden. Elsewhere, plentiful ladybird larvae cleared the blackfly from my dahlias in a matter of days. The one pictured above has grown large and fat on what was on offer and is ready to pupate and transform itself into the adults we love to see. Now we're in June - and with a fairly reasonable rainfall - other pests have arrived in droves to be dealt with. For some strange reason I only ever find rose sawfly caterpillars on my 'Kew Gardens' rose, perhaps its position in the middle of the garden is a favourable to the unseen incoming adults? Luckily, they readily show themselves (as shown above) when I do a...
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Postcard from Wales

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Just back from a fabulous week in Tenby - my first time there and it won't be the last. I went with my friend W and we rented a comfy apartment in the centre of town with views of the sea and the town walls. Plenty of walking, castles, dreaming, snoozing, feasting and exploring ensued. Our timing was perfect as we had the best of late April's weather - both warm and sunny. Highly recommended.
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Friday Bench: Paddington

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A day trip to Salisbury and a glorious find on our walk into town from the station in the shape of this fab Paddington bench. I'd forgotten that many of this design were placed around the country last year as publicity for the latest film Paddington in Peru . It was lovely to see the bench being used by this gentleman who generously gave his consent to be photographed. I hope Paddington also agreed! 🤣
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Earth and Sun and Moon *

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It's been great to have some quality time on the patio this week culminating in yesterday's partial eclipse. With the live stream to hand, we had fun with our hastily made pinhole projector (a piece of card pierced with a paper clip), playing with the image on our hands, then NAH decided to carefully take a direct photo of the sun. 'That won't work', I said, and I was right... and wrong, with the sun behind its mackerel sky veil blazing forth as usual, but the camera lens flare revealing a perfect image of the sun bitten by the moon. * = I've had Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon on the brain all week; especially appropriate for yesterday's celestial event.
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Book Review: Daffodils by Naomi Slade and Georgianna Lane

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If there's one flower which shouts 'Spring is here!', then daffodils must be it, and with perfect timing Daffodils  also did the same last week when it hit the bookshop shelves. I was lucky to receive a copy to review and tempt you... and temptation is easy when comes in huge dollops of gorgeousness as Daffodils does. This is thanks to Georgianna Lane's exquisite and bountiful photography accompanied by Naomi Slade's cheerful, evocative and informative writing. A book that's both useful and looks ravishing is one of the hardest feats to pull off and here we have one that looks effortless in this achievement thanks to the hard work by author, photographer and publisher alike. It's a book that deserves to be left out permanently, for both frequent referral for key information as well as reading purely to lift one's mood. The book has three main sections: the first gives us a short tour of the history and botany of daffodils - aka Narcissus to give them t...
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Easy Recipe: Aubergine Bake

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  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 😋
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