Happy New Gardening Year!

Hello Friends,
I always say that gardening New Year starts in October & I'm in good company because Monty Don said exactly the same thing in a recent edition of 'GW'. Although there are still usually last bits to harvest in October, there is absolutely LOADS that can be done to get next year's growing plans underway. Today I thought ahead to next summer's strawberries. 

This year's strawberries were very nice, but there weren't enough of them. There never are, & this is because for years, I've been growing them in a designated strawberry tub......which unhelpfully, strawberry plants just don't enjoy living in. Time for a change. I visited a community allotment earlier this year & saw a built up strawberry bed there which gave me an idea. I can't replicate it...... there are no carpentry skills in this house, unless Albert Whiskers has a secret little toolkit we don't know about......but it did give me an idea, so next year, I'll be constructing a new condo for our strawberries. I'll need lots more plants first, though, & as my favourite kind of plants are free ones, I started pegging down strawberry runners this year as soon as they appeared.

I say 'peg', it wasn't even anything that sophisticated. I just pulled the runner over to a neighbouring trough & couple of large pots, made a little dip in the soil & gently pressed the crown of the new plants in.

I snipped the runners & lifted the new plantlets today & found they'd made pretty good root systems.

Definitely worth potting up, as well as this year's plants, which I lifted out of the now defunct strawberry tub. One or two had succumbed to the Evil Weevil. I found a few of the telltale grubs in amongst the old compost, but I just spread it over an empty bed. Our robin will be jumping for joy when he finds those!

I used cut-down recycled yoghurt pots for potting them up, & stood them in shuttle trays so that I can move them around the greenhouse easily. It always surprises me to see these things actually on sale! Who would choose to buy more plastic when most garden centres have a stash of these trays by the tills ready for taking free of charge? 

That's 48 new plants potted up to over-winter in the greenhouse, ready for my new strawberry construction thingy when I make it up next spring. It's not all about looking ahead, either. I've enjoyed watching skeins of geese wheeling around overhead as I worked, another sure sign of autumn.
Albert Whiskers joined me in the greenhouse, but his attentions were soon called away to do a spot of border-patrol. Although he has zero interest in my plans for next year's strawberries, that didn't mean any old neighbouring moggy could swan in giving them the eyeball. Hungry Blackie & The Tabster were soon shown the way back through the fence, along with a suggestion that they might like to reverse a bit quicker if they didn't want a bash. Having won that little stand-off (two cats at once, you see), he had to retreat indoors for a bit of a lie-down........

........and he hasn't moved a whisker since!
To all my gardening friends, Happy Gardening New Year! To all those who keep meaning to grow a teensy bit of something or other, plan it now, & then it will be more likely to happen. And if you have a barrel of old crusty-looking strawberry plants which you haven't even watered since you ate the last berry, go & have a look to see if you have any runners to pot up......& treat them better next year!
Back soon,
C x

Apples, apples & more apples.........

Hello Campers,
Well, what a humungous crop of apples we've had from our old tree this year, which is good because the pears have been pants, but even the ever-resourceful me is going to struggle to use them all up creatively. The Big Hairy Half of the Relationship went up the ladder brandishing the apple-pole at the weekend, while I stood underneath catching them & loading them into a crate on the wheelbarrow......a very useful crate which had been fly-tipped behind the bottle bank at Waitrose, to be rescued by me (surely I can't be the only person who goes to the recycling banks & then comes home with stuff?) 

We stopped when we'd gathered this many. This is only about 1/4 of the crop, & that's without counting all the windfalls I've been picking up over the past month. Back in the kitchen, I went into sort of 'triage' mode. Apples were divvied up into 'ICU' (for using asap....you know, the ones with all the little nibbles out of them, bruises, that kind of thing), then 'Walking wounded'....those which wouldn't keep long-term but are fine to put in the fruit bowl to eat when I fancy one. 

They're really nice apples, actually. They cook well, but left to redden, they are also good eaters. It's a big gnarled old tree we inherited when we moved in. I wrapped the best apples for storage. I'd love some of those lovely old wooden apple storage racks but they are such silly money that I always use a budget option for this job. Newspaper!

I just line a crate with newspaper, then making sure each apple is clean & dry, and more importantly, in good condition, I wrap each individual fruit in newspaper. The crate needs to be stored somewhere cool & dry. I've done it this way for a few years & while it's normal for me to find one or two have gone mushy, the majority of them store just fine, meaning that I can eat my way through them or use them for cooking for much longer.

We turned 3lbs of the ICU bucket into brown sauce on Saturday. I've also made blackberry & apple jam, apple chutney, Cranks' apple & ginger chutney (just bubblng on the hob as I type), apple sauce, apple & cinnamon muffins, as well as eating stewed apples with oats for breakfast. Am still aiming to make apple & ginger loaf cake, apple buns, Norwegian apple cake, plenty of apple sauce for the freezer & apple & ginger jam. The Carnivore-in-Chief has also roasted a shoulder of pork on a bed of sliced apples and I've used some in a curry sauce. When I've exhausted all my regular recipes, I shall look for some new ones.
You see, there will be appley endeavours all week.......but our tree still looks like this......

.....there are HEAPS more! 

Albert Whiskers hadn't encountered the apple-pole before. He came out to give the proceedings the once-over, but. when he'd established that none of it was going to result in his dinner being plated up any earlier, he soon trotted off for a rest, so as to work up the energy for his Really Big Snooze later on. I have never known such an utterly bone-idle cat!
Nearly bottling time, house smells gorgeous!
Talk to you soon,
C x