River Cottage in Spring

On Saturday we spent another lovely day visiting River Cottage HQ celebrating the return of Spring. There were talks and demonstrations on growing vegetables by Mark Diacono Head Gardener at RC, cooking seasonal vegetables and making pasta by Tim Maddams, Head Chef at RC Canteen and an illuminating talk by John Wright, wild food expert, on collecting sea weed and foraging by the coast. There were stalls filled with gardening paraphernalia, a talk by Dave Wiscombe on keeping bees, which always fascinates me, plus the usual stuff, yummy food and drink, animals, including baby lambs and for entertainment the Uplyme Morris Men.

I absolutely love visiting RCHQ, it has such a lovely atmosphere and is filled with a gorgeous light.

Talking of light, on the way home above Bridport, I saw a rainbow. It's the first rainbow I have ever seen from start to finish. In other words I saw the whole thing. It was an amazing sight seeing it coming up out of the ground, so to speak.

We are all reved up and ready for Spring now. I have planted the garlic cloves into modules and popped them in the summer house. The bed which had the bonfire on it, has had the ash dug in and compost added. I have raked it and we put the new cloches on top to warm the soil up ready for planting. We have marked out new beds, ready for the turf to be stripped off - exciting times ahead, if not a little back breaking!

The Scent of Spring

This week we have had the most incredible weather. Although there is still a little nip in the air, we have had wall to wall sunshine for the whole week.

The sunshine has brought the Spring flowers into bloom with their soft colours and scents filling the air.

I tided the front garden this weekend and was blown away by the scent coming from the Skimmia. I had never noticed it before probably because I never spend any time in the front garden. It's one of those wasted spaces, with scrubby grass and a car parked on it for much of the time. I am at a loss as to what to do with it. Where is Matt James when you need him?

Hyacinth

Skimmia

Yellow - The Colour of March

Today I woke up aching after my first proper workout in the garden of the year.

The grass was cut, edges trimmed and the leaves from the Winter drop were sucked up and burnt on a bonfire.

The sun had a warmth to it - Spring is definitely here!!

I took a trip into Bournemouth last week and paid a visit to Wilkinsons. They have a fantastic gardening department and I got all sorts of bargains. I bought a couple of clear plastic covered cloches for £4.99 each. They are going to be excellent for putting on the soil to warm it up before planting, or for keeping off the rain, if it gets really heavy.

I also purchased some lovely gardening gloves, which are too lovely to wear, for a couple of pounds. Their live plants need looking over before purchasing but you can certainly pick up a bargain. I bought two blackberry plants and two blueberry plants for £2 and £3 each.

The garden is coming back to life after its Winter sleep. Buds and shoots are appearing and there is anticipation in the air. My Tete a Tete are heralding the beginning of Spring with their yellow cheerfulness glowing in the sunshine and with the clocks going on an hour in a couple of weeks, that really is something to look forward to.

Tete a Tete

Kerria Buds

Raspberry Shoots

What do you wear to garden in?

When you get dressed in the morning, knowing that you have a day of gardening ahead of you, do you have clothes dedicated to the task? Do you look presentable like Rachel de Thame, or do you look like me; joggy bottoms splattered with paint, the oldest t shirt from the drawer and no make-up! The clothes I wear in the garden, used to look tidy, until worn out and tatty and then relegated to the gardening wardrobe. I know it seems kind of pointless, looking your best, when you know you are going to get covered in dirt but really I think I need to make more of an effort so I am going to look in my wardrobe for newer clothes to relegate to gardening duty and maybe a touch of mascara at the very least!


The sun shone yesterday and I was glad to be outside. For a brief moment, there were no children in the neighbouring gardens and it was peaceful. Instead of enjoying this moment though, all I could think of was that the little blighters would return at any second to spoil the birdsong and then there it was, shouting from the top and side of the garden. My daughter tried to remind me that she and her brother were like that once but somehow it doesn't sound so bad when it comes from your children!

After muttering 'shut up' a few times, I turned to the jobs in hand. To move the raspberries which I grew in pots last year into beds and do some weeding. The raspberries did quite well in pots last year but you have to be quite vigilant with the watering (which I wasn't always) and they didn't fruit as well as the ones in the ground. They are autumn fruiting raspberries, which are cut to the ground each winter and now have lovely green shoots over them, a sure sign that spring is on the way. The weeding and cutting back were quite satisfying jobs. I got quite excited to see new shoots on the clematis which I purchased last year but hadn't planted out. I was a bit worried that it hadn't survived the cold weather we had this winter.

I found a few spring flowers to photograph in the garden. Pulmonaria also known as Lungwort and Bergenia. It was thought that the plant had medicinal qualities, as the leaves have white spots on them, resembling diseased lungs and therefore it was used to cure pulmonary disease during the plague.




Pulmonaria



Bergenia

Fingers crossed for sunny weather next weekend. Lots to do in the garden and I must sort out my wardrobe before then.

Valentines Flowers

I was totally knocked off my feet by the enormous bouquet of flowers I received for Valentines Day. My boyfriend is not known for showing his romantic side and he positively winces when I shower him with kisses (but secretly I think he likes it!).

I took a walk up the garden path yesterday. Nothing much going on but I think it's the calm before the storm. I have so much work to do in the garden this year, it's quite daunting.

So for now I will just sit back and smell my flowers, until the weather warms up a bit and then the back ache and dirty fingers nails begin in earnest!

I put these flowers from the bouquet into a separate vase. I have a lovely old vase which I picked up from a charity shop, which has a maroon base and is quite unusual. The pink carnations and pink broom which has a sweet smelling perfume, just needed their own stage.

Shopping for Seeds and Raiding the Archives

If this was a blog about my life, I would tell you about my discovery of Fleet Foxes and how their album is absolutely beautiful. I would tell you about how my boyfriend has nearly finished our new bathroom and how I have had to summon up all my patience, telling myself that I will be worth the wait. I would tell you about my successes at baking. (Andy is very good at cooking cakes and we are always in competition to see whose is the best) and I would tell you about my disappointment that HFW is charging £110 per ticket for the annual River Cottage members evening (hence we won't be going!) but I won't because this blog is about my garden and my photography. But if it was about my life, then I wouldn't have left it so long between postings as my gardening pursuits have only extended to looking out of the kitchen window.

I have stayed firmly indoors this January, apart from leaving the house for essentials, work and shopping for instance and I am pleased that we have now left that month behind. I don't do Winter very well and I have been feeling a tad 'down in the dumps' these past few weeks but with the promise of lighter evenings, my heart feels a little lighter today

I did venture out and took a turn around the garden once, only to find a plant which I had put in my summer house to protect from the frost had copped it. It was a succulent which I had bought on my trip to Trebah gardens in Cornwall, early last year. I wonder how my dahlia tubers will fare under their blanket of compost? This Winter has been considerably colder; the upside being that bugs and pests which have been surviving in our warmer Winters of late may have also gone the way of my Aeonium arboreum 'Atropurpureum'

Although I haven't done any physical gardening, I have been shopping on the Internet and made the most of Thompson & Morgans offer of free p & p. I ordered my potatoes for chitting. I chose Charlotte again as they were easy to grow and very yummy. I ordered garlic, which I am going to start off in modules in the summer house. I hope this will give them a better chance, away from the Winter wet. I am going to try more legumes this year. I ordered, Runner Bean 'Painted Lady' and Pea 'Hurst Green Shaft', and I am trying Parsnips this year for the first time and of course Carrots 'Adelaide F1 Hybrid. That's it for veg for now, so it will be onto ordering salads and tomatoes and I will be trying cucumber as well this year.

On the photography front, I read last weekend that an Austrian artist is saving Polaroid film from extinction. To celebrate, I reached for my Polaroid camera, from the shelf and promptly photographed my daughter with the remains of a bowl of melted chocolate, leftovers from the cupcakes I had just adorned. She was amazed that I had just fired off a Polaroid as I had been saving them for 'special' photographs only - an explanation ensued! (Not that she isn't special enough!)

In the absence of any new garden photography, I have raided the archives and found some images which I had scanned onto disc. These black and white photographs were made long before digital photography was even heard of. I photographed the plants on good old Ilford film and after developing the film, I took watercolour paper and painted it with silver gelatin (This had to be done in the dark, without using the red safety light ) After a couple of coats the paper was ready for the enlarger. Various exposures on test strips later, the paper could be exposed for the correct amount of time and then into the 3 baths and then a 4th holding a super fixer. The paper was then washed to get rid of the chemicals and you can see from the photograph of the closed sunflower, that not all the chemicals were washed off properly.

I showed these photographs to Val Williams, many years ago ( she was the curator at the

Hassleblad museum in Germany) and she liked them and said I should sell these to galleries. Sadly I didn't pursue this and now you can do this all in photoshop; it's no longer an art form.

I sometimes feel that photographers today have it oh so easy. It's just a matter of pressing a button. But do you really learn anything that way? The hours spent in the dark room, perfecting that one print has gone now. You certainly learnt by your mistakes but I wouldn't have it any other way. I feel quite privileged to be part of the 'old school' but equally love this new technology. The best of both worlds!

Grasses

Arum Lily

Echinacea
Sunflower

Happy Gardening New Year!

We have turned a corner - the light is coming back to the northern hemisphere.

I celebrate the Winter Solstice. It's a really special time for me. It's a chance to think about the year that's been and to think about the coming year and especially to think about the earth and how by all working together, in our own small way, we can make a collective difference.

Solstice Alter

The garden is quite bare at the moment. Well on the surface anyway, apart from a few brave plants. My Skimmia which I cut a piece of and bought indoors is looking lovely, adorned by ruby red berries and I have a plant which has been in flower pretty much all year long and is still going strong. I have no idea what it is with its orangey-yellow flower but seems to survive as it is planted against a south facing wall.

I am now planning for the new season of gardening. I bought myself Carol Kleins new book Cook Your Own Veg which is full of wonderful recipes and the most beautiful photographs taken by Howard Sooley. Howard Sooley was a great friend of the late Derek Jarman. He did the photography in Derek's book Derek Jarman's garden, which documents the amazing and beautiful garden which Derek created in the wilds of Dungerness, from its beginnings in 1986 to the last years of his life. I believe that Howard still keeps the wooden house and garden as a memorial to his friend. If I am correct, its somewhere I would love to visit.

I took advantage of Thompson and Morgans offer of free p & p last weekend and ordered my seeds and seed potatoes and garlic. I am going to try planting my garlic in pots and keeping it in the summer house until the spring and planting out then, in the hope that that will give them a fighting chance this year away from the soggy weather.
I have also booked myself and long suffering partner Andy on a day at River Cottage in March entitled Get Growing in Spring. Any excuse to visit River Cottage!

Andy knows of my admiration for the late Geoff Hamilton and so for Christmas bought me his 3 DVD set of Ornamental Kitchen Gardens, Cottage Gardens and Paradise Gardens series. They really are wonderful to watch.

I watched the Christmas edition of Gardeners' World and I have to say that I now heartily endorse Toby Buckland. He really reminds me of Geoff. He and Alyse have a lovely rapour and she is so sweet. I an looking forward to its return in the spring.

It might be really chilly outside but the sun is coming back and the nights will soon be drawing out again - lots to look forward to!

Winter Wreath
Boots snuggled up in his new basket