Veg Plotting

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...

A number of these signs have popped up around Chippenham lately, which are heartening to see. Since the Town Council took over management of the town's parks and open spaces, it's clear they want to manage them in quite a different way to when they were in the hands of the County Council. In this case, it turns out a number of open spaces across town are designated in the same way as this one I found in the Donkey Field when I walked home recently. There's a map which shows where they are, together with information on the new management policy for these areas and the other open spaces they manage. I love the Donkey Field at this time of the year as it billows with oodles of wild meadow cranesbill aka Geranium pratense   flowers* I was concerned they were dying out as nettles have out competed them strongly in recent years, so it's good to see they've made a comeback this year. A few years ago Wiltshire Wildlife Trust did a survey and proposed a management plan sp...

  I've tracked something every month of the year so far, from my diet through to screen time. This month it's the turn of the Wildlife Trust's 30 Days Wild initiative and I'm having a great time adding a bird's foot, plus a little drawing of what I've observed that day to my tracker. I also get a daily email packed with information and ideas and seeing we're half way through the month I thought it would be fun to convert some of my little pictures into a Nature Spotting Sheet as suggested a few days ago. Five of them are from my garden, two are from going to the archery field (hare and poppies), one is from the Donkey Field (Meadow crane's-bill), and one from Tuesday's day trip to Blenheim (orchid). How many of these have you spotted this month? You can construct your own spotter sheet here , or simply use the ones provided on the activities section on the Wildlife Watch website. Great fun!

  Regular readers know I'm a bit partial to taking part in citizen science initiatives such as the annual Garden Birdwatch and Butterfly counts, as well as one-offs such as Flying Ant Day. These are a great way of gathering huge datasets over a wide area that are simple to do and repeatable. This year I've upped the ante by becoming a monthly  Riverfly monitor for my local stream, Hardenhuish Brook. This scheme is designed to survey the key freshwater invertebrates which are more sensitive to pollution and also taps into my Masters degree. The wider the variety and number of these found each month gives an idea of the water's quality. In the photo you can see me assessing the stream for those invertebrates usually found in the more urban locations by kick sampling the stream bed for 3 minutes and then having a look at what I've caught. March's net had a bullhead fish as well as plenty of little wriggly things to identify! It's been great to use the skills I ac...

Here I am with my friend and fellow garden writer Sue on Chelsea Press Day, our fab photo kindly taken by another friend and photographer Ian Thwaites, who's given his permission for me to use it in this post. Thanks Ian!* 'Oi, stand aside,' I hear you say... 'we want to see the garden you've been telling us about for months!' Well, here it is... ...almost exactly the same view, but without us!  I'm also rather fond of this photo looking the other way, despite it being shot into the light. I think it gives it a slightly mystical feeling, especially as I mentally called the tree on the left 'the whomping willow' whenever I saw it. Weren't we lucky with the weather! The reaction to The Flood Resilient Garden on the day, on the Chelsea TV coverage, and in the press was immense. Naomi and her co-designer Ed certainly caught the zeitgeist after our miserable rainy winter and spring. Joanna Lumley said she adored it. Here are a few more scenes from the...

I spent an amazing couple of days at RHS Chelsea helping Naomi with the planting tasks for her Flood Resilient garden . This is what I learned along the way... Have hi viz, will travel! Luckily I didn't need to borrow NAH's heavy duty railworking hi viz jacket and trousers (on standby in case it really poured with rain), nor did I need a hard hat as I was working after the main construction phase. I had to take an online site safety course and test before being allowed on site It's good to travel comfortably and wait until the last moment to don your heavy steel capped boots. Even better when you find a bench at Chelsea Barracks to do so whilst admiring their fab Chihuly glass installation at their Spring Festival Have a spare pair of steel capped boots available when the rubber tread on your day one boots drops off on the way home. Luckily I was by the Barracks when this happened and could swiftly change into my trainers. Even luckier is my shoe size is almost the same as ...

Let the Flood Resilient Garden's build commence! My friend  Naomi and the rest of the team are on site at Chelsea today, so now all the dreams and plans are set to become reality. I'm getting really excited as I'm working on the build just before the show! Hopefully there will be time to snap a few quick pics when I'm there so you can see what's happening. In the meantime we'll have to make do with the sketched design - as you can see there's a lot crammed into a small space. FloodRe - the garden's sponsor - have an interactive version on their website which allows you to explore the garden's features thoroughly - both in terms of the various habitats and planting - which are also chosen carefully to help with flood resilience, as well as the more engineering aspects to the design. As a result I'm currently pondering whether we can have some extra wide guttering installed on our house as we have real problems with overflows on an increasingly r...

We had a lovely welcome home from the garden in the shape of these bulbalicious hyacinths greeting us at our front door when we returned from Italy. It was a serendipitious moment as I'd originally bought them to decorate our kitchen when Helen  came to stay back in February. However, our cat Skipper was paying them far too much attention, so I moved them to the hanging basket out front. The cooler weather there meant they've only started to bloom recently, and most welcome they are too. Once flowering is over, I'm taking a top tip learnt from my time at West Green House and planting them out in the border. I have a plan to revamp the front garden after last year's box demise and these will go there alongside a couple of ferns I have languishing in pots out the back. Waste not want not as they say. These are not the only bulbs I've been chatting about recently. Over on Insta I'm celebrating the pictured  poet's daffodil  posing on my windowsill as one of m...

We're just back from a fabulous time in France and Italy in celebration of significant birthdays and anniversaries. We particularly loved the higgledy hillside clinging buildings we discovered in Genoa and its surrounding coastal villages of Camogli, Portofino , Nervi and the Cinque Terre . I've chosen a photo I took in Camogli to illustrate the perfect combination of bright ice cream coloured buildings, bobbing boats and Mediterranean vegetation we found in many of the villages. Look closer and you'll see many of the buildings have designs painted on them in a technique called sgraffito - one layer of paint or plaster scratched through to reveal a second colour below. Talking of ice cream, the rich dark chocolate fondant flavour was declared our holiday winner. You're probably familiar with pesto and focaccia already - some of the typical regional (Ligurian) cuisine we sampled along the way. Homemade and freshly made that day took them to another level. It's be...

One of the highlights of the recent Garden Press Event was the Guernsey Clematis stand where they showcased their two clematis due for launch* at this year's Chelsea Flower Show. If you're unfamiliar with the company name, then I'm sure you know of the lovely Raymond Evison , who is the breeder behind these two new plants. * = if they're launching them at Chelsea, then it looks like I've let the cat out of the bag 😉 On the left of the photo we have 'Lindsay' with 'Guernsey Flute' on the right. Both have been selected for their plentiful blooms across the entire length of their stems, flowering from May through July with a second flush in September. They grow to around 6 feet in height (90-120cm in metric) and are good candidates for a large pot as well as the more usual site in the garden. 'Lindsay' is the one for sunshine and 'Guernsey Flute' for the shadier side of things - as is the case with most white clematis. Unlike its forebe...

I've spotted primroses popping up in many places on my walks this week and it's a welcome sight to see them. I found the pictured ones in Old Hardenhuish Lane on my way to Lidl* yesterday. They're in a patch on the edge of damp woodland next to Hardenhuish Brook and I've also seen them close to the River Avon right in the middle of Chippenham. They're a timely sighting as I'm thrilled to be working with FloodRe's The Flood Resilience Garden team in a small way during the run up to Chelsea Flower Show. I'll provide the written content for their Plant of the Week spot on the garden's Instagram account over the next few months. It just so happens the primrose is my first entry this week - you'll find snowdrop, birch and dogwood there already, as provided by Naomi , the garden's designer. My primrose finds show they're an excellent fit with the show garden's ethos which is to demonstrate simple choices in design and planting can help a...

Regular readers know I do love a good citizen science project and I'm happy to announce the latest one is launched by The RHS/Bumblebee Conservation Trust today. What can be better than watching bumblebees bothering our flowers on a sunny day and help science to boot? From today until 31st May we're asked to submit our sightings from our gardens and parks around the UK. Why is this important? Well, bumblebees are a vital pollinator for our garden flowers plus crops such as apples, tomatoes and peas. When the weather starts to warm - even on the odd warm late winter's day - queen bumblebees emerge from hibernation to find nectar to help fuel themselves and gather pollen to feed the hungry larvae of worker bees back in the nest. Finding out the exact situation in springtime is particularly important as habitat loss/climate change may be affecting the availability of springtime flowers, which in turn will affect the successful establishment of bee colonies at the start of the ...

This image makes my heart sing and is why I love the National Gardens Scheme (NGS). It doesn't cost much to visit a garden tended by an enthusiast, yet see how all those entrance fees can grow into something life changing. My visits are going to start early this year with a trip to Westcroft  next month, a Wiltshire garden near Salisbury which is stuffed with snowdrops and so is opening happily as part of the NGS's Snowdrop Festival. See you there Helen !