Grow Your Own- The Boring British Heatwave

Drip down, oh heavens, from above, and let the clouds pour down righteousness!* If you hadn’t heard, it’s been hot lately. Hot and dry, and in my neck of the woods it hadn’t rained in something like nine million weeks until a feeble downpour on Friday night, followed by a flash torrential downpour for about […]

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Grow Your Own! The Wind Down.

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 […]

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Grow Your Own! An Onslaught of Pumpkins

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 […]

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Grow Your Own! A Welcome Return

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, […]

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Grow Your Own! Round Two

You 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 […]

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Grow Your Own- The Salad Days

I can’t imagine that I would have ever believed that the day would come to pass that I would find the lack of the need to buy lettuce so utterly thrilling. I never really bought much of it anyway, it goes soggy in the lunch box and never tastes of much, not to mention the […]

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Grow Your Own!

I’ve romanticised for many a year on the prospect of home grown produce. Plump green tomatoes jewelling the garden. Straight proud rows of asparagus in tight tidy lines like soldiers. Boozy soft plums you pick a week too late and get drunk on. All the while flapping diaphonously around an immaculately pruned garden with gleaming […]

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VIFC Meeting- Veg!

I think it is fair to say at the end of last month’s meeting there weren’t many whoops of joy as the theme of Vegetable was drawn. For clarity this meant that dishes for the October meeting had to not just involve but star vegetables. Major food groups such as meat, fish and chocolate were […]

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Super Simple Coleslaw- Part II

Yeah, so, June, BBQ time, a great date to push forward another simple summer salad that you can bang out ten minutes before the guests arrive and you all sit out in the garden sipping Pimms and bathing in the wafts of meaty aroma while Dad burns off his eyebrows giving the coals a little […]

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Food Hero- Celeriac

Celeriac, or if you prefer (and who wouldn’t) Knob Celery. *insert gales of childish giggling here*. A hefty root vegetable from the celery family which yields a bulbous root structure or ‘hypocotyl’ which looks marvellously like a dirt encrusted brain and tastes pretty good too. Celeriac grows pretty much anywhere but is thought to have originated in […]