Well, its been a while, but I haven’t forgotten you (Lorna!) so back with an update. Don’t even know where to start. So will start by saying I have done absolutely nothing constructive this weekend. Have been mostly eating, drinking, walking in the rain and throwing coconuts. The good news is that it was our village show this weekend, and our debut year was a complete success. We didn’t enter many classes, not really knowing what it was all about, but won in every one! Andy – first prize biscuits (sorry Pete: third place loser!); Sarah – first prize beetroot chutney; and perhaps most impressively (because there were more than 2 entries in this class) first prize courgettes. Just watch out everyone, next year we will be back with avengence.

PS Note to self, when the hill is in cloud, there is no spectacular view to show the city folk visiting for the weekend; there is just a lot of very wet sheep.

I learnt to knit as a child but recently decided to resurrect the skill and its quite sad but I am really enjoying it. So far I have made: hat, scarf and mittens, although the hat turned out a bit small because I used the wrong sized needles – it was for a 4 year old, luckily I also have a 1 year old who it fitted perfectly! Oo and I also made a dress for a Dora the explorer doll and a hooded jacket for a friends baby.

Last weekend I had a bit of a session on ebay trying to but some wool or yarn as the knitters seem to refer to it. I went a bit mad in the end. It started off with me losing a couple of bids – who’d have thought bidding for yarn was so competitive? I got very annoyed as I had already virtually knitted at least 3 items with some nicely colour coordinated yarn. Then I got carried away and by Monday I had won 8 lots, which added up to quite a lot of money and quite a lot of yarn. Not a lot I could do about it by then so I have now filled the bottom of my wardrobe with more balls of wool than I know what to do with!

I started knitting the first jumper yesterday…

Have had a bit of a nightmare the last week . The weather has been stunning (that’s not the nightmare obviously) but I’ve been stuck inside studying. Final assignment for an Open University course was due in of Friday so I spent all week in a blind panic. Still, it’s now done, slightly short in a couple of places but at least its off my back, now I just have an exam, but thats not for a month…

Andy has made up for my lack of gardening effort by going into overdrive. He’s planted: potatoes, onions, garlic in our newly dug beds and got some seeds going in our greenhouse (which we have now managed to stabilise!). Have no idea exactly what he’s planted, except that I made him some labels from an old margarine tub!  We’ve also got sweetcorm and tomatoes on the windowsills. In the meantime I’ve manged to germinate 3 chillis. I have some catching up to do…

Spring is so definitely here. Its March so it must be. Although, Megan has decided its not spring until we have a daffodil in flower, which we don’t. But that would make it still winter, and that just feels wrong? The weather has been largely beautiful this week so I have spent a lot of time in the garden planning and marvelling at all the plants springing into life.

The tulips are looking stunning and I don’t even know what colour they will be yet! and then there are the hidden jewels – I think this could be a hellebore coming up amongst the brambles?

We have an absolute jungle of weeds, the celandine is everywhere but somehow its hard to hold a grudge when it looks this pretty

The sudden surge of energy in the garden seems to be spreading to everything else, the lambs have arrived, Gilbert our cockrel has started bonking the hens and Andy has had an irresistable urge to start planting his seeds… in our brand new minature greenhouse. Only slight disaster is that as soon as it was erected and full of seed trays we got a bit of a strong wind and the whole lot toppled over. Talk about landing buttered side down – I ended up having to scoop a large mangled mess of compost and seeds back into a bucket.

On the plus side, we’ve also had a couple of heavy frosts this week that probably would have killed of any germination anyway!

Today we have been rummaging around garden centres one closeish to us was having a closing down sale, although when we got there it had pretty much already closed. However, we did manage to get a couple of half price terracota pots and the seeds were down to 50p a packet – there was next to no useful veg left but at that price, I was allowed to go a bit mad on the floral side. As a result I shall be mostly trying to grow my own bedding plants from seed. Without a proper greenhouse I am not sure how successful this will be, but I will keep you posted.

I can’t tell you how excited I’ve been re-exploring the garden after the snow melted. This weekend in particular so many things are springing into life. This is our first spring in the garden so there are allsorts of hidden surprises we missed last year, only moving in the July. We have stunning displays of snowdrops at the base of the hedges and huge clumps of daffodils, bluebells and I think probably hyacinthes and tulips are popping up all over the place. You have to be careful where you step for fear of tromping on them, especially as all our wellies have double to footprint due to all the mud!

Snowdrops

Of course the downside is that I am slowly being reminded of the battle we are going to have with the weeds. The ground elder was horrendous last year and I can already see the fresh leaves starting to emerge. I pretty much ignored it last year and I’m sure will pay the price this year – if anyone knows any brilliant ways to get shot if it then please let me know!

I have had such a good weekend after a blinkin awful week. I was going to post earlier in the week but it was turning into such a rant I thought better not to. In brief it involves an argument with my daughters head about the gritting of pathes around school (or lack of), getting home from a weekend away to find we had run out of oil (such an embarrassing novice user error), spending 4 days trying to get an oil delivery and then getting a failed delivery because ‘the roof is too low’ – its not like they haven’t delivered to us before? Anyway we now have oil (from a different supplier) but still no central heating as the boiler now needs bleeding. The best thing about this whole palava is that it didn’t happen the previous week in the middle of a minor ice-age.

Rant over – I had a great weekend! We had friends visiting, spring was present in abundance and we spent the whole weekend in the garden, not entirely 100% productive, especially on Saturday due to some pretty sore heads, but today we really made some progress. The boys got stuck into some digging and the girls continued the mammoth pruning and we even managed to plant something. Spent hours deliberating where to plant the gooseberry bush we got for Christmas. We seem to have fruit bushes randomly planted in various locations, so the dilema was whether to try and keep them all a bit more together or to put it in the best position? Went for the best position (I hope) and decided to just accept that everything will be a bit jumbled.

Planting the gooseberry

Gooseberry bush

PS Edited to add some photos

To distract myself from the mingin’ cold I seem to have developed, I thought I’d tell you about my marmalade. It was very nearly a disaster when I bought the wrong kind of orange – how can there be a wrong kind of orange? On closer inspection of the recipe, after I bought a delicious looking bag of big juicy oranges, I noticed the crucial reference to retaining any pips which contain pectin and makes the marmalade set. Mine were apparently the very best eating oranges – with no pips! I then scoured the house for marmalade recipes and mixed and matched until I came up with the following:

4 navel oranges
2 unwaxed lemons
500ml apple juice
2 1/2l water
2kg jam sugar (with added pectin!)

I followed a pretty standard method involving juicing the fruit over a seive lined with muslin, scooping out the remaining flesh (pith and pips an all) into the muslin. Spend hours finely chopping all the skin and leaving to soak overnight in the fluids with the muslin bag of goodies. Following day I simmered for about 3 hours til the skins were really squishy then removed the muslin and added the sugar.

This is where it all got a bit scientific, but I tried my best to be professional, dolloping gloop onto cold plates in the hope it would wrinkle. I have to say it never really wrinkled as such, but I decided after 25ish minutes, once nearly everything in the kitchen was pretty sticky, it must be about done.

Getting it into the jars was not easy. There was quite alot of scolded  fingers and another whole layer of stickiness to contend with, ooo and I didn’t let it cool enough before putting in jars so all the peel floated to the top and I had to try and redistibute when it cooled some more… but, in the end I got 9 jars (not sure the exact quantity as they’re all different sizes) of what looked suspiciously like marmalade!

This morning, I cracked open the first jar – it is sooo delicious. Definitely worth the effort!

I meant to come straight back after the last post and show you just how severe my prune was, but got completely distracted because it snowed! Really, really snowed more than I think I’ve ever seen in my life before. SO here is a picture of my pruning…

Hedge prunings

  but much more interestingly here are also some really snowy pictures!

Snow storm

Is this a whiteout?

And the sun came out

PS It turns out chickens hate the snow. Ethel and Vera just about braved a quick roam when the sun came out yesterday afternoon but Gilbert wouldn’t even step foot outside the henhouse. He is such a woose!

Our new garden has the feel of a huge unloved beast. It has obviously been subject to a master plan at some stage but the plan is long lost and we are left with with a wildly unruly beast. The first thing we did, when we moved last summer, was attack the main thoroughfairs so that we could at least navigate our way around most of the garden. Further than that it’s quite hard to know where to start so I’ve started in the only way I know how, a complete massacre! I’m working on the basis that if it doesn’t survive its probably not worth having. I am a little concerned that my lush and voluptuous garden won’t be quite the same this summer, but remain confident that anything thats got that big is probably going to recover pretty well.

Gilbert, Ethel and Vera

 This is a first test post. It seems to be working…

Trying to get to grips with this whole blogging thing, so be patient while we get the hang of it!

PS Thank you to  My Tiny Plot  who’s tutorial on WordPress gave me the confidence to get started.