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Thursday 20 June 2013

June Colour

The hay fever is doing its best to keep me out of the garden at the moment but I  have managed to get out long enough to take a few snaps.








In the mean time, the salad is coming on nicely, giving us a handful of fresh mixed leaves every day and the first of the strawberries have started to ripen.
 

Saturday 8 June 2013

Salad Days

As the weather continues to warm up, the salad bed is really starting to fill out. Time for a bit of thinning out then and a chance to try some of the fresh salad leaves.



The rather modest crop of two good sized radishes and a few young plants were delicious when combined with a sprinkling of fresh herbs.



Hopefully just a taste of things to come for this year.

Wednesday 5 June 2013

More Rhubarb Recipes

Eaton mess is one of our favourite quick and easy desserts but our strawberries aren't quite ready yet so, when I saw this little recipe, I just had to give it a try.

I substituted the port for a splash of the red wine we had open on the kitchen side. This really gave a rich, 'grown up' taste to the rhubarb.



We already had a couple of our squishy-centred home made meringues so the whole thing took hardly any time to put together and the result was absolutely delicious. Definitely one to try again!

The great thing was we had some rhubarb left over, so today, I used it to top some vanilla ice-cream. Accompanied with some crushed up ginger biscuit and a dash of double cream, this made another excellent quick dessert.



Sunday 2 June 2013

Up the Garden Path

This weekend saw the beginning of summer and the start of the summer season on the Isle of Wight with both the Old Gaffer's Festival and the Round the Island Race. Whilst all those people were messing about in boats however, we took advantage of the fine weather to lay a garden path.




It has taken us two weekends but we now have a ribbon of brick path joining the veg patch at the bottom of the garden to the decking at the top. We used a dry mix of approximately 1 part cement to 4 parts sand. The main advantage of doing this is that if you make a mistake you can quickly take up what you've done and re-lay it.


From humble beginnings at the edge of the deck, the path now weaves gently down the edge of the lawn to the veg patch. We intentionally avoided keeping it straight and the planting along the edge should soon soften it even more.


The final touch was to brush more dry mix into the gaps between the bricks and then water it in. Alternatively, we could wait for the great British weather to do it for us, although thankfully, the weather forecast is definitely predicting that summer has arrived.