Our 'wild' garden

The wild part of out garden looks brilliant at the moment. After all the rain of the past two weeks, everything has grown incredibly fast. This 'wild' garden is my favourite part of the garden.

The aquilegias are in full bloom.

The plum tree is already full of small fruits

and the apple tree is coming on nicely.

As are the wild strawberries

and buttercups.

In the garden

I had to make pictures of some of my autumn and winter bags in the garden before the weather really changes (and that may be anytime soon now)!

Autumn at Towerburn

I wanted to make pictures of some bags in a more seasonal setting, i.e. autumnal:

Doesn't this bag look quite stunning among the autumn leaves?

Earlier this week Alan made some crab apple jelly and I tried it today for the first time. I have never tasted crab apple jelly before and I must say I do prefer bramble jam. I think it is rather the consistency of jelly than the taste because that was quite nice.

Some bramble jam we made in France before we left for Scotland

Boiled crab apples dripping from a jelly bag.

How to keep animals from devastating your garden

As mentioned in one of my previous blogs I am not a gardener. I like my garden to be nice and I like to be in the garden but I do not like to get my hands dirty. I therefore leave it all to Alan who loves gardening.

Yesterday he came in with a large bowl full of green gooseberries and informed me that we should make jam with these. Gooseberries are not my favourite berries. I like my fruit red - cherries, strawberries, raspberries, and particularly brambles or blackberries. I told Alan that I prefer the red gooseberries to the green ones - two years ago, he told me that he pulled all the green gooseberries bushes out and only kept the red ones. I was therefore not quite sure where these had popped up.

Three years ago, we visited some friends near Munich for four days. When we came back, half our crop of sweet corn was devastated. We suspected wild pigs and were pleased that they left us half the crop and I was quite looking forward to having some sweet corn. When we went up to the garden the next day, the rest of the crop was gone as well! The day after that all the gooseberries were gone! First, we suspected thieves of the two-legged variety but somehow that made no sense. The neighbours on the left side have their own garden full of fruit en vegetables and we always share when we have too much of one sort and so do they. The neighbours on the other side do not eat fruit - one of them is allergic to all sorts of fruit! In addition, hikers do not come along the path anymore since the council changed the walkway to a parallel path higher up. The only other form of thieves we could think of were blackbirds who are great fruit eaters.

We, i.e. my husband, gave up on planting sweet corn the next year but the gooseberry bushes where still there together with all the other berries that we we have like black-, white- and red currants. That summer my husband observed one day that the gooseberries were coming on nicely and would soon be ripe for picking. Two days later, he had another look and they were all gone again!

Therefore, when I told him yesterday that I preferred the red gooseberries to the green ones he told me that these were the red ones but he picked them earlier this year to beat the birds!

That was the reason why today, in a near heat wave, I have been slaving away in the kitchen. I had to wash the gooseberries, top and tail them, put them through the food processor (I particularly do not like the hard skins, not even in jam), weigh them, get the sugar and jars from the cellar and wash and sterilise the jars. After all that, I had to stand over a hot plate boiling the fruit and put them in the washed and sterilized jars.

How is it that all those years ago, before Pinterest became available, I was buying Country Life magazines with beautiful romantic pictures about living in the county with people peacefully sitting in the garden on some rustic romantic (or shabby chic) garden benches happily shelling peas or apples, chatting with one another and having a nice cup of tea with a very tasty looking piece of fruit pie (homemade, of course, recipe in the back of the magazine) on the side! I always seem to be standing in the kitchen at the sink doing these things on my own!

I am finished now, my back and knees are aching but I feel also good having done it. And anyway, who am I to complain – Alan, who is eight years older than I am and always working, was standing in the hot sun sandpapering the window frames which had to be painted this year?

Amazing how green gooseberries turn into red jam!

Slugs and snails

I first came in close contact with slugs and snails when I moved to a house with a garden and planted some small salad plants. I woke up the next morning to find out that they were all gone or half-gone .Of course, I knew that there were snails and slugs but they had never bothered me much. I just found them nasty and slimy but they had never before ruined anything that was mine. However, not really being a keen gardener I gave up on the idea of planting anything edible and the flowers I planted either grew or not.

Having grown up in Holland with Dutch as my mother tongue, I did not realize for some time that the snails with a house and the snails without a house are called differently. In Dutch, we call them (translated into English): snails with a house and naked snails. This is the same in German (I lived in the German speaking part of Switzerland for over forty years). Therefore, it took me a while to realize that in English there are two different names for more or less the same (in my mind) animals.

Now, being married to a very keen gardener I have come to learn, unwillingly, a lot more about these slimy beasts. I now know that there are brown ones, black ones, slugs with strips, spotty one, etc.

This year especially there seem to be more slugs than ever before. Even though we had a long, cold winter with lots of snow. However, after winter, springtime seemed a long time in coming and up to now, it has been very, very wet.  Therefore, I can see my husband every evening going through the garden with a spade halving the slugs and getting angrier and angrier because so many of his beloved flowers are devastated by these creatures. He does not want to use slug pellets because of our small Yorkshire terrier Aischa as well as birds and other small animals. It seems very cruel to me to kill these slimy creatures by halving them. We have a friend who tells us the only way of getting rid of them is collecting them every evening, putting them in a hole in the ground,  pour boiling water over them and then covering them with a thin layer of soil and repeat this every evening. This is supposed to get also rid of the eggs. This sounds just as cruel to me but apparently, slug pellets also cause a very painful death.

This year there are also a lot more snails in our garden. My husband told me that they are harmless so when we see them on the road or in a hot spot we pick them up and put them somewhere out of harm’s way.

Being the argumentative person I am, I wanted to find out more about the difference between slugs and snails, especially with regard to what they eat, and, with the internet at my disposal, this was of course not too difficult.

I started by looking the two sorts up in Wikipedia but found that there was a lot of information on slugs but far less on snails. In addition, the information was too scientific for me and that was not what I was looking for.

Snails were never as repulsive to me as slugs are (I have never seen snails eating dog pooh but I have seen countless slugs devouring it) and I have eaten them as well (the snails, not the pooh). In addition, as far as I know, some snails are protected in France.

I found some very interesting articles though. Here are just a few:

http://www.kiddyhouse.com/Snails/ This explains snails in a very easy child friendly way, which even I can understand.

http://www.snail-world.com/ A very snail friendly site from which I learned that snails could live up the ripe old age of 15 to 25 years and that some of them are kept as pets!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2353482/France-left-shell-shocked-s-revealed-90-snails-end-plate-come-eastern-Europe.html Article from the daily mail on the fact that most snails sold as escargots do not come from France but from Eastern Europe.

http://www.powen.freeserve.co.uk/advanced/slugs/Slugs.htm I have to show my husband this site, if only to show him that it is not really too much when he kills 50 slugs from our front yard, which is about 40 square meter. I have now learned that there could be 50/60 per square meter and that this can increase to even 100/200 during optimal conditions.

However, I can also tell my husband that he is wrong in saying that snails are not harmful. They are just as harmful as slugs. However, as there are far more slugs in our garden than snails, I think we can live with the snails. Or was this what he meant by calling them less harmful than slugs?

When I went out into the garden to make some pictures of snails (I did not want to take any pictures of the slugs as I do not like looking at them) I came across this woodant heap. When I asked my husband how he was going top get rid of this heap, he informed me that he was not as 'they will not hurt you'. He says the same about spiders and I know the ones we have here will not hurt me. However, with spiders I put my foot down - I will not share my private space with them, it will be either them or me!

Summer at last

I just love these pictures and want to share them: