Garden Centre

Monday, August 4, 2008

When is a garden not a garden?

When it’s a herb garden! I was lucky enough to find an absolutely brilliant herb stall at a local fair and came home with two bulging (recycled) carrier bags full of plants and seeds.

There’s a real advantage in growing herbs – you get to eat or otherwise use the produce from your garden. There’s also a disadvantage though – many herbs are annuals so there’s quite a lot of work to be doing in sowing seeds and digging up old plants that are past their best, and also that gives you some bare patches at different time, although you can always plonk down a potted plant to cover the bare earth.

So, on the perennial side I already had: bay, lavender, rosemary and angelica (okay, not perennial, but biennial and self seeding, so all I have to do is dig out the old exhausted parent plant every four years or so and let a youngster fill in the parent’s place) and some chives (both ordinary and garlic). I bought lemon verbena (a windowsill plant, but worth it for the glorious scent and to make lemon sugar for baking and a couple of leaves will scent bathwater as nicely as the most expensive bath oil) and a couple of self seeding salads like orach and mizuna which should just keep filling up their space year after year. And I fell in love with chocolate mint – which doesn’t taste as good as ordinary mint in cooking but smells like chocolates and is great in summer drinks and cocktails.

On the annual side I have now added dill, chervil (same family) basil and oregano. The problem is … where am I going to put everything!

Labels: angelica, bay, herb garden, lavender, lemon verbena, mizuna, orach, plant sales, rosemary

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:42 AM 2 Comments

---

Thursday, July 10, 2008

What's best in the garden in July?

In my view, the answer is obvious. Lavender!

I have three kinds: angustifolia (silver-grey heads streamlined along the stems), stoechas (the kind that have a rounded, tightly-packed lower bracts and extended flaglike flowers in the upper bracts, usually in bright purple) and a white lavender, genus and variety unknown, I got it as a cutting at a fair! This is the time when flowering stems can be harvested for drying and storing, although the weather just isn’t cooperating. You need to wait for a dry day and cut the lavender with fairly long stalks when the buds are beginning to show colour but are not yet fully open. Tie the stems in loose bunches and hang upside-down in a reasonably warm, dark and airy place.

You can do all kinds of things with the dried heads: make lavender bags, put a couple of heads in a tea infuser and drop it in the bath for a lovely scented soak, or (my favourite) cook with them!

Dilly biscuits

125g butter
100g caster sugar
1 egg
2 tsp dried lavender flowers (make sure you haven’t used pesticides on the plant you harvest from and angustifolia are best for this)
150g self-raising flour

Cream together butter and sugar, and add the egg. Beat well stir in the lavender flowers and fold in the flour. Mix lightly.

Use a teaspoon to spoon out onto a greased baking tray, leaving plenty of room between each one for them to spread. Bake for 15 minutes at 170 degrees Celcius (325 degrees Fahrenheit), then turn out onto wire racks to cool.

Why ‘Dilly’ biscuits? Well, "Lavender’s blue dilly dilly, lavender’s green … "

Lavender courtesy of ilovebutter

Labels: july tasks, lavender, lavender recipes

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:25 AM 0 Comments

---

Monday, July 9, 2007

How is your garden growing? The All Seasons garden is much as it was in June – green, green, green. Everything is sappy and verdant, putting out masses of green growth, but the floriforousness (to coin a word) that I’d usually be seeing by now is not there. The lilies have begun to open, a week later than this time last year, and the roses are at their best, although they are almost lost in the green leaves of everything else. My bay tree has gone insane, putting on about eight inches of growth in the three weeks since I last trimmed it, and that’s eight inches in all directions, up down and sideways, so it looks like a haystack rather than a cone. And my laurel and fig have also sprung up a couple of feet on the warm and rainy weather we’ve been having.

The big shock is the wisteria. We pruned it back so hard that it didn’t flower this year (we had to, it was so rampant on the garage roof it was lifting off the tiles and chucking them onto the paving, like a delinquent child!) but that hasn’t stopped it roaring into new summer growth, and it is now only about two feet short of its height in November when we took the machetes to it. The problem with wisteria is that it throws out long whippy new growth like a cowboy’s lasso and if you don’t get on its case immediately, it will have travelled six or seven feet in a weekend, hooking its clever little tendrils onto anything in range.

Three of the four kinds of lavender I grow are in full growth: Lavandula augustifolia, the classic lavender, Lavandula intermedia with white flowers, and Lavandula latifolia which has no flowers to speak of but has very wide leaves that can be hung up and dried and used to scent cushions, wardrobes and so on, but the fourth, Lavandula stoechas, which has fatter purpler heads, really isn’t thriving – it seems to need more sun than this year has given it to perform well.

My broad beans developed rust overnight and my pea pods aren’t fattening as fast as I’d like – and the forecast is for yet more rain …

Labels: garden news, garden tasks, lavender, wisteria

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:14 AM 2 Comments

---