Crevice Gardens

Into the best-laid block paving some weed seeds will fall...and I am paid to go down on my knees and prise them out again.  Peering at these little plantlets at close quarters I observe how perfectly they adapt to their patios.  Their roots go down into the sand on which the blocks or bricks were laid and penetrate the underlying black membrane that was put in place to suppress them.  Their leaves lie flat, making them hard to tug, and their seeds, like miniature dandelions, are distributed by the wind.  I scrape mosses that cling to longstanding crazy paving, uproot lawn daisies appearing in pockets of soil, tug at willowherb with its delicate pink flowers, oxalis with clover-like dark leaves and shallow-rooted herb robert, whose leaves are fragrant when crushed.

Turning to July's edition of the Royal Horticultural Society's magazine, The Garden, I found an article on how to create a crevice trough for miniature alpines, mimicking their natural habitat.  Alpine enthusiasts can thereby showcase their specimen plants.  In contrast for two hours I disassemble these tiny ecosystems, along with their accompanying ants, woodlice, centipedes and beetles.  Miniature and beautiful common or garden weeds growing in the 'wrong' place.    

Conifers and other culprits

Two of the lawns we attended to this week were showing signs of drought.  Previously  I have associated this with the heavy clay soils of our allotments.  There cracks become visible in high summer where the grassy paths end and the beds begin. 

A shady lawn we visited exhibited a crazy paving of cracks under the shadow of leyland cypress.  This set me thinking on the habits of these conifers and their deleterious effects on turf, and from there to plants that I have encountered in our daily work and wish to avoid in our next home because they are fast-growing, thirsty, invasive or non-native species whose leaves do not biodegrade easily.  So here are ten for my list.  I would just add that gardening is a matter of taste, and you, dear readers, may in fact love all of these specimens dearly:

• bamboo which travels
• leylandii which grow tall - unless you are willing to hire a tree surgeon
• prickly pyrecantha which sticks out at awkward angles and pokes you - unless you are capitalising on this as a burglar deterrent
• stag's horn - it dies back at the tips and bits drop off and then it shoots up vigorously in other places
• photinia a.k.a. 'red robin' whose leaves do not biodegrade well
• ash - a tree which will colonise a garden uninvited
• sycamore - ditto
• elder - ditto
• ceanothus - it looks pretty but does not seem to thrive here

and finally

• ivy which, unchecked, pulls down your trellis.

Something about Semolina

Today I picked our red dessert gooseberries.  I brought home about 700 grams of ripening fruit and needed some inspiration.  I consulted my 'charity shop' cook book selection and went for The Dairy Book of Family Cookery published over thirty years ago in 1983.  I was going to make Gooseberry Fool, but had no gelatine, so chose Honeyed Gooseberry Dessert (serves 4).  I had all the ingredients, including the semolina which I bought for the stock cupboard on the inspiration of Anjum Anand's Indian Every Day (2003) with the intention of making pilaff or perhaps halva following Madhur Jaffrey (1982).  I thought it would be interesting to experiment with semolina.

Semolina that is, that had taken on an exotic guise.   How different these recipes seemed from the bland milk-based puddings of my sixties school dinners - semolina, tapioca, sago - or one of my late mother's stand-bys at home before the era of widely available yoghurt - junket made with milk and a flavoured rennet tablet (consumed by mother but not by me).

Honeyed Gooseberry Dessert with its layers of gooseberries and semolina was  a success.  We ate half of it although we did not eat it chilled as suggested as I was running out of time.  I also reduced the sugar content - eighties recipes are not always suitable for diabetics. 

So here's to semolina whether by east or west.  Semolina rediscovered and relished.  

Seedtime and Harvest

This year I have been letting plants go to seed.  We will vacate the plots at the end of the growing season and I have refrained from clearing and cutting down everything (although we will of course hand them over, mown and tidy, to whoever comes next).  So, for example, I have let the spinach run to seed in its permanent bed.  Likewise the rocket, the flat-leaved parsley and the curly-leaved, and the most impressive of all - the parsnips high as hemlocks above my head.   I shall be saving seeds from the latter in old prescription paper bags and taking them north. 

What a pity that we cannot uproot our soft fruit.  I shall be sad to leave my blackcurrant which is having another great year with berries like small black grapes; my redcurrant, also a fruitful bush; the strawberries, the raspberries, the tayberries all delicious in their time.  I have struck a dessert gooseberry cutting for M. 

I shall be making as much jam as I can from the damsons later this summer and eating or pressing our two varieties of black grapes.  We will lay out our apples on the floor of our lounge-diner and finally harvest our winter squash.  These hardy plants were a gift from a colleague who commuted from Peterborough. 

Seeds are easier to transport than plants.  We shall take one herb, a propagated golden oregano whose original was sourced from a garden centre in Poynton, Cheshire and one bush, a blueberry which requires ericaceous compost, a gift from H on the allotment.  And then who knows what else our future garden holds?  Our Mancunian pastor once observed, 'you always reap what you sow, but you don't always reap where you sow.'  I wonder what we shall find.