Five good things about today

1. My son and his wife and their dog are here for the weekend.  We haven't seen them since before Christmas as they are newly qualified doctors (not the dog obviously, she has been qualified for years) and are working very hard.
2. My crocuses are out by the drive, in shades of purple and lilac with here and there a shining shot of pale yellow.
3. I made some of the best cheese scones ever for tea.
4. I ate three.
5. I have no time to blog because I need to go and talk to my family.

Bliss.

Seed sowing

I was a passionate gardener for ages before I got into seed sowing.  I bought plants, read gardening books, wandered round gardens and made notes but I felt that sowing seeds was for real gardeners, real experts, too tricky, too serious for me.  It wasn't helped by a few forays into sowing hardy annuals with those free seed packets you tend to get with magazines or thrown in when you are buying something else.  I know the spiel: sow directly where they are to flower, fine tilth, thin out and all that garbage.  In my experience seeds mostly fail to germinate and the glorious patch of colour of your imagination becomes a straggly weedy bit of the garden where one or two puny love in a mist fail to make an impact on the chickweed and the dandelions.

Having a greenhouse has made a difference.  Under the controlled conditions of seed trays and watering and benevolent warmth, seeds do germinate and I do notice and I do look after them.  I have discovered that growing things from seed is like looking after children.  You can't just whizz through once a week and disappear.  You have to look at them and notice how they are doing and tweak things gently every day.  When I discovered that I could take cuttings and have them grow it seemed even more weak and puny that I still felt that growing from seed was too tricky for me.  It was time to be a woman and face up to it.

You really can't grow veg without growing from seed (well you can I suppose: there are companies which will send you plug plants and good luck to them but it is so much cheaper to grow from seed) so when we moved here and started growing food in earnest I had to get down to it.  And from veg seed, which is so keen to grow you would have to chop at it with a machete or sit on it to stop it, it seemed a short step to trying to grow flowers too.  A couple of years ago I even bought some heated propagators.  But still there was a trepidation, a sense that it was all quite hard.  Even in the propagators things didn't always work.  Every time I had a failure I assumed I had done something wrong.  It has taken quite a long time and quite a bit of talking to other gardeners, virtually and otherwise, to realise that some seed just doesn't germinate.  It isn't me.  It is crap seed.  What a revelation.

For the last couple of years I have grown loads of sweet peas from seed.  I could hardly believe it in the first year when practically everything came up.  I grow three great walls of sweetpeas in the cutting garden, partly because I love the scent and partly because they are a sublime cut flower.  Last year when I was basically dissatisfied with the cutting garden, the sweetpeas were the one thing which was working.  Growing them myself has opened up the possibility of indulging my taste for older varieties and getting bothered about scent.  I don't want to get obsessive about sweetpeas because there are so many other things which I need to think about and I suspect my real obsession might prove to be something else entirely, something about bees and butterflies and a garden which fits its place.  This year however I have bought some root trainers and seeds from Sarah Raven which feels like an indulgence.  So today I sowed them.  It is way too early for many things up here.  Time and again I have sowed things, in that itch to get gardening again, and they have sulked and turned their backs on me.   It was too early.  It was too cold.   I hope these will thrive.

And now I have the itch again, good and proper.

A day out

Yesterday I woke and was instantly awake.  Most mornings I drift in and out, slowly shaking off the fuddle of sleep but yesterday I was right there with my eyes wide open and the clock saying eight.  I realised it was because I was going somewhere: a visit to Karen at Artist's Garden over on the west coast of Wales, a visit that has been postponed and postponed as things fell about our ears.  I felt slightly guilty, leaving Ian with FIL for the day and lots of jobs to do and for no other reason than that I wanted to see her.   I'm not a great one for feeling guilty so it slightly surprised me.  When I took it out and looked at it I found that it was weeks and weeks since I had done anything which wasn't focussed on someone else: looking after my FIL, visiting my brother, worrying about how my mother is coping, wondering about whether Ian is doing too much.  And yesterday I was saying that despite all those concerns, I was just going to get into the car and drive away.  No wonder I felt guilty.

The drive from our corner of North East Wales to the coast near Harlech is one of the best drives in the world.  The road lifts out of Denbigh up over the Denbigh moors, bleakly beautiful, and then takes you even higher into Snowdonia.  The narrow road curves through a high and empty bleached winter landscape and the mountains pile up on either side.  Nobody was going anywhere on a Friday morning in February.  Sheep munched stolidly on the yellowed winter grass.  A black crow flapped slowly up from a rabbit carcass on the road as I approached.  Eventually the sea gleamed silver grey on the horizon and down and down I drove through stone villages, under the trees, down towards the sea with the sand and grass running out to the shore.

I don't think I was very good company but Karen was.  She made me laugh.  She reminded me that spring will come.  I have been tentatively trying to reconnect to my garden.  The garden has always made me feel better.  I have cut back the hellebore leaves and done some mulching, scrabbling for satisfaction and  feeling frustrated that the greyness didn't lift.   But Karen reminded me that January and February are not the time to look for light and colour in the garden.  She has seeds already sprouting inside and seed packets bright with orange and russets, glowing on the table. It's all there, just waiting.

We talked.  I found myself surprised by sudden tears.  I left, leaving marmalade and some of my favourite gardening books behind me and taking away sweet rocket and seeds for a blue Salvia and a sense of having been reminded of myself.

And today the sun shone and I cut back the autumn fruiting raspberries and tidied the greenhouse and undertook the annual, anal, snowdrop count.  We put in about 500 snowdrops in 2006 and 2007.  In 2009 I thought I would count the flowers in the hope of finding that they were spreading even though they looked very little different to my eye.  In 2009 there were 725.  Last year there were 1094.  And this year there are 1480.  I can't tell you how much this pleases me.  Karen tried to tell me that snowdrops increase and yesterday I responded with a snort about their slowness.  But they do and they are.  The crocuses are coming out too by the gate and in the wooden greenhouse the dark purple spears of iris reticulata are unfolding.

Spring is out there, stirring.

Apples

We always have more apples than we know what to do with.

We have eight apple trees.  They were all here when we came so I have no idea what most of them are.  In the kitchen garden there are two dwarf trees which are always laden with small eaters which ripen late towards the end of October.  Then there are four older trees.  Two of them have very little fruit but they provide shelter for the chickens and I can't bring myself to get rid of them.  Two of them didn't fruit much when we first came here five years ago but have responded to pruning by becoming quite prolific.  The fruit is pale yellow and of a good size but too sharp to be a dessert apple.  Some of the fruit is misshapen or blotched with scab but the blossom in spring is so glorious I would forgive the trees anything.

In the field there are two more: a battered and bent tree which I was going to get rid of but which I have instead brought into the corner of the orchard and a huge and beautiful Howgate Wonder.  This spreads its skirts wide and produces more fruit on its own than all the other trees put together.  The apples are huge, the size of a baby's head.  When they are first picked they are green streaked with dark red.  We pick them in wheelbarrowsful.  They keep wondrously well hanging in plastic bags in the rafters in the workshop with little care except being taken down from time to time to check that none has begun to rot.  From October to Christmas they are definitely cookers but by late winter the skins have turned yellow blushed with a rosy red and the fruit is sweet enough to eat straight from the hand.

It is quite impossible to use them all.  Every year we give a lot away to friends and colleagues and family.  Every year some go into chutneys and relishes.  I also make apple jellies by the ton: sweet ones with cinnamon or ginger to eat on buttered toast; savoury ones with sage, mint or rosemary to use in cooking or to have with meat.  Most of the puddings we eat here over the winter have to include the compulsory apples.  I could make apple crumble in my sleep, likewise apple pie, apple charlotte and a chocolate apple betty recipe by Nigel Slater brought into the house by my daughters and now a firm favourite.

But my favourite apple recipe of all is a Somerset apple cake.  It comes from a book called Farmhouse Kitchen first published in 1975 to go with a Yorkshire Television series.  I bought the book in a jumble sale at school when my children were small for 25 pence.  It is the source of a lot of my baking staples: cheese scones and fruit cakes, teabreads and pastries.  It has become one of those recipe books that fall open at the most used pages, the paper spattered with years of flying cake mixture.  I had never seen another copy until last year, mooching around a local village show with my daughter on a sunny August day, and there it was on the second hand book stall.  She fell on it with cries of delight and bore it away to her then London flat where its recipes for mutton pies and rabbit paste must have sat oddly alongside Nigella and Diana Henry.  I do hope she has used it.  I must ask her.

So here is the recipe for Somerset apple cake.  It is tremendously easy and totally yummy.  In exchange I would love to have any apple based recipes that you love if you would share them.  There are still fourteen plastic bags full of apples hanging in the workshop roof!

The recipe will have to come in pounds and ounces, just as written in the book.  I am trying to move over to baking in metric but there are some things where I don't even try and this is one of them.

3 oz butter
6 oz sugar
grated rind of one orange
8 oz self raising flour
1 lb of cooking apples, peeled, cored and cubed (you don't need to be exact about this.  I usually use 3 whoppers or 4 smaller ones).  Squeeze a bit of lemon juice on them if you have it to stop them going brown.
2 eggs, beaten
a little milk
about 1 tablespoon of granulated sugar

1. Grease and line a 9 inch cake tin.  I use a loose bottomed one or a spring form which makes it easier to get the cake out.
2. Cream together the butter, sugar and orange rind.  I use a hand held mixer for this.  If you do the creaming by hand make sure the butter is quite soft or it will take you forever.
3. Put the eggs in the bowl with the creamed butter and sugar.
4. Add the flour and apples alternately, mixing in well.  If the mixture is too dry add a little milk, a spoonful at a time until the mixture goes easily together.  You shouldn't need more than two tablespoons of milk.
5. Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth it down so that the top is fairly flat.  If the apples stick out a long way, press them down into the mixture a bit.
6. Sprinkle the top of the cake with the granulated sugar and cook at 350 degrees F, 180ish C, Gas Mark 4 for 40 to 50 minutes until the top is golden brown and the cake is firm to the touch.  It should just be beginning to come away ever so slightly from the side of the tin.
7. Leave it to cool in the tin.
8. You can serve it warm as a pudding with cream or cold as a cake.

I hope it works for you if you have a go.  Any other ideas for North Wales's apple mountain?

End of month view gets going for 2011

I really enjoyed getting involved in the end of month view posts hosted by Helen at patient gardener last year so I have decided to do it again with the odd addition here and there to reflect new projects or attempts to tackle past failures.  It was interesting to see how things changed and encouraging looking back on the photographic diary of the year to find that areas which look like a war zone in late winter do fill up and out and create things of beauty as the year goes on.

Here is the side garden.  The angle I usually use for this does not let me show you the snowdrops just coming into flower at the bottom of the side wall.  The path which goes out through the gate to the workshop and the field gets wet and muddy in the winter.  One day we will have the money and the time to put down a proper path.  This is a spring and summer garden. In summer the sun gets high enough to make the seat whose corner you can just see into a sunny and sheltered spot to sit in the morning with a cup of tea.  For winter I have planted sweet box, sarcococca humilis, at the corner of the bed nearest to you in the picture.  The plants are quite small but are covered at this time of year in tiny white flowers which smelt exceptionally sweet.  Behind them are five hellebore orientalis.  They are full of fat buds and this morning I have been cutting off last year's leaves so that you can see the flowers when they open.  I love hellebores and, when so many things I love are not happy up here, hellebores love me right back.  I have bought some more from Sarah Raven which will go down by the native trees in the field.

Here is the new little orchard looking up towards the cutting garden.  The trees, with the exception of the mulberries which are so slowgrowing you can hardly see, are beginning to look like proper trees now after three years in the ground planted as maiden whips.  The native daffodils are just starting to poke their snouts up around the trees.  Last year I began the slow process of introducing native wildflowers to this area.  There are ox eye daisies, fox and cubs, teasels and ravenswing cow parsley in here but far too few of all of them!  I have found a local nursery, Saithffynnon meaning Seven Wells, which specialises in plants for butterflies and bees and is only a few miles from here.  I am hoping to buy more seed or even treat myself to some plugplants from them in the hope that local plants will thrive.  I am only just beginning to get my head round the number of plants which you need for naturalising, even though I am not after instant results and am quite happy for things to take their time.  The thirty of so ox eye daisies which I grew from seed and planted out last summer in this meadow barely made a splash of white.  Think of a fairly big number and multiply it by ten seems to be the rule of thumb.  Even then you are hardly drowning in the stuff.  Last year I let the grass grow tall over the summer and Ian scythed it down in September.  This year I shall do the same but with one mown path so that you can walk right through the middle of the meadow.  The grass will be as high as my soon to be five year old grandson's head.

Here is a revamped bed in the cutting garden.  The cutting garden is a rather grand name for a long thin bed, about the length of an allotment but a little narrower.  The mesh you can see is one of three sets of supports for sweet peas, one at each end and one dividing it in the middle.  So far each year the sweet peas have been fabulous and the rest of the cutting garden a bit disappointing.  I have grown the plants in stripes, in keeping with the allotment feel, but I have never been pleased with the effect.  This year I shall grow in blocks   between the baby box hedging in this half.  Cosmos grows well for me every year but last year's first attempt at zinnias was disappointing.  This year I am going to try Centaurea cyanus, Black Ball, a deep almost black version of the cornflower, with Cosmos sulphereus Bright Lights, a vivid orange cosmos.  At the other end I have lavender in rows and globe artichokes and need some ideas for what to plant between the artichokes and the middle row of sweetpeas.  There are tulips in there already in two of the squares.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could remember what they are?  The cutting garden is one of my projects for this year.  It needs more thought and time in its planting to be a beautiful thing in itself rather than a repository for half grown things which won't quite fit anywhere else.

This is another new bit to work on this year: the native tree walk in my head.  At the far end is a whitebeam, then a rowan, a silver birch and at this end a wild cherry.  Between the trees are hollies and dogwoods and beneath them some snowdrops and scillas.  Here I shall also put the new hellebores and perhaps over time try to increase the numbers of everything.  I want something to lure you down to the bottom of the field on a bright late winter or early spring day.  I am almost tempted to put more daffodils down here but I think I shall resist, leaving the daffodils to dance round the trees in the orchard and to crowd behind the swing.  There is enough space here to let each area have its different feel and I think the yellow of daffodils might overwhelm the woodland feel.

The witch hazel is out, it spidery flowers catching me unawares again.  It hides in the corner of the field, amongst hazels put in for coppicing and filberts for nuts.  It is probably not the best place to see it and it's easy to miss its flowering period if it is cold and wet and the days are not for wandering  about in.  Too big to move though, so it will have to stay there.  I love it.  I wonder if I love it so much I can justify another one?

Here is the sunny bank, the little quince tree bare and leafless and the bank all tidy and weeded ready for spring.  This is a late summer place with pinks and penstemon and sedums.  I have cuttings of a tender pink salvia which I bought last year at Wollerton Old Hall.  It doesn't look as if the parent plant has survived the cold but the cuttings are sitting up on a bedroom windowsill so I must remember to care for them until they can take their place besides the jostling valerian.

Here is the kitchen garden.  In the summer the growth of trees and hedges and the overflowing of the raised beds with herbs and salads disguises the fact that the whole garden is on a slope.  At this time of year everything looks as if it is sliding away down the valley.  You can hardly tell from this picture that there is more yew planted at the far end to extend the big yew hedge which protects the henhouse.  When it is big enough I shall cut it so that it produces a horizontal, spirit level straight against the fall of the valley and the rise of the hills beyond.  I think it will make me smile but if it doesn't work it can always be left to do what it likes.

So there we are.  Too many projects, too much rough ground, all still a work in progress and fledgling as a wet bird.  You can tell I am tired because I am not yet champing at the bit to get seeds sown although I did feel a stirring of excitement when I went walking with my secateurs and my camera.  And look, it's February now.  Surely Spring cannot be far behind?