Overwintering a bedding plant - Nicotiana 'Lime Green'

Strangely we appear to be 'on trend' with the RHS and its April theme of Inside Out Gardening.  We look out onto our patio through a collection of houseplants such as  pelargoniums from various sources, sansevieria from a college where my husband once worked, a strelitzia from my family.   But the prize must go to the tobacco plants, an outdoor variety from seed gifted by a friend that flourishes indoors.  

If we possessed more up to date 'tech' I would take a photo of this and send it to the RHS 'Readers' Letters'.  They were sown in a warm place and planted out in a front bed by my husband.  With their large tender leaves they seemed to be succumbing to slugs and snails so he dug them up and they overwintered in our back room.  Within the last month they have started to blossom and produce lime green flowers.  The sweet faint scent is more pronounced in the evenings 

The practice of using bedding plants as house plants is not without precedent.  Dr D G Hessayon has a section in The House Plant Expert.  (Our edition is thirty years old but the series originally dates back to the 1960s).  The nicotiana he recommends seems to be a more compact version  Nicotiana hybrida.  Ours are growing tall, with support.  I cannot tell if this is the light conditions or just the variety.

I hope we continue to enjoy them throughout the coming months as they flourish in our below average conditions (18 degrees Centigrade).  Modern homes might be too warm to sustain this practice.  I look forward to the RHS revisiting this theme in months to come. 

A Guide for a 'Bad' Birdwatcher

 It was my good fortune this week to find a copy of the American edition (2005, $17.95) of Simon Barnes' book How to Be a (Bad) Birdwatcher displayed in our local charity shop.  At £1.50, in hardback, retaining its original dustjacket it was a bargain.  I think what drew me was the cheeky title and equally cheeky engraving of the little bird on the front and back.

Simon Barnes is almost a contemporary - I checked on the Internet and was relieved to find he is still alive.  He is a journalist and writes in the accessible style of the devotional or self-help guide.  I could reset that enormously loaded opening phrase 'to the greater glory of life' and then read his short pithy chapters with pleasure and profit.

The whole point of a devotional or self-help book is to move to action so I began by taking Simon's advice in chapter six.  We already have a bird book The Mitchell Beazley Birdwatcher's Pocket Guide.  This has probably been in my family since the reprint of 1986.  I picked it up and added my own name in it (in pencil) for continuity.  

Two things struck me when I read this pocket guide more carefully.  Firstly the introduction was extremely sensible and in line with Simon's advice which was not surprising as he has a longstanding connection with the RSPB.  I wonder if the very small print had previously put me off.  Secondly, and this is somewhat galling for a person with a post-graduate teaching qualification, I realised that I had not ever studied the section entitled 'How the Guide Works' or the Species List.  I had been flipping through at random trying to find the Nuthatch for example, and wondering why I landed on page 112 with the Tawny Owl.  

I am so glad that these two books have come together.  In true 'devotional' fashion I already had what I needed but needed a nudge to use it and appreciate its value.

Both will now find a place on the coffee table in our back room where we look out on our bird feeder through the patio windows.  On the floor rests a pair of binoculars but that is a post for another time.

Twigs in pots

Recently my husband potted on the willow twigs that we had rescued from the flailing hedge-cutter at the beginning of January.  They sat in a glass vase in a semi-dormant state until the daylight hours lengthened and then we saw the brown cases fall to the carpet and fluffy grey 'blobs' emerge.  They even put out a few leaves and started to form roots.

There were three twigs that my husband considered worth saving.  These now join a motley collection of twigs in pots on our back patio which I list as follows:

Two small oak saplings from the great tree at the junction of our avenue, a relic of the times, within living memory, when all around us was farmland.  These were probably buried by the grey squirrel before my husband had a chance to shout 'Oy' and rap on the window.

Another willow which came up in the midst of a flowerbed.  I cannot attribute its arrival to the squirrel.  It is a different variety, I think, to the rescued ones and has no 'pussy' buds.

A street tree, from further down the lane.  Possibly squirrel had a paw in this one.  I haven't identified it yet.

A homegrown forsythia cutting.  This will have its final destination in the front hedge alongside the others that J gave us last year.  It is small, but growing green buds.

A homegrown rosemary cutting.  I hope we will eventually be able to give this away.

Three raspberry canes donated by J.  We do have raspberries, but we had a large pot going spare.

As I look out on these from the kitchen window I wonder if we are turning into the kind of older persons that we once gardened for with their miscellanies of assorted pots and saucers for wildlife.  I cannot bear to put good trees into the garden recycling bin, they are too precious.  They will grow.  Another season, I promise myself, no need to take any decisions yet.

Recipe Box

The habit of cutting out and pasting recipes seems have begun with a grandmother whose recipe book was started before her marriage in 1915 (she has written in her maiden name and address).  It is an illuminating piece of social history and deserves a post of its own. It has come out of its drawer and gone back to my family awaiting re-binding,  An earlier great grandmother received from one of her husband's cousins a copy of Mrs Beeton's guide to household management, a fitting gift on her wedding day.

I store most of my recipes in a box inside plastic wallets recycled from the decades when I taught using photocopiable worksheets.  The recipes needed to be kept splash free and legible.  But they were beginning to spill out of the box and escape their category dividers.  So I had a sort out and wondered how my tastes had changed.

Most of them date from ten or more years ago when we lived in London.  Two neighbours would pass women's magazines to me when each had finished and I would cut out recipes and knitting patterns, some of which I still have and have knitted up.  

Economical and tasty recipes (one of the favourite descriptions of the magazine) have stayed in.  The vegetarian section seems to be the largest because I enjoy cooking with pulses and finding good uses for 'stickered' vegetables such as  cauliflowers.  It is so easy to revive these by cutting a slice from the base of the stem and leaving the cauliflower in a bowl of cold water overnight.

I have discarded the glossier stuff that is more time-consuming, the upmarket store magazines trying to sell their pre-packaged ingredients, and almost all 'family dinner' recipes for roast lamb or pork.

I have kept a selection of recipes from our grandmother's book that remind me of the home baking Friday afternoons of childhood - parkin, bannock cake, rice cake, chocolate cake  - and copied them out on recipe cards with their date and provenance.

My slimmed down box now sits happily on the island table of our kitchen, propping up a good selection of cookery books.  I am not proposing to dispose of these any time soon.

Viable Seed 2024

 I noted from the January pages of the RHS Allotment Diary that it was time to select seed for the coming season.  So we had a stock-check and made some decisions on what we would like to grow.  It reads like the fashion advice given in popular broadsheets, namely:

Out go plants that did not thrive last year.  Cucumbers even when transplanted to the greenhouse failed to do well.  Likewise our neighbour's blue green pumpkin which was disappointing when compared to our own saved winter squash.  (It probably does much better on her allotment).

'Must haves': Winter Squash, Runner Beans, last year's discovery Pea Greenshaft, reliable Kale and Swiss Chard. We will try our own saved seed French Beans again, but we are a little too far north for these most summers.  Salads are in particularly oriental salads, lettuce, rocket and my husband's greenhouse tomatoes Moneymaker and Gardener's Delight.

Sunflowers cheer up our front garden, so once again I will grow from saved seed; wallflowers too.  Over to my husband for Sweet Peas.

Best Newcomer Second Early Potato.  This year we will try Jazzy.

Why are we hanging on to these?  This is a question I sometimes pose to my husband.  Why did a friend pass on Catmint when we do not wish to attract cats?  Hollyhocks - the triumph of hope over experience as far as my husband is concerned.  Verbena Bonariensis - now seeding itself unaided into the cracks in our patio paving.  

Feeding the birds

Last Sunday afternoon we watched Disney's Mary Poppins (1964) on terrestrial tv and perhaps subliminally I got the message to 'feed the birds'.  Fat-balls, even at the bargain price of two packs for one, cost considerably more than tuppence a bag and I was initially disappointed to see that apart from the bluetits there was no return on my outlay.  So it was time for a rethink.

Over to my husband to rejig what had been handed on to us to make it more accessible for small birds.  The double cage structure (possibly squirrel-proofing?) disappeared, the inside was retained and what he labelled a 'budgie perch' made of some old garden stick was attached.

Down to me then to re-read the packet instructions and ask him, nicely, to reposition the holder we inherited from one of our gardening customers closer to the hedge to give our avian visitors a better feeling of security.  A few additional pieces of useful string (thanks to my niece) and our redesigned feeder was ready.

This time we have been rewarded.  We have seen a pair of nuthatches, bluetits, coal tits and long-tailed tits plus hedge sparrows.  It is a delight to watch them alight on the landing stick and then balance on the wire. The blackbirds, who are too heavy for the budgie perch, peck around at the bottom eating up the crumbs that fall and then fly to the raised beds and happily turn them over in search of insects.  

The robins are bobbing along our fence.  The woodpigeons roost high up in the trees in the park, coming down to flap about in the ivy.  Long may they remain there.  Unlike Disney's lyricists I do not love pigeons.

PS It has taken the blackbirds less than a day to work out how to land on the perch.