(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: What the Rudbeckia are Thinking

Rudbeckia with speech bubbles showing what they might be thinking

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Wildflower Wednesday: Alpengarten

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A little while ago I wrote about garden visits which suit both NAH and me. Little did I know within a few days of that post I'd find a whole holiday. Don't get me wrong, all our holidays are enjoyable, but Switzerland was exceptional. NAH could happily play on the mountain railways and cable cars all day, whilst I could take in everything nature wanted to show me. One day on a train journey up the mountain back to Wengen I caught NAH watching me with a smile on his face. 'What's up?', I asked him. 'I'm watching you taking it all in', he said. Little did he know that not only was I drinking in the gorgeous mountain views, I also had a running commentary playing in my head along the lines of: "That view is fabulous; that's a wild flower I have in my garden... there's another, it's clover; and that's a Campanula ; and there's a scabious like the one I have in my pots; here's a smaller version of the ox-eye daisy in my
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Salad Days: Mastering Lettuce

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I've decided one of my salad challenges for this year is to grow as many lettuce varieties as I can, ready for the publication of my planned Factsheet* later on. The idea is to grow as many of the Tried and Trusted lettuce varieties last year's Salad Challengers helped compile, then provide a visual guide and as many lettuce facts as I can muster. So far I've found around half of those listed**. Then naturally whilst I was out searching - because such is the way with seeds - a number of other varieties found their way home too ;) A couple of weeks ago I sowed 22 varieties***. Just the simple act of sowing them has me intrigued. Why are some lettuce seeds black and others white****? They split into about half white to half black in my sample and as far as I can tell it's nothing to do with whether they're a type of cos, iceberg, or whatever. I sowed them indoors and popped them into a propagator on the windowsill. The soil's too cold outside for sowing
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Garden Bloggers' Blooms Day: 'Just Add Cream'

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Veg Plotting 's Blooms Day would be incomplete without the occasional foray into Grow Your Own flowers, so I'm pleased to bring you my 'Just Add Cream' strawberry plants for this month's floral focus. This is a relatively new variety from Thompson & Morgan 's own breeding programme, who also provided me with a few plants to try in 2017. Naturally I've given them a tough time by forgetting them entirely  deliberately growing them on in the smallest of trays for a year before I finally planted them out. I'm pleased to say they've passed this test with flying colours. I'm growing these at home instead of on the allotment where VP Gardens demands food plants look attractive as well as being productive. Apparently pink flowered strawberries have proved rather bland and unproductive in the past, but this variety is bucking those particular trends. It's an everbearer strawberry which means the crop is spread over many months in the su
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From The Editor's Post Bag...

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It's been a while since we've had a Question Time here on Veg Plotting, mainly due to the majority of the search hits I've had the past few months being from people obsessed with making preserves. My jam recipes are so popular, I've been wondering whether I've chosen the right subjects to blog about. However, now the darker evenings are here, a much wider range of queries are finding their way into the editor's postbag my site statistics. Unfortunately for everyone seeking the Orange advert , they've had to make do with a view of Bristol's public planting instead. Whilst that fair city is host to said telephone company's HQ, I'm sure I haven't provided what they're seeking. I'm also sure that the query Everyone has these on their faces isn't looking for my Red Nose Day jokes either, but hopefully they left here in a better mood than when they arrived. Unlike these examples, most of the searches hitting my blog seem to
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Just Chilling

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I've started to try and make sense of what I need to do with my seed stash from the RHS today. The upshot is: 3 varieties are relatively straight forward and can be sown straight away - Fatsia , Hyssopus , and Leucojum . As they're from such precious places, I'm going to treat them to some proper seed compost instead of my usual peat-free :) 11 varieties need to be pre-chilled first as a minimum - so they've been put in the fridge today as pictured. I have a list of questions to be answered before I can get on with anything else. Research will commence as soon as I can stand being logged onto the internet for longer than half an hour...
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June Drop

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After a warm, dry spring and almost a hundred percent pollination I guess it was almost inevitable June's apple cull would be brutal. This 'June Drop' is nature's way of ensuring the tree can support its crop of apples. Many of the fruiting spurs have five or more apples - eight in quite a few instances - which isn't sustainable. As you can see in the photo above there simply isn't enough room for all of the apples to grow to maturity, so some of them must go. Quite often there are some slow developers like the one you can just see in the middle and these are usually amongst the first to drop, followed by any damaged and deformed fruit. I've already seen some early signs codling moth have come a-calling judging by some of the frass they've left behind. There are some signs of bird damage too: two months of dry weather has left the ground rather hard and I suspect there's been slim pickings for feeding a growing family, so the birds have turned their
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Garden Bloggers' Muse Day: The Best of Summer

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Thanks dear Dee for posting this quote on Facebook this week. It sums up succinctly my recent thinking about this time of the year, also hinted at in my Blooms Day post last Sunday. I feel like I'm in an odd, twixt time; the meteorological calendar says it's autumn - since September 1st - yet  the horticultural calendar doesn't say so until the weekend. The current spell of warm, sunny weather is more summer-like too. I love the light in the garden at this time of the year. It has a softer, more translucent quality which makes the garden sing at any time of day. My chosen photo of the Monk's Garden at Avebury Manor echoes my feelings well. It looks like summer there, yet the chosen colours for this part of the garden are more autumnal in their hues. It turns out that the Manor's gardens are in a twixt phase too. Box blight has devastated the garden and much of the formal lines are in the process of being stripped out in the hope that the larger topiary it
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Jack Go To Bed At Noon

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Last year this rather exotic looking flower appeared on mine and several other allotments for the first time. Having been stumped (again) by Mr Allotment Warden as to its identity, I rushed home to find out what it was. It's salsify, aka the marvellous Jack Go To Bed At Noon - named as such because its flowers always close by midday. Here you can see both open and closed flowers - making it seem even more exotic and alien than in the first picture. I think this must be the cultivated version because the flower in my Francis Rose Wild Flower Key looks exactly the same in form, but is bright yellow in colour and called meadow salsify . Its other common name is Goatsbeard, which must be a nod to the fantastic dandelion-like clock which forms the seed head. With 'parachutes' like those shown above, who knows how far our plotted plants came from. I rather like the photographic dissection of the seedhead found in this link . Salsify is edible: its lateral shoots and fl
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Dessert Apple Jelly: Seasonal Recipe

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This year has seen a bumper apple harvest, possibly the biggest in decades, so like many of you I've had my work cut out keeping up with the crates of apples piling into my kitchen. NAH has been most happy for me to convert a fair portion of the spoils into the pictured jars of his favourite apple jelly. As you can see all kinds of jars have been pressed into service. My apple jelly is a little different to the usual kind. Neither NAH or I are particularly big on jellies or chutneys accompanying our meat, fish or cheese*, which is the traditional way of eating them. Also when I chose my apple trees, I went for the dessert varieties as that's what we like to eat. So my apple jelly is used like jam: on bread and often accompanying peanut butter. All the recipes I have are for a savoury jelly, often flavoured with herbs such as mint or rosemary. They usually call for cooking or crab apples and so need quite a lot of sugar to sweeten them and to counteract the recipe's vinega
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Weekend Wandering: To the Sunflowers!

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Chippenham is currently all a-buzz with news of the appearance of a huge field of sunflowers to the north of the town this week.  Come with me on the three or so mile stroll to see them in their full glory - the photo above is a mere teaser of what truly greets us at the end of our walk... As you can see our countryside's having a bit of a blonde moment as the grasses which line many of our roads have now dried to show off their decorative seed heads. We're lucky on this walk as we're following Maud Heath's Causeway for much of the way. It means we have a nice safe path to walk along away from any passing traffic. We go under the railway and even here the path remains as... ... we have our own pedestrian tunnel. The path predates the railway by centuries (15th vs 19th). Here we're looking back the way I've come so we can see the evening light through the tunnel. More blonde moments... ... a pause by a shadowy bench... ... over the ancient clapper bridge , then
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