Of spuds and newt scenes

Potatoes chitting...

After yesterday's trip to the garden centre I have now got the King Edward potatoes ready for chitting. They are sitting in their egg boxes on the window ledge and will hopefully develop some nice shoots. Not sure I have enough room to accommodate all of these when it comes to planting time but I'd like to try. We had a lovely crop last year but hadn't planted that many as it was our first time but since it worked so very well, we'll get as many as possible into the ground (or I should say "grow bags").

I will also have to look into the details of when to sow the tomato seeds. I am pretty sure I read in another UK blog that they had already planted theirs into pots, so maybe it's time to get a move on and start these off as well. The variety we bought is a cherry tomato one, good for growing in baskets and pots and therefore ideal for smaller areas. Again, as it is my first time growing these, I will probably begin with just a couple of plants and see how we get on.

I am terribly excited about the new growing season! :-)

And exciting news from the pond! The frogs are not the only ones in the pond meeting up with their mates: last night 8 (!!!) newts were recovered by husband - they had only made it as far as a big puddle instead of the pond. All were rehomed swiftly and hopefully will be producing offspring in due course. They are quite shy creatures and we have only spotted them on a few occasions, so it was lovely to be able to see so many of them at once.

Let the growing begin...

We spent quite a long time in my favourite garden centre (Fforest Mill Swansea) and picked out the things I'd like to grow this year. I got so excited looking at all the seed packets! :-) Luckily, I managed to restrain myself and stuck to the plan: seed potatoes, broad bean and tomato seeds, onion and garlic bulbs...oh, and another grow bag and tomato feed. I still have some lettuce seeds from last season, so I will give those a go again (lambs lettuce seems to be best here as the slugs don't seem to like it) but I think I will stay clear of carrots as I had pretty average results with those. Carrot fly got to it and I think I'll be better off using the space for something else. Maybe I can grow a few more herbs instead or courgettes or... so much for not getting carried away ;-)

I wish I could get out in the garden and sort out the raised bed and grow bags but it is raining quite heavily again and it is also a bit early for some of the seeds to go outside. So I will have to bottle my excitement and just do the planning from indoors. I can get the seeds ready to germinate, the potatoes ready for chitting and do lots of reading to find out what tips other people have.

Last year, I kept a garden diary but I think this year I will use the blog to keep track of any progress. It will be great to post photos and keep a visual diary of what is going on in the garden at the different times of the year. Here's to a year of vegetable & fruit growing success!

Chicken soup on a rainy day

More rain today which is more than can be said for other areas in the UK which are now officially in drought. Let's hope the situation eases up a bit as it really doesn't look good for crops and drinking water levels. So, we definitely mustn't grumble about the additional rainfall in these parts and instead warm our bellies with chicken-noodle soup after walking the dog. After Sunday's roast chicken dinner I made stock out of the bones etc to be used as the base of our soup. From Saturday's lasagne (also homemade) we had some pasta left which hubby cut into strips and dried - these strips were added to the soup a couple of minutes before serving. I don't know what it is about chicken soup but it is just so comforting and nourishing!

Talking of comforting & nourishing...I am thinking of what to plant in the vegetable patch this year. It's only our second season, so it's all very much an experiment. I was thinking potatoes, carrots, lettuce, onions, garlic (if it's not too late to get this in the ground), tomatoes and possibly broad beans...we'll see! It's not a big patch, so I need to plan how to use the space properly, although the potatoes will not be in the raised bed but in grow bags since we had very good results with these last year. There'll also be the blueberry bushes which will hopefully carry lots of fruit this year. I can't wait to get out there and get everything ready, the first seeds planted and to watch everything come to life.

Of frogs and scones

After a mild and sunny day yesterday, the rain returned this morning and created a huge puddle by the garden wall. The frogs seem to look at this as a perfect pond extension and are happily going about their froggy business in both.

More and more are arriving every day now - a couple had just been sitting on the edge of the pond but I was too slow with my camera and just saw them jump in. :-) The sun is coming out a bit now and several frog faces are visible.


Our afternoon treat is likely to involve homemade scones :-) It's the first time I have attempted making these and we are very happy with the result (having sampled a couple already).

Scones...

The recipe is from the brilliant Paul Hollywood, found on the BBC food website and I can definitely recommend it! I have included the link above if anyone is interested. We didn't have clotted cream to recreate a "proper" cream tea but butter & strawberry jam did nicely instead. I guess that these should be good to freeze as well, although none of this batch will make it to the freezer...

Romance is in the air...

Pear & Ginger loaf cake...

Yes, it is a day after Valentine's Day but never too late to write about romance of some kind. The frogs in our pond have been enjoying the sunshine and it looks like they are getting romantically involved. Last year we had over 30 of them meeting in our pond, so we are hoping a lot of them will be back again this year. You could hear their frog choir from the upstairs window! And I am sure a lot of baby frogs were the result. :-)

To be honest, I don't like Valentine's Day at all - it is just so commercial and feels as if it just fills the "shopping gap" between Christmas and Easter. Luckily, husband and I feel the same way about it! Should it take a special day in the year to be nice to your loved one?

On the baking front, I have been trying a new recipe - Pear & Ginger Loaf cake. Very nice, although you can't taste the pear that much.

Learning lessons...

So, after my last post I had to revisit my own observations regarding palm oil. I realised that the stuff is in many more products than I had initially thought, so I have definitely learned something.
For example, some margarine I was going to buy for baking... on the front of the package it said "contains vegetable fat" but a large proportion of that is palm oil! How are consumers supposed to make ethical choices based on that? Yes, palm oil is vegetable fat but not the kind I necessarily want in my cakes, given its environmental impact. In the end I opted for buying butter - more expensive but at least I know what's in it...for the most part, that is. It just goes to show that we sometimes have to dig even deeper to get to the information we need, the "real stuff".

The end result of my baking session was a apple & raisin crumble cake (or in German "Apfelstreuselkuchen") :-) - flour, baking powder, butter, egg, sugar, apples, raisins, cinnamon...that's pretty much it if I recall the ingredients correctly. There's a whole tray's worth of it and I have frozen a big chunk to have another day. YUM!

Real food or "Does palm oil belong in biscuits?"

Coffee walnut cake

It's still freezing here! To warm us up we have been having steaming mugs of tea and homemade coffee & walnut cake... any excuse ;-) The walnuts came from one of my mum's friends who has a nut tree in her garden and the recipe from River Cottage. It's the first time I made it and it definitely gets the thumbs up!

Pond update & Leftovers of a different kind...

An update from the pond (given the title of my blog): The pond has been frozen over for the last few days but we have been able to spot the frogs under the ice. I have no idea how they manage to live under there but they seem to be doing nicely :-) Lots of birds in the garden as well - one of my favourites is the little wren that comes down to the path by the pond to check what's on offer.

**************************************************************************

In my last post I wrote about food waste and using up leftovers. But this is about other types of "leftovers"... Having just moved house I found far too much clutter lurking in the back of wardrobes and in boxes; stuff I hadn't looked at in at least a couple of years and obviously hadn't missed either. And then those things that I had bought and then hardly ever used (luckily, not too many of those but still...) - those things could still be useful to someone else. This is where "Freecycle" comes in. On the attached link you can find information regarding the UK network of Freecycle and also similar ones across the globe. Basically, you advertise what you are trying to give away on your local Freecycle website (and the important bit is give away, so it has to be free and no money should change hands) and people interested contact you to arrange picking the item up. So my "leftovers" can go to a new home rather than landfill. Brilliant!

Now, I guess the idea is not to amass so much stuff in the first place. I am now trying not to buy things I don't absolutely need (and let's face it - how many of us in Western Europe actually need more things?), despite advertising campaigns and society wanting me to continue buying. One exception for me are books - always worth having! One of my favourite books is "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau (free download via the link) - it amazes me that someone in 1845 could write about simple living and the madness of having too many possessions. Very inspiring, still very relevant and definitely worth a read!

Waste not want not...or "Why I love leftovers"

For a lot of people living and working in cities like London the day starts with a takeaway "designer" coffee and lunch could be sushi in a pretty plastic box with all the trimmings. My day often looked like that and more often than not I felt guilty for creating so much rubbish and not using up the perfectly good food we had in our fridge at home. Commuting almost 3 hours per day was my excuse but maybe I was just lazy. Fact is that life was not only an environmental nightmare, it was also costing me a fortune. Fastforward a couple of months and I am sitting here in Wales. Things have changed! These days, tea and coffee is drunk out of proper mugs at home and lunch is more often than not made out of leftovers. It is absolutely amazing what you can create out of those things lurking in the fridge or cupboard. Take today, for example... on the lunch menu is a Kirsten version of frittata... a sort of omelette or tortilla. There were some eggs that needed using up, an open packet of ham, a few mushrooms, half an onion... ta-da! Lunch is sorted! Yes, I have more time now but I wish I had had the inspiration then to make the (little) effort it takes to make my own lunches etc. Better late than never, I suppose.

Behind all this is more than just my "old" wastefulness. A report published last year by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) called "Global Food Losses and Food Waste" makes shocking reading. It found that "roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted", fruit and vegetables being amongst those food items most wasted. Now, if like me, you are trying to grow your own veg and fruit (I have only just started doing this last year), you know how much love and effort goes into growing food. Can you imagine then just taking all of it and throwing it away? No, thought not! So why do we do it with supermarket food? I guess somewhere along the line the relationship with that food has broken down and those packets of tomatoes or tubs of yoghurt are no longer close to our hearts. A lot of the waste appears to happen at source or in the supermarkets themselves but surely, we as individuals can play our role in reducing the waste - for the good of the planet and our wallets. So, let's get creative and see what "meals for free" we can create from the foods that would have ended up in the bin!

Bread

I love the smell of fresh bread! It reminds me of spending time in my uncle's bakery as a child when I was allowed to choose from the different types of bread, rolls and cakes made that morning. He had decided to become a baker during the war when he saw people going hungry and he wanted to change that. What an admirable reason to choose a profession!

I have started baking bread for us and absolutely love it! Kneeding the dough is almost therapeutic and it is so satisfying to have a loaf of bread or a batch of rolls at the end of it. Yes, it can be time consuming but then I suppose lots of things worth doing are. Should you find yourself with a bit of spare time, I can highly recommend giving it a try. What I found immensely helpful was the book "Bread" by Daniel Stevens, River Cottage Handbook No. 3 - it explains every step very well and so far, the results have been brilliant...even if I say so myself :-)! I am in no way as talented a baker as my uncle was - far from it - but with the help of the instructions from the book, I have been able to make bread such as the batch of white spelt & oat rolls and white spelt bread I baked today. How satisfying!