New Herb Bed

One of the things I enjoyed the most this last winter was not having to work in the garden! No brambles or elm suckers to cut back, trees needing branches cutting off, fruit trees needing pruning, not to mention the stream at the old place that would get covered in vegetation (mostly brambles) which needed hacking back every year. Oh the joy of the low maintenance garden here! 

However, now summer is here I do miss all my old flowers (except the work!), which of course attracted butterflies, bees etc. So I had a few plans for this garden which I decided that creating over a couple of years would be doable without being too much hard work all at once. For this year I wanted a herb bed, and close to the kitchen. Next year will be a ‘Nectar Bar’ in the front garden around our bench which has a fab view of the valley. I’d love to erect an arch over the bench for shade, and for climbing plants. That will be a bit more work but we’ll worry about that next year!

When I finally managed to buy pots of herbs after the main lockdown lifted, I marked out where I wanted the bed to be, and my lovely husband set to work deturfing. He knew he would be doing the hard work! Unfortunately, the soil turned out to be rock hard so he couldn’t use a spade for this, so had to attack it with a mattock. When the turf was finally off, we discovered the soil was so hard that you couldn’t even get a digging fork in. It had been dry for a few weeks so I suggested getting the hose on it, but to save us the job, luckily it rained, which softened the soil enough and K was able to dig it over and get a couple of sacks of bought compost dug in. However, the soil here is thick, sticky clay - yuck! So much for a fine tilth, that’s just impossible as the lumps of clayey soil on the surface dry out really hard. Even digging holes with a trowel to plant my herbs was tough...... and I did something I’ve never had to do ever before - I put gravel at the bottom of each planting hole! I know some aromatics would not be happy sitting in soggy clay soil over winter, and would need help with drainage.

Our covered terrace outside the kitchen

In the meantime, whilst this was all going on, I sowed some seed - flat and curly parsley, normal and lemon basil (not tried that one before), plus some coriander and dill to use until I get a chance to sow some direct in the soil. I also managed to find not only Thai basil seed, but actual plants in one of the garden centres! I absolutely love this herb and it makes a Thai style stir fry really amazing. Thai basil has an aniseed flavour, if you are not familiar with it, and is not the same as Holy basil, which I tried to grow once but failed. It didn’t seem to have a nice flavour anyway.

Thai Basil

Greek Basil - this has tiny leaves and a far superior flavour to regular basil

I mentioned on my last post that I had been doing a bit of crafting - amongst other things I have done some stencilling for the first time. I've made some of my plant pots a bit more interesting with stencils that I bought off Amazon. It wasn't easy to do as the chalk paint leaked a bit under the stencil in places so I had to scrape some off, particularly on the pots with fine writing. I don't care too much, nobody is going to be looking close up except me!

Of course I had to have a dragonfly! It says La Libellule on the other side,
which is the French for dragonfly.

.... and butterflies!

The bed is now finished and I’ll be planting out the parsley soon and I've just sown some coriander and dill seed direct - for the moment there is loads of space between the plants. The rosemary is so small, I have a laugh remembering my old one which was enormous and I’d prune about a wheelbarrow full off it every three or four years! 😄 

Finished, for now, herb bed.

On the far left are chives and garlic chives, which are in the shade in this image.

I must also mention that over the last month we have been eating our own cherries; we have two trees which are different varieties, and they’ve been pruned so that most of the fruit is pickable without even needing a stepladder. We’ve had kilos and I’ve made several desserts with cherries. Next year I’ll make cherry jam especially for Keith as it’s his favourite jam. One of the trees has deep red sweet cherries, and the other the fruit is orange before turning red and is slightly tarter (but still sweet). I’m dead chuffed that we have these trees, though in the last week they have suddenly become covered in rust so the leaves are turning a horrible orangey brown colour. K has sprayed with a fungicide so I hope it won’t get any worse. Just when I had been admiring how healthy our fruit trees look compared to our old place!! We also have three plum trees, but not a huge harvest this year - one tree has no fruit at all, one has quite a lot of very small plums and the third has a nice bunch of green plums on one branch, which I think is going to be a golden greengage (I found a label in the garage), and it is going be fun finding out what they all turn out to be soon.

We also have a few veggies in pots - three tomatoes, two aubergines and one Cayenne chilli plant! It's quite exciting again after a number of years of not growing veggies. We knew we wouldn't be going anywhere this year so not really a problem with the extra watering - I potted up tons of geraniums/verbenas in pots too, although dotted around the pool and the front of the house they look rather sparse! It's more than enough when it comes to watering every day when it is hot though. 

I should have taken a more recent pic with the aubergines and chilli and other tomatoes in it!

I have made a new ‘page’ for butterflies where I am listing both butterflies seen in our garden, and the ones I’ve seen on walks in the local area and various outings further afield. I’ve also updated the bird page with our new garden bird list - up to 30 so far, with several species I wasn’t expecting to see, such as Zitting Cisticola! The bird song here is quite different from at the last house!

I’m sure you are all enjoying being able to get out and about more now, so enjoy the summery weather when we have it. xx  

(As usual I am behind with blogging - these photos were taken through the month of June, so the herbs and tomatoes etc are far more advanced now.)

Lemon polenta cake with rosemary syrup

I had forgotten about this recipe until I read about Miss Lady Bug's recipe for Rosemary Honey on her website, which sounds divine but I have not yet got around to trying. The rosemary syrup here is really easy to make and I'm sure could be used to top or drizzle over many different cakes, desserts, ice cream or pancakes.

I originally found this recipe on the Selfsufficientish forum but have no idea who to credit for it. I guess it's a recipe which has been doing the rounds for years.

LEMON POLENTA CAKE WITH ROSEMARY SYRUP

175g polenta (fine cornmeal)
50g plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
5 tbsp plain yoghurt
5tbsp rapeseed or sunflower oil (plus extra for greasing)
grated rind of 2 lemons
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 eggs, plus 2 egg whites
400g caster sugar
2 branches fresh rosemary

Preheat oven to 180 C/350 F/Gas Mark 4/Fan oven 160 C.

Sift the polenta, flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Place the yoghurt, oil, lemon rind and juice into a jug and stir until combined.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and egg whites with half of the sugar for a few minutes until creamy. Beat in the yoghurt mixture until smooth and then fold in the dry ingredients until just combined - do not over-mix.

Batter mixture into a 1.2 litre/2 pint lightly-oiled loaf tin lined with greaseproof paper. Bake for 40-45 minutes until a thin skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Meanwhile, place the remaining sugar (200g) in a pan with 200ml water and the rosemary branches. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Leave to cool completely and then strain through a sieve.

When the cake is cooked, place on a wire rack to cool for 15 minutes, then invert and peel off the greasproof paper. Prick all over with a thin skewer or toothpick and drizzle over half of the rosemary syrup so that it completely soaks into the cake. Leave to cool completely. Keep the remaining syrup in the fridge until ready to use.

To serve, cut into slices and drizzle with some more of the syrup, add dollops of greek yoghurt.

In the cake tin after I had slathered
the syrup all over it. It soaks in quickly.
Yes I used a round cake tin, but same cooking time.

I'll never make a food photographer because the thought of faffing about with tripods and
lighting with this in front of me waiting to be eaten is too awful to contemplate :-)

Rosemary. It's been flowering for ages
but it would be nice to see it covered in bees!

So this is what we are eating this Easter in lieu of chocolate. I think it is fractionally more healthy and at least contains two ingredients from the garden, rosemary and eggs!

My top garden plants - Alliums

My garlic is coming along nicely, my leeks are frozen in the ground and I will be growing onions after all, thanks to a kind friend who spotted those elusive pink Roscoff onion sets and sent them to me (hugs to Mrs M xx), but, as I've never let them flower because I grow them to eat their bulbs, it's not those alliums to which I'm referring.

There's a whole host of ornamental flowering alliums too, not to mention the chive family. What can be prettier than a bunch of chives in flower in the early spring? The flowers taste good too and look lovely sprinkled over a potato salad.

I also love garlic or chinese chives which I grow mostly for the flowers, although the flat leaves which have a hint of garlic are great added to all sorts of things. They flower later in the season, usually around July to September, and are much loved by bees and some butterflies and daytime moths. Neither of these kinds of chive are too happy when my sandy soil is really dry, except of course for the ones which have happily self seeded in my really dry, compacted soil under the gravel!

Jersey Tiger Moth on garlic chives

Gatekeeper butterfly

Of the ornamental varieties the only kind I have here at the moment is Allium sphaerocephalon which is my favourite. They grow very tall but take up little room at ground level, unlike some of the larger leaved and flowered varieties. They look brilliant in mid summer poking up above or in amongst other lower growing flowers. Bees just crawl all over them too!

Just looking stunning in amongst the Rudbeckia

I saw this wonderful creature last year - after a bit of research I discovered it is a Spotted Longhorn Beetle (Rutpela maculata) - I'm assuming all that dust all over him/her is pollen! The larvae feed on decaying wood (all the more reason to leave some rotting log piles around) and the adult beetles are often found around woodland edges and clearings feeding on pollen and nectar of various flowers. I love interesting looking and coloured insects, and all the better when I do manage to ID them!

My top garden plants - Thyme and Oregano

There was a programme on the telly last night about flowers, bees and butterflies by Sarah Raven which I recorded and will watch tonight. I thought it rather apt given I've been writing about these things, and glad I am not the only person who is discussing them in the depths of winter, which might seem a bit mad. But not only do I have the time to do so right now, if it is at all helpful to anyone reading this who may wish to do more to encourage our nectar loving and pollinating insects into their gardens then all the better to do so now at the planning stage so there is time to get that herb bed organised or flower seeds ordered!

Thyme

When we first moved here I had a very dry sloping bank and decided to grow some wild thyme (Thymus serpyllum) from seed. It was a bit difficult as the seed is tiny, consequently the seedlings are tiny too so are a bit tricky to prick out and pot on. But I persevered and within a year had a good show of thyme which over the years has spread to fill in all the gaps. I now see clumps of it growing in the grass on the other side of the drive and somehow it has found its way into the back garden flower beds (via the compost no doubt) so if it's fine where it is, it stays, it it isn't, then it doesn't harm to remove it, because I doubt I am ever going to be without it!

My thyme bank, before flowering

This is the only Jersey Tiger Moth that I saw last year. It stood out a mile on the thyme and I rushed inside to grab my camera. They are daytime flying moths and have incredible markings, as you can see.

Its underside is just as beautiful.

Thyme also attracts the little brown butterflies such as the Meadow Browns and Gatekeepers, as well as many honey bees.

Oregano/Marjoram

Is there an actual difference between these two? I always feel it's rather a personal choice, much like the words pumpkin or squash. I have two varieties, the bog standard dark green leafed with lilacy-pink coloured flowers and Golden Marjoram-or-is-it-Oregano, which has striking bright yellow leaves in spring and bright pink but quite small flowers in summer. The former seems to attract honey bees in their droves (hard to photograph this in a way that shows how many there are on one plant) whereas the golden variety attracts the little brown butterflies more.

This is a Gatekeeper butterfly on the golden marjoram.

And here are several of them, with the flowers visible.

I don't think I really need to go into detail about the culinary virtues of either of these herbs as I'm sure nearly everyone will have used them or at least eaten them, even if only dried, whether thyme in Herbes de Provence or oregano sprinkled on pizza!

It suddenly occurred to me the other day that the vast majority of these plants, that I have been or will be talking about in this series of common garden nectar rich flowering plants, seem to self seed with gay abandon. If they don't self seed quite so much as some of the others then they tend to spread like crazy and can swamp other established plants (oregano/marjoram are two of these 'thugs', and to a lesser extent, thyme), so need a bit of digging out and dividing occasionally.

The sole exception is lavender, which bees do love, but I've not had a single one self seed. Even my rosemary self seeds in the gravel for god's sake, but lavender? Nope! 

My top garden plants - Dill

There are a number of garden plants that I love for the fact they have multiple uses and all are ones I wouldn't want to be without in any garden. They are all pretty when flowering and of course (and I think you may have figured this out by now), have benefits to wildlife too!

Dill

Most people know dill as an annual culinary herb. Yes it's delicious, is probably best known as an accompaniment to fish but I use it predominantly in Greek cos lettuce salad, something I learnt when spending time in that country. It's simple, just take 4 or 5 leaves at a time, roll them up and shred them crossways as fine as you can, then add chopped spring onions, lots of chopped dill and dress with malt vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. I eat great bowlfuls of the stuff when I have a good hearted cos lettuce, which isn't often enough as it tends to bolt easily when the weather gets warmer. You can also save the seeds for flavouring vinegar for pickles.

However did you know if you just leave it to grow tall and flower it makes the most magnificent stately addition to any flower bed? It goes very well with tall but 'see through' plants like Verbena bonariensis (more about that in another post) and Perovskia - none of which form dense mats and all blow around in the wind quite happily without generally falling over. They also don't take up much room at ground level so can squeeze in amongst other plants which take up more room lower down. Dill will self seed all over the place so once introduced, so long as you let it set seed (and especially if you compost it after this stage!) you'll probably never need to sow it again. I have swathes of it in both the veg patch and flower beds - I just weed it out if it is in the way. It's pretty hardy too and will germinate in low temperatures and smaller plants will survive several degrees of frost, so some winters I've managed to keep a bit of dill going all through.

The blue spires on the left are Perovskia, or Russian Sage. Verbena b. is far left, the tall
mauvy flowers you can just see against the gravel and hedge.
Actually this whole bed is my main bee and butterfly magnet
and I tend to spend a lot of time here!

Dill, Perovskia and Cone Flowers

But aside from the above, this is one of the main reasons I grow it. Along with fennel and wild carrot it is the foodstuff of the Swallowtail caterpillar. I see quite a number of these beautiful caterpillars through the summer months and if I see one has stripped a plant bare I move it to another plant! Swallowtails are beautiful butterflies and need our help and I'm rewarded here by seeing them often for months on end, as early as April some years.

Dill also seems to attract a particularly spectacular red and black striped shield bug - I am not sure why they like the flower heads but they don't seem to do any harm to it and they are rather fun to have around.

Dill gets my joint no. 1 vote and I'll mention my other faves in due course.