Veg Plotting

The darkest days of the year are upon us here in the Northern hemisphere, so our thoughts turn to Christmas and our hopes and dreams for the perfect garden and plot next year. However, if you're fed up of curling up in front of the fire and fancy something a bit more outdoorsy, then the You Ask, We Answer team have found the following gems to whet your appetite. Anytime: Want to blow away those winter blues and cobwebs? Getting out for a brisk walk during the daylight hours, particularly on a cold, crisp, clear morning could be the perfect antidote. Here's some ideas of where to go. Throughout December - Christmas Markets, Fairs and Fayres. Many of our towns and cities hold some kind of Christmas market, usually in early December. I've had the pleasure of attending events in Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, York and the Eden Project so far. This website has details of all of these, plus all others in the UK and much further afield in Europe and the USA. A great way to ge...

Today's Advent Sunday and ever since I was a little girl this is always the day we get the Christmas decorations down from the loft and I decorate the Christmas tree. It's a family tradition which NAH is more than happy for me to continue with ;) So you can imagine my delight when the nice people at Dobbies offered to send me a sparkly Snowtime Fibre Optic Sunburst Christmas Tree for me to try out. A package promptly arrived from Scotland via Parcel Force and as I was away on holiday at the time and my neighbours were out, it was taken to my local post office for me to pick up later. I unpacked the box this morning and assembled everything within a mere 5 minutes. There's 3 legs to attach to the base, the tree's branches (a single unit for this 4ft tree) to slot into it, plus the transformer to plug into the base and the wall socket. The base also contains the light and the revolving disc to drive the changing colours within the fibre optic lights spread througho...

It's a bit of a mixed bag today, but I've a few things to tell you which are all demanding to be written about right now, so here goes... First up is this sparkly new bit of bling, courtesy of Kitchen Garden , aka The Constant Gardener with her vegetable growing hat on. I also see Rothschild's Orchid has given this to me this week, so that makes it double bling. Rather cheersome, after a week of wind and wuthering weather. Thanks both of you, it's much appreciated :D As usual I'm going amend the rules for this award so that they work for me. I see it's been doing the rounds of most of my regular gardening reads already and I'm confident it's only a matter of time before everyone I have in my sidebar links, plus all my bookmarked favourites will receive this award. So instead of nominating 15 of my gardening friends, I'd like to draw your attention to a non-gardening blog which I've come across recently via my site statistics. It's called Wh...

Last Thursday, whilst the poor people of Cumbria were enduring Britain's heaviest rainfall in 24 hours, NAH and I were not that far away in Liverpool for the day. Surprisingly we had no rain at all, although it threatened to do so for most of the time we were there. It was tremendously windy, the kind you can lean on without falling over and the antics of a pigeon on the ferry across the Mersey [cue song - Ed ] amused us greatly: it was clinging onto the deck for dear life, but the wind was still managing to push it ever closer to going over the side. We'd decided that the ferry was a holiday 'must do' and this was my first ever visit to Liverpool. Here you can see one of the classic Liverpudlian vistas: The Three Graces aka the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building (from left to right). NAH and I think the view's been spoilt somewhat by the brand new Pier Head ferry terminal in front of the Royal Liver Building: you c...

Yesterday afternoon NAH and I visited our local farm shop * to see which unusual apple varieties they have on sale at the moment. Whilst there I spotted the pictured shelf of honey. Now Allington is less than a mile as the bee flies from my garden, so there must be plenty of the nectar from my flowers in each and every one of these jars :) * = a thinly veiled excuse to have the largest slice of chocolate banana fudge cake ever in the tea room :o

... Secateurs Secateurs (aka pruners, pruning shears) are probably the tool which I use most frequently when out in the garden or up at the allotment. I'd previously not given much thought in choosing a pair and as a result, I've needed to buy a new one every couple of years. More recently I've resorted to the gear assisted type, such as those developed by Wilkinson Sword (now rebranded as Fiskars ) as I've found my increased usage has led to a rather painful elbow at times. However, earlier this year I decided that constantly replacing my secateurs was a waste and I should go for the kind where the parts can be replaced. Thus I decided to finally bite the bullet and buy me a pair of Felcos to celebrate my birthday [she really knows how to party eh? - Ed ]. I even had a nice stash of garden gift vouchers, courtesy of Gardeners' World magazine , to cushion the expense: we're talking about the Rolls Royce version of garden tools after all. So I wended my way do...

Food security's a hot topic at the moment and I reckon it's set to become even more so over the coming years. Fluffy Muppet and Soilman had some thoughtful posts and debate on this subject earlier this year, and now Matron 's joined in too. Her piece focused on our ability to pass on our vegetable knowledge to those that don't grow their own, which Soilman followed up by posing the following question: If you had to give three specific bits of help/advice to a total vegetable virgin – once the oil and fertilisers have gone – what would they be? As usual his response to this question is pithy, smile inducing and thought provoking. Lots of people have left their ideas in the comments already, but I wanted to have a think about it and respond on here. Matron 's original post said: Growing food locally using sustainable methods has been placed at the top of the Government's food security agenda following its first ever assessment on the safety of the country...

Last Monday, NAH and I took advantage of a relatively good weather forecast to visit Dunham Massey , a vast stately home and estate just outside Manchester. It was a sunny, showery day and our drive around the outside of the estate's boundary walls to its entrance was marked by vast piles of burnt orange beech leaves being whipped up by the winds over the walls and flying across our path. It felt a little like being caught inside a childhood Christmas snowdome, with leaves instead of snow and made an exhilarating start to our day. The house itself is closed for the winter, but the parkland and gardens are open year-round. I was particularly keen to visit because a newly planted winter garden had been opened just a fortnight prior to our trip to Cheshire last week and I wanted to be one of the first to see it. It's meant to be the largest winter garden in England and we have only a few gardens open at this time of the year, so I was intrigued in seeing what this actually means....

Hello, I'm back and rather nicely refreshed after a week in a cottage just outside Chester. As you can see from the above image, Cheshire is famed for its black and white architecture. This is a scene from our walk around the town walls last Tuesday. I'll be taking you on a longer tour shortly :) I also have a trip to Dunham Massey to show you their newly opened winter garden; a tour of Port Sunlight, an early example of a Victorian/Edwardian garden village; plus a brief sojourn in Liverpool. We enjoyed ourselves immensely and plan to return to the area for a much longer holiday at a later date. Here's a taster to whet your appetite. You may be familiar with this Liverpudlian scene already as Anna has featured it twice as part of her posts for Out on the Streets . I recognised it immediately and couldn't resist a quick snap myself (we were running to catch the hop on hop off city bus tour at the time) just to show you it's still looking good in November and from a ...

Decide to make your living through writing in stone Find a derelict but prominent place to show off the kind of thing you can do Wait for a blogger to have a good look at your wares by the railway viaduct Wait for that blogger to tell the blogger with the camera what you've found Et voila! In case you missed it first time round, just like I've done for so many years, compare the word area with the rest of the piece. My thanks to Mark for telling me I should take a look again at this body of work ;) And here's a wider view of the first thing you see when you hit Chippenham's high street should you walk into town (like I do) from the west. Welcoming isn't it?