Beets me

 One of my favourite experiments in the veg patch is growing something we think we don't like. 

My reasoning goes that if you can taste something picked at its best, prepared freshly and still dislike it, you've given that food every chance and you never have to try that thing again... but you might be surprised.

I used to think I didn't much like sprouts until I grew them and harvested them myself. Peas got a lot more interesting to small children who could eat them fresh out of the pod. Somehow red currants off the bush are vastly nicer than those in a supermarket. In fairness kohlrabi remained boring and salsify just wouldn't grow so there's not always a success, but it's a game worth playing. 

In my opinion, the worst family of vegetables is that loathesome Clean Dirt masquerading as food, beets and chard. There's no faster way to destroy a salad than to add some baby chard leaves, or that duplicitous, misnomered leaf Perpetual Spinach. Aside - It's not spinach, it's a chard. The name is to make it sound good when it's actually dreadful. Just accept that spinach bolts and sow it successionally.

Worst of all is the Root Vegetable of Doom, beetroot. 

I've had it grated raw in salads, pickled, roasted with other veg, added to hummus, as a so called crisp, ruining added to a smoothie  and god knows what they do to the weird vacuum sealed stuff in the supermarket, but I've had that too. All tasting like a mouthful of earth. At least the pickled one was dirt with added vinegar. 

I'm not alone in this. When my Dad did a bit of vegetable growing in a corner of their herbaceous garden, he was delighted by the success of his beetroot crop. My Mum actually had nightmares about him force-feeding it to her. 

A few years ago I blew a moderate fortune on booking 6 months ahead to take Mark to Tommy Banks's restaurant The Black Swan at Oldstead*. Don't get me wrong, it was money well spent, it was the meal of a lifetime! What I didn't realise was that one of the signature dishes is a slab of crapaudine beetroot cooked for 5 hours in beef fat or olive oil. Yikes!

It was absolutely delicious.

With that in mind, this year I decided to give beets a chance**.

If Tommy Banks goes to the hassle of growing 14th century French heritage beets, and I really want to give beetroot the best go at being acceptable, I thought I should probably do the same. Crapaudine means toad, a reference to the rough skin on these unusual beets. Only specialist and heritage growers sell the seeds, but there are lots of chef-type recipes specifying them in recipes so I figured they must be worth the hassle.

Looking a bit moth eaten by October

Germination went quite well. I sowed the seeds direct in May, with a second, less successful sowing in late June. The leaves looked like pretty much standard beets but the root itself is more like a fat parsnip shape than a globe. I wasn't expecting that. Unfortunately, the same problem as I've had with both carrots and parsnips happened with the beets - they hit an obstacle in the soil and split. I had a nice thick cylinder for the top few inches of root, them they split into useless leggy strands.

Slightly deformed beetroot

Still, I had some healthy looking plants, so was free to experiment.

First I tried the baby leaves, which I'd been told were good in salads. Nope, they taste exactly like chard and are horrible. The hens were extremely grateful to my picky tastebuds as they got loads of nice leafy treats. Personally, I'd rather go hungry.

Next, I tried one of the tiny beetroots raw after I'd thinned the row a bit. Dad said they are particularly nice when young. Nope, still like willingly eating dirt. 

When it came to cooking them, I decided on a split approach. I would drizzle some in oil and salt and roast in a tinfoil parcel, and the other I would try approximate the Tommy Banks approach by cooking it on a very low heat in olive oil on the hob for a few hours.

The latter didn't work at all. Even on the lowest setting on the smallest gas ring, the oil cooked too vigorously. I ended up with a weird halfway house of boiling olive oil then turning the heat off, back and forth for about 2 hours before I abandoned it. I think I should have removed the beetroot from the oil at that point but I let it cool down first.

The second worked really well! I couldn't justify having the oven on for a couple of hours for just beetroot, so I also baked a gluten free lime yogurt cake for my Very Excellent Mate SJ, then one of my favourite easy meals, confit tandoori chickpeas from Ottolenghi. 

To serve it, I meant to have nice seeded flatbreads with Abergavenny goats cheese and walnuts. As it turned out, the shop didn't have any flatbreads and the walnuts in the cupboard were stale, so we went with just the beetroot and cheese.

The attempted confit beetroot was a bit oily, but other than that they all tasted pretty much the same. Remarkable sweet, a smooth texture and yes, a little bit like Clean Dirt but only a tiny bit, and it complemented the cheese. I think the walnuts - or a bitter leaf like radicchio - might have improved it by cutting through the sweetness but it was still more of a success than I'd anticipated. 

Mark's verdict was Absolutely Delicious. Mine was Not Bad, Actually.

I don't think I'll be rushing to buy great bunches of the stuff, but as an occasional thing, slow roased beetroot is a nice surprise. 5 months from garden to plate, but I don't garden hoping for fast food.

A small plate for such a long project

As I have been putting away gardening things for the winter, I see I still have half a packet of crapaudine seeds. I might even plant them next year. 

Maybe.

* It was later voted best restaurant in the world, and I believe it. If you should ever stumble across a giant wad of money, I heartily reccomend spending it there, or Roots in York by the same team.

** Apologies to John and Yoko

Beanz Meanz Happiness

One of my very favourite moments in the veg patch is when the borlotti beans are ready to be picked. For weeks I've watched the pods grow and swell, become mottled then a deep satisfying scarlet. They are lovely ornaments dangling down, gently swaying in a breeze. They draw the eye, only to taunt me with Not Yet.

Not quite ready

It's when those pods are drying and dull that the fun starts.

I love the feeling of splitting a leathery pod down its central seam to reveal the cream and purple jewels inside. It's incredibly satisfying. Each bean is a beauty - even the occasional pale green under-ripe ones are pretty. Before long the mound of pods is replaced by a bowl full of plump borlotti beans ready to become that most wonderful of soups - or is that stews? -  pasta e fagioli.

Pasta e fagioli just means pasta and beans. If you're Dean Martin and come from Naples stock*, it's pronounced Pasta Fazool, which conveniently rhymes with "when the stars make you drool," which is why I sing That's Amore every time I make it.

There are probably as many different Correct Recipes as their are Italian families, but this is how I make mine, showing off the borlottis at their finest.

Pasta e fagioli

• Large bowl of fresh borlotti beans
• 3 medium onions
• 2 large carrots
• 1 small head of celery
• bay leaves
• stalk of rosemary
• sprig of thyme
• stalks of parsley tied together
• 2tbs olive oil
• 2 tins of tomatoes
• salt
• pepper
• lemon juice

then, later, 

• macaroni
• water

First, cook the borlotti beans until tender:

In  a good sized pot, tip in the beans and cover with plenty of water. Cut in half one each of the onions and carrots and add them and 4 stalks of celery (including leaves if present) to the pot along with the bay leaves, rosemary and thyme. To make life easier for yourself later, tie the parsley stalks together so you can fish them out easily at the end.

Bring to the boil and skim off any froth, then simmer until the beans are completely tender. This is generally about an hour - do keep checking the beans aren't boiling dry as the liquid will make our soup stock.

Leave to cool, then remove and discard the vegetables and herbs. They have both infused our beans and flavoured the stock, and have little goodness remaining.

Chop up the remaining onions, carrots and celery and fry gently in the olive oil until tender. Add the tinned tomatoes and cook until they've broken down a little.

Depending on which pot is the biggest, either add the beans to the vegetables or the vegetables to the beans and stock. Bring to a boil and season generously with salt and pepper, plus a healthy slosh of lemon juice to brighten the flavours.

At this point, I usually let it all cool and portion it into tupperware or ziplock bags, labelled E Fagioli because they haven't got the pasta in yet. The pasta tends to keep absorbing water and becomes unpleasantly over-floppy if it's kept for several days, in my experience, so is best added when you're going to eat it. I pop the various containers of soup in the fridge and freezer - they defrost just fine, and we have a very quick dinner whenever we need it.

The Pasta bit:

Put as much of the soup in a saucepan as you need for the number of people you are serving. I find a big heaped ladle per person is about right, maybe one and an half if you're greedy me. Add a small handful of dried macaroni per person and some cold water - probably 125ml per portion. Bring the soup to the boil and simmer for around 8 minutes. Top with some grated parmesan or pecorino if you like.

The borlotti beans really are next level delicious. They elevate this from a basic vegetable soup to something rich and nourishing and ridiculously moreish. I highly recomend growing them, they are an absolute doddle.

Buon appetito!

  

*yes, a terrible soup pun. I'm not proud.

Water works

 I love to grow veg in the poly tunnel and I love my garden but one part I really don't like is watering things. I forget, or my knees hurt, or I get distracted. I am terrible at remembering to do it consistently and unfortunately consistency is the key to successful veg growing.

Watching a section on Gardener's World about an allotment for a guy who is frequently away for periods during the growing season, I was interested in his 'self-watering' planters, or Wicking Pots. This is a system involving a reservoir of water, a wick to draw the water up, and the pot itself. There are absolutely heaps of items you can buy from the basic to the very high tech, but the principle is largely the same.

Our garden tends to the 'allotment chic' aesthetic rather than gadgetry. It felt much more fun to work out how to make them myself than to buy a system so I headed to Google to look at ways of making some wicking pots myself.

THE TRIAL

On the advice of some very helpful YouTube channels, we bought generic builders buckets from Wickes for a quid a go. These would be our resevoirs.

Reusing large plastic pots from shrubs we'd bought in the past would be fine for my cucumber and tomato plants. To hold up the pots I put upturned ice cream tubs in the buckets. This holds the pot proud of the bucket, creating more space for the reservoir.  I cut openings in the sides to let the water in, and in the top to allow air to escape as I pour water in.

As for wicks,  I took the worst of our old tea towels and a sweatshirt B has outgrown. I cut them into strips and pushed the ends through the holes in the base of each pot, long enough to dangle over the ice cream tub to the bottom of the bucket. 

There are loads of different ways to lay out the wicking systems. I made three different ones so I can monitor the results and see which (if any!) is effective.

1) Four thick twisted sections of sweatshirt fabric running all the way up the sides of the pot and held in place by clothes pegs, with a piece of fabric across the bottom of the pot to stop any soil falling into the reservoir. 

2) Several short wicks leading to a thick layer of fabric in the base of the pot to water it from below only.

3) Loads of short croquet-hoop style wicks made from tea towels, both ends trailing to the resevoir and fiilling every one of the holes in the pot - a little but everywhere approach

You can see approaches 1 and 3 - I forgot to photograph the base layer type.

Next job was to fill the pots with peat free compost and plant the tomato and cucumber seedlings. I put in a cane to tie them to as they grew. The pot then went into the bucket - making sure the fabric wicks were hanging down to touch the bottom of the bucket - to sit securely on top of the ice cream tubs. Mark carried them into the poly tunnel for me and I filled the resevoirs from the water butt.

I found the top of the soil felt slightly damp for about 4 days - 5 if it was cooler out. This was great for my erratic watering; even more so later in the summer, when I once again tore the meniscus in my right knee and mobility became a bigger issue for me.  It was also great because our 8 days in Portugal meant my Very Excellent Mate Penny only had to pop over twice to water them.

The gorgeousness of Portugal

Truly fantastic holiday- and yes, you can read in a pool

RESULTS

Good things - 

• stayed moist
• needed little attention
• plants survived heat waves and absences

Bad things - 

• the insects! something clearly lay its eggs in the stagnant water at the bottom of the resevoirs
• the smell when watering - disturbing the stagnant bit not only led to a swarm of flies but also a horrible stink
• instability - the pots listed somewhat over the course of the summer so the plants grew at some inconvenient angles. I could pop a bit of stone or brick to wedge them upright in future

Learning points - 

• FEED THE PLANTS.  I always used growbags with added fertiliser incorporated so it didn't occur to me I needed to regularly feed the plants. What can I say, I'm a twit.
• put less water in the resevoir each time unless I was going away. By leaving so much standing water in the reservoir (because I thought the plants would be more thirsty than they were at the start) I ended up with the bugs/pong situation
• wedge them in place so they don't tip to the side

I will definitely do it again. There was no observable difference in the growth of the plants or the effectiveness of the wicking systems whether tea towel, sweatshirt, long wicks, short wicks and croquet hoops, so that makes things easy. The wicks aren't reusable as the cotton is pretty disgusting after one season, but we always have some old rags, t-shirts or cloths around.

For a number of reasons we didn't have a successful tomato crop - the scary 40 degree temperatures stressed everything, the plants fruited late and didn't have time to ripen, and yes, for those on the back, I totally failed to regularly feed the poor things.

On the positive side, lots of green tomatoes means lots of green tomato chutney.

Green Tomato Chutney

• 500g unripe tomatoes
• 500g onions
• 250g sultanas (or 125g plus 125g diced Bramley
• 200g brown sugar
• 1.5tsp salt
• 1tsp cayenne pepper
• 1tsp crushed cardamom seeds
• 1tsp mustard seeds
• 500ml vinegar - whatever type you have

Chop the tomatoes and onions, chuck everything into a pot and simmer uncovered for 45-75 minutes, depending how finely you diced things. When it's nice and reduced, put the hot churney into sterilised jars.

Ta-Da!

Getting my head straight, getting my home straight

As anyone who has ever been to our house will no doubt be aware*, I hate housework.

Not just dislike, actively loathe. 

I'm frequently happy as a clam cooking, baking, preserving, sowing, potting on, pruning... I even quite like pegging the washing out. Repairing a tear or sewing a button on is pretty satisfying too. But tidying and cleaning? I'd rather have dentistry.

Even Gonzo's complaining about the mess

A more recent impediment has been the short period of activity I can manage before I 'run out of knees'. If I've only got a good active 45 minutes I'll be damned if I'll spend it cleaning the kitchen when I could be in the garden or making a curry. 

With Mark working full time, the lads with their stuff and B at school, this leads to the place becoming a bit of a tip. I'm the one with the time to tackle it and I don't or won't or can't. It becomes a vicious circle - the worse it gets, the more is required to put it right, and the more anxious and stressed about tackling it I get, so I put it off.

I was lying in bed this morning doing my physio exercises and feeling very fed up with the state of the bedroom and bathroom, hacked off with my pain levels and pretty pissed off with my lack of motivation. 

The bathroom didn't just need a quick clean, it needs the steam mop on the tiles and grouting. The bedroom won't just improve with a quick tidy up, I need to sort out the massive stacks of clutter on every horizonal surface (except the bed - that just had the cat and me). After I washed the sheer curtains last summer I broke the wire and never rehung them, so that needs doing too. And the windows need a clean.

My instinct with each of these was to tell myself it's all awful, I'm a horrible lazy slob and to walk away and close the door on it all until one day I can't stand it anymore and burn it down actually get stuck into cleaning.

Then I stopped myself. I've done enough CBT to not get into this sort of unhelpful churning, for god's sake, so why wasn't I using it?

As Voltaire tells us, 'best' is the enemy of 'good'. I am a very thorough person by nature, but that's a stumbling block here. OK, I can't spend two hours with the steam cleaner on all the tiling. What if I didn't tackle the tiles and the grouting, but did clean the sink, toilet, mirror and shower screen and stopped? No, I wouldn't have a glistening lovely bathroom, but I would have one much nicer than now.

A good 80% of the clutter in the bedroom is books I can't currently put away. If I'm not up to (yet another) big book cull, what could I improve in 5 minutes? Simply putting the travelling bag away, removing clothes from the chaise longue, making the bed, collecting the laundry into one place made the room less of a disgrace. 

I had internalised that if I wasn't doing cleaning 'properly', it wasn't worth doing. That's nonsense. It's not a binary of acceptable and unacceptable. There's a sliding scale from Show Home to Shit Tip and a nudge in the right direction is a good thing.

It's simple, it's obvious but I couldn't see it.  I don't have to do everything thoroughly or not at all. Similarly, I don't have to commit to 'little and often' as a permanent approach. I've been an All Or Nothing person my whole life, it's not likely to change now. But I can just decide "I would feel better if I spent 5 minutes on that job" and do it, without pressuring myself to do the next bit and the next. And without walking away from it all because it's too much.

One day there might be a utopia in which I can make my friends' dinners and they do my cleaning - or I work out how to monetise my disparate skills and earn enough to employ a cleaner. But until then, doing a bit when I can is better than my current approach. 

I generally write things down here when I think I'll need to come back to them. (This is usually recipe or garden related!) I know my housekeeping debacles are a recurring theme, so I'm going to need reminding of all this. Type it out, find the right words, rewrite a bit until I make sense to myself and POW the muddle of emotions and anxieties in my head becomes something I have Thought Through (another favourite thing of mine) and no longer has to power to stress me.

Words make things so much better.

*I once had a friend who used to come around frequently tell me "If my house was like this I would never invite anyone over." She did have a cleaner 3 times a week though.  

oh, Canada

Yesterday was Canada Day. For me it's a chance to mess about making food from my childhood and think about all friends who would share that food with me over those years - a very personal reason to celebrate.  Normally in Canada it's a celebration of nationhood, of who we are and where we came from. Flags, songs, fireworks. Not this year.

The horrifying revelations about the Indigenous Residential Schools and the number of bodies buried there, nameless and abandoned, has shaken Canada's vision of itself as The Nice Place. We need to look clear-eyed at the atrocities of our past, acknowledge our complicity in a society that not just allowed but encouraged this to take place, and to mourn with those who lost their families and their culture. So this year, Canada Day is a muted occasion tainted by the shame of what the state did to vulnerable and disempowered people it should have been protecting and nurturing.

Reading the news, I wondered whether it would be more respectful to call off having our neighbours over as planned. I decided to go ahead, partly because it would let down to very special little boys, and partly because my cancelling my one day of being Canadian for the year doesn't do anything to support the First Nations. A hair shirt gesture by me helps no one.

So we went ahead.

Seeing as the handful of people who read this blog all know me anyway, you will not be surprised to learn I went a bit overboard. What started with a plan to bake butter tarts turned into a 5 hour session in the kitchen, including some rather mixed successes in cheese-making.

The crux of the thing was how to try recreate poutine in the UK, and make it suitable for vegetarians.  Poutine is chips and fresh cheese curds liberally doused in (usually chicken) gravy. It turns out the UK doesn't generally have cheese curds and my usual onion gravy isn't the right kind of gravy. Clearly experimentation was needed.

In the end I pretty much cracked it.

Vegetarian gravy:

1 onion, diced

1 handful dried porcini mushrooms

40g butter

handful of plain flour

500ml double strength vegetable stock

20ml soy sauce 

Cook the onion on a low heat in the butter, stirring occasionally until it starts to caramelise - probably around 20-30 minutes. Meanwhile, pour 500ml boiling water on the dried mushrooms and leave to steep. 

When the onions start to colour, add the flour and stir, making a roux. Once the roux has cooked off and is starting to stick, gradually add the vegetable stock (I use those Knorr stock pot things, but whatever you prefer) and whisk it smooth each time. Tip in the mushroom stock, rehydrated mushrooms and soy sauce. Leave to simmer for 10 minutes or just before it's needed.

Pass the gravy through a sieve; it should be smooth and glossy and a good pouring consistency. Add a dash of hot water if needed. Pour generously over your chips and cheese curds.

The creation of real, squeaky curds for the poutine is something I still have to master, but the compromise of my (initially futile) cheese making still tasted great with chips and gravy.

Cheese Curds:

1 litre of full fat milk

one entirely pointless phial of vegetarian rennet

generous slosh of lemon juice

slightly too much salt.

Following the instructions that came with my mother-in-law Marion's cheese making kit, I heated the milk to 28 degrees and added drops of the rennet diluted in a bit of water. I left it for the maximum suggested time of 60 minutes, and came back to a pan of warm milk. In fairness, the rennet instructions did say to store it in a cool place and it's been in my (very warm) kitchen or Marion's (very warm) conservatory for 6 months, because the instructions about keeping it cool were inside the kit. 

On the assumption that if it works for paneer, it can work for this, I warmed the milk slightly once again and added lemon juice. The milk curdled satisfactorily, so I put cheescloth in a collander and drained the whey off. (I actully used some of it for the vegetable stock in the gravy)

Mixing the drained curds with some salt, I put them in a container in the fridge until needed. 

Other foods I associate with Canada are Grandma Curl's potato salad, chicken wings (our family had weekly trips to Mellows in Main West, Hamilton for wings night) Nanaimo bars and really good grilled cheese sandwiches. Obviously there's Kraft Dinner too, but since they removed all of the dangerous and probably toxic additives it's no fun anymore.

Pearl Curry, grandmother to our childhood best friends Darrin and Kirsten, made the best potato salad in all the world. As her grandchildren struggled over Grandma Curry and her first name, she was Grandma Curl to everyone. 

Grandma Curl's Potato Salad:

Cold cooked potatoes cut into dice (I like Charlottes)

1-2 hard boiled eggs

1 green pepper

1 onion or several spring onions

Hellman's mayonnaise (Grandma Curl was very insistent on this)

Chop up the hard boiled eggs, onion and green papper as finely as you can - not much bigger that breadcrumbs. I slice finely then go to town with a mezza luna until they are  chopped into tiny pieces. Combine the spuds, egg, pepper and onion to a large bowl, mixing gently. Add mayonnaise a dollop at a time, as you don't need as much as you might think. Taste and adjust seasoning to taste. To go the full Pearl aesthetic you can top it with a generous sprinkling of paprika.

Proper Grilled Cheese Sandwiches:

Butter

White bread

Grated extra strong (Canadian) cheddar

Grated Mozzarella

Mix the cheeses together. Thickly butter the slices of bread. Put it butter side down in a frying pan, griddle or panini press. Top with plenty of grated cheese (cheddar for flavour, mozzarella for texture) and the second slice of bread, butter side up. Press down with a fish slice, and when nicer crisp and browned, turn over carefully and repeat.

Make more than you think you'll need because they do get eaten quickly.

It was a laid back affair. Not really a party, just a get together between neighbours. The girls played games with our 5 year old neighbour and Luke kept soon-to-be-3 neighbour entertained for ages with the help of a stick, a leaf and the pond. We chatted, swapped tales and generally had a lovely relaxed evening.

It was wonderful to share the food of my childhood home with the ace people in my life now - I think North Leeds is ripe for converting to the joys of a butter tart and a bowl of poutine.

June's Three Letter Acronyms: HRT and RHS

 

What a lazy thing I've been for 6 months! Not a word written, and my principle activity has been binge-reading for days on end. No wonder I'm fatter and more unfit than ever. The inactivity and inertia of 16 months of isolation has led to me being heavier than ever and I'm a bit ashamed to let people see me. I was feeling pretty low about it. With that and my stomach hernia tearing ever wider, I feel something of a lopsided freak. 

In addition, my moods have been getting worse and worse. I've alway been on the ranting feisty side. However, over the last five years I've been FURIOUS. Not a bit irritable, not grumpy, actually incandescent with rage most of the time and struggling to suppress it. My poor family are very hard done by. It can't be helping my blood pressure

Added to that has been increased joint pain, erratic sleeping, hot flushes, and for the first time in my life, poor memory.  I always had an excellent memory. Now I feel disorganised and stupid; I can't remember names and frequently drop a word from my brain for a while. I was worried this is how dementia starts, to be honest.

However, Davina McColl's excellent programme about menopause gave me the prod I needed. I emailed my GP (phone calls and appointments are near impossible) and aftert a telephone consult 4 weeks later, find myself the owner of the coolest stickers known to women - the HRT patch stuck to my butt cheek.

I'm only at the start of my HRT experience, but so far it's bloody fantastic. Reduced flushes, but still there sometimes, slightly reduced joint pain but mostly NO RAGE.*  It's brilliant! I feel optimistic. I can have fun. I can have sex, too, which perimenopausal me was struggling with somewhat. It's a clear broad square of cellotape that is making my life so very much better.  I give thanks to the Goddess of HRT, whoever she is, and encourage all my perimenopausal-suffering sisters to request it. 

Side effects so far are a tendency to get even pinker in the sunshine, a burst of swearing when I realise I've forgotten to swap patches and having to use baby oil for the first time in decades. (It cleans the sticky residue off your skin). It should even regulate my periods; a blessing when my cycle ranges from 16 days to 147 days!

In celebration of this new optimistic me, Mark and I went to a visit at the new RHS Bridgewater garden in Salford. We'd seen the first of four episodes of the BBC documentary of its contruction and thought it looked great. The main attraction for us was  - inevitably -  the chance to see such a massive kitchen garden. I may be a grempty spoaces adual convert to growing flowers but my true love is growing food.

It's important to remember that Bridgewater's a very new garden opening in a difficult time. There are some areas not established enough to look impressive - particularly the Chinese Riverside Garden - and some empty spaces only gradually being planted out. However, you such a young garden it is fantastic!  The repeated swathes of salvia and geums, the beautiful structures for climbing plants echoing the Bothey's chimney, the pleached tree courtyards and stunning use of water in both the kitchen garden and paradise garden were delightful. 

We weren't the only fans. As well as the human admirers, the gardens were filled wiht bees of all types, butterflies, dragonflies, damsel flies and birds. We were particularly delighted to see a swallow nest full of chicks, and watch the adults swoop in every two minutes with beaks crammed with insects. Give me a puffer jacket and call me Michaela Strachan!

I was very impressed how natural the new lake looked already, with at least 3 species of dragonfly in residence. Their waterlilies were in bloom weeks before ours, so I was definitely rather envious. Unfitness and knee pain meant we didn't explore the furthest areas of woodland, but this is very much as garden in progress so coming again won't be a hardship.

One thing I've found at every RHS venue or event I've been to is how absolutely lovely the staff are. Those at Bridgewater are clearly as proud as punch of the new garden, and were happy to chat with the many visitors on all sorts of topics. They really are a credit to the RHS, and I hope the organisation knows it.

The main prompt for writing a quick post today was my mother in law Marion, who was hoping I'd posted some phtots of Bridgewater for her to admire. In that spirit, here are lots of photos of pretty or inventive things that appealed to me:

*Ok, a bit of rage, but that's because of Johnson and Cummiongs and Hancock and all those weaselly mendacious incompetents, so is to be expected

To garden is to be an optimist

It's that rare thing - a properly snowy day in England.  They are exciting days to be relished, as years can go by without them. The wildlife is making the most of it as well - two healthy young foxes were. doing what can only be described as frolicking in the next garden, and it was all very Christmas card-like. Leaping, pouncing, rolling in the snow, looking absolutely gorgeous. The birds are less keen. The hens are quail are hunkered down under shelter. 23 starlings mobbed the bird feeders, so I suspect I'll need to venture out and top that up shortly.

I'm warm and snug inside with a stack of seed and plant catalogues and a wish list. It's time to plan this year's vegetable garden. 

We've had a lot of reference books over the years but the one I most turn to is the River Cottage Handbook: Veg Patch by Mark Diacono. It's full of practical advice, suggestions about various varieties, soil conditions, sowing and planting charts and all the usual stuff you'd expect. However, what stands it apart is the section on What To Plant.

Diacono suggests first making a list of all the veg you like. Don't worry about whether it will grow or not at this stage, you can whittle the list down later.  If a vegetable doesn't appear on your list, don't grow it.  Sounds obvious but believe me, it isn't. I grew perpetual spinach for several years before accepting that yes, true spinach bolts and runs to seed but who cares? It's far, far nicer to eat than a chard pretending to be spinach. See also beetroot (for my Mum) and radish (for my Dad).

He also suggests you look at several different reasons to plant something. Is it far better when freshly picked? Asparagus, peas, sweetcorn and sprouts picked minutes ago are all a world away from the supermarket equivalent because the sugars degrade to starch by the hour. Freshly picked tomatoes smell absolutely wonderful. The best strawberries you'll ever taste are picked straight from the plant, still warm from the sun.

Is it expensive to buy but easy to grow? Again, asparagus is the clear example; once the bed is well established it effortlessly produces stalks for years. Herbs grow very well from seed in generous armfuls. The more unusual varieties like Pink Fir Apple spuds are pricey in the shops and a doddle to grow in a sack on the patio.  

The reverse is also important from my point of view - is it cheap to buy and either complicated to grow or needs too much space? Don't bother. (Celery, I'm looking at you.) Greedy things, squashes - the plants grow quickly and well but they take many months and a huge patch of the raised bed to produce something I can pick up for a quid at the supermarket with no loss of flavour. Onions are insanely cheap, whereas shallots are far more expensive to buy and grow beautifully in our climate so I choose them instead.

NB - this space issue is for those of us with limited raised bed space or a small veg patch. You allotmenteers can fill your boots, you lucky devils.

How about thinking about food miles - there are loads of commonly imported vegetables that grow perfectly happily in our gardens. Any we grow ourselves is a step to reducing our carbon footprint. With successional planting in troughs I can keep us in mixed salad leaves from late May to September at the very least. 

Is it attractive? Runner beans were initially grown for their flowers, not the pods, and come in many shades from  white or yellow through orange to the most vivid red. Globe artichokes are stunning plants with huge silver leaves and giant purple thistle flowers (if you leave some buds to develop.) They are always covered in bees and hoverflies. Jerusalem artichokes are really a strain of sunflowers that grow 3m stalks with bright yellow flowers. Borage is not only great for bees and for producing cucumber flavoured flowers for your Pimms, those flowers are prolific and the most heavenly blue. So if you want to enjoy the look of your veg patch as well as its produce, that's worth thinking of.

Diacono also strongly recommends growing something you've never tried before. That's brought me a lot of fun over the years from cute but silly cucamelons, tomatillos for Mexican food, my first taste of quince this year and the ridiculous looking kohlrabi, which makes great coleslaw.  He also suggests something you think you dislike.  I know that sounds contradictory to Grow What You Enjoy, but it's choosing something deliberately to see if your prejudice holds. That's how I learnt that I love sprouts (see Better When Fresh above).

I would add another consideration - Don't Grow What Is Doomed To Fail. Why do it to yourself?  Optimist that I am, I have attempted to grow aubergines on at least 12 occasions. I'm here to tell you that if you live in Yorkshire without a heated greenhouse, my lovely, you are NOT likely to be successful. With red and green peppers you'll get some, with chilli peppers (in a poly tunnel or cold frame) you'll have masses; aubergines? not so much. Ditto rosemary in heavy clay soil, or blueberries planted in lime-rich soil. I also tried chilli peppers from seed unsuccessfully for years until I got a heated propagator. I make that mistake a lot, and it's expensive. Enthusiasm over practicality. I'd save yourself the bother; just look at me as someone who makes mistakes so you don't have to.

With all that in mind, I'ver gone through and created the list for Veg Patch 2021. I hope by placing my orders on the early side I won't get blindsided like last year when a third of the things I wanted were out of stock as new lockdown gardeners emptied the shelves. 

This year's wish list include some things I fancy a go at, some things I know we love, some stalwarts we can't do without. I haven’t included shallots, coriander and salad because those are my essentials I won’t forget.

Equally important is my No list. That starts with those I often out of habit but don't justify the space: broccoli and cauliflowers, squashes, more than 2 courgette plants.  The other group includes those that are great  in theory but fail in practice: last year no one harvested the runner beans or peas beyond a handful picked in passing and eaten raw. Not this year, I'll wait until we actually miss them before adding them back in the rotation. (Side eye to Mark, who asked me to plant the runner beans when I don't like them!)

I also know from experience that some plants are more economical for me to buy as seedlings rather than growning from seed myself. I'm an erratic gardener really, and tend to stop paying attention between the exciting bit (Oooh! a seedling!) and the fun bits (big enough to plant out, then later harvesting). Therefore I tend to have more luck with a sturdy couple of cucumber plants than a packet of 10 seeds. It's not all my fault, the slugs are also a major factor, but it's pretty frustrating so now I acknowledge that and work around it. 

By the way, my all time best Buy It, Don't Sow It is sweetpea seedlings from Sarah Raven. They are EXPENSIVE, there's no way around. However, they are extremely study and prolific plants. I get 2-3 bouquets of sweetpeas for at least 12 weeks straight - more if I were a less erratic waterer. It's an annual gift I give myself and it is stupendous value compared to any cut flowers I might buy. The whole house is filled with the scent, it's divine. My friends and neighbours benefit too. She has many gorgeous collections but my favourite are the very simple ones with few flowerheads that produce the most wonderful scent. 

My final decision on the wish list is to not buy what I will inevitably get given. Last year I was offered courgette and tomato seedlings from 9 different people. Both those good natured plants propagate like billy-o, bless their lovely selves. Any gardener who grows them inevitably ends up with a glut of seedlings and not enough space. I'm going to bank on being offered some*, and will have some less common seedlings to offer in return.

Next jobs - planning what will go where, which involves looking at last year's planting diagram to make sure I'm rotating my crops and remembering companion planting. Then placing the orders. I love this - all the potential, and dreams of warm summer days in my garden, piucking veg for dinner. 

*If this all backfires, don't worry about us going without. I reorganised the freezer and food cupboards this week. Turn out I have 31 tins of tomatoes in there!