Best Case Scenario

Rainfall update	Snab	Brize
October	114.8	79.1
2014 to date	730.8	694.4

Moving swiftly on. Autumn has to be one of my favourite seasons, along with winter and spring (summers of course are invariably a disappointment). Some of the garden's sparkle remains but it's a time for gathering up your finest to see you through the dark months. There's not much fresh fruit to be gathered by November - although the raspberries are struggling on, it's now largely frozen berries and stored apples to keep us going.

But despite the first frost of the winter this week, there is one exotic crop still harvesting... the cape gooseberry. This is a fruit with an identity crisis, its name being a scandalous misnomer since they look and taste nothing like gooseberries and Physalis peruviana is actually native to the high Andes. Its other names including ground cherry, husk cherry, golden berry and inca berry are equally unsatisfactory as they don't have much in common with cherries or your typical berry. The French apparently call them amour-en-cage, which captures a bit of their appeal - their papery cases concealing a golden heart. I think I will try and establish them with their Peruvian name, aguaymanto. They are something of an acquired taste in the raw - perhaps most like their tomato cousins but with a sweet grapey melony undercurrent, although that varies with ripeness. 

But they are best cooked and make one of the finest jams, with a tarry flavour reminiscent of apricot, which makes up a little for my apricot blossom flattering to deceive. They are beloved of those arbiters of fine cuisine, the Snab voles, but unlike those other exotic vole specialities like aubergine and sweet potato, there are more than enough to go round. And best of all, the plants survive overwinter in the tunnel and also self-seed ready-made new plants that go on to produce a much bigger crop in the second summer. I recommend trying them outside in the south anywhere except in the shade of mature lime groves.

Pressing Matters

With my mid-life crisis getting into full swing, I am ordering lots of new toys in pursuit of various high-adrenalin thrills.

In lieu of the typical symptoms of a motorcycle or carbon-fibre frame, this is the piece of elegant powerful machinery with which I hope to impress.

It takes about 15 apples to make a litre of the finest nectar. Sounds like a limited return on net but the orchard is finally yielding hundreds of plump low-hanging fruit. I just have to get there before the wind, deer, voles and the lady of the house combine to hoover them all up. I'd have pressed the pear crop as well but I hadn't got an empty whisky miniature to spare.

To someone brought up on the heat-treated cartoned urine-juice,  it has an appearance and flavour remarkably characteristic of apples, and indeed the type of apple used to make it, in this case Red Devil. All very exciting, but I suspect a venture into cider-making would be a thrill too far. Instead, I'll rev up my dehydrator and make some apple rings for an extreme muesli experience.

P.S. So much for our "driest September on record". The deficit, which stood at 281mm at the start of June, has been entirely eliminated.

	Snab	Brize
September	39.8	5.3
2014 to date	616.0	615.3

There's a bit of a squash in the pumpkin patch

Thankfully, the monsoon has now passed. Although the climate here is clearly devolved and with a strong divergent trend, it turns out that the overall figures suggest we are still Wetter Together.

	Snab	Brize
January	34.5	155.2
February	42.5	105.7
March	21.0	56.6
April	23.4	62.7
May	58.1	80.5
June	76.6	47
July	58.1	29.7
August	262.0	72.6
2014 to date	576.2	610.0

While parsnips were the main casualty of the dry spring (ok, I was slightly complacent with the weeding too),  the squash are having a ball after three years of meagre returns. This year's haul harks back to the carefree infeasibly large wheelbarrow-toting harvest of 2010. However, I may need to upgrade my barrow's suspension to move this beast. I have added in the BS5930 recommended indicator of scale for familiarity...

but, since it's being applied outside the reliable calibration range,  you may prefer the the more appropriate farm-yardstick...

Anyone got any good squash recipes?

Monsoons, midgets and trombones...

2014	Snab	Brize
January	34.5	155.2
February	42.5	105.7
March	21.0	56.6
April	23.4	62.7
May	58.1	80.5
June	76.6	47
July	58.1	29.7
2014 to date	314.2	537.4

Memories of those droughty days of spring draw ever distant. The Moray Monsoon weather pattern seems to becoming ever more prominent - a vote for independence from the rather passé maritime temperate ethos of high winter rainfall afflicting the rest of the UK.  In a period of 24 hours on 10-11 August, we had a further 155mm, which you can see is more than the total for the 4 months to April. Good for the pumpkins, not so good for getting in your onions.

It's times like this that the polytunnel earns its keep, fooling the plants into thinking they are thriving in a hot, dry but humid, windless wonder climate.

There's my Minnesota Midget melons...

 and my rampant tromboncini, which can be relied on to raise a smile...

and my cobs ready for plucking...

and my shapely swelling borlotti...

and my dangling aubergines - which are popular with the local epicurean vole population, who are apparently partial to a baba ganoush appetiser to their main meal of slightly underripe strawberries.

And it provides a shelter for one's onions away from the mayhem of the Moray Monsoon,
 

but not by any means all of them...

Stick-in-the-Mud

After a difficult few years of very cold springs and late frosts, the orchard is finally coming to fruition this year. I admittedly have lost a plum, but it was not too painful because I have four others, including an impressively fecund drooper, plus three damsons, a greengage, and a couple of feral suckers I got from a sucker's garden in Bradford-on-Avon. Some of my cherries are still intact, but I suspect they'll prove popular with the birds and won't last much longer. An avalanche of apples is also on the cards, but my two pear wouldn't make much of a hand at poker, but I call that a success at this stage.

Some of my experimental fruits are not quite so promising. This my mulberry, a hybrid Canadian variety perhaps suited to the northerly climate.

Maybe so, but not coming into leaf till June leaves itself a lot to do in a short season, and it gets no sympathy from the looting bullfinches and alpinista slugs that have taken a shine to the buds and leaves over everything else in the garden. Three chewed up leaves on a two-metre long stick is not much to show for three years' effort. Now the problem has been diagnosed, we may get the green shoots of recovery...

Here's your drought update. To talk in agrohydrometeorological jargon, we've made a slight dent in the anglo-scottish soil moisture deficit.

2014	Snab	Brize
January	34.5	155.2
February	42.5	105.7
March	21.0	56.6
April	23.4	62.7
May	58.1	80.5
June	76.6	47
Half-year total	256.1	507.7

Return of the Weed

Amongst the deluge of derisory name-calling at school, I remember being labelled a "weed". I always took it to mean one of a feeble or weak-willed disposition. It's taken me forty years to think about it but that's a curious colloquialism. Perhaps it is the sense of worthlessness. Of course, it's difficult to believe it these days given such a manly countenance but I've filled out a lot since then. But perhaps those cruel boys (and girls for that matter) knew more than I did. Sure, they weren't referring to a thuggish nature of couch grass or the smothering tendency of chickweed, and definitely not the unbearable plainness of pineapple mayweed, but perhaps they saw a delicate beauty that stood out from the crowd. 

Back from a week in Orkney, amongst the waist-high mass of the usual suspects, I'll be finding space to save some of the uninvited interlopers that perhaps remind me of surviving against the odds amongst much tougher species. I would never pull up a heartsease...

while I'll overlook the odd campion, corn chamomile, corn marigold, mallow and common fumitory...

And in this weed sanctuary, I am even nurturing some introduced weeds.Somewhere amongst this sea of self-seeded phacelia are six young blueberry bushes. But it's such a popular buzz with the pollinators that I can't bring myself to remove it, even though the garden is littered with the stuff. Not sure where this sentimental streak appeared from.

Much of a mulchness

2014	Snab	Brize
January	34.5	155.2
February	42.5	105.7
March	21.0	56.6
April	23.4	62.7
May	58.1	80.5

We finally got a bit of rain but finished the month with four scorching days in a row. So everything is going rampant, and that includes the dreaded chickweed. But after a few years of battling, I think I am getting the upper hand. 

Anything that doesn't like the competition or likes consistent available water is given a head start by growing through black plastic. Here you see my garlic, beyond that will come my celeriac, and then the strawberries. Onions and shallots get the same treatment. 

 

The edible-berry-hedge to the left (Amelanchier alnifolia and Aronia Melanocarpa, if you're asking) sits in a bed of bracken litter scavenged from the forests during the winter. (Well, what else is there to do?). Likewise the gooseberries, while the ever-expanding blueberry patch prefers pine needles. 

Any defiant chickweed that makes it through against the odds finds out out why it is so named and, along with an unfortunate assortment of slugs, wireworms and leatherjackets, succumbs to the resident pesticides.

Lay of the Land

We have some new arrivals. 

Fowl Challenge

Their home is functional made from various bits of recycled construction waste (*exemption applied for) with no thought of aesthetics.

And there is no room for sentimentality here.These are food producers not pets and it is ill-advised to name your hens. But it is more important to relive past glories and celebrate revered figures from world history. Clockwise from bottom left: Benjamin, McGoldrick, Gilbert, Morley.

And the drought goes on...

2014	Snab	Brize
January	34.5	155.2
February	42.5	105.7
March	21.0	56.6
April	23.4	62.7

When the plot starts to resemble a beach, it's time to resort to maritime plants, quite littorally. Asparagus and chard are adaptations of shore plants. A more unusual choice is sea kale. It's a native perennial and you may find its blanched stems emerging from your local shingle bank but you can mimic this by use of force. 

At a time of relative dearth, it gives a crunchy treat with a sweet cabbagy flavour. Use raw, in spring stir-frys, and with a squeeze of lemon on pasta. Remove the chimney pot and it develops an attractive rash of white flowers, worth a place in the flower border, if you go in for such conformist concepts.

Productive Working Environment

Welcome to my office. It's one of those typical brisk Scottish spring days - bright but the wind is blowing the tea out of the cup. So my flexible work pattern kicks in and I'm hotdesking on some new projects indoors.  With the windward door firmly closed, it's approaching 30degC in here. The place might look like it has a low utilisation rate but it's keeping up a supply of highly billable spinach, salad leaves, coriander and radish. Work in progress includes early potato shoots, strawberries in flower, and embryonic apricots. The cape gooseberries have overwintered and even the forecast for the formerly forlorn hardy kiwis is looking up. But top of my key performance indicators this week is my cauliflower pakora. That's not a bookie's pencil by the way. 

Stan's CauliMore

Water Teems?

It's been a long time and the garden has moved on a shallot in the last 18 months. But any sustainable gardening blog must start with a fresh look at one's integrated water management policy. Yes, I've got a raingauge. The real-time tipping bucket web transmission will have to wait. Aesthetics is more important at this stage, and so a shapely antique copper monthly collector will have to suffice. It is, of course, the met office approved distance of twice the height from the nearest obstruction.

Hot off the kitchen scales is the March total. For information, I will be giving a comparison of the dustbowl figure with a random place somewhere in the wet tropics.

2014 (mm)	Snab	Brize
January	34.5	155.2
February	42.5	105.7
March	21.0	56.6 (+dust)

The data will be used to inform the climate change apricot adaptation strategy and parsnip risk profiling scenarios.