The Gallery - An Apple Tree

This apple tree is 3 years old, we planted it after we moved in and started work on the garden.  It is small and only bore 6 fruits last year, but this year its branched are bowed under the weight of its fruit.

For me this feel like parenting, sometimes you feed the children, nurture and look after them and it feels like they are just ignoring your advice, but then it just happens.  It clicks and there is please and thank you without prompting.

Frugal Food - Utilise your Garden

One of the many comments I got on my feeding a family of 4 for £50 post was that we must be green fingered or have a lot of room for growing vegetables.

The truth is we don't and I am not, we have a small back garden, but in 2009 MadDad built me 3 raised beds, they are not large, they are 6 foot by approx 3 foot and we also have a couple of barrels that we fill with potatoes.

But those raised beds and what pots we have round the garden supply me with a steady supply of vegetables right through till the Autumn.

At the moment we have the following

Bed One - Draft Beans, Runner Beans and Pea's

Barrel - New Potatoes

Bed Two - Spinach, Rainbow Chard, Kale

Barrel - New Potatoes

Bed Three - Leeks and Onions

6 Hanging baskets + Home made fence baskets - Strawberries

2 troughs - Cucumber

2 troughs - Tomatoes

1 Container - Courgettes

4 Containers - Herbs

2 Containers - Salad leaves

Come Autumn, we will be planing garlic and Spring cabbage, we have already eaten the spring onions and all the radish that we grew.

We have grown everything from seed and have shared the initial cost of the seeds with our neighbours who also grow and friends that have an allotment.  We don't have a green house, but I germinated and grew all the seedlings on the window ledges!

We planted our apple tree 3 years ago and this year is the first year we will see many apples from it (we only got about 7 last year), but you need to bear in mind that our back garden was that of a new build - full of clay and bricks with very little soil at all.  

We also planted a pear tree and will get our first fruit from that this year, which is very exciting indeed.

Upkeep and Daily Maintenance

We bought a reduce water butt in the sales last year and we water the beds and containers every night which takes us about 15 mins , or longer if the boys help!  I also go out a couple of times a week and weed, but we don't get many weeds as we plant very close together.

Slugs and snails are our main enemy, but the boys are well trained.  If they see a slug or snail, they squash them.

I think this post shows that you don't have to have a lot of space or a huge initial outlay to start growing your own vegetables.

Fresh from the Garden

A Wonderful Bank Holiday Monday spent in the Kitchen and Garden

I think the sun forgot our little park of the North East today.

So we have spent the day baking.

Maxi did all the weighing and measuring

Mini did most of the stirring and tasting

We have had a lot of fun and made lots of cakes

Oat and raisin cooks and mince pies (mini's favorites)

Many Muffins, sweet mincemeat and St Stephens Day Muffins, in addition to some fairy cakes.

Whilst I was busy in the kitchen, MadDad tended the garden, including planting out the courgettes and cucumbers.

Everything is looking great and really coming along.

He also washed and cleaned the cars, ready for the trip we are taking today to Emma Bridgewater's Factory to celebrate their 25th Anniversary with them. We are very excited and I am sure will have loads to show and tell you.

A weekend spent in the Garden

I said that I had grand plans for the garden this weekend, well the weather was mostly kind and we did manage to get quite a lot done

Onions have been planted out, 2 varieties, Red Barron and Bedford Champion.  We have also sown some spring onions (Lisbon) direct in to the bed.

Rainbow Chard has been transplanted in to the bed too, alongside side Chinese Broccoli, which is a new vegetable for us.

We have also direct sown the runner beans, peas and dwarf beans in to another bed.

The potatoes have been planted in to our two barrels.

Our Sunflowers have been transplanted too, the boys are so excited about these and can not wait for them to start getting bigger.

We also managed to move the sandboat and the playhouse, well we swopped them round,as the sand needs to get more sun to dry out, we dug the wet sand in to the raised beds and will be getting new play sand at some point.

There is still lots to do, but I have put away the other seeds for safe keeping and for the life of me can not find them!  I have also got some strawberries and tomatoes coming, which I used Tesco club card point to pay for.  Our neighbour dropped in two raspberry canes, which we are soaking ready to plant later in the week.

We didn't plant the sweet peas out yet, as they could do with getting a little bigger. 

So my plans for this week are:

Sow some lettuce in trays

Find my other seeds (spinach, Kale, Leeks) and sow in the conservatory

Sow some radish in between the rows of beans

Sow some borlotti beans in the conservatory

Me and MadDad even contemplated putting our name down for an allotment, but part of the reason I love growing so much is that I can see it, the boys can see it and I can walk out the back door and pick something for dinner.  So even if I only have 3 small raised beds, they are wonderful.

Sunflower Club

We are taking part in Nuturestores Sunflower Club and have been busy planting our seeds. We are using single giant sunflowers and have decided to start them off inside, as last year our sunflowers were pretty late and lame!

So we decided to plant our seeds in egg shells, as sunflowers don't like to be transplanted and this is a great and Eco friendly way of doing this.

Both the boys love gardening which makes my heart sing and we will be planting more seeds over the coming weeks

We put one seed in each egg shell and covered with more soil.

We are going to be doing a scrapbook like Nurturestore have and keep a record of growth etc over the coming months too.  When I asked Mini what did the sunflowers seeds need to grow, he told me that they need soil, water, sunshine and lots of love.

Parsnip Harvest

I pulled our first parsnip from the garden yesterday to add to our sausage casserole.

What a whopper!!

It tasted good too, time to pull the rest I think.

Pumpkins and all that

We decided that we would carve our precious pumpkins today.  We are so proud that we managed to grow them ourselves in the garden.  Like all things in TheMadHouse, it was a family affair, but MadDad took centre stage.

Although MiniMad is a super duper scooper

Watch out man at work and concentrating hard

Nothing too scary, the minimads dont like scary

A face and a bat

Then roasted pumpkin seeds, delicious and so simple.

All you need do is scoop out all the seeds and clean them.  We like ours salted, so I boil then in salted water for 20 minutes, then toss them in garlic butter or olive oil and pop in a roasting sheet (single layer) in the oven for about 30 mins at 180.

The mini's were waiting for them as they came out of the oven and they lasted all of an hour.  I have orders to buy any inexpensive pumkins I see for more!!

We also harvested some of our sprouts today to go with the roast chicken and Yorkshires. I love the way they look for architectural.  I also love the fact that my children know that sprouts grow on a stick!!

 I am not keen on the taste, but will eat them and grow them as my children love them and I am all for encouraging eating vegetables when they want them.

Its raining its pouring

The weather is very wet at the moment, so much so that a 25 min journey took me and the boys an hour and a half this afternoon and was very hairy in places. I was secretly pretty apprehensive, but the mini's were loving every minute of it! Especially as they watched two cars fail to make it though the flooding and they gave a great big cheer when we manged to get through, MadDads voice in my head "high revs and go slow". I have a diesel and that does make it easier in the wet.

Well one thing that is loving the rain is our garden. MadDad installed a water butt when he built the raised beds and we have been amazed at how much water it collects and uses and we love the fact that it is so ecological too (one of the other things we want to instill in the children is looking after their planet).

We are really enjoying the fruits of MadDads labour and the peas are wonderful and sweat almost like sweets. The mangetout are so crisp and delicious. The kale and chard plentiful and both boys love them, although MadDad is not so keen. The potatoes are coming on well, but we planted them a couple of weeks late due to hospital, so we are waiting before trying them. The cabbage are yummy and well you get the picture it all tastes so much better when you grow it yourself with no pesticides and anyway I am running out of ways to describe the taste. The spinach seemed to have taken over so we have pulled a couple of the plant.

We are excited watching the rest and the boys seem to be even more excited than me. The eldest MiniMad came in and jumped up and down when the beans first flowered. we have eaten carrot thinning in salads. The mixed salad leaves have not done so good, neither the belotti beans or the corn. The pumpkins, leeks, onions, sprouts, broccoli, cauli and parsnips are all looking promising.

Even better still the apple tree we planted last year (we moved in to a new build, so our garden was just a building site 2 years ago) is bearing fruit. We have strawberries in hanging baskets and I think we need to have much more strawbs next year as the boys love them.

How does your garden grow

We have tried to teach the boys were the produce we eat comes from since they were tiny - having a father in law who is a dairy farmer really helps. So we grow veg in our small garden.

After coming out of hospital MadDad decided that I needed raised beds to make this more accessible this year and set to work with his trusty saw and transformed some old planks of wood in to 3 fantastic raised beds. We are now beginning to see the fruits of his labours.

We planted cabbage, cauli, broccoli, kale, chard, spinach, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks, beans, peas, pumpkins, courgettes and strawberry's in our little beds.

It is wonderful watching them eat all the food we have grown and also the amazement as they see things grow before their very eyes.

They each help water the plants and take responsibility for their own pot of sunflowers - feeding them and watering them too.

I am very lucky in that both the boys love eating veg, but this introduces new veg to them very easily and we are having ratatouille for lunch