Veg Plotting

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life . Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) If the above quote is true, then in my view the Begonia 'Amour ' by my front door is aptly named. I love the dark sultry leaves topped by the kind of shade of seductive red I don't usually go for. The plants nearby are green or have a similar shade of foliage, so it looks very much at home. Elsewhere in the garden it would clash horribly. It was a chance discovery recently at my local garden centre and I immediately knew its purchase would solve the problem of finding something to fit well in my 'wheelbarrow' container for the summer. Most plants look out of place there, but the sprawling shape of this one is just right. Garden Bloggers' Muse Day is hosted by Caroline Choi at Sweet Home and Garden Chicago .

A few doors down the street from our holiday cottage was an old church which is now the Embsay Children's Centre . I was charmed by this display on the top step by the front door. I wonder if they got to take them home for their mum at the end of term?

My outdoor tomatoes are beginning to ripen nicely so I reckon you greenhouse growing types must getting near to tomato glut times. We're nowhere near that happy time yet, but a chance encounter with the cheap-because-the-sell-by-date-is-due-today shelf at my local supermarket yielded a goodly crop of ingredients for an instant make-it-up-on-the-spot simple tomato and pepper soup :) Ingredients 2 litres vegetable stock 1kg tomatoes, whole 2 red peppers, chopped (preferably the ones with the pointy ends) Salt and black pepper to taste Method Place all the ingredients except the seasoning in a large saucepan Bring to the boil Ensure the tomatoes are well mashed into the stock Add seasoning to taste Simmer for 25 minutes Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary Whizz everything together with a hand blender Serves 6-8 with lashings of freshly baked crusty bread - hot or cold depending on the weather and your mood. Hints, tips and variations Ham stock make...

Ever since I can remember I've been fascinated by the weather and its measurement. I'd love one of those really posh weather stations, but in the meantime I'm making do with my simpler rain gauge to measure any precipitation and a Max/Min thermometer . My trusty weathervane shows me the wind's direction, but instead of an anemometer I've been using the visual cues from the Beaufort scale . Does anyone else imagine the sound effects of the rising wind strength like I do when reading through the list, from calm (silence) through to hurricane (so loud you can't hear yourself think)? A trip to Poundland the other week yielded a bright windmill initially destined as a bird scarer up at the allotment. Once assembled I stuck it in a pot on the patio and there it has stayed because it makes me smile. It's on view when we have our meals as well as when I'm out in the garden. Its continued presence has led me to devise my own gardening version of the Be...

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...

I've always had a bit of a struggle with grasses. Too much tackling couch, then a highly invasive zebra grass at our first house have put me off them somewhat. Then my garden here goes from deep shade through to Mediterranean in just a few steps, so I haven't really managed to see how they'd fit in this garden either. Helen ( Patient Gardener ) and Karen ( Artist's Garden ) find this a rather strange (and amusing!) state of affairs and have done their darndest to get me converted to grasses, with some degree of success. They hatched a sneaky plan at last year's Meet at Malvern and Karen's generous gift of plants meant I could experiment a little. I must concede there are some definite possibilities for succession planting amongst my Aquilegia . But I'm yet to be fully converted. That is until I started reading Neil Lucas' Designing with Grasses . Neil owns Knoll Gardens in Dorset, famed for its grass specialism. He has a deep understanding of ...

A few weeks ago I was invited to a bloggers get together at RHS Hyde Hall in Essex. A new garden to explore with blogging buddies old and new was way too much of a temptation, especially as a picnic, tour of the garden with Ian Bull the garden manager and a plant swap (a planned RHS event for the weekend) were thrown in for good measure. I don't know Essex that well and as I got ever closer to Hyde Hall, I couldn't believe an RHS garden could be found anywhere amongst the rolling hills (yes, Essex has hills!) and extensive farmland - and that was after I'd taken the signposted entrance to the garden.* Later Ian enlightened us about the farmland whilst looking at the pictured view above - over 300 hundred acres came with the house and original garden bequeathed to them. So as well as this being let out to farmers, the RHS has plenty of opportunity to make walking trails, plus plant 1,000s of trees on the estate as well as having ambitious plans to make ...

This photo appeared on Sign of the Times earlier this week before I realised it would be perfect to talk about The Big Butterfly Count which starts today. All you need to do is spend a relaxing 15 minutes on a sunny day in your garden or other sunny spot between now and the 31st July and identify the butterflies and (some) moths fluttering by. Don't know your red admiral (see above) from your peacock? Then all the help you need is on the Butterfly Conservation website where you'll find this handy ID guide (NB if all you see is a black page from taking this link, click on the + button at the top of the page and all should be revealed). You have until the end of August to record your results . Just like the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch held in January, The Big Butterfly Count is a great opportunity to help gather masses of data about what's happening with a vital indicator of our wildlife's health. Live across a the pond a feeling left out? Why not take part...

It's high time for another trip to the allotment for Blooms Day so I can show off the frothy dreaminess that is my Daucus carota ssp. sativus in flower, otherwise known as carrots. When I cleared the plot at the start of the year I was surprised to find a late sowing I'd made last autumn had not only come through unscathed - despite winter's harshness - but had also started to grow again. As carrots (like their parsnip cousins) are biennial plants, I thought it would be fun to see what happened to them if I left them to their own devices. This is my reward: chest high creamy flowers in profusion with a most heavenly scent. Lots of insects seem to like them too. Tomorrow I'll cut some to put in a vase when I get home. We have visitors coming to stay from Australia next week: it'll be interesting to see if they can guess what these are. Do you have any surprise blooms this year? Garden Bloggers' Blooms Day is hosted by Carol at May Dreams Garden .

Since March this year I've been attending a Zumba dance class at Hardenhuish school. This takes place in the gym which has the typical look and smell of any school gym built in the 1950s or 60s. Despite that, the class is a lot of fun - it's a bit like aerobics, with lots of moves from salsa/ Greek/ Bollywood / belly dancing thrown in for good measure. I'm useless at it because it moves so fast, but I reckon that jumping around for an hour looking silly (and giggling a lot) has to be doing some good. Whilst the school dates from the 1950s with various additions across the decades, the grounds are much older. They house the pictured rather stately Hardenhuish House and the grounds are the parkland of its former estate which still retain much of the feel of those grander times. The estate has been nibbled around the edges somewhat: part of it is now the Donkey Field which we encountered for the letter D and you've also seen the rather fine St Nicholas' Chur...