Veg Plotting

Some of my favourite highlights of 2016. Here's to a wonderful 2017 for you and yours :)

Bustling Oxford Street when I treated myself to a day out in London recently.  Merry Christmas everyone! Here's to a brighter, kinder 2017.

I couldn't resist this week's festive yarn bombing on Chippenham's High Street   Just popped in for a quick update and to show you some cheerful pictures. Thanks to everyone who commented on my last post ; your good wishes have helped me through the past few weeks. Mum moves down to Wiltshire tomorrow, so cross your fingers it all goes smoothly. There are still a lot of hoops to go through, but we're getting there... slowly. It'll be a while before I'm back to regular blogging again, but I'll pop in from time to time for a quick update or two. In the meantime, here's the full story  from our local paper on who's behind Chippenham's yarn bombing. Someone even wrote in with a thank you letter :)

I love how the tree matches the garage door at this time of the year. The house is just round the corner from us. Sometimes life conspires to take you down a different path to the one expected. It was just such a diversion which led to the start of Veg Plotting nine years ago today, when I realised being a distance carer was more important than my job. I started this blog on the day I wrote my resignation letter and what a sensible move that's been. It's meant I have at least one happy place in my life and it's allowed me to tell the stories which my head demands be told each time I go to the allotment. It turns out this new path has its own unexpected twists and turns, with plenty of new friends and surprises I've welcomed along the way. To keep Veg Plotting happy means I choose not to talk much about the most personal aspects of my life. Until today that is. The path turned again recently as I had to make a tough decision about my mum's continuing care...

Autumn is a good time to start plans for next season in the garden, and the following three books are great aids to help gardeners to do so. Over the past few weeks I've had the pleasure of reading: The mother of all plant reference works A great boxed set to inspire the budding fruit and veg grower, no matter how small their plot A book on design that's been a regular companion in my garden, whilst I ponder where it's headed next. All three are review copies, I received courtesy of the publishers. The RHS A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants This is no lap book, but a hefty tome weighing in at around four kilos. It merits a read whilst sitting at a table with a cuppa and notebook to hand. This is the 4th Edition of Christopher Brickell's outstanding work. Around 5,000 plants have been added, to provide a comprehensive reference of over 15,000 garden plants. I would have preferred the two-volume approach of the previous edition, but welcome the increas...

Fraxinus angustifolia 'Raywood' and Rhus typhina in Chippenham yesterday

Our part of the score, with my annotations above the score line on how it should be performed on the day.  My head is still stuffed with the most wonderful music today, so it's time to take a break from my usual bloggage. On Sunday I sang the chorales in Bach's St John Passion at the Wiltshire Music Centre  in Bradford on Avon, as part of a project put together by English Touring Opera (ETO). Our performance was reviewed in The Guardian yesterday, which has kept the music in my head and the good feelings going well into today. I must admit I was a bit daunted at first. I can't read music, it's a challenging piece, and it's not the kind of thing I usually perform or listen to. However, the WMC Choir component was a scratch choir, so there would be plenty of people like me there. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Can a scratch choir perform to the standards expected by ETO with just four rehearsals? It seems we can, as long as you do your homework. ...

You can read the whole of Robert Frost's wonderful After Apple Picking here .  I'm not quite as weary as Robert Frost's apple picker, but then I'm not doing it for a living. This year's crop is a good one, and now is the right time for picking most of them here at VP Gardens . It's the perfect way to celebrate today's Apple Day . This year marks a change in how I'll use some of my harvest. The bulk is for eating fresh or squirreling away in the freezer to extend the time I can add chopped apple to my daily porridge. The difference lies in what I'll be doing with the remainder: in the past windfall cake and apple jelly were our staple fare, but now we're trying to reduce the amount of refined sugar in our diet. As a result, a smart, shiny new juicer awaits these apples in my kitchen. I agonised for ages over whether to invest in this or a press. In the end I decided I'm not quite ready for a bulk approach to juicing, nor do I have t...

Here's a nice surprise from last week's mail. I wrote the above article for Suffolk Plant Heritage Journal early this year and then promptly forgot about it. Click to enlarge the picture if needed. 'Washfield Double' hellebore  Since I wrote the article I've added twenty 'Washfield Doubles' to the shady borders in the front and back gardens. I've planted some of them in the lower terrace bed, so I can admire them without having to bend down to do so. They rewarded me with a surprise flowering in late spring which shows they must be settling in well. These forms were bred by Elizabeth Strangman, who raised them from double flowers of Helleborus x hybridus she found growing wild in Yugoslavia. They're beginning to make themselves known again, now that summer's foliage is beginning to die back.  So far I have a couple of creamy speckled ones, and I may find I have white, yellow, light or dark pink ones too. It's good to know I ha...

Earlier in  Blooms Day  I talked about the concept of Sleep, Creep, Leap which allows plants to take time - around three years - to establish themselves before they show their full glory. I've also blogged about surprise returns to the garden after a long absence - yes, I'm looking at you, Fuchsia 'Garden News' and you,  Anemone 'Hadspen Abundance'. Little did I know there was an even bigger garden surprise awaiting me, in the shape of the pictured nerine. I planted it in a sunny gravel area at the side of my garden seven years ago; the best spot for it, or so I thought. Most years it's deigned to show a couple of untidy sprawling leaves and this year it's actually flowered for the first time. My last job often took me to Dublin, where it seemed every front garden hosted a border or two of the more familiar pink nerine at this time of the year. I felt they'd lined up in welcome, with their heads nodding approvingly in the breeze as I made m...