Own Grown Gardening

This is the first year I took the plunge growing spaghetti squash. After flowering and dropping loads of immature fruit, one squash on one intrepid vine managed to make it to maturity. Such a thrilling survival story considering the onslaught of slugs! I made some yummy fried fritters from the spaghetti like flesh, but that didn't feel enough. I did not wish to waste any of this precious gem. With this in mind, I made a nutty snack of roasted spaghetti squash seeds, a convenient spin off of roasted pumpkin seeds. Here is the recipe. Ingredients: - Seeds of one spaghetti squash - Enough butter to coat the seeds - Dash of maple syrup - 1/8 tsp of cinnamon powder - Dash of salt Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Then,  separate all the lovely seeds from the squash flesh by feeling through with your fingers. My seeds came away easily, but I still gave them a quick rinse under the tap and dabbed them dry with a kitchen towel. Then, melt a small dollop of butter in the frying pan a...

  Now, you're probably thinking this is an odd post. To be honest, I'm thinking the same. It manifested out of an unexpected windfall of, you guessed it, alpaca poo. We decided to take a walk on the Cornish side of the Tamar River last weekend and found ourselves wondering past the gate of Mount Edgcumbe House . A little sign greeted us simply stating "Alpaca poo", one bag for £2.50. How unusual. I duly popped my payment into the smiling piggy bank honesty box and became the proud owner of a heavy bag of poo. Hahah! You can probably guess my intentions for it. In the spring, I'll incorporate it into the veg patch as fertiliser. Over the winter, I'm letting it mature in my garden's two compost bins. The worms are already getting to work on it. Pleasing to see. I must admit, it has bothered me for a while that I don't have access to any sort of livestock manure to use as fertiliser. Manure increases soil organic content and plant available nutrients . It...

Yesterday, on our allotment plot, I worked on completing the rather mundane task of topping up our access paths with woodchips. The Council's tree surgeons very kindly dump piles of the stuff at the top of the site, so my job involved hauling endless wheelbarrow loads back and forth. Good exercise. While filling my barrow yet again, my heart suddenly skipped a beat when I uncovered the beauty pictured above, not out of fear but elation and wonder.  A slow worm! Although alone, this burst from my lips all the same.  I haven't seen a slow worm in years. Interestingly, their Latin name of Anguis fragilis translates as ' fragile snake ', but they aren't actually snakes (or worms) at all. Misnomers all over the place! Instead, they are legless lizards . Unlike snakes, and like lizards, slow worms have eyelids . This gives them the ability to close their eyes, which snakes simply can't do. A slow worm can also shed its tail when attacked to provide the predator a di...

  It is the time of year again to propagate our alpine strawberries ( Fragaria vesca ). Throughout the summer, these tiny ruby-red gems burst with a sour sweetness far more flavoursome than full sized garden strawberries. I know this is a stroke of good luck, however, because the same can't be said of all alpine or wild strawberries. Many look luscious, but taste of little more than watery nothingness, from personal experience.  I know you're now anxious to know what variety I grow. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss to tell you. The single little plant I originally bought was sold simply as an alpine strawberry. This is interesting in itself, however, because alpine strawberries are not known for producing runners . These ones definitely do. Just take a look at this tangle.  All those new little daughters are still attached to their mother plants by runners, also called stolons , that act a lot like umbilical cords.  The fact these plants produce such exuberant runners ha...

Here is a funny little success story for you today. I'm growing four cherry trees in my garden alongside my apples, plums, medlars, and hazelnuts. I cram them into our tiny urban garden by pruning them into a columnar style . In other words, straight upwards, just like Nelson's Column. These trees are still young, so the very first trees to come into fruit are doing so for the very first time this year. When the cherry blossoms bloomed, they were beautiful and raised my spirits after the long winter. Cherries really do flower early.  When little green cherries began developing a few weeks later,  I quietly smiled, pleased they were heading in the right direction. Just look at those little emerald gems.  I refused to get my hopes up though. Young trees usually, and rightfully, drop their fruit to focus instead on strong root and shoot development. My heart quickened when one Kordia cherry , just one fruit, continued to swell and mature from green to red. By the way, this ...

Here is another little orchard management story, this time about grass. I'm only one person and Plymouth City Council only lets volunteers use hand tools in their community orchards. For health and safety reasons, I don't blame the council. This rule makes complete sense in my mind, but it means I must think very carefully about how best to utilise my limited time. Last year, I bought myself a little hedge clipper (see below), which I used to clip back the grass in little circles just around the trees. Even this conservative approach was a struggle though around all 26 trees. By the time I reached the last tree, the grass around the first one was already tall enough to clip again. This cycle looped around all summer. Not fun...   I noticed something interesting along the way though, something which I initially could not explain. The grass I clipped grew greener and more vigorously than the grass I left unclipped. This occurred consistently around every tree.  Over the winter, ...

Yesterday, I visited the community orchard I maintain in Plymouth's Central Park. One of my previous posts describes it in some detail. While there, it was the orchard's understory rather than trees that caught my attention. Let me rewind a bit to explain.  Last summer, I stumbled across a patch of yellow rattle ( Rhinanthus minor ), on the far side of Central Park from the orchard. They are lovely flowers. I always think they look like a choir of singing parrots pointing their yellow beaks to the heavens. I returned to the spot later in the season to collect some of the dried seed heads. By the way, the species gets its name from the fact its seeds literally rattle inside these heads . I collected the seeds to spread in the orchard, which is exactly what I did. I seeded them into a little patch by cutting the grass short and raking in the seeds to ensure they made good contact with the soil.  I went to all this effort because yellow rattle has the alternate name of meadow ...