ROLLER COASTER (AND STINK PUFF)

Let me start with something gardeny like the pink hellebore and then get onto other things. R is still clearing brambles and I am shifting well rotted manure (as usual) and the compost from last year onto the asparagus bed. I have also roughly repaired the rabbit proofing around that bed.

Walked around the garden and we put up a jack snipe in the top wood. Smaller than usual snipe and flies lower.

We have moles everywhere, even coming up through the woodland paths.

So - to the title and the ups and downs of life.

1. Faux pas - had my hair cut and came home. R said nothing so later in the car I mentioned that I had had it done and she had not noticed. 
The reply was devastating as she said - well, you did not notice that I had also had my hair done!
Whoops!!

2. Slight redemption - we went for a walk up Barrow Banks towards Raven Scar - a couple of miles or so on a forest track - and when we got home R noticed she had lost a nice earring she had bought in Burford. Come Sunday morning I was doing nowt so retraced our tracks - all the way to the top of the hard core track and zero. Gave up and started back the way I had come and there, a third of the way down, sitting in the track was the missing earring!

Now this pic has been criticised on facebook as not being up to my usual standard but to illustrate the problems of finding a silvery thing so small on a grey surface it will do. (It will have to do.)

We have had wintry showers driving through the garden and it has been cold.

 The pond has a coating of ice. (This does not stop the heron eating the frogs. R saw one mouthful disappearing, legs waving in the air.)

All is not grey in the garden though and the miscanthus with the sun on it is a golden delight.

 Here is one of the recipes from my mother's book that defines my childhood - she called it Raspberry Delight, we called it Stink Puff! (Pink stuff).

1 pint raspberry jelly
1 large tin of evaporated milk
1 medium tin raspberries or equivalent of fresh fruit though then you do not have the juice from the tin.
3 tablespoons sugar

Make jelly with juice from raspberries made up to 1 pint water.
Keep some fruit for decoration.
Allow to cool but not set.
Whip evap. until it doubles in volume.
Whip jelly till it bubbles.
Whip together. (Sounds like a sad-masochists delight!)
Add the sugar and fruit and whip again.
Put into big bowl or small individual dishes.

Let set for a short while then eat the lot.

Was going out to garden but cut finger slicing bread so got out of it. 
Waiting for the mower service man to come and collect them.
He has been.

Shurrup lad and eat yer Stink Puff.

NEED TO GO ON A BUNNY HUNT

They are back again - two fat rabbits in the snowdrops. The question is - where is the burrow? Methinks I shall have to do a search.

I am missing my coffee in town as I am waiting for a delivery of bookcases to store R's library in our her bedroom. Actually I have now built them and have 2 blisters as a result.

We have put the gorgeous (a horrible word but just right) lily on the stair window sill. The little china dog was my grandfather's and sat on his bookcase.

There is colour out in the garden too, albeit foliage - this beauty was bought by R at some coffee morning or other and was a 7 cm cutting in a tiny pot. 

I have just noticed that the first of the pink hellebores is flowering by the shed outside my window. 

The menagerie is now in full swing as the squirrel is here, no two, and a jay is on the banking trying to remember where it buried its hazelnuts.

The pot made from a water tank is doing well.

Now the sun is out, no it isn't, yes it is, now it is windy and snowing, no it isn't . . . you get the gist of the weather.

Now it is dull and drizzly, the rain gives a sheen to my blue fleece and dribbles down my face from my sodden hair.

I have been at the back of the house cutting down the ash branches that have grown too big and are overhanging the house. The flowering currant, elder and privet are left alone, more or less.

Most of the branches will be trimmed of their side shoots and will be used to replace path edging (R wants them for firewood.) The rest has gone to the bonfire - well, not quite, I lie, I gave up and came in for a cup of tea and a shower at 3.30 pm leaving stuff on the paving.

Whilst up there I revealed a bird's nest in the ivy. In view of the many sunflower seed shells in it I suspect this is a finch's nest - perhaps a chaffinch?

Despite the snow showers I was out the next day and trimmed the ash poles. Then I carted the rest to the bonfire. Seeing this pic I also remember that R wants me to stick the fig up on the banking.

Every time I look out of the window I see more to be done - the Rambling Rector rose in the flowering currant is completely out of hand.

Just made some biscuits - Mother called them melting moments if I remember right but in the book she calls them small round shortbread cakes.

8 oz butter
3 oz icing sugar
Vanilla Extract (about half a teaspoon unless you are very vanillary in which case a whole one)
8 oz plain flour
A few place cherries.

Cream butter and sugar together, add vanilla, mix in sieved flour a bit at a time (so it does not shoot out all over you).
Form into walnut sized balls and put on a greased baking sheet.
Press a fork dipped in flour on the top and adorn with half a place cherry if desired.
Cook at 380F (in Aga I did them at bottom of top oven with cold shelf in) for about 10 minutes until just starting to colour at the edges.

Then I ate the four misshapen ones!

MINT AND THE ROSSIDE CLEARANCES

So here is a pic of the area beyond the den R has cleared of brambles. On the left you can see there is more to do, mind you, as she nears the wall she will find a dip and in this are various discarded metal objects from the previous owner including and old hand mower.

Down by the bottom hedge is the bit I have done. The area on the right will be full of white wild garlic or ramsons in the spring.

Some of the hazel and ash twigs have been cut and placed on the trestle to keep them dryish for pea sticks, well, bean sticks.

This morning 

I was looking out of my study window and there was the squirrel on the peanut feeder. Then I noticed two fat rabbits at the top of the banking and where there are two rabbits, presumably of the opposite sex, there is going to be TROUBLE!

Little breeders!

I am listening to John Renbourn's Traveller's Prayer from his Ship of Fools album. Once was involved with putting him on at a folk concert at Liverpool University in 1967 (I think). The less said about that the better.

We have had some pink viburnum bodnantense dawn in a  vase but now it has gone over. I have trimmed the sticks and shoved them in the cutting bed - unlikely to root but you never know. (Or perhaps you do.)

Now, I know you think we are basking in the sun so here is a morning photo from the house to dispel any doubt that might be lingering in your grey matter.

Plenty of room for gloom especially when my friend P in NZ goes on about to being 26C out there. I can just imagine myself lying in the warm sea off the Coromandel. Unfortunately there is the large question of the journey. It is about time we had wormhole technology so I could walk into a booth here and step out in Auckland.

Back to gardens and stuff.
In the autumn I bunged some chopped mint into vinegar so I could have mint sauce (R does not much like it) with my lamb in the winter.

In my mother's recipe book are two alternatives :-

TO PRESERVE MINT IN THE WINTER

Pick young leaves and wash.

Chop very finely, almost to a mousse & put into a screw top jar - preferably with a plastic lined lid.

Make a syrup of equal quantities of vinegar and sugar - i.e. 1/2 pint of each. Boil syrup gently for 5-7 minutes. 

Pour over the mint and screw down lid.

To use - take a teaspoon or so in a small jug adding more sugar and hot water and, if desired, more vinegar.

(I like to use a good malt vinegar if possible.)

MINT BUTTER

2 oz butter

1 heaped tablespoon fresh mint

salt, pepper and lemon juice

Pound mint in a mortar, add butter and pound again. Season and add lemon juice.

Good on lamb cutlets, grilled sole and in small quantities on carrots, potatoes and green peas.

Personally I like the rather hairy apple mint better than horse mint, it seems to have a sweeter flavour.

JANUARY NEARLY GONE

The rooks next door are in full croak - nests on the way - except for one with a tenor call that seems far too high pitched.

R is stiff from gardening the other day - brambles and dead leaves her forte at the moment. There are bulbs flowering in the pots - I think these are paperwhites. I should have put them in the house pots but, well, ne'er mind lad.

Buds is a-sprouting like this promise on the blackcurrants and the garden is stirring despite the nip in the air.

There are snowdrops everywhere - a testament to R's determination to have them here there and - well, you know - a bit like pimpernel.
By the time I am 135 the garden will be full of them.

Down in the cutting bed, after I had pruned the rosemary, I stuck about thirty rough bits in the soil in the early autumn and they have all taken! Here they are growing up through some foxglove self sown seedings.

On the banking below the house the montbretia (crocosmia) has got out of hand and will need digging up and replanting. It can be a bit of a thug if left and when it gets congested does not flower as well. We have three types - red, orange and yellow.

The weather this morning is a mixture of sun and black threatening cloud.

I have noticed that the rogue ash to the right of the nicely shaped tree at the back has got a bit large and will need chopping (well sawing) down. The trouble is it sprouts again so readily I - wait - source of firewood, I suppose, so okay-ish.

One of the things I inherited from my mother was her personal recipe book. All measures will be UK and pounds, ounces etc. No vouching for how good this but - 

LILY'S LEMON BAKE

6oz butter
6oz soft brown sugar
6oz self-raising flour
2 eggs
lemon 
4oz caster sugar

Mix butter and sugar and rind of 1 lemon in pan and melt.
Leave to cool then add flour and eggs. Mix well.
Put in swiss roll tin and bake 20min to half an hour at about 180. (She does not say whether Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Kelvin.)

Take 4oz caster sugar and mix with the lemon juice and pour over warm cake.
Cut in squares.

This sounds a bit lemon drizzly to me.
Lily was Lily Barrow who helped Mum around the house. After she died I wrote a poem about her - 

LILY

She sits on a three-legged stool in front 

of our grey shippon door plucking chickens.

The feathers fall like snow to the yard earth

and eddy erratically until picked  

by a gentle breeze and sent skittering

to collect as a drift in a tangle 

of pineappleweed by the dairy door.

She notices the camera and looks up,

gives a small smile to the cameraman, 

my father, then returns to ripping down.

We had no freezer then, this is dinner,

Aga roasted in the kitchen.  By then

Lily will have walked back to her farmhouse

hidden in the hills beyond the village.

Her cottage was in a fold in the fell.

Her weathered hands had made a rare garden

amongst rocks, a place of peace and beauty.

By the five-bar gate was a small stone shed.

Here were her dogs.  She walked ten miles a day

to harden them for the weekly hound trail,

the long chase after the drag sack of scent.

She did not travel much beyond her home

till she was eighty and her husband died.

Suddenly she was off across the world.

One day whilst driving down to Broughton Mills

a shadow crossed the road and, looking up,

we saw a large balloon.  In the basket,

was Lily loving life before too late.

Back in the house the place is still full of flowers like this one and the old amaryllis is sprouting.

Sorry L and G, have not mentioned compost for a bit so here you are.

There can be too much information in a blog so I will not mention the "upbumcamera" waiting for me.

That seems an appropriate place to get to the bottom of the page.

A PAIN IN THE . . . .

So dawns another blog.

It is very cold - earth as hard as iron, water like a stone.
I am suffering from seccateurer's wrist - thought it was improving so I finished tidying the thorns of the lower branches of the damsons and then cleared the far lower corner of brambles and young ash trees, and the canes from the autumn fruiting golden raspberries I had dumped there as R does not like them. Now I am sore. Obviously a repetitive strain injury and nothing to do with using the mouse on the computer a lot nor playing golf.

R was clearing brambles from the far end of the garden today.
She has also said now that the pond is too small - unfortunately, with the slope of the garden enlarging it would mean a very shallow upper end down a steep bank. Anyway we have not had a summer with it yet and will need to see how it gets on.
I have cleared the sweet peas away - they have finally succumbed to the weather - but two of the elder stems used as support have rooted. I will have to wait till things soften up to move them.

To Wednesday morning and we have a light covering of snow. Because of the cold the birds are feeding easily so I must go out into the cold and replenish the feeders.

Being a control freak I find this weather very frustrating as it interferes with getting on with things, plans etc. (Like playing golf, driving anywhere without worries and so on.) (Nothing to do with gardening.) R says I am getting more like my mother every day!

In the afternoon it stopped raining/sleeting/snowing and I went out to freeze my fingers. I pruned back the buddleia around the septic tank and took down the cut-leaved elder. I know it is a bit early but needed to do something. 

When I got back to the shed the robin arrived and waited until I gave him/her (cannot tell) some bird seed.

Now there is a challenge - how to discover the sex of a robin. There is discussion about leg colour and the shape of the red/brown colouration junction on the brow but most ringers say it is very difficult, even when the bird is in the hand so it makes no difference as to whether the robin is in the hand or there are two in the bush. And this bird by the small water bath thing is frozen solid.

Sunrise over the bay splendid this morning so am I going in then garden - not yet as need to have a coffee in town first.

COLD AND A VOLE

Let me start with COLD! Now I know this has nothing on Canada and the ilk but it is 2C and a gale blowing which is enough to deaden my  fingers as I winter prune the fruit trees removing dead and damaged branches, and crossing twigs. 

I start with two very chilly morning images from our bedroom window.

The top one shows freezing fog with pylons pushing out of the mist like giant Triffids, the lower one is a longer lens shot of the moor across to Birkrigg.

Out in the garden the robin braves the winter hail showers and the heron hunches miserably by the pond trying to shelter under the hedge. I have been down - no frog spawn yet. Whilst all this is going on an enterprising bank vole, they are the source of numerous small burrows in the garden, sneaks out of a crack in the paving under the feeders and dashes off with a sunflower seed. then back again and so on - obviously not eating them but storing them away in a safe larder.

I have just brought in some snowdrops from the garden and popped them in a small vase.

We hd considered going for a walk but were devoid of sheltered ideas, we had just been to Potato Day at Greenodd Village Hall for soup, a cake and a cup of tea. We bought no potatoes but I did get three asparagus crowns to replace the ones we lost with the flooding a couple of years ago and R bought some gladioli corms - deep purple and lime green flowers.

In the house the long wait for the Peruvian Lily to flower is over and it is also pushing up side shoots in the pot - more plants to come.

The house is not devoid of flowers and there white orchid R bought for less than £6 in Ikea some years ago is putting out a splendid show again.

We are trapped a bit by the weather so perhaps I will turn to the Sarah Raven catalogue. The pics of flowers are wonderfully inviting.

R thinks we should make more of the path up the wood and improve the experience of walking around the garden. 
Thinking cap on then! (And no snoozing.)

WEIRD WINTER?

This came to me as we were walking near Bouth and the Winter Heliotrope was flowering in the roadside - there are still a lot of flowers in the garden if one looks carefully - I mean, not just the snowdrops - now coming out - nor the winter flowering honeysuckle (a shrub not a climber).

I have cut some of the scented flowers of the latter and put them in a base on the stairs windowsill. We also have some flowering currant sprouting in a vase in the kitchen.

There are the usual nutters flowering when they shouldn't ought - I have just picked a white pink, smelling faintly but still - in January?


Red campion have the occasional flower in the wood and the red rose A and P gave us is doing well by the shed.

The hellebore - the Corsican one I think - is well into flowering and, of course, that anthemis by the path . . . 

It makes me wonder if we have a new mutation - an all year round anthemis - flowers whatever the weather.
Actually I do not believe this - it would lose the flowers etc if we had a really hard snap.

In fact we woke to a bright morning and a covering of hail.

 Now the wind is getting up and rain is on the way - AGAIN!

This does not mean I have not been in the garden, I have, a bit. The rose bed is manured and I have gathered many sticks, some for the wood shed and other stacked in the trees for wildlife. Sadly the wall of the shed nearest the house has disintegrated (It was made up of old failed paintings nailed to a trellis.)

Yesterday we went to the funeral of an old family friend of R in Cheshire. She loved nature and gardening. She painted watercolours and we have one in our living room as a reminder of a lovely lady. 

WILD MENAGERIE

No cigarettes, perhaps a little whisky and no wild, wild women but wild wild weather.

My windmill is bent - could not take the strain.

And the garden is a menagerie. I am sorry R but the spray of squirrel repellent did not do much and the peanut feeders are regularly assaulted.
Then I wander upstairs to see two fat rabbits munching the lawn.

Yesterday was gales and driving rain flooding through the garden. Down by the settling pond a miserable looking, bedraggled heron was trying too shelter from the wet and wind. The pic is not sharp due the the copious amounts of water driving through the air between us.

Gardening is intermittent to say the least, R tidying, me picking up sticks and barrowing well rotted horse manure onto the rose bed.

 There are still flowers on some the roses and we have a small vase of them with some honesty seed heads in the kitchen.

 There are a plethora of blue tits on the feeders, many surviving the winter well.

The grasses and such as the cardoons have been left for the winter frost to coat them but all we get is westerly wet. You can just see the new growth at the bottom coming already.

Thank all sorts that we have a sanctuary here, away from the horrors humanity inflicts on itself - Paris, Australia - you name it.

What a waste of life, a gift that we all need to nurture and enjoy - yes, there are good times and bad times but that is all part of the incredible journey. In fact I think that I would like my last words to be that - What and incredible journey! But not quite yet - a little more road to travel I hope.