Showing posts with label Emma Cooper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emma Cooper. Show all posts

Monday, November 9, 2009

Killing Thyme but it isn't all bad news!


Continuing on a gardening theme, I thought I'd offer an update on our growing antics this year.

But I am very sorry to admit that as well as being a worm murderer, this year I have also been responsible for killing thyme too as well as a few other green and lovely things.

The problem is I am not naturally green-fingered on account of me having great aspirations but insufficient time to achieve them. And it's been a great lesson to me that I shouldn't invest time in the garden unless I am able to commit regular hours to it its upkeep, otherwise our best intentions just go to waste along with the produce itself.

You see it's not just the thyme that got the chop - or in some instances the chomp - it was the beans & peas in the front garden too. I can now admit that planting a small vegetable garden next to a "snail hotel" in the shape of a Phormium was not exactly the best brainwave I've had this year. Neither was planting lots of salad leaves just because they were easy to grow, when we don't actually eat much of them as a rule, whether they come from the back of the garden or from a supermarket plastic bag.

Seeing a lettuce bolt is not a rewarding sight.

This is why I am taking these lessons learned as the foundation for going forth for next year's garden antics and instead of growing lots of different things next year, we will be focusing on what's worked and leaving behind what hasn't.

Where the Thyme was on borrowed time, at least the runner beans jogged along quite happily as did the tomatoes grew in such abundance, it's only now that I've pulled in the remaining harvest.

You can see the last fruits of our luck and fortune here. This weekend, we even pulled the last of our potatoes from the pots in which they had been planted. Some of the beans have gone to seed, but we're keeping those as presents to share with other novice growers as part of our Thrifty Christmas plans.




So our plans for next year will focus on tomatoes, along with another crop of runner beans, which were resoundingly successful this season.

However, all this talk of reigning things in doesn't stop me from dreaming. I am currently re-reading an excellent book, which was published this summer called "The Alternative Kitchen Garden: an A-Z", written by the wonderful Emma Cooper of www.coopette.com.



As well as advice about beans and tomatoes, the book covers a whole range of inspirational ideas for novice gardeners like me as well as experienced green-fingered folk who want to try something different.

With Emma's advice, there's hope for me after all, but one thing's for sure, next time I'm definitely not going to run before I can walk.

So apologies for my green-fingered failures this year. Next year, I promise I will do better.

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Friday, July 31, 2009

A Summer Holiday Surprise

It's been a tad tricky getting to the blog this week as things have been far busier that I could have ever planned. Not only have I been enjoying the school holidays with the children, but I've been busy whizzing across the country attending a family funeral, celebrating a new pregnancy [not mine, I should add], speaking at a regional climate change conference, meeting a very important councillor, pickling beetroot for the very first time, enjoying a friend's birthday bash as well as another friend's hen night for whom I've also been busy making a gorgeous sparkly tiara.

So it is a welcome surprise to return home and find that the wonderful Baba has just entered The Rubbish Diet into the very yummy Dorset Cereal's Little Blog Awards and that a few folk have already started to vote. I feel very honoured indeed to be listed among some really wonderful blogs, so do pop over and have a gander and if you vote, you're in with a chance of winning something too.

So for just a few moments I can relax and breathe until...

I catch up with emails, with Twitter, with blogs and with friends who have left me some lovely messages, before it's time to pack for our big family holiday to Switzerland. I feel a huge multi-tasking exercise coming on, don't you.

But first things first...if you're missing the Big Green Gathering which was pulled at short notice and want to do the next best thing, then pop over to Emma Cooper's fabulous blog at coopette.com. Emma is author of the Alternative Kitchen Garden and is busy hosting the Big Green Blog Gathering, which is already brimming with lots of entertainment and thought-provoking ideas on water, energy and transport.

Tomorrow's theme is waste so it will be my turn to join the gathering and add my two penneth. And if you visit Emma's Blog on Sunday, there'll be plenty of discussion about the climate to look forward to.

Well it's all go isn't it but it's fun...and for anyone who read my last post, all I can say is thank goodness there is more to life than pants!

So I hope to see you back here tomorrow, when I will be catching up with your recent comments and doing my turn on the stage for waste.

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