The Greedy Gardener

Today is St George’s Day and with it the first properly warm day of the year. I’m sitting outside in the garden in a t shirt and the temperature is 18C. Despite that, there is no sign yet of any asparagus coming up on the allotment. St George’s Day traditionally marks the start of the short English asparagus season but this year’s is well behind.
These celandines in my garden should have been over weeks ago but are only just showing their faces. I love these little wildflowers and don’t mind their habit of seeding themselves as they’re such a welcome bit of colour early in the year.

Finally some decent weather so much activity in the garden and on the allotment this weekend. Polytunnel weeded and watered, salad, peas, parsley and coriander sown, potatoes planted and compost heaps turned. The greenhouse at home is already busting with seedlings and bedroom windowsills filling up with propagators.

Spent most of Saturday and Sunday outside, sun on my back, surrounded by birdsong. Spring has finally sprung.

Spring postponed

These beautiful purple hellebores have managed to flower despite having nearly a foot of snow land on them just as the buds were beginning to emerge. After the snow melted, they were completely squashed flat. Last year’s leaves are looking pretty rough and are still laid on the ground, but the flowers are struggling upwards.

We braved the unseasonably cold weather and cranked up the earth oven for pizzas last night. We had our inaugural pizza session a few nights ago, a slightly hysterical and slap dash but atmospheric event, with the first pizza going in way after dark and the last topping going on several hours and bottles of wine later. We’ve been hosting the delightful Catalan theatre company A Tres Bandes whilst they’ve been in Birmingham for a residency and they and a few other friends were our enthusiastic guinea pigs. Things got a bit chaotic in the elegant but inadequate candlelight and subzero temperatures, but the pizzas were a triumph.

Our second session was a bit more organised, helped by starting in daylight and with a few refinements to our set up. The oven was fired for three hours to a temperature sufficient to completely destroy the oven thermometer I rashly put inside. Twelve pizzas were cooked in the heat from the one firing - had we wanted to do more, we could have raked out the ash and renewed the fire briefly.

Both evenings were great fun and everybody enjoyed themselves, adults and kids. Even so, as I shivered in the frosty garden in my warmest fleece and wooly hat, I looked forward to a more leisurely pizza bake on a warm afternoon with a nice cold beer.

Pizza night

Despite the cold weather, as the days get longer, our chickens get more productive. Dottie and Doris, copper black hybrids who lay the brown eggs, are two years old and lay almost every day, year round. The other four are 18 months older and so are getting a bit middle aged in chicken terms so their production is slowing down. They are also rare breeds so lay less in the winter, if at all. Florrie is a black leghorn and lays white eggs, Betty and Ivy are cream legbars who lay pale blue eggs and Olive is a very rare Wernlas who lays greenish eggs.

Now that the equinox has passed, they are all in lay but because of their age, we rarely get six egg days and even five egg days like this one are getting less common. We still have plenty for us plus the odd half dozen to sell, trade or give away so I’m not concerned. Keeping chickens has proved to be a great pleasure in my life and I love seeing them pottering round the garden and hearing their comforting sounds. When the time comes that we start to lose our ladies I think I will replace them with a mix of hybrids and rare breeds because it’s important to support these older breeds. I don’t mind having less eggs in the winter, it’s all part of the rhythm of the year. And anyway, who wouldn’t want to collect a clutch of eggs as multi coloured and beautiful as these?

Goldfinches dismantling seed heads of evening primrose. I leave the stems of plants like this growing all winter as their oil rich seeds are a good food source for small birds during the cold months. Also, I like watching their acrobatic antics from the kitchen window. Goldfinches tend to congregate in small flocks and they flutter around the garden making their soft twittering call. I love their brightly coloured faces with patches of red, yellow, black and white, which reminds me of clowns.

If the air stays still, I might just fire this up tomorrow for pizza in the snow.

I had a meeting today in Worcester at the rather splendid Hive, the new combined university and public library and all round community hub for the city. In front of the main entrance to the sleek glass and gold tile clad building is a large elevated courtyard, underneath which the county archives are kept in 25 miles of shelving and a strong room.

The courtyard is lined by wide beds that have been planted up in an informal prairie style garden. I have a few of these plants at home but it’s great to see them en masse like this. The tall purple stems of verbena bonariensis look especially effective in this setting but are equally at home in my mixed borders.

There are other specimens here though, like the blue leaved eryngium maritumum or sea holly that I’ve been unable to establish in my heavy clay soil. Seeing them here has made me think about squeezing a couple in to the perennial bed on my allotment that has dry stony soil, perfect for these coastal plants.

After writing yesterday’s recipe for bramble jelly, I started thinking about other fruit that is coming into season, especially foraged fruit.

An excellent, quick setting jelly can be made from crabapples which you can pick up by the bucket load in parks. They are sometimes yellow, sometimes pink and make a beautifully coloured preserve. Cook them down in enough water to cover them, and carry on as the basic recipe from yesterday - you don’t need extra pectin to set them.

If you let it cool for 10 minutes or so before putting it into the jars, you can add some chopped fresh herbs - the cooling means the jelly begins to thicken and stops them floating to the top. The jars in the picture are from a batch a couple of years ago and have sage in them but you could use mint, parsley or rosemary. It makes an excellent accompaniment to all kinds of savoury dishes - I put it on nut roast because I don’t eat meat, but I’m told it’s good on roast pork or chicken.