My first loaf of bread

This weekend I made my first ever loaf of bread! I have made focaccia and flat breads but never a proper loaf. Home-made bread always tastes so fresh and it was very rewarding to see it rise in the oven to something that looked like a real loaf! :-) This time I followed a recipe to the letter for a white loaf but I think in the future I might start to experiment with different flavours and flour combinations. It is amazing that this loaf was made from only three ingredients; strong bread flour, yeast and sunflower oil. The key to the crispy outside and moist inside was a tray of hot water in the bottom of the oven that generated steam whilst the loaf cooked. This was very effective and something I will definitely do again.

 

The salad plants are also doing well; they have survived  being transplanted last week. I have found that they are becoming more and more thirsty (which is not surprising considering they are growing fast and the weather has been so warm). 

 The seeds I have planted over the last few weeks are germinating well and making the most of the warm, sunny weather we have been experiencing. We have had temperature as high as 18 degrees over the last few days and it really feels like spring has settled in. The broad beans and mange tout seeds that were planted in toilet rolls filled with coir last week are coming on nicely and should be going in to the soil in the next few weeks. Planting seeds in to empty toilet rolls filled with compost proved to be very productive last year. The rolls help to absorb moisture so you have to water less often, you don't need to use as many plastic pots and best of all you can plant the seedling in to the ground still in their tube; protecting the roots from damage. All round this is a very easy way to recycle and the cardboard will bio-degrade over time to enhance the structure of the soil in your flowers beds. This technique seems to work particularly well with beans, peas, climbing plants, butternut squashes and courgettes. We now collect toilet rolls all year round with a plastic bag on the back of the bathroom door.

The ground is still pretty empty of vegetables and salad (although they are coming on) but some of the herbs are really doing well. We have sage, chives, oregano, thyme and even parsley that has overwintered on the patio.

Two new bags

This weekend I made two new bags from this gorgeous material I found last week. The bag above is for my Grandma so that she can carry her canvases to art class. It has long and short handles (for ease of carrying) and a small zip pocket for bus money (or as I suggested to Grandma the far more important cake money).

I had some material left so decided to make myself a satchel for work. The material itself is heavy cotton designed for curtains and is very easy to work with. The sides are reinforced with heavy interfacing and it is lined with satin. There is a long zip pocket on the back and a cross body strap. I was also thinking I might spray my bag with a waterproofing spray so that my stuff doesn't get too damp in a downpour. 

Quite a productive weekend I think, and since I have only ever made shopping bags before I am quite proud of the satchel. I didn't use a pattern (rather just made it up as I went along) but if I was to try something more complicated I think I would. There is a little bit of material left so I will have to think of something else to make. :-)

A Goldfinch

Just a quick post to say I finally got around to making another drawing of the birds in our garden - this time a male goldfinch. I have started using marker pens to do my sketches because you get such a good range of colours and they are so quick. Compared to paints they are so convenient and I love that you can start a drawing and then leave it for a couple of days before you come back without having to worry about not having the same colours etc. I am still getting used to blending them (they don't always behave how I expect them to) but I think there is definitely some potential there. 

Winter Salad Experiment - an update

About 7 weeks ago I decided I wanted to see if it was possible to grow salad indoors during the winter because frosts outside meant that there was a fairly limited supply of home grown veg. This week the seedlings finally looked strong enough to plant up! As you can see from the Lettuce plant above the seedlings have grown some lovely strong roots but they were starting to suffer a little from overcrowding. The most important thing when potting up seedlings is not to damage the stems (as this will kill the plant). Start by filling the pot or tray the seedling is going in to with compost and make a well in the soil for your new seedling. Support the seedlings with two fingers just below the leaves but keep the pressure of your fingers very gentle. Use a teaspoon or something similar to gently lever the roots out of the soil and then put gently in to a the well in the new pot. Carefully firm some soil around the plant so the stem is supported and all of the roots are buried. Put a few drops of water around the plant to wash the soil down and tap the pot very gently on a hard surface (this gets rid of any air gaps that will cause your roots problems). These tops that you can get for water bottles (which you can find in most good garden centres or online) are great because they allow you to drop or sprinkle water around your seedlings without the pressure being so hard you squash and break them!

 I have started using a new (to me) peat substitute called coir (the outer fibres of a cocunut shell). There are so many reasons not to use peat but finding a more eco-friendly alternative is not as easy as you might think. The coir comes in compacted blocks and by adding a few sachets of nutrients, a few litres or water and some vermiculite (and leaving for a couple of days) does seem to produce a lovely product. I will definitely be giving it a go and will report how it goes at the end of the season. One thing I like already is how little space it takes up for storage because it comes in compacted blocks. 

So the Chard, Rocket, salad plants and Spring Onions have been potted up and seem to be doing well. The Florence Fennel is also doing well and can probably be potted up in the next couple of weeks. The Spinach on the other hand has done nothing! No sign of life. So I am leaving it in the propagator for now but I think I am going to have to plant some more and see if we have more luck a second time. The salad crops can start to be sown outside soon and from that point will be planted every 4-6 weeks to provide food throughout the spring and summer.


This weekend we have also planted Butternut Squash, Broccoli and Cabbage seeds, as well as some of the annual flowers, Sweet Peas and some more Broad beans and Mange Tout. The temporary greenhouse is up and ready and the cold frame has been cleaned for the new season. It really does feel like spring is here and the ladybirds think so too; they are everywhere! :-)

Cereal box magazine files

Every year we seem to collect magazines and paperwork on every flat surface of our sitting room and kitchen. We always want to keep the stuff but it's a pain. I realised what we really needed was some magazine files but I didn't really want to go out and spend money on them. I had been saving cereal boxes for some time and realised that they were the perfect size. A few cuts later and here is the result:

A handmade magazine file within seconds and no money spent. I quite like the pattern on the box (especially in the kitchen) but if you would rather plain ones you could paint over the cardboard with white gloss or acrylic and even stick on wrapping paper or colourful magazine pages to cheer them up a bit. OK they are not as strong as the plastic ones you can get but they are so quick, easy to make and free. :-)

It's spring in the garden

The spring flowers are really starting to come in to their own and the garden is full of birds! Last week I drew this picture of one of the blue tits that has been feeding from our bird feeder. I am going to try and catalogue the birds coming in to the garden in this way – which hopefully will also help me to learn to distinguish one from the other!

It has been a while since our last post but a combination of a week’s holiday and catching up with the spring cleaning means that we haven’t done much of interest. This weekend however we have finally started to work on the garden again. The beds have been dug ready for the coming year’s vegetables and the last of the winter vegetables are being used up. Still in the ground are a few swedes, parsnips, white cabbage, sprouts and leeks. The salad crops that we planted a few weeks ago (in our winter salad experiment) are doing well and I think next weekend will be a perfect time to pot them up. I also need to start planting the first seeds of the year.

Today we have spent a bit of time preparing the beds by digging out any weeds and stones and forking in the compost from last year’s grow bags. I have also done some weeding in the flower beds to get out the dandelions and nettles while they are still relatively small.  

I have always found it interesting that the best thing for a nettle sting is to rub a dock leaf on it and that (conveniently) dock leaves and nettles often grow together. This week I learnt a new fact about nettles from mum – apparently the first sting of the year (which I got today) genuinely does feel worse than later in the year because your body gets accustomed to the sting. So each time you are stung it hurts less than the last time - I still think I will be avoiding it at all costs but interesting fact none the less! 

Bringing a table back to life

We have a table that is perfectly functional but has lost a little of its former charm. The main problem is that it has been moved one too many times and has started to chip. It wasn’t an expensive table in the first place but it seems a shame to chuck it out if we can still use it. So I decided to come up with a way to bring it back to life. We could have just painted it but that seems a bit boring. The curtains in our sitting room are made from some lovely material featuring flowers and birds and I thought it would be nice to produce something to match.

I found come lovely wrapping paper that was in the right colours and had some nice shapes. Having cut out the individual plants etc. I used some permanent adhesive spray (you can get this in any good craft shop) and sprayed the table. The spray should hold the paper cutouts in place and due to it having less moisture doesn’t create the bumps and wrinkles you would get using PVA. Then I stuck the cut out wrapping paper in place. This was harder than I had envisaged (as these things tend to be) as I kept sticking my fingers to the table instead, but eventually I got there.

When I get around to it (or Nick gets fed up of tripping up over it every time he goes to the fridge) I will apply a layer of varnish over the top. This should seal the table so that we can use it again. This is a very cheap way to update a piece of furniture – just some adhesive spray, some wrapping paper and some varnish. Instead of wrapping paper you could use old glossy magazines and make beautiful mosaics or just random swirls of colour. If you are using thick paper you can usually get away with PVA but for anything thin it is best to use adhesive spray.

Top tips:

• Remember to clean your table carefully first – dust caught in the glue is generally not a good look!
• Lay your design out before you start so you know where things are going.
• Shake the adhesive spray well and don’t hold the can too close to the table (it is a good idea to experiment with the spray first so you can get as smooth a result as possible).
• Seal your final design in some general furniture varnish (any good craft shop or DIY should stock varnish).

And in other news ....

The winter garden experiment - an update

We have the first signs of life :-) - the rocket, spring onions and salad are just starting to show. Pots that started in bags need to come out as soon as any seedling come up but if you are using a propogator then leave them be. The soil needs to be kept slightly moist (but not wet!).

Winter Salad Experiment

So it is winter and the garden isn’t really teeming with vegetables. The frosts have arrived and although I love the swedes, parsnips, leeks and cabbages coming out of the garden I miss those summer salad crops.  But is it impossible to grow salad in the United Kingdom in the winter? The scientific part of my brain has decided what is needed is an experiment. I have included general instructions - but as with all experiments I can't promise a successful outcome! We are lucky enough to have a small room at the back of the house which has several windows and enough room to fit some shelving (but a windowsill or greenhouse would also be worth a try). This is where we will germinate seeds for the garden in spring but at the moment the space is empty and this seems the perfect place for my experiment.

I have started with some spring cleaning. The last thing you want when growing plants indoors is mould. Unfortunately this is exactly what we had in the chilli plants housed here until recently – partly due to my paranoid over watering! So I have learnt two useful lessons already – keep the place you are growing in as clean as you can and don’t over water! I have got some containers - in this case washed food containers cut to size and with some holes put in the bottom for drainage. I am trying juice cartons cut down, butter tubs and some of the trays that mushrooms come in from the supermarket. They have been filled with soil and left indoors for a week to defrost and warm up – I’m not joking it was actually frozen in places and seeds don’t like the cold!

Today I planted the seeds – I am trying fennel, spring onions, lettuce, spinach, chard and rocket. If these work then I might try some more things.  Each pot has a few more seeds then the number of plants it can support – this means that even if not all the seeds germinate we will get something (hopefully). If we are lucky enough to have all of the seeds germinate we can thin the seedlings out later. The soil should be damp but not wet (and you should not add any more water until the seeds have germinated). In order to keep the soil as warm as possible and to keep the moisture in, the pots need to go in to a propagator. If you want to try this experiment and had all the kit up until now – don’t panic! Instead of spending money on a propagator you can use a sandwich bag for each pot. Put your pot in the bag and tie the handles together (leave as much air in the bag as possible so that there is a gap between the top of the soil and the bag).

Now is the most nerve racking part of the experiment - walk away and wait to see if the seeds will germinate. Your packet of seeds should tell you how long they will take to germinate (but since we are doing it out of season it is worth leaving it a bit longer for good luck). As soon as there is some sign of life the plastic bags need to be removed. Once you have some green showing you need to keep the soil damp to the touch (but not wet). Fingers crossed there will be another post on this subject in a couple of weeks when we have some seedlings!

A year in the garden

We spent yesterday in the garden tidying up the last of the annuals and trying to dig out all of the stinging nettles before the bulbs come up (a losing battle but I keep persevering). We live in a rented house but were lucky enough to find one that had a garden and a letting agent who was happy for us to use it! Anyway, whilst I was stood in the rain and had stopped for a break (having just banged my head on the bird feeders again - why do I never remember that they are there?) I tried to remember what the garden looked like just a year ago.

 This is what the garden looked like in September 2010:

Essentially a lawn, a dead apple tree and some paving slabs (oh and of course some stinging nettles). Over the winter we dug some borders around the edge of the lawn and bought some plant pots for the patio. We also made a cold frame to bring young plants on. We don’t have a greenhouse but luckily there is space in the house to germinate plants. Once established the seedlings can be moved to the to the cold frame (to make space for the next lot). The frame is made from wood and sterling board and the lid from polycarbonate sheeting.

This was very much a joint effort and we are still learning about ways to improve it. The frame needs some ventilation in calm weather (hence the lid being lifted by wood in the picture), it however needs to be closed in windy weather as the plants inside get damaged otherwise. Also we need to paint the inside white in order to allow more light to be reflected in to the frame (although tin foil stuck to the inside walls worked quite well as a temporary solution this year).

We had grown Lupins, Hollyhocks, Aquilegia and Delphiniums from seed at the end of 2009 that were still sitting in pots. So once the beds were dug in November (a little late but they seemed to take ok) we planted them out. We also started to buy seeds so that in the spring we could grow on our veg and flowers. It is much cheaper to grow plants from seed and we now had room to bring the young plants on.

Almost everything in the garden was grown from seed or cuttings and some of the plant pots are from recycled food containers. We grew the seedlings in cardboard toilet rolls to save on the number of plant pots we had to buy.

By June this year the garden was really flourishing:

We grew herbs in red IKEA waste paper bins and to our surprise this was a massive success. For some reason the slugs and snails did not seem to climb the pots so despite neighbouring pots having regular problems the herbs were ok! I don’t know whether it was the bright red colour or the slippery sides but even the Basil flourished with no slug problems at all for the whole summer! We will definitely do this again. Aphids became a huge problem in the summer demolishing the Lupins and Nasturtiums but my mum suggested spraying the plants with soap flakes diluted in water and this made a huge difference - thanks Mum!!!

The vegetables did quite well, well except for the butternut squash plants that grew about 3 m long and then died in a storm! L I think perhaps next time we need to plant them in a more sheltered spot. The carrots were huge and even at the end of the summer when we came to clear the bed there were about 1 kg of carrots left. We tried Florence Fennel for the first time and have discovered a new vegetable – so good in salads or griddled in some olive oil. The marrows just rotted on the plants but apparently this was a general problem this year. We had beetroot, spring onions, lettuce, rocket, chard, mange tout, broad beans and spinach consistently for several months having planted new seeds every couple of weeks or so. We will definitely grow these again because they were so easy to grow and it meant we had fresh vegetables all summer long.  

It has been so nice to watch the garden develop. Looking back at the photographs that we took when we moved in has reminded me just how little there was just over a year ago. There is still so much to do this year (if we can stay here – always a problem in a rented house). I am determined to try and get on top of the stinging nettles!

Happy New Year!

Sorry I know it has been a while since we last posted. This is partly because we have been away visiting relatives over the Christmas period, but also because we have been finishing the Christmas presents we were making. It was a close run thing but we did get them all finished in time! Here are a few pictures of some of the things that we made:



The presents include homemade beads strung on to ribbon to make necklaces and bracelets. Some paper stars made in to earrings and a bracelet. Shopping bags made with curtain material and lined with satin. Picalilli, Chilli Jam, filled spice grinders and the hampers mentioned in a previous post. We also finally finished the baubles (we managed to make 6 whole sets although there were unfortunately a couple of disasters (a new method for sticking needed I think)). I also found some really cool buttons in a local material store which I attached to ribbon to make bracelets. There were some other bits and pieces but I forgot to photograph them - oops but I think you can get a good feel for what we have done.

It was so much fun making them all but such a relief that we managed to finish them all in time. Hopefully the coming year will be filled with new projects to write about! We wish everyone a happy New Year - and hopefully won't leave it quite so long until we post again.