Looking out at my garden this morning after our second proper frost in sunny Essex, I am (perhaps over dramatically) put in mind somewhat of tales of winters on the Somme. There’s a lot of mud, you see. My planning was a bit out this year in terms of maintenance and removal of edibles and […]
Read More Grow Your Own! A Winter’s TaleI remember seeing chard mentioned on Masterchef increasingly frequently and assuming it was about to become the next go-to-food-twat ingredient taking the supermarket by storm. That was a while ago, as it’s been at least two years since I have paid any attention to Masterchef and I am still yet to recall a single incident […]
Read More Are You Going To Eat…..Chard?It’s nice, as we descend into the season of falling leaves and escalating rows about the central heating settings, to be able to say that I have really enjoyed my garden these past few weeks. In the real sense of just being out there and having s good time. In the earlier half of the […]
Read More Grow Your Own! The Wind Down.I assure you that I am not your irritating facebook friend constantly posting about how many weeks/Saturdays/nanoseconds are left to pass until we can crack open our advent calendars. However, there are certain activities of yuletide prep which really need to begin in this the final quarter of the year and if you’ve got a […]
Read More The X(mas) Files: Grow Your Own Christmas Spirit!Earlier in the year whilst planning my garden efforts I picked up some pumpkin seeds to try in my little patch of green. I opted for the ‘Invincible’ variant as I had never grown them before and wanted a good chance of one of them surviving my lack of squash nurturing skills. Oy. Well I […]
Read More Grow Your Own! An Onslaught of PumpkinsDespite recent radish issues and an out and out potato fail, my garden is currently offering up some really wonderful pumpkin and courgette flowers which have been going into our new favourite summer evening dinner. I do love a risotto, and weirdly I forget how much I love a risotto quite frequently and hadn’t made […]
Read More Squash Blossom RisottoBelieve it or not you don’t need several acres of allotment and hours of daily toiling to achieve a decent edible production line direct to your kitchen- it needn’t be an exercise in endless soil turning and Alan Titchmarsh tomes. You don’t even need that much ground if you have space for some decent sized […]
Read More Grow Your Own! 5 Easy Home CropsEducation abounds in the Boomboom garden and I find myself once more starting to draft in some mental lines of change for the end of this summer. Gardening is hard, and some plants are right gits. My potatoes, for example, are absolute gits. Having taken over the majority of my veg patch and grown […]
Read More Grow Your Own! A Painful Lesson in Tuber Betrayal.I am almost too eager to get out and tackle the rising Essex jungle at the back of my house to pen this bank holiday entry. Almost. It is all going on, in a borderline ferocious fashion thanks to all the recent bouts of downpour punctuated sunshine. Like so many areas of this blogger’s life, […]
Read More Grow Your Own! A Welcome ReturnYou may have noticed that in between the bitingly cold mornings there is a fair bit of sunshine and spring-like-action occurring at the moment. The evenings are lighter. The finches are back. It is gardening time, and this year I’m ready for it. The last growing season has been basically a long, hard learning experience […]
Read More Grow Your Own! Round Two
Food. Boom. 