This time last year, after a promising start, events conspired to put gardening and harvesting somewhat on the backburner.
This year, events have conspired to have the opposite effect. Not just for extra lockdown projects like the greenhouse and fruit cage, but to have beautifully weeded, prepared and planted out in the veg beds for once too. Continue reading
We don’t know about you, but for us it seems to be a bonanza year for broad beans.
Our over-wintered crop, which in past years has struggled to get past knee height, suddenly shot up during May to waist level monsters.
Our first attempt at a spring compost dressing might have helped, as no doubt has the good spring weather. Continue reading
The mad rush to catch up in the garden at the end of May was immediately followed by the mad rush in early June to catch the Elderflower at its sunny best.
After this year’s whopping 4kg of wild garlic pesto making, we made Continue reading
April was unusually warm and dry, ensuring Spring arrived with a vengeance, underlining the timeless wonder of it all.
At The Secret Acre it proved a busy month recycling, creating new borders, as well as cutting the grass, planting the potatoes, planting extra successional broad beans and onions, and bottling the last of the cider. Continue reading
No sooner had we opined that our new veg bed might successfully produce some harvest after all, than our first veg duly arrived in the form of Broad Beans.
In fairness the young broad bean plugs has been gifted to us by a kindly neighbour, rather than being fully our own work, but we are still taking it as a win.
Fortunately we also happen to love broad bean pesto discovered a few years ago thanks to the services at the time of an Able & Cole veg box, and can highly recommend it to you if you’ve never tried it.
Spring’s arrival of wild garlic has usually been our second major event in the kitchen store cupboard calendar, even as urban foragers before moving to The Secret Acre.
Of course moving to a new area this year first necessitated seeking out local woodland areas suitably carpeted with the Ramsons. But wild garlic has to rate as the easiest of forages. Continue reading
