Let the gluts begin

Been away for a wee holiday, enjoying the great outdoors, lots of walking, wildlife and dipping my toes in water, history, art, literature and gardens. But I'll leave writing about that for another day. The main thing is coming home to find that the cats have survived and the vegetables are flourishing The allotment is …

A stressful time of year

Today I had to dig up my awesome rainbow chard plants to make way for cucumbers and runner beans: Most of this sadly had to land in the compost bin, but I saved a big bucketful to live on for the next few days: We are subsisting almost entirely on rainbow chard and rhubarb at …

Reclaiming Paradise awards 2018

As the old year rolls on and we venture into 2019, it's award season at Reclaiming Paradise. In a year of weather extremes and personal complications, we celebrate all that is great, good or frankly unsuccessful in my garden and allotment. This year I  cracked a bone in my arm, helped my mother move house, …

November sunshine

Earlier this year I had some monstrous conifers removed from the back of the garden - here in mid-removal: Behind them the privet hedge is  recovering slowly but surely. This photo is from June: I had this idea that I would make a place to sit in the sun as this is the sunniest part …

Autumn tidying

Today was a garden day, it seemed like the first in months. The garden has been doing its best producing wonderful fruit and vegetables, especially plums, apples and tomatoes but, what with the allotment, and the musicians, various other family and work things, a wee trip to Norway and the small matter of the cracked bone …

The trouble with

.. courgettes is that they grow into marrows. We've had a bumper crop on the allotment this year and I've been struggling to keep up. My allotment keeper friend is not very keen on the big guys so I said would deal with them. Only, I didn't get along to the plot for a few …

Holiday with some vegetables

I've been away for a few days, staying in a caravan with my mother. My luggage included several holiday essentials: my swimming things,  drawing materials, a very fat book, my laptop (in case I had an urge to work or blog) and a load of allotment vegetables. We enjoyed the vegetables one evening after an …

Pickle

Last night's rain has caused the cucurbits to grow overnight I think: and we had some more rain this morning: Stotting off the patio is the only way to describe it. The sun's out again now and we had a garden lunch: Whole cucumbers, along with yesterday's courgette pickle and pea guacamole.  The pickle was surprisingly …

Cucumber frame

I finally got round to building my second lego brick raised bed. The first one is doing well: with tomatoes, lettuce and Swiss chard all looking fairly happy. The sea shell is supposed to stop people from poking their eyes out.  I planned the new raised bed so that my trusty plastic cloche will fit …

Seedlings

Today has been a pretty bleak start to a few days away from work, in which I hoped to get lots of gardening done.  But everything in the garden is saying 'no, wait! It's too cold'.  So I stayed inside and got on with repotting my tomatoes and cucumbers: As usual, there are too many …