Time for planting onion sets and chitting potatoes.
Onion sets are basically partly grown onions – but most gardeners find them so much easier and quicker to grow that they buy these tiny onion bulbs, plant them in February – or as soon as the ground is workable – and by June they have usually grown into good size onions ready to eat.
Egg trays are ideal for storing onions until you are ready to plant them – and also for ‘chitting’ potatoes – this means putting them in a light, frost free place rose end upwards so they can begin to sprout while you wait for the right time for planting.
No-one ever really explained to me what the ‘rose end’ of a potato was but I have eventually discovered that it’s the opposite end to the ‘stalk’ end – where the potato was attached to the mother plant. So one end will have one mark with sometimes a tiny bit of stalk attached –and the other end with several marks where the new sprouts (chits) will grow from. Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to tell the difference – but if you put them out in trays, they will begin to sprout –and you can soon see whether you have put them the right way up!
Spring is in the air – the frogs have awoken from their winter sleep
I woke up this morning expecting to hear the dawn chorus, instead there was a gentle burbling floating in through the open window – the frogs were back in the pond – a sure sign of Spring. Later in the year, there’s sometimes a frog or two croaking in the shallows on the edge of the pond, but, this time of year, they make a soothing gurgling sound. I love to sit in the sunshine by the pond with a cup of tea and count the frogs – if I sit really still they bob up to the surface one by one and peer at me between the kingcup leaves.
When we first moved in there were no fish in the pond but lots of frogs – and one or two newts – and the frogspawn soon became tadpoles that turned into tiny froglets. Now we have goldfish and they eat most of the tadpoles so there are very few tiny frogs tp terrify with the lawnmower – we used to have to mow the lawn so slowly to give them chance to get out of the way!
Today’s Treasures – Snowdrops – Tiny Pearls of Springtime
The days are getting longer and the first flowers of the year are peeping through Autumn’s fallen leaves – snowdrops – tiny pearls of springtime, creeping towards the light; frosts may wither them but their fragile stems soon revive in the sunshine, they shake their petals free of winter and their tiny white bells tremble in the spring breeze.
Snowdrop Walks mark the start of the season for many of our historic houses and there are lots of early spring walks through snowdrop-dappled woodland. Rode Hall, just over the North Shropshire border, has a wonderful display of snowdrops set in enchanting woodland.
The snowdrop trail begins alongside neatly manicured lawns overlooked by a picturesque combination of unusual mature trees, through formal rose gardens, heavenly scented in summer but now lying dormant waiting for the first rays of the summer sun.
Through the gap in the hedge, a whole new vista opens out and you enter a wild woodland star spangled with snowdrops roaming unchecked, under the trees, along the brook, scrambling around the shrubs and bushes that decorate the landscape, and you can find a bench, or perch on a stone bridge, and merge with the magic of the trees, serenaded by robins and blackbirds and soothed by the sound of the stream bubbling over stones, watched by myriads of tiny snowdrop faces, studying their reflections in the water.
Rode Hall is open from Saturday, 4th February to Sunday 5th March (except Mondays) for snowdrop escapades for all the family (including dogs – on leads). The tearoom is open serving light lunches and you can warm up by the logburner with a welcome pot of tea and homemade cakes. The art exhibition in the barn is well worth a visit, showcasing creations by local artists – and not all of the paintings feature snowdrops! www.rodehall.co.uk
In the Druid calendar Snowdrops heralded Spring and first appear at Imbolc – celebrated on 31st January and 2nd February (Candlemas Day).
There are snowdrops walks all over Shropshire, including Combermere Abbey, Attingham Park, and Dudmaston Hall.
The Snowdrop Fairy
Deep sleeps the Winter
Cold, wet, and grey;
Surely all the world is dead;
Spring is far away.
Wait! the world shall waken;
It is not dead, for lo,
The Fair Maids of February
Stand in the snow!
Catalogue of catastrophies with Eny’s latest litter!
New Zealand White rabbits are beautiful, very tame and very friendly so they make excellent pets. They are good house rabbits as they are clean, usually using the same place as a toilet all the time. They also grow quite big, quite quickly which is why they are often bred as meat rabbits. Once they reach 3 months old they generally have very few health problems, BUT, until they get to ten weeks old they can be notoriously difficult to rear.
Eny had 6 babies, two of them died in the first few days – no idea why – it was just like she abandoned them. The other four were fine at 3 weeks old, then one of them mysteriously just flaked out and I found it cold as stone in the morning. And then there were three!
Next day I found one of the babies in the hen house, goodness knows how he got out but I managed to catch him and reinstall him safely with his mum. Checked everything but couldn’t figure out how he got out but added extra security just in case.
Two days later – he’s with the hens again – but this time something has attacked him and he’s looking very sorry for himself indeed, so I put him in a pen on his own, cleaned him up and covered him in Aloe Vera gel (works wonders on everything from rabbit scratches on me to hens attacked by foxes – and poorly rabbits).
The next day he looked a lot better, but the shock must have been too much because he was dead the next morning.
So now we are down to two – one of which is quite small and therefore not really suitable for breeding although she’s really sweet and would make an excellent pet. Often people who are looking for rabbits as pets want two of the same sex to keep each other company. Guess what – the other baby is a male. So I am looking for someone who would like a small NZ white doe as a pet and someone else who would like a buck as either a pet or for breeding.
Breeding NZ whites is never simple! (But never boring either!)
On a more positive note, for the first time I have kept one of my own does and one of my own bucks (different mothers and fathers) for breeding and they are just old enough now to breed. George is beautiful, he’s a really large buck and was the only baby Cowslip had in her last litter so he had the best possible attention. He’s just over 6 months old. Holly, my new doe, was one of Eny’s babies. She is now just over 5 months old. Alhough it’s still winter, the weather last weekend was quite mild so I thought I would see how they got on together.
I never leave a doe with a buck unattended as sometimes they can fight so I always keep an eye on them – there’s always lots of things I can get on with in the rabbit shed – cleaning up, washing food bowls, stroking the rabbits (my favourite task!). After 10 minutes of chasing each other round I put them back in their pens and tried again the next day – with no luck.
Holly really doesn’t like being kept in a cage – the other rabbits are fine but she absolutely loves being in the run outside so she gets to go out more often than the others. In the spring she will have a hutch outside but, for the moment, she’s safe in her cage. So I thought I might put a nest box in her cage to see if that changed her mind about mating. (Usually you put the nest box in a week before the babies are due because otherwise rabbits tend to make a mess in them and you have to keep cleaning them out.) Anyway, Holly loved her nest box and settled down happily in it. Next day when I introduced her to George again, she mated straight away, so I am hoping Holly and George will be parents for the first time in February.
Let’s hope the babies in this next litter are less problematic than Eny’s last litter.
Rats, they fought the dogs and killed the cats and bit the babies in the cradles, and ate the cheeses out of the vats and licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles…
Shropshire might not be as bad as Hamelin, but we don’t have a Pied Piper to lure the rats away and, in the past, I have had problems with rats eating tiny baby rabbits. Finding half eaten babies in the morning is not one of my fonder memories! After persevering with rat traps for ages, we finally had to resort to rat poison – you can buy packets of liquorice smelling poison that you don’t have to open but just place in the boxes. The council used to come out but they don’t any more – although you can still get advice from your local council. They provided us with safe rat poison boxes which are placed along the rat runs. I keep an eye open for any rat droppings which act as a reminder to put poison down again. It doesn’t matter how careful you are with never leaving food lying around, rats always find a way – and they cause so much damage eating holes in everything too.
Looking up the spelling of Hamelin, I found the poem – I didn’t know that Robert Browning wrote it and it has a different ending to the fairy tale I knew. It’s one of the poems on this website if you want to read it for yourself.
For my birthday this year we purchased joint (senior!) membership of English Heritage. One of the first places we chose to visit was Boscobel House in Shropshire – where Charles II famously hid in an oak tree after his defeat at the battle of Worcester in 1651.
You can visit an oak tree that grew from an acorn from that very famous Royal Oak tree. You can also see the priest’s hole in Boscobel House where Charles II subsequently hid.
It was a beautiful sunny autumn day. We declined the guided tour and meandered through the house and gardens on our own, through hazel avenues and around lavender and box formal flowerbeds. The house has some wonderful old beams and floorboards and there are magnificent views over the surrounding countryside. The dairy is very well equipped with ancient equipment, milk pails, enamel jugs, wooden butter churns, memories of a by-gone age when everything was painstakingly done by hand.
By this time, we had worked up quite an appetite so, before embarking on the 20 minute walk to White Ladies Priory (which actually took our ambling gait well over half an hour!), we decided to treat ourselves to a late breakfast. The café is installed in the old stable block and we enjoyed delicious real bacon sandwiches and a proper cup of tea in china cups, poured from a china teapot.
Thus fortified, we set off the find the priory. The path goes along the edge of the fields alongside the road so we made a mental note to walk back on the easier terrain of the tarmac. The priory must have been magnificent in its time (built in the 12th century). As you can see from the pictures some impressive archways of the church remain – after the suppression of the monasteries most of the convent buildings were taken down. We imaged the nuns (Augustinian canonesses who wore habits of undyed cloth) at morning prayers, growing herbs, peacefully tending the gardens and watching the sun set on the Shropshire/Staffordshire border.
2 tsp of dried mixed herbs or, ideally, chopped fresh herbs as follows:
1 tsp basil
1 tsp parsley
½ tsp thyme
½ tsp oregano
½ tsp marjoram
1lb rough puff pastry (frozen or you can make your own)
Flour for rolling out pastry
1 egg, beaten
Poppy or sesame seeds
Thoroughly mix the sausagemeat, onions, mushrooms and herbs.
Sausage Rolls Roll out the pastry to an oblong about 5 mm thick. Spread the sausagemeat in a long roll down the centre of the pastry. Brush one edge of the pastry with beaten egg, fold over the pastry to form a long roll.
Cut the roll into 35mm lengths and place on a baking sheet lined with baking paper. Brush the rolls with beaten egg.
Cut small slits in the pastry with scissors and sprinkle with poppy or sesame seeds.
Sausage Plait Roll out the pastry to a rectangle. Mark into thirds lengthways. Spread sausagemeat evenly over middle third.
Cut pastry either side into strips (see photo) and fold strips alternately over sausagemeat to form a plait. Seal ends with left over strips, brush with beaten egg and sprinkle with seeds.
Bake in oven 230C (220C fan oven) for 10-15 minutes until the sausagemeat is cooked (maybe a little longer for sausage plait).
Pastry:
8 oz (250g) flour
6 oz butter or butter/lard
Water for mixing
Rub 4 oz of the butter into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs.
Add water and mix to rolling out consistency.
Roll out pastry to a strip, mark into 3 and spread rest of fat on one third in small pats. Fold into 3, roll out gently to a strip again and fold into 3, then roll out to the shape required.
Well it wasn’t exactly life-threatening – but she saved me being really scared by a rat. As usual she came with me to let the ducks out and she followed me into the rabbit shed – where she pounced on a rat and quickly killed it. It was probably half dead from poison or she would never have caught it – she is getting on a bit! But it was dead very quickly and I didn’t have to kill it. Horrible things. Always makes me think of the poem:
Rats, they fought the dogs and killed the cats and bit the babies in the cradles, and ate the cheeses out of the vats and licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles…
Shropshire might not be as bad as Hamelin, but we don’t have a Pied Piper to lure the rats away and, in the past, I have had problems with rats eating tiny baby rabbits. Finding half eaten babies in the morning is not one of my fonder memories! After persevering with rat traps for ages, we finally had to resort to rat poison – you can buy packets of liquorice smelling poison that you don’t have to open but just place in the boxes. The council used to come out but they don’t any more – although you can still get advice from your local council. They provided us with safe rat poison boxes which are placed along the rat runs. I keep an eye open for any rat droppings which act as a reminder to put poison down again. It doesn’t matter how careful you are with never leaving food lying around, rats always find a way – and they cause so much damage eating holes in everything too.
Looking up the spelling of Hamelin, I found the poem – I didn’t know that Robert Browning wrote it and it has a different ending to the fairy tale I knew. It’s one of the poems on this website if you want to read it for yourself.
I didn’t intend to grow enormous pumpkins because they are totally unmanageable – I just wanted some large enough to make Jack’o’Lanterns for Halowe’en and some to store for the winter to make spicy pumpkin soup (see recipes) to warm us up on Bonfire Night and to cheer us up for December lunchtimes.
Pumpkins must love rabbit manure because this is the result! I do admit that I did dig quite a bit of manure into the pumpkin patch. Fortunately, not all of the pumpkins are this big but it’s going to take all the boys to lift this, a saw to cut it in two – and probably all day hollowing it out, taking out the seeds and cutting the flesh into manageable chunks for soup!
Last year I dried pumpkin seeds on baking paper in a slow oven and they were really tasty – they made a great substitute for peanuts and I served them in bowls with olives.
What a surprise! One damp and dreary early Autumn morning I stumbled out to feed the chickens and was suddenly stunned wide awake by this beautiful bright blue flower positively glowing – Morning Glory! It’s supposed to be really easy to grow but I nurtured tiny seedlings that struggled to survive and, when I finally planted them out they just sat there and refused to climb up the bamboo wigwam – until I got bored waiting and forgot all about them – until this morning! Every morning since there have been new flowers – they love the early mornings and close up later in the day – hence the name. It’s a type of convolvulus – our native white version can be a troublesome weed as it chokes other plants – hence its common name – bindweed. All of the plant is poisonous as it contains tropane alkaloids – especially the seeds – but this flower certainly brightened up my morning.
