New Potatoes.

Here are our new potatoes freshly dug and washed from the veg plot.  I spread homemade compost in the spring and planted them in the ground.  The only home made fertilizer they have had is my nettle garden tea.  In other years I have give the plots lots of cow manure.  

This summer is very mixed weather wise and the gardens and veg plot have loved the showers and sunshine.  It's also been good not having to water it all the time.  

We bought some Organic carrots from Lidl for 99 Cents.  They cost the same as the ordinary carrots.  Eh?  Yep that's right.  You can but Organic carrots that haven't been grown with granulated fertilizer or sprayed with chemicals either.  Do you see why I don't bother growing all my vegetables anymore?  Of course they aren't as fresh as homegrown ones.  But when they are cheap as chips?

I have been maintaining a garden for an elderly lady since this Spring.  It's a mature herbaceous perennial (my favourite!) type of garden with lawns, mature shrubs and perennials in the borders.  It's very labour intensive and the soil in the borders are wonderful.  You could dig to Australia.  I have told you a million times Dave, don't exaggerate!

They are so full of wonderful homemade compost. Years and years of adding homemade compost, leaf mould and emptying the bought compost out of the flower pots have made it wonderful to work.  There is a Robin that perches on my garden fork and he or she looks at me weeding like an old head gardener and I am sure it will say:

"Put your back into it.  Have you got any worms?"

There is even a big compost heap.  Full to the brim with home made compost.  Just like my veg plot has!  The potatoes are delicious this year.  Especially washed down with a glass of Portal Do Minho.  It's a white wine from Portugal.  They sell it in Lidl.  We love it!

A Mixed Day At The Car boot Sale.

I got up at 5.15 on Sunday morning and filled the car with small perennials in trays.  It only took me an HOUR!

We had a cup of brew (black coffee) before we set off to the car boot sale near Cork city.  It's only about fifty miles away.  We paid ten Euros for our pitch and duly proceeded to empty the car of plants.   I decided to only charge a Euro a piece for them!  A helpful car booter seller came over and said we should try to sell plants that are in flower.  Most of ours did not have  any flowers.  Slap on wrist.  Sit on naughty seat!

Any way to cut a long story or standing time.  We sold eighteen plants.  Minus the pitch fee of ten Euros = 8 Euros.  Not bad for a mornings work eh?  

On a positive note I met some great people and passed on some good tips like how to make a Sedum cutting.  I even demonstrated!  I am available for after dinner speeches, garden fetes and gardening programmes.  Oh I forgot to say.  I am very CHEAP!

When the biblical multitudes of car booters gave us a minute.  I walked round on a car boot treasure trail.  This is what I found:

The vase or vahz cost four Euros.  It's hand painted, fine Staffordshire China and made just after the Second World War.  It made my day!  Do you like it?  What's the least you ever made on a car boot sale and what's the most?  

Anglophile Calling.

One of the many things I love and miss from England came home last week.  Good old Newcastle Brown.  I love English bitter, especially from the Midlands upwards.  You can go in a supermarket and find Belgian, Irish, Indian, Czech, French, Portuguese, Polish beer.  But can you find English beer?  Can you flip!  

Did you know that Guinness was first brewed in London?  I jest not. So really its originally an English stout?  

Bill Wyman missed Piccalilli when he lived in France.  Which is actually an Indian delicacy brought home when the Empire was still in full swing.  Even that Vindaloo song which England football fans sing is really an Indian dish from Goa which was a Portuguese colony.  Not many people know that.

Any way thanks to one of my relations wife going to England I ended up with eight cans of Newcy Brown.  They were delicious and please can she bring me some back every week?

Next question.  Any ex pats who read this.  Please tell me what you really miss from Blighty?  If you still live there.  What would you miss?

We have Iceland stores now in Ireland.  So we stock up on Hollands and Pukka pies, Cheddar cheese and good old Vimto and Hovis.  

I miss cricket too and watching a live football match and allotments of course!  What do you miss or would you miss?

New Garden Plants All The Way From China.

We sent off for some plant seeds a couple of months ago.  I think I mentioned it on here.  You only had to pay for the postage.  We ordered Bamboo, Pampas grass and Maple.  We ordered them through Geek.  Two Euros postage for each sachet of seeds.

About a month later a package arrived.  This is sounding like I am a drug dealer.  We sowed them in some trays and we have had mixed results:  The Pampas grasses all germinated.  

There are TWENTY SEVEN Blue Pampas Grass happily living outside in pots.  I even divided up the plants!  .  I like them and they seem to tolerate living next to the sea too.  Can't wait to see their Blue plumage!

Lots and lots of Pampas grass.

The Bamboo and Maple are a bit slow germinating.  I have even resorted to putting them in the wife's 'magic' window.  It's a NORTH facing kitchen window and everything sitting on the window sill germinates.  I have read that Bamboo need frost to make them germinate.  Even putting them in the fridge for a few weeks.  Anybody else had any experience of growing Bamboo from seed?  

I have seen Bamboo plants for sale for 22 Euros.  What's 22 x 5=?  A lot of pennies.  So the return is good even if the germination is a bit erratic.

We have about five Bamboo plants emerging at the moment and the Maple is starting to germinate.  Anybody else bought some 'free' plant seeds from China?  Or overseas?

A Very Good Gardening Book From The Charity Shop.

Here is the book I mentioned the other day.    It only cost one Euro and I am loving it nay devouring the compendium of female garden writing.  

Here's two or three snippets to whet your appetite:

May I assure the gentleman who writes to me (quite often) from a Priory in Sussex that I am not the armchair, library-fireside gardener he evidently suspects, 'never having performed any act of gardening' myself, and that for the last forty years of my life I have broken my back, my finger- nails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my occupation?

                                                            Vita Sackville-West , 1958.

Has anybody visited Sissinghurst?  Is it worth visiting?  I going to Kent soon.  

Gertrude Jekyll (Robert Louis Stephenson was friendly with her family and used their surname) great plantswoman and garden designer wrote:

For planting ground is painting a landscape with living things and I hold that good gardening takes rank within the bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity.  (Wood and Garden).

I have often said on here that I view gardens and allotments to be works of art.  The gardener and Mother Nature paint the picture and the soil is the easel.

Deborah Kellaway the Editor of The Virago Book Of Women Gardeners asks the question:

And what about the really poor?   They had no gardens, but they  had always gardened.  In the early middle ages they were there with their baskets, working in other people's flower-beds for a few pence a year.  In the seventeenth century Celia Fiennes marvelled at an effigy of one of them in the gardens of Woburn Abbey.  They were still there in the nineteenth century, and Mrs Ewing describes a certain woman in a hood, remembered from her childhood: 'She is not very old but she looks so, because she has lost her teeth, and is bent near double'.  She was bent double because she spent her working life stooped over the soil.  She was, simply, a 'weeder woman'.

What a great find of a book.  It mentions Weeders and Diggers, Advisers and Designers, Plantswomen, Colourists, Countrywomen, Townswomen, Visitors and Travellers, Kitchen Gardeners (walled gardens are my favourite!), Flower Arrangers and Visionaries.  It's a great book!

What's your favourite Estate garden to visit?  In England for me it would be Cholmondley Castle in Cheshire and The Lost Gardens Of Heligan in Cornwall.  I love the walled kitchen garden.  Did I tell you I love walled kitchen gardens?

A Postcard From The Potato Plot And Ice Plants.

I thought I would show you the latest photo from the veg plot.  The new potatoes are beginning to flower.  More perennial cuttings are potted up in the bath.  The bay in the background and Beara peninsula.

It takes me back about fifty years ago when everybody grew a field of vegetables for the humans and cow cabbages for the cows and mangels for the cart horse.  Piking hay by hand, chasing rabbits with salt and my dad and his brother drinking cold tea in a bottle brought to the field in an old sock.  

Ice plants that the wife grew from seed.  She got the seed free from Lidl a few months a go.  They made me think of the Algarve in April a few years ago.  We walked along the cliff tops to Carveiro and the Ice plants where growing wild there.  

Some Fab Things From A Charity Shop.

A rose glass or for a single flower?  Its old and heavy (sounds like me) and was only a Euro.

This coffee cup and ashtray immediately caught my attention.  I just had to have it!  Anybody know anything about it?

Seven Sundae glasses.  Fifty Cents each or ten bob in old slot electricity meters!   They took me back fifty years when my dear old mum would take me for an ice-cream with wafers in a Sundae glass in the the tea rooms.  We're going to use them for vases.  Some folk would call it tat I call it treasure!  

Oh I got some books too.  One on Portugal and one about Lady Gardeners.  All for a Euro a piece!   Will post a blog about the book when I have read it.  One lady gardener employed eighty gardeners.  Doff cap, pull forelock: 

"Yes my lady!"

Talking of lady gardeners.  Watch Carol Klein tonight on Channel 5 at nine O'clock.  She's one of my favourite television gardeners.  Who or was your favourite television gardener?  Geoffrey Smith was mine and Geoff Hamilton too.  Monty is good too and I adore his gardening dogs Nelly and Nigel.