I’ve got a few friends who are fantastic gardeners. They have years of experience and dedication behind them and they seem to know the right time to plant everything and generally get it all done on time. Their earth is always dug ready for planting, their seeds get sown on time and their seedlings are planted out before they show the slightest signs of stress (plant or human).
Unlike them, my ambitions are always much greater than what I manage to achieve. Last year, my planned tomato terrace of unusual heritage varieties didn’t quite come off. I started them all off from seed, the plants were doing ever so well but just when I needed to pot them on, on to the ‘terrace’, my attention was diverted for a few weeks and that was that. The plants tried their best to flourish in their tiny pots but without divine intervention they didn’t stand a chance.
That is just one example where time and other commitments took precedence over my gardening schedule. Still, it is always better to dwell on the successes rather than the failures isn’t it?. More recently I have been examining my ‘style’ of gardening in order to find other ways around these problems. Of course in the ideal world we would all follow the rules as told by wise old gardeners with knowledge handed down through the generations, or, at the very least, by following those charts with coloured coded ‘sow’, ‘plant out’ and (hopefully) ‘harvest’ bars. There are thousands of gardening books out there spelling out the ideal scenario.
I have mentioned before that I am fast becoming a fan of buying ready grown veg plants when you only need a handful of plants but yesterday I went one better. I belong to my local Freecycle group. For anyone who doesn’t know what Freecycle is, it is a global network, split into local and regional groups, whose main aim is to prevent reusable things from being discarded and sent to landfill. Since I have been a member I have seen caravans, wood burning stoves and even condoms! change hands. It is a great way of recycling stuff, getting rid of things and acquiring other things you didn’t realise you wanted.
Plantstuffs, which don’t really fit into the landfill remit, occasionally come up for grabs, as well as bean poles, peasticks and plant pots. A constant stream of emails all day long can become a little annoying but the advantage of opting for immediate updates is that you can be first to bag a bargain. Yesterday someone was offering a few trays of vegetable plants that were surplus to requirements and I was able to go and collect them straight away.
It seems to me that this is just the most brilliant way to do things, for people to always plant more seeds than they need and then to swap the excess for something else they don’t have time to sow. I know this goes on to some degree already on gardening forums etc and seed exchanging is quite established but I’m sure that with grow your own veg becoming increasingly fashionable combined with the technology we now have at our fingertips, plant swapping makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, I still don’t know where the seed potatoes are going to be planted and the clock is ticking.

I have just ordered some Nemoslug and I am feeling in two minds about it. Nemoslug, in case you have never heard of it before, is a biological slug killer which when watered in, introduces nematodes into the soil which in turn kill the slugs that are lurking underground. It arrives in the post in a small box, but as it is full of living organisms, it has a limited shelf life and needs to be kept in the fridge and used within two weeks. So long as the soil is the right temperature and so long as there isn’t a heat wave which dries the soil out, the nemotodes get to work, thus in theory creating a 6 week window of opportunity for seedlings to avoid slug damage for just long enough to be well on their way. It isn’t particularly cheap and they do recommend that you give the soil more than one treatment.
Now this of course is all good stuff. Slugs and snails are the bain of a gardeners life and it is soul destroying when your nurtured crops dissapear overnight and you are left doubting your own sanity, ‘I’m sure there were some seedlings growing there yesterday, but perhaps I imagined it?’ So what is my problem with Nemoslug?
Some people say it works and others say it doesn’t. There are alsorts of uncontrollable variables as regards the conditions which will make it work effectively or not and as all the work is carrying on unseen underground anyway it isn’t as if you can be sure that anything is happening at all. It is intriguing that some of us are trusting enough to hand over money for a product that only might work and comes with not a single guarantee. As an entrepreneur myself, it is certainly one of those products which I only wish I had invented, that and the water filter. At what point do you add up what you are spending on growing your own food and say, ‘This is costing me a fortune!’

Anyway, enough of that. As I have very little luck when sowing directly into the ground, I have been busy starting my seeds in pots, making my own pots using a Paper Potter. At least with this ingenious invention, once you’ve bought it, it goes on working for ever more and uses up waste paper at the same time. I did get rather carried away, starting by making pots out of newspaper, then using the colours and fonts to get creative. The weekend Guardian is really good for this as it is well designed making it easy to find lovely headings and typefaces to use. I also found some cheap wrapping paper in the shed which made even fancier pots as well as some wicker-patterned paper for pots that look like baskets. Thankfully, at this point I told myself to get a grip. Using the Paper Potter you can make pots for your seedlings out of any waste paper of a newsprint quality that will absorb water and biodegrade.
Here’s how you make them.

Today is positively spring like. It really feels like the first day of spring and for me that means getting a washload of laundry underway and pinned out on the line to dry in the fresh air. Of course my optimism could be short lived but at least for the moment life has a uplifting vibe.
My bed is surrounded by gardening books and bits of paper detailing my horticultural hopes for the season ahead. I am always way too ambitious but at least in March anything seems possible. The four edged beds, they can hardly be called ‘raised’, that I made last year are in pretty good shape; dug over, weed free and raring to go with any freshly-dug bare earth covered with hessian coffee sacks to keep them safe from marauding cats.
The globe artichokes which were planted last year are looking very lush (I think I was supposed to have cut them down to the ground over the winter but I forgot) and the rhubarb (Glaskins Perpetual – I chose that variety just for the name) is also looking very promising.

I have a few more new beds to dig, nowhere for my chitting potatoes to be planted and rasberry canes that need to go in somewhere. Gardening can be another of lifes big pressures if you don’t approach it right and it can cost a fortune as well. I don’t have a greenhouse and with limited windowsill space in the house I am trying to be realistic. I’ve still got lots of viable seeds from last year that I will be using up this year but I don’t need acres of tomatoes, just a handful of plants and likewise with other vegetables. So why do I think I have to grow everything from scratch?
Last year when I had not got round to planting something on time or else my carefully nutured seedlings disappeared overnight when the slugs had a snack attack, I started looking for ready-grown plants to buy. Mail order veg plants, ready to go in, is an increasingly growing business and you can now have a whole vegetable plot delivered to your door based on square metreage.
This trend is becoming apparent on ebay too and I feel sure this is likely to be a real boom area. I wouldn’t feel comfortable buying in my whole garden like that but I have been finding some really great things on ebay to help lighten the load. So far this year I have bought in a great selection of raspberries from Blacklands Plants and they arrived in the post in excellent condtion, have pre-ordered 5 organic tomato plants each one a different variety from helenchenplants who is growing some really interesting varieties of tomatoes, chillies and aubergines, and found unusual beetroot seed, burpees golden and chioggia, from Pelican Seeds. Last year I bought in leeks, sprouting broccoli and cavola nero plants on ebay because it was too late to plant from seed and they are all still doing very nicely. This is definitely the way to go.

I bought some unwaxed oranges the other day and had a nice suprise when I cut into them to find they were in fact blood oranges. I think both of these properties mean that they aren’t good keepers. The season for blood oranges is from December time to the beginning of April. I could make an exotic cocktail with them or use them in a salad with beetroot or something equally colourful but they are so fantastic as they are that no other preparation is needed.

The other day I was watching a food programme on Sky 3 called Taste. They were doing a feature about what to ‘cook’ for a girlie night in using ready-made food and the presenter came out with the phrase, ‘I’m not suggesting you peel a potato’. I almost choked on hearing this and the words have been going round in my head ever since. God forbid, anyone should peel a potato and to suggest such a thing…well! Once upon a time life was too short to stuff a mushroom, now it’s too busy to peel a potato.

Yesterday I bought the Saturday papers including a paper with a feature about Delia and her upcoming new TV series and book, How To Cheat At Cooking, where she will be using pre-prepared bought-in ingredients, such as ready-made mashed potatoes, cook-in sauces and other ingredients that need to be hyphenated, to rustle up lovely meals in a moment. This is aimed at busy people who don’t have much time and are also quite poor so need to eat battery farmed chickens (quite obviously a distortion of the facts, in a nutshell, based on what I have read in the paper, Chinese-whispers-stylee, pass it on!). There are bound to be many words written about her and the series in the weeks ahead as she holds such an iconic status here in the UK and this series is her comeback, having retired from cookery writing 6 years ago to concentrate on her career as a footballer.

I must admit I hold her in the highest esteem myself, having learnt to cook with her. When I lived in two places I made sure the 3 part cookery course (the first time round version) and her Summer Collection were duplicated, one in each home, as I consider them to be ‘must haves’. I know many of the recipes especially from her earlier books by heart and on numerous occasions Delia recipes have been served up at momentus family gatherings. A sort of mythical Delia inhabits my families consciousness. She has an uncanny knack of being ahead of the game, like she just knows something the rest of us are struggling to put our finger on, but I am feeling very wobbly about this new theme she has embraced.

I am not a particular fan of the ‘quick and easy’ route to anything, just for the sake of it. Some things simply are quick and easy and still work brilliantly and that’s great, but there is something at the core of this that bothers me. I think we’ve got an obsession with being busy people. Most of us ARE busy, that’s a given, but the cult of busy is about making ourselves feel significant by banging on about how busy we are all the time. There is a huge industry out there catering for our busy lives and that relies on us buying into being really ‘busy people’. What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Go on, step outside the box. Find the time to peel a potato. Upend the cliche.

We are experiencing a bit of a cold snap this weekend, so I’ve got the Rayburn all warm and glowing and batches of damp, freshly-washed laundry are draped over it to dry. I call that a win, win situation.
Last weekend we had a surprisingly spring-like day on the Sunday. It could have been April. It was so warm and sunny that I sat outside, overlooking the vegetable garden and ate spicy squash soup (made using the only 2 squashes I managed to grow last year) and cheese scones (thanks Dan, fab Guardian recipe for scones here) in the sunshine.
It gave me time to peruse the veg plot and start to get my head in gear to begin planning what needs to be done, what I am going to grow and where I am going to grow it in the year ahead. One thing that is definitely my number one resolution is to try and plant the seeds on time. I am always full of ambitious plans, do a ton of research so I know all the varieties of lettuce and the seed merchants who sell them, then I buy them, then I miss my planting ‘window’ and it is all for nothing.
Best to try and not be quite so ambitious I suppose. Lets face it, gardening is a battle. You have to face all sorts of unexpected obstacles, freak weather conditions, disease and pestilence, and hope that at the end of it you end up with some salad on your plate. I’ve got a few evenings of planning ahead to decide what to grow where and I want to add a few more beds to what is there already. The great thing about a sunny day in January is that you suddenly feel raring to go and ready to begin all over again. Let the battle commence.

Over the last few days I’ve been busy baking. I first began making sourdough bread last year starting my leaven starter from scratch. Baking for me has always been a comforting activity and I would consider myself experienced at bread baking, but sourdough baking is quite different and requires a different approach. Life was already pretty stressful and growing and feeding the starter almost tipped me over the edge. My sourdough adventure very nearly became a sourdough nightmare.
Years ago I remember a Paddington bear animation on TV where he is making porridge that keeps expanding, oozing its way over the top of the pan and down the side of the cooker until it all goes out of control and the porridge engulfs his house. This cartoon image was one that came to mind many times over those first few weeks. I was using expensive organic flour to feed the leaven and couldn’t bring myself to throw any of it away as day by day it expanded and seemed to take on a life of its own. Then I started to make it into bread and the dough was wet and unmanageable. In the middle of the night I’d be on the forum on Dan Lepard’s website trying to find the key that would make my baking comfort blanket wrap me up all warm and cosy again.
Well, I am nothing if not persistent and I was determined to crack it. Hydration, hydration, hydration I began to chant. I bought some digital scales and measured everything with precision and then it all started to fall into place. I am still not sure that my ‘kneading’ technique is quite like Dan Lepard’s but I can now turn wet sticky dough into a posh loaf, perhaps not yet the smartest-looking artisan bread but not far off.
This morning, for breakfast, I had a slice of the ‘best barm bread ever’ spread with organic butter and homemade damson jam. I closed my eyes and savoured the taste as I was eating it, appreciating every moment. If it wasn’t for the fact that my espresso machine broke last week life would have, for that moment, been pretty damn near perfect.

Rummaging around in my shed I came across a copy of ‘A La Carte’ magazine from Christmas 1985. In the 80s this title and ‘Taste’ magazine were the big foodie mags and I used to buy them in London to send to my Dad in Lancashire. My Dad loved cooking and had discovered this hobby relatively late in life. He was a cookery book cook and if what he made didn’t look exactly like the picture in the book he considered his efforts a failure. Thankfully food has become a bit more relaxed since then both in preparation and presentation.
Travelling back up north for the festivities, by the time I reached home he would often have saved a job for me to do that for some miguided reason he thought I would relish, usually on the display front. I remember one year he had made a salmon mouse in the shape of a leaping fish which he asked me to complete by surrounding it with dyed aspic. Unfortunately he had been a bit too heavy handed with the blue dye so it looked to be leaping in a municipal swimming pool. Another time he had saved me the job of tying smoked salmon and cream cheese parcels using chives as if they were ribbons – what I learnt from the experience; chives don’t behave like ribbon and do not like to be tied into bows.
Christmas cooking was always accompanied by much huffing, puffing and sighing, swearing under your breath and saying ‘never again’ (until the next time). How ever stressful and seemingly unpleasant those occasions were at the time they are the things I now remember most fondly especially as he’s not here any more to plan these mad meals.
This copy of ‘A La Carte’ was particularly special to us. A feature called ‘Surprise Christmas, it’s all wrapped up!’ was at the time inspired. I now see that Nigel Slater produced the feature (yes I know, that’s what I was thinking, I didn’t know he’d been around that long either!).

All the recipes made food that was gift wrapped. The filo pastry crackers, fabulously innovative at the time, were then copied by other magazines for the next 15 years at least. Me and Dad made them and found a box lined with tissue paper to serve them in.
But my absolute favourite recipe was for chocolate and praline boxes. The chocolate squares you needed to make the boxes weren’t easy to find even then. We had some old family friends over from Australia dining with us and when these little chocolate boxes were served they insisted on being photographed with them.

Here is the recipe. I hope nobody complains about the copyright – it’s Christmas after all and this is in the form of a homage.
Oh and by the way, I managed to buy the chocolate squares last week from an online sweet shop here. I’m going to make the chocolate and praline boxes again as a tribute to my Dad.

I have come to the conclusion that foodie gifts are always welcome. Apart from gifts for children of course who generally prefer a Play Station to a bottle of extra virgin olive oil. This week I’ve got big plans for making gifts I know I’d love to be given.

When it comes to food mixers there seem to be two main camps; do you choose Kenwood or Kitchenaid? The other day I realised that I was longing for a new Kitchenaid Artisan mixer (perhaps in tangerine) but my reasons were based on having seen them used on TV food programmes (always in red). As I consider myself intelligent enough to see through this blatant product placement I decided to question my desires. Both makes have been around for a very long time, Kenwood since the 50’s and Kitchenaid since before that and it seems that both have built up strong brand loyalty. I haven’t inherited a preference myself, growing up it was only the ‘Blackpool landlady’ faction of my family who aspired to the Kenwood Chef with all the attachments.
After some research I am drawn more towards Kenwood, originally and for most of its existence a British company. The design of the Chef stayed relatively unchanged from the early 60’s and has a great retro look, a bit more edgey than the US 50’s-diner style Kitchenaid. The fact that the Chef was considered to be ‘over engineered’ contributed to its robust and reliable reputation. So instead of rushing off to John Lewis to buy new I have saved a deserving vintage Chef from landfill. Christmas has come early at The Laundry and my life has just taken a turn for the better.
And not only that ….. it is TANGERINE.