Cake and Beans

It's been a long time coming...

Garden Boy's birthday cake, that is.

But finally, today, I made it. And although it wasn't quite the aesthetic masterpiece (icing a little lumpy, cake very gooey so didn't hold well when cut) it was delicious - if I do say so myself. Not that I take much credit. I can follow a recipe like the best of them!

So thank you to Nigella Lawson and her Feast cookery book for the Chocolate Honey Cake... YUM!

Today I took Spike and Dude down to the allotment. Not to do any work, you understand, but just to check up on the poor neglected thing. We have had poorly tummies etc and to be honest I find it difficult to spend much time down there with my three little darlings. There isn't much to do that they want to do (dig weeds for 3 hours, boys?) so I spend my time fretting about them not getting nettled/ thistled/ stepping on my few remaining plants/ wandering off/ messing with the newts (newts!) in the communal water-butts etc...

But we went down today to look around, and, if you ignore the weeds that are thigh high in places it is actually not too bad. In parts. For example:

my butternut squashes, grown from seeds from a supermarket squash! Getting bigger all the time! And the borage which self-seeded from one we grew last year in the home-garden, which I transplanted - successfully! Hooray!

And the bed I did last time, and have since ignored: bordered with hand-me-down chives from a generous allotmenter and 25p tomatoes and sweet peppers (all of which said they would rather be in a greenhouse - which I don't have, so they have had to suffer the indignity of being outside in the real live weather!) which are growing nicely, and really could use a prop so they don't sprawl in such a slovenly manner.

And the calendulas are flowering very prettily... and the cosmos are getting nice and big, which means that not everything is being eaten by the slugs and snails... very promising!

After that I treated the boys to a trip to Butterfly World... nice and warm on a rather unpromising day. Full of beautiful butterflies, and I would have taken more pictures, but the camera batteries were dying and the focus was suffering because of that. The meerkats were a big hit too. They are such funny little creatures...

And last but not least, here is an update from the home-garden. The Cherokee beans and the Runner beans are getting tall and lovely. The Cherokees are producing beans, and the Runners are flowering like mad, but no beans from them yet.

Cherokee bean flowers and baby beans

Young Cherokee beans

Grampy's heritage Runner Beans, in flower

The mangetout and sugar-snaps, after a glut, seem to have quit almost entirely. I think some of them got something attacking the root systems, because they have totally died, gone all brown and crispy. Some of the survivors have also been suffering from leaf-miners. So they aren't looking too good, and not surprisingly, I guess, they haven't been producing well for the past week or so. Hmm...

Rainy Days and Birthdays

As you can see from the water accumulated in the wheelbarrow, we have had quite a bit of rain recently. In fact, it started raining on Thursday around 4:30pm (I brought the washing in hastily as the first fat drops fell) and didn't stop raining until about 7pm on Friday evening. It poured and poured and poured. I couldn't believe that the sky hat that much water available to dump on us!

Still, the mangetout and sugar snaps like it, and they are putting out peas faster than we can eat them. We have a ziplock baggie in the fridge full, and we keep on eating them. The veggie of choice everyday, but they are growing faster than we can eat them. And we can eat them pretty fast, let me tell you.
Actually the mangetout are doing a lot better than the sugar snaps. They are far more prolific, and bigger, so although the sugar snaps are tasty I don't think I will bother growing them again because you get so much more pea-for-your-penny from the mangetouts! But that's by-the-by.

Yesterday was the GardenBoy's birthday. I was going to make him Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Honey Cake, from her Feast recipe book... But he was given a big chocolate cake from some friends... so I have promised to make him a cake later in the week when the gift-cake is finished. We went out to Betty's Tea Shop in Northallerton for his birthday treat... the whole lovely experience was topped off with a gorgeous Eton Mess for him, a mini lemon cheesecake for me, and milk-shakes for the boys.

It was all just too much for Spikelet. They all crashed out early and were still so full that they went to bed with no supper!

Smile!

Look what I grew! A truly smiley 'smile potato'! Part of our first harvesting of the potato crop.

I have to admit that the only reason these ones came up (most of them were a bit on the small side) was that it was growing in a pot with another potato plant and was beginning to look a bit like a stunted twin with yellowing (not blighty) leaves, so I thought we'd have it out and let the other grow unimpeded. Have subsequently watered the remaining twin with tomato fertilizer, because apparently that's what they like... same family and all that jazz.

It has been hot and quite muggy here. Great weather for drying washing, but makes the plants (and general population) feel a bit wilty. Hence I have been watering the plants quite a bit and Spike has been playing with an old washing up sponge and a bucket of water in nothing but his undies. Splodging patterns all over the driveway. How great to be a child in summer...

Last night I went out with a torch and satisfied my lust for the sound of crunching snailshells... Where do they all come from? It wasn't the first night I had been out there massacring molluscs, and the paths are littered with the wrecked homes of other deceased gastropods. And yet there are always more. Which would explain why my beans are only 4 inches tall! Still, hopefully they'll regrow. There are new shoots and new twiney arms reaching upwards, but will they actually make it past the snail army? With my continued vigilance, we hope and pray for success.