Tempestuous weather leaves gardening in a whirl

An anenome finally opens on the patio.

How many fingers can you cross? And is it possible that crossing some toes too will add to the effect?

The weather pepped up over the weekend. It wasn’t a heat wave, but there was enough warmth to give hope that my bones will feel warm sometime soon.

And enough warmth to make you very aware that the warming of the sun on you skin is very, very different to the warming of central heating.

Such an improvement was also just in time to be able to sit outside and appreciate the results of the bulb planing that we'd done last autumn.

The question, as always, is whether it lasts, but the forecasts are looking more optimistic, at least in terms of temperature.

Spot the healthy ones.

It had been a crazy week. Last Tuesday, I got home to find that the sudden sun that day had boiled most of my seedlings in their propagating trays. Most was gone – it remains to be seen whether any of the peas and broad beans recover. I’m holding out faint optimism for one or two at most.

At least there were two small pea plants – the smallest and poorest, it had seemed – that were outside the trays waiting for the extra coir pots needed for repotting, and thus didn’t suffer. They look so healthy by comparison now.

And then, just 48 hours after that, a blizzard hit. Oh, it didn't stick, but the snow was teeming down, swirling around in the wind, obliterating the nearby St Pancras and British Library.

All this while early mornings would, whether bright or gloomy, reveal frosted car roofs.

How on earth do you judge whether to try to harden off plants or open the propagator vents or do anything when the weather is so utterly all over the place?

Grazing sheep at Hackney City Farm.

It is a learning curve – and then some.

As young plants succumbed to massive stress and shock, the leaves of the broad beans turned from vibrant green to grey, and everything else wilted, it felt soul destroying, having judged so well until that moment.

But you have to get right back into the saddle, as they say after a throw, so on Saturday, with the sun at my back once more, I sat down and sowed two more full cell trays.

One was made up of salad vegetables – I’m going to leave radishes and spring onions until I’m back from my brief trip, and then sow them straight into pots – but included two varieties of lettuce, plus more chard.

The second tray was all tomatoes and chilies, of which there have been no sign in the earlier attempts.

Red leaves catching the sun near Columbia Road.

I read somewhere that the entire country is about five weeks behind usual growing times, so perhaps those first ones may yet geminate, while the new sowing should have a much better chance as the temperature seems to be stabilising.

Yesterday, a pleasurable wander down to Columbia Road allowed to to pick up some more fibre pots for potting on.

And alongside the one pea that I sowed to make a trio with the two healthy plants (a Kelvedon Wonder), I added three broad beans (Witkiem Manita) and three runner beans (St George).

All are sitting on trays – but are not in propagators. Let’s see what happens.

Primula on Columbia Road market.

Also yesterday, I added another row of carrots into the potager – there is no sign of anything pushing up from the first sowing, but as with the tomatoes, they may now appear.

And alongside this now sits a row of turnip seeds.

The revelation of the weekend – of the week, indeed – was the discovery of three tiny pea shoots in the potager, just pushing through and unbending to reach the light.

Sown five weeks ago, I was beginning to doubt that any of them would germinate, but it provides yet more evidence for just how tough and resilient plants can be.

They now have a wigwam erected around them – with space for several more plants – and are themselves encircled by strips of copper to (hopefully) help keep the slugs off as they grow bugger and juicier.

Joyfully able to revel in the weather, I also spent time clearing the space in the pot holding the vine, together with the hanging basket, and sowed substantial amounts of nasturtium.

Potager with added wigwam. And car. For context.

That will keep things ticking over for a few days, I think.

But with the forecast suggesting – finally – that temperatures are approaching a seasonal norm and, most importantly, not plunging below freezing almost every night, gardening matters might finally be looking up.

And the lesson of the lost beans and peas must be that, once leaves appear, open the vents.

As a wise man once put it: living is learning. And the same goes for gardening.

Garden firsts and squidgy cakes

Coral spot.

Life as an apprentice gardener is full of little firsts. Having 10 out of 10 peas germinate in my growhouse is the sort of first that leaves you bursting with pride (albeit having done little more than offer nature a helping hand).

Correctly diagnosing a garden problem, followed by taking appropriate action, leaves an entirely different feeling.

There have been three bushes of pyracantha in the garden for years and, when we finally got around to having the entire area paved a year last November, these were cut back and the slabs arranged around them.

The amount they grew last year was just one of a series of lessons in how resilient plants are. You may think that you, the snails or the weather have killed something off, but give it time and there is every chance that it will come back.

Last year alone we seemed to witness more revivals than Billy Graham.

But back to the pyracantha – or firethorn as it sometimes known. It was one of the first things we planted, years ago when we moved in and the garden was just a few flags in a square outside the door, and a small ‘L’ of rather poor and uneven grass with a plain, light wood fence to keep the rest of the world out.

It was one of the first things into our small patch after an early attempted break in at the back. The flats were new and, in an area that still had some years to go before the trendiness only then starting to Hoxton would move further east, must have looked pretty damned posh, even though it was a housing association build.

It provides all-year-round greenery – and wonderfully sharp thorns.

There are nice berries for the birds in the autumn and winter – although our three bushes, theoretically producing different colours, only ever actually seem to manage red.

However, one of the bushes, after serious cutting back, has seen one thick trunk die off. And that, together with a little of the joined trunk, had pinky orange spots on it.

Anyway, that’s why there’s a Royal Horticultural Society book on Pests and Diseases on the shelf, for precisely such cases.

It turned out to be a case of coral spot – nectria cinnabarina – which can infect parts of dead trees and shrubs.

Treatment is pruning carefully and possible wound sealant to stop the infection getting in again.

Down on Columbia Road, Les explained that such sealants are usually bitumen-based. But my idea of using melted wax met with approval.

Here’s a thing: you don’t get to go to B&Q and get this sort of conversation. Don’t just cultivate your garden, but your local suppliers too, wherever possible.

Back at the ranch, The Other Half removed the infected parts and then dripped wax over the fresh-cut wood, as a hint of sleet filled the air.

Hopefully, that will do the job.

Not that it was all that needed doing this morning. I’d dug more of the compost in yesterday, finally seeing something that looks like a much more mixed, lighter soil.

But while I’d been doing that, I’d noticed just how many weeds were showing their faces in the rest of the patch that is marked out for communal decking.

If I don’t do anything, they’ll be in my bit before you can say Charlie Dimmock.

Once I was out there with the Dutch hoe, in community-minded mode, I gave Michael’s bare bed a few minutes of attention too, as there were weeds sprouting where he’d cleared away another dying bush, ready to take flowers this year.

So far this year, I’m the only one doing any actual gardening, but I suspect that won’t last, once the weather is a little more consistently warmer and brighter. If …

After that, my hands – even having worn gloves – were frozen. The wind was biting.

And so to the remains of yesterday’s Westmorland farmhouse pie – topped with freshly-rolled pastry from the leftover dough.

Perfect fodder for such a day.

One of the joys of having cupboards that seem to be bursting at the seams is that on the sort of day when it’s cold and grim outside, and you suddenly fancy a cake, it’s not usually too difficult to find enough ingredients in the kitchen.

Having spent such a busy morning, I fancied dipping once more into Recipes of Lakeland as the day got progressively colder and greyer.

There are cakes and fruit breads and biscuits galore in its pages – the only shame being that all those readers who contributed recipes are not themselves credited.

Not very elegant, but plenty of taste.

In his thoroughly enjoyable Eating for England, Nigel Slater notes the extraordinary regional variety of such cakes and observes that, although English cakes lack the elegance and finesse of a Madeleine, they have “a certain wobbly charm to them” and a “lick-your-fingers stickiness”.

Dalton gingerbread seemed likely to fall into exactly that category.

Three cups plain flour,” says the recipe, to be rubbed into “¼lb lard”. This is the juncture at which I admit southern jessiedom.

Much as I have learned, in the last couple of years, to love lard – and dripping – using it in a cake is a step too far. So, butter instead.

And to translate everything into modern money, that’s 450g plain flour and 225g butter.

Once you’ve beaten those together – in a mixer in my case: all the bodybuilding of my younger years still hasn’t equipped me with a country housewife’s forearms – before adding 150g sugar (I used a soft demerara) a pinch of salt, two teaspoons of ground ginger and last, one and a half teaspoons of baking powder.

Into that, mix 150g of melted dark treacle: for some reason or other, lost in the mists of time, there was a jar of organic stuff in the cupboard, unopened.

Then, dissolve a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda into 150g of boiling water – and stir that into the mixture.

Decant everything into “a deep roasting tin” and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.

The tin in my case was my largest enamel pie dish, buttered. The oven was set at 150˚C (fan).

I tested with a skewer after 30 minutes – and gave it another 10.

This is not a thing of beauty. It is not elegant. It lacks any finesse; although it came clean away from the dish easily, it crumbles even more easily.

But it is crisp on the outside, squidgy and sticky inside; dense and rich and yet not heavy; gloriously aromatic and, tasted together with a bit of Stilton (Lancashire or Cheshire would also work well) it is a thing of warming, comforting pleasure.

A load of shit

Ah. Me. With manure.

It comes to something when a couple of hours spent with a load of shit leaves you with a grin on your face.

But sure enough, this afternoon’s endeavours have left the warm glow of satisfaction, as well as the slight, but not unpleasant, ache of muscles that have never hefted manure – or a wheelbarrow – before.

As mentioned a few days ago, Hackney City Farm, which is only a five-minute walk through the park at the back of us, had said that I was welcome to a load of manure – and they’d even let me use one of their barrows to wheel it home.

Indeed, I got the manure free, as I’m “community”, which chuffed me rather a lot. Actually, I gave them a donation, but they were reluctant to take it initially, since they didn’t want me to think that I had to do that.

Very nice people and a really friendly environment.

And a big ‘hello’ to Larry the Donkey and all the other residents, plus all the carers, at the farm.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve toddled down occasionally on weekends when The Other Half is away.

It’s easy to assume that such a place is for young families with tots, but I find it has something to ofer the likes of me too.

I have real, concrete memories of staying on farms for holidays as a child. And they are valued, loved memories.

And discovering that I can wander just a short distance from my middle-of-a-bleedin-big-city home, and smell the same smells that I remember fondly from farms, is not – how shall I put it – unwelcome.

And after all, we only think it’s a ‘bad’ smell, if we don’t remember what it means and how incredibly productive and life-promoting what makes that smell can be.

But anyway, if you’re up this way, Hackney City Farm is very well worth a visit. There’s a nice café, with fresh food, too, plus the opportunity to buy such things as fresh eggs.

Anyway, let’s go back a bit. It’s probably a bit early to say that today has been ‘a job well done’, since the job isn’t finished yet, but it’s certainly a case of ‘a job well started’.

Before any digging in.

Although it wasn’t the only soil-improving arrival today,

Les from Halifax – or more pertinently, from a shop just off Columbia Road – brought me up two 60l bags of organic all-purpose compost.

The majority is going on the same bed, but some will be used for sowing the first batch of seeds that will sit in the new growhouse.

God, I love discovering real, local, independent businesses! And is it any coincidence that the service is almost always so much better?!

I have to say, I was also absolutely thrilled when Les, having driven into the car park and pulled up right next to my precious bed, looked at it and praised what I’d done.

I was elated – really.

Now because of the lack of readily-available hot water this week, much of my intended cooking and preserving has been put on hold, so it’s been rather easy to see the week as a failure – or at least a part-failure.

But what I’ve managed to do in terms of the garden is pretty good – I’m on track for everything I wanted to achieve. And that can’t possibly be bad.

What remains is more digging in, plus a lot of sowing. And, err, that’s it.

To add, I’ve just joined the RHS and I feel all sort of frizzy and excited. I hope you understand.

And finally – a big shout out to Larry the Donkey, and all the other residents (and helpers) at Hackney City Farm. You really do rock, guys and guyettes.

Gardening with the seasons

Acton's Lock, Regent's Canal, Hackney

The tall, lithe birches in the carpark have already yellowed and, with the slightest tremor of the air, sent leaves earthwards, floating gently down, until they stand now as skeletal reminders of longer, warmer days.

One of the flats above ours, its balcony railing festooned with boxes, is all but bare, with white petals from its final flowers helicoptering to the ground.

The London plane just on the other side of the wall that divides our carpark from the park beyond, and by which I find myself judging the progress of the seasons (it’s always late), is just revealing the first hints of yellow.

Today day has been grey – not 50 shades: just one. Grey and with dampness hanging in the air.

For all the promises, this weekend – yesterday morning apart – has been dull and grey. And colder. And with the hour having gone back, it’s felt as though autumn proper has arrived with a bang.

Like last Sunday, though, today has also been a time to get out into the garden, creating new habits of all-year-round activity.

Protected tree and planted pots

The core tidying had, by and large, been finished. But as the temperature even in central London dropped, it was time not only to wrap the lemon tree in a duvet of fleece to protect it, but also to think ahead and plant bulbs for next spring.

Two visits to Columbia Road have produced a variety of daffs and tulips, crocuses and snowdrops, with the addition of some anemones and a small bag of scilla.

The tulips include Blue Diamond – which sounds as though it comes straight out of a Dick Barton plot.

And there’s Red Riding Hood, a small, early variety, plus Van Den Berg’s Memory, a traditionally-sized red – the latter of which evokes memories of Amsterdam.

Last weekend, having cleared and cleaned out a number of pots, we planted in the drizzle. Today, there was only the merest hint of rain in the air as we completed the task.

Instead, the wind was whirling around, sending Boudi and Otto scuttling back inside quickly: they don’t enjoy wind in their longer fur. Loki, on the other hand, with her much shorter fur, seems to love it, in a wild sort of way; chasing after leaves.

There’s something enormously pleasing about such work. It adds another layer to my growing sense of the cycle of the seasons.

And here you are, not simply packing away the garden for the winter, pruning away the dying and clearing the decaying, but preparing it too for the start of the year to come.

With a little luck, we’ll start to see the first delicate signs of life pushing through soil and toward the watery sun in January.

In the meantime, metallic winter heathers in jewel-bright hues, and cyclamen in vivid pinks and reds, are adding a touch of colour to the patio.

There’s still work to do. The remains of the tomatoes need to be cleared away and the pots scrubbed out; the final chilies – a large handful or red, orange and green – were harvested earlier and will be grilled and then preserved in a jar of olive oil.

And then there’s the patch at the back. The beans were dismantled a couple of weeks ago, but the rest of the bed needs digging out.

Taking 'baby veg' to new levels: with 5p piece for scale

Now that the temperature has dipped, there’s no hope that the carrots and swedes and turnips will grow more than they have – and they’re not at edible point now.

But it was good practice getting them up – you really can’t just pull them out, I realised, after a couple of failed attempts. That’s what a small fork is for!

The summer, like so much else, ensured they didn’t grow enough, early enough.

The soil needs to be sieved out – I’ve done some already, but it’s backbreaking work, to be done little by little – and then I’ll dig a little compost in: a case of some TLC before planting anything next year.

This is the first year in which I’ve ever gardened all year around – not simply planted a few things and assumed they’d take care of themselves, and done nothing else.

Some weeks ago, Guardian gardening columnist Alys Fowler noted that, if this was your first year as a gardener, you mustn’t be disappointed: it’s been bad a bad year for everyone – slugs and snails excepted.

Which was reassuring. But even after such a bad year, the bug has bitten. And there will be much more to come, with the benefit of some experience and a little more knowledge, as the days next lengthen.

But before then, a winter beckons spent curled on the sofa with my new Royal Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening – a wonderful early birthday present from George – planning and considering and dreaming.

Blue sky thinking

Parts of the UK are basking in sunshine this week - but the temperature has been climbing for a week or so.

When that happens, your mind starts turning away from the big, comforting dishes of the cold, dark months to lighter fodder for lighter days.

And then it's difficult to avoid thoughts automatically turning toward the food of the Mediterranean.

It's some years ago that I started becoming aware of southern Italian cooking, thanks in large part to River Café Two Easy. Without ever really giving it much thought, it became a favourite book - particularly turned to whenever The Other Half was out of town and I was cooking for myself and could eat things like squid.

Alongside very rustic soups, roasted meat dishes (the three-and-a-half hour chicken that I do comes from this book) are various pasta dishes - many of them striking even on the page because of their extraordinary simplicity.

Take the classic Sicilian combination of sardines with pasta. In that book, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers use filleted fish with garlic, flat-leaf parsley, dried chillies, pine nuts, raisins, saffron, lemon and, of course, good virgin oil, and serve it with linguine.

It's not far removed from the apotheosis of exactly that fish and pasta combination, sardo.

Actually, I knew the basics of this specific mix of flavours from an earlier purchase - a book of 32 Practical Pasta Sauces (no author listed) that I picked up for something like £1.99 in Lidl some years ago.

On the basis of cost per recipe, it's possibly the best value cookery book I have.

There's a nod toward sardo in its pages - although it uses fennel bulb, thinly sliced, instead of the dill-like herb that is so much a part of Sicilian cooking and grows alongside the roads of that island.

Otherwise, the only real difference is that it skips the saffron and raisins.

In Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Sicily, however, we get something closer to the real deal.

His Pasta con le sarde has the sardines, of course, but with anchovies too as well as the saffron. And "3 sprigs of wild fennel" of the sort (hopefully) that is now growing in a pot in my garden and which I was astonished to find on Columbia Road being sold as 'bronze fennel'. The raisins are replaced in Locatelli's version with the greater succulence of sultanas.

Okay, there are one or two other refinements: a little white wine here, some breadcrumbs and some chopped onion there, plus a small amount of 'strattu, a Sicilian type of particularly intense tomato purée. Or you can just use purée, since you're unlikely to find 'strattu anywhere outside Sicily, where making it is very much a community affair.

And if you haven't got wild fennel, you can use a teaspoon of fennel seeds, soaked in a little water.

But in those very Arabic ingredients of the nuts and the spice and the dried fruit, together with the chilli and the lemon and the really good oil, you start to get a sense of the island's history - and its cuisine.

Now close your eyes for a minute and imagine it all as fresh as it's possible to be, cooked and eaten under a blazing sun and a saturated, azure sky.

But back to that Lidl book: regular readers may remember a dish of roasted tomato, pepper and chilli, with toasted, ground almonds that has become a favourite. The nuts and the chillies suggest the south of Italy.

Another dish from the same book - actually described as a "Sicilian sauce" - combines roasted tomatoes, pine nuts, sultanas, anchovies and tomato purée.

Returning to River Café Two Easy' I've tried several more dishes - and often the ones with some crumbled dried chilli and lemon.

There's a lovely combination of squid, courgette, garlic, chilli, lemon, with olive oil and marjoram, that's served with spaghetti.

And another favourite of scallops, pan fried with chilli, garlic, borlotti beans, lemon, virgin oil and rocket.

Time and again, since starting to discover these combinations of flavours, I return to them at the first opportunity.

And the Locatelli book is expanding my range. He has a beautiful and ridiculously simple salad with chopped green olives and celery at its heart, plus finely-chopped mint, and finished with a simple dressing of red wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, a little water, seasoning and virgin oil - and since it'll keep in the fridge for six months, it's not extravagant or wasteful to make a batch up even for one person.

Regardless of the currant weather, perhaps the emphasis on simplicity and quality ingredients that are the hallmarks of southern Italian cooking in general and Sicilian cooking in particular really is blue sky thinking when it comes to culinary matters?

Spring sprung as spirits soar

Unbelievably, it’s only a couple of weeks until Easter. Where on Earth has the first quarter of the year gone?

We barely seem to have emerged from the darker days – yet this weekend, the clocks go forward. And earlier this week it was the spring equinox!

Even though I love the darkness and the cold of winter, with each passing year I seem to yearn more and more for the warmth and the sun.

Deep down, still a northern girl – northern European, that is – but increasingly drawn to the south and the sun.

The spring is having an impact on the home front, though. Almost four months after actually getting the initial work done to clear our small garden, we’ve now started to actually do some planting.

On the wall that is now revealed by having finally had the dreadful pampas hauled from the ground, there is space for a ceramic sun I bought in Collioure, together with a vibrantly-coloured ceramic lizard from the same shop and a warning sign in French about the dangerous felines that reside in our little corner of Hackney.

And the cats are most certainly feeling full of spring. Boudicca has already done a couple of celebratory patio rolls on warmer days. And the kittens are just as full of seasonal bounce, having also both also decided, in recent months, that it’s far more fun playing with The Other Half or I than with each other.

Otto might look a cutie, with lovely soft, mitten-like paws and big, soft eyes, but those mitten paws have very sharp points in them, even when she’s playing gently, and she’s got teeth like a little vampire too.

My arms are covered in the marks of play, but for some reason, when it comes to cats, I have the patience of Job.

On a rather gentler note, after a visit to a rammed Columbia Road flower market on Sunday afternoon, a lemon tree is now settling into its new pot against the same south-facing wall; one large fruit already well on the way, with more emerging and dozens of buds slowly opening to embrace the warming days.

The mere idea of having edible lemons growing in my own back garden is difficult to believe – and really quite exhilarating.

Violas and pansies have added quick, deep colour, while thyme and sage and fennel and two varieties of mint have been potted too.

There’s plenty more to do and next week, more will be done. I want to get some aloes and a chilli plant. I’m wondering about wild garlic in a pot in the shadier part of the garden – you can make great pesto with it, apparently.

But more herbs are essential: oregano and tarragon and chives are top of the list. And both flat leaf and curly parsley are required too – the latter by special request of The Other Half.

Rosemary will have to wait until I’ve devised a net covering for a pot, thus avoiding it being eaten by shiny, metallic beetles that have arrived on these shores from southern climes in recent years.

What we’re after is a mix of decorative and edible. At the moment, the first suggestions are there, although it looks a little stilted at present. But our Gaudí salamander, from Barcelona, has already found a sunny new home.

This coming Sunday, I’ll head back down to Columbia Road – early, so that it won’t be almost impossible to move.

Then on Monday, as part of the ongoing work we’re having done on the flat, I’m taking a trip to the nearest B&Q to buy more pots, gravel, sand and compost.

It’s a bit of a guessing game at present. The garden, once cleared and with paving slabs now having replaced the embarrassing excuse for a ‘lawn’ that had struggled on for 16 years, now seems to have doubled in size.

But it’s all too tempting to do so much that it shrinks back again quickly. Pots hopefully offer the chance to create something that’s enjoyable and productive – and looks good.

And if any other proof were needed that spring really is here – beyond seeing how the willow trees in the park near our flat are now draped in green – then the arrival in Waitrose of baby Jersey Royals is enough to make the spirits soar.