2018 Garden Retrospective

In 2018, we grew 63kg of food, up slightly from 54kg in 2017. Considering that gaining access to the garden plot in town more than doubled our available growing space AND gave us access to a polytunnel, that seems a bit depressing at first glance, but if we include qualitative as well as quantitative criteria, the result is not as grim as it could be.

Weekend update, 7-8 April

It's been 5 weeks since my last post and I confess I feel a little bit guilty. I've jotted down notes for at least six different topics, but I never seem to make the time to sit down and turn them into cohesive paragraphs. At the very least, I have been hard at work during those 5 weeks, developing a new gluten-free bread recipe, mending a bunch of old clothes, spending a week volunteering at Coed Talylan near Llangadog, and most recently, getting the vegetable patch up and running.

This time last year, our conservatory was full of seedlings ready to plant out, but with the possibility of snow as late as two weeks ago, everything is a bit behind schedule. Looking around this week though, Spring is most definitely here, and so this weekend was all about the garden.

Weekend update, 1-4 March (Storm Emma!)

Well, we survived the "Beast from the East" and my first-ever snow day more or less without incident. On the first day of the storm, I arranged to work from home, but by around 9:30 the university decided to close up shop, so I got an unexpected 4-day weekend!

The view out our back window on day 2 of Storm Emma.

As someone who grew up in Los Angeles, I still get a little giddy whenever it snows even a little bit, and we had much more than a little snow this weekend. The cold weather didn't stick around in South Wales nearly as long as it did in other parts of the country, but my area did get just under two feet of snow over the course of two days, accompanied by 45mph winds. In spite of the giddiness, I confess I did worry a bit about our garden as the snow drifts rose over the tops of our raised beds and completely buried a large portion of our herb garden. I was very glad that that we'd finished the raised beds and put new cloche hoops and fleece over them.

By Sunday morning, the snow was beginning to thaw and I peeked outside to inspect the damage to our herbs, which weathered the storm without protection. Much to my amazement, the only casualties appeared to be a recently-transplanted garlic mustard and a couple of broad beans whose cover blew off during the worst part of the storm. Plants are amazing.

Weekend update, 17-18 February

Saturday was spent in the garden. The weather was finally clear enough for Steve to put the second raised bed into place. Our cloche hoops finally arrived, so I bent those into shape, and covered them with new, not-ripped fleece. Doesn't it look much nicer now?

As long as I was out in the garden, I picked a few radishes, transplanted a few that were overcrowded, and moved a few shovelfuls of dirt back into the raised beds. (We needed to clear a bunch of dirt in order to set the beds into place.) Our soil is still very, very heavy clay, but it was heartening to see SO MANY WORMS in every shovelful.

On Sunday, I intended to make pancakes, feed the worms, do some sewing, write a blog post, etc. but I only got as far as making pancakes before my brain chemistry turned against me and I became non-functional for the rest of the day. Will try again next weekend.

January carrots, or, The trouble with seasons

Needless to say, there's a bit of a learning curve to growing your own food. Particularly if you grew up in a place like Southern California where seasons are something that happens to other people, and then move somewhere like, say, Scotland or Wales where seasons make the difference between lounging outside with a picnic of fresh strawberries, green salad, and roasted summer squash, versus sitting in your house shivering and hoping you never see another rutabaga as long as you live.


This year, we did a lot of things really well. One of the things we didn't do so well was carrots.

Compost for the Suburban Hippy

As I mentioned in my first post of the new year, one of my goals for 2018 is to wrap my head around composting. In our vegetable garden, we're following a mixture of square foot and no-dig gardening, both of which call for large quantities of compost on a regular basis. Last year, we rented a car and picked up loads of free compost from our local council. Not only does the need to rent a car negate the benefits of "free" compost, it wasn't particularly good compost. It was full of large chunks of wood and little bits of plastic. A year later, I'm still pulling brightly-colored bits out of the vegetable bed every time I go out to harvest or weed. So, to take matters into my own hands, I bought myself a copy of How to Make and Use Compost by Nicky Scott and started looking for ways to make more compost, and faster.

2017 Gardening Recap

Oh dear. Is it really 2018 already?

The past few months are a bit of a blur, honestly. Sometime in October, my brain chemistry decided that it hates me, so it has taken all of my energy just to keep myself more or less presentable for work and try not to let the house devolve into a squalid mess. Every once in a while, I'll summon the will to do some work in the garden or chip away at one of my crafty projects, but it tends to be a few stitches of embroidery here, a bit of weeding there--nothing that seems to be worth publicizing to the world. That said, this blog *is* called Things Made Slowly, so I suppose I'm living up to the name.

Three months after the initial assault, my brain still hasn't quite let go of its enmity toward me, but with 10 whole days at home with absolutely no commitments over the holidays I began to feel like I might just function long enough to do some work in the garden. While standing outside on New Year's Eve, shoveling dirt in a drizzly 3 degrees Celsius (festive, no?), I couldn't help but be a little impressed by all we've accomplished in the past year.

Pickled Chard Stems

What's this? More pickles? Didn't I just post about pickles?!

Photographic evidence that I have, in
fact, been working on something
other than food.

It really isn't my intention for this to become a food blog, but it's midsummer and the garden is doing all sorts of wonderful things. This is the first year we've been able to coax a harvest worthy of the name out of the ground, and I'm positively giddy. We've had plenty of failures this year, of course, but we're actually growing our own food! OMG!

Crafty stuff has been happening, but nothing has reached a milestone that seems blog-worthy yet. Soon though, I promise.

You know what tends to go from start to blog-able pretty quickly though? Food.

(To skip my rambling and go straight to the recipe, click here.)