Living in the UK again

 At last a bit of produce worth shouting about. Pak Choi. I have given a couple away, but we have eaten a couple, in stir frys . It’s not a particularly tasty vegetable, but nice and crunchy. I have bought a few more small plants and planted them. We have loads of flowers on the broad beans, I pinched the tips out, in order to mitigate the black fly. I washed the plants with soapy water to try and eliminate any black fly on the plants. They are not too badly affected by the black fly so far. The bindweed not surprisingly is still coming back, in open ground I can get rid of it, but in the raised beds and underneath the beds, it’s not possible to do. The Sweet Potato plants aren’t looking very good, flowers on the peas, the brassicas are mostly doing well especially the Kohl Rabi. On my old plot, the tenant’s husband has built this amazing bug house, for all sorts of insects. You can’t quite clearly see the lady birds on the roof. It’s neatly time for the next TRHA show, one of the ...

Like many tourists of yesteryear I have just got back from a holiday in North Wales, based in Colwyn Bay where my brother in law now lives. I have stayed there before but many years ago. He was down in our neck of the woods, so I hitched a lift in his MX-5 car to save me using the train or driving. The weather was still nice up there, just a little cooler, with a sea breeze thrown in for good measure. In the evening after we got up there, as  Monday is a quiet night, we had a few drinks in a local bar, where they have a reciprocal arrangement with a local pizza place, you order at the bar, they get delivered to you and you eat them with your beer. Result. All are priced the same. I had Peking Duck ( amazing ), he had Smoked Haddock ( also amazing ). The bar does all sorts of things like film nights, to tempt to punters in. We also had another drink in the local Wetherspoons, which I think was an old cinema, still featuring lots of its old fittings. On the next day we walked to near...

The recent hot weather has been really nice but no rain, that’s creating problems for the garden and allotment. The back border, around the pond, had loads of forget me knots, and although they are pretty after a while, they have to be lifted as they swamp the perennial plants in there. They have had a good chance to reseed, later on we will see those seedlings, ready to flower next year. I learnt that the flower, has a yellow circle on its petals, when there is no nectar it goes white. Bees know this, so save time by not wasting effort going in those flowers. After clearing them, I put a mulch of well rotted farmyard manure that we sell at the store. I bought a few plants to fill some gaps and move dahlias that I have been growing on to try and avoid the slugs. We have some nice iris, and self seeded Welsh poppies too. At the allotment, things are growing, I have been watering well every few days. Bindweed is still showing its hand. But I am keeping it down as best as I can. I have de...

When we built our ponds, we often had tadpoles in the Spring, we even had Toad spawn, just once I think. But now we don’t. But our neighbours, still have it appear every year and they donated some tadpoles for our back pond.  Another thing back from the dead is our white Wysteria. We used to have one gracing our pergola, but it sadly died. What is interesting is that the white was grafted onto purple root stock. A couple of years later a sucker appeared and now it’s flowering. It’s purple  of course. Unfortunately the bees that used to be all over the Wysteria are not to be seen. But they do appear when the blackberry flowers, later this year. The allotment is doing well, the Pak Choi is really coming along nicely. The bindweed is also, so needs constant removal. The roots are not always so easy to remove, but hopefully in time, it will succumb to my efforts. There is small fruit appearing on a lot of the trees, giving me hope I will have fruit in the autumn. We used to have a...