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21.08.2023 - 11:56 / theunconventionalgardener.com / Emma Doughty
A few weeks ago I was talking about my desire to have more mint in the garden, a plan which is still a work in progress. It’s hard keeping mints in small pots happy in a hot, sunny garden. Ultimately I’d like to plant them into bottomless pots, sunk into the soil along the fence, but work on that area of the garden has stalled whilst we take care of other things.
The mints I have (and the lemon balm plants) are all putting on new growth after their summer hair cuts, and looking lovely. A recent blog post about growing your own green thai curry reminded me that I wanted to add lime balm into the mix, but this particular variety of lemon balm (Melissa officinalis ‘Lime’) isn’t widely available. The author of that blog, Nic Wilson, told me that she picked up her plant from a stall at the Hampton Court Flower Show, and events like that are often good places to find unusual species and varieties for the garden.
A quick Google (including a look at the RHS Plant Finder) showed me that there aren’t too many online suppliers for lime balm in the UK. The most obvious is Hooksgreenherbs, from where you can buy a 1 litre plant for £5. Which sounds reasonable until you get to the postage charges – £6.50. It’s not cost effective to buy one plant from them (and one plant, and a packet of seeds, was all I wanted from their catalogue at the moment).
A slightly more extensive search brought me to Battlesbridge Mills at Newlands Nursery, which has quite a large range of herb plants, as well as chillies. They sell much smaller plants – the options being an ‘established starter plant’ (£1.05) or a 9cm potted plant (£1.55). Orders over £10 offer free delivery.
I can’t be the only person more willing to pay for plants than postage
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Remember those heady days at school, when you were faced with choosing your subject options, or which courses – at which higher education establishments – to apply for? There were a lot of things to consider, lots of differing advice on hand, and the prospect of making decisions that would affect (you were told) the rest of your life.
A quick and easy potato salad that makes a lovely side dish for a BBQ.
Seeds can be one of the biggest expenses in a garden, and if you spend time tracking down heirloom or unusual varieties then they may also be very precious. Many gardeners sow seeds indoors, or in pots and trays, to ensure a higher rate of germination than you would expect in the open soil, but even doing this does not always ensure successful germination.
It’s a family tradition for my dad to make a lot of different petits fours in the run up to Christmas. Some are packaged up nicely and given as gifts. The rest are eaten over the Christmas period. A lot involve marzipan, but my favourites are the peppermint creams, half coated in dark chocolate for a real treat. I’ve never quite mastered them myself, although I remember making the soft fondant version at school once. Dad has a different recipe, which involved boiling sugar syrup. I need to spend some time experimenting in the kitchen.
I grew up understanding the phrase “a bit Heath Robinson” as meaning something that had been cobbled together, but I wasn’t really aware of the fact that Heath Robinson was a real person. Born in 1872, he was an English cartoonist and illustrator, and he became famous for drawings of convoluted contraptions – ridiculously complicated machines that achieved things you don’t need a machine for. It was in this capacity that ‘Heath Robinson’ entered the dictionary in 1912; he became more synonymous with cobbling things together during the ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign of the Second World War. In fact, one of the automated analysis machines at Bletchley Park – a forerunner of the codebreaking Colossus – was named Heath Robinson in his honour.