Category Archives: Gardening connects us all

Redistribution of gardening wealth

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One of the best things about this gardening lark is when people pass on things and we’ve picked up all sort of stuff from out in the street or left on garden walls with a “Take me” note on it. We’ve found gardening tools, a very strange coatstand that works as support for climbing plants (here) and even our silver birch that is growing so tall now (here).

In the last week we’ve kindly been given some seeds (Cheers Debby H!) and the other night we happily received a couple of bags (pic above) of Russet Apples (Cheers Adrienne!) which we’ve never tasted before and were very pleasantly suprised when we had them with some frozen berries (found at the bottom of the freezer) with a sponge top.

So keep that circle-a-turning and if you’ve got something that you don’t need, pass it/them on!

Custodians of the cosmos

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Cheers to Debby H for influencing us here at Weeds to grow that plant with a lovely flower called cosmos. We’ve only got one flower on ours at the moment (above) but we’re not complaining, as it is November.

We had a daft idea here, to make 2025 “The year of the cosmos”. So next year we’d love to see lots of cosmos pictures and we could even do a cosmos from around the world feature. Spread the word to “Make the cosmos come alive in 2025” (and boy do we love a cliche here!)

And here are 3 great cosmos tracks:

 

 

Now here’s a view!

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Cheers to our man in the Lake District Rich R, for sending this wonderful picture from when he visited Hawes in North Yorkshire last week. As he wrote “This is on the main street!” Blimmin’ eck, what a view. Beats the usual McDonalds, Asda and the like and imagine that as the view out of your front room window. Excellent stuff Rich.

Tie a yellow ribbon around the strawberry tree

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We’d like to think that we knew our local area well but last Friday just around the corner we spied a woman getting fruits from a tree and eating them. It looked like she was a gardener on her way to work as she had a pair of loppers in the panniers of her push bike and was wearing some overalls and a pair of steel toecaps.

We initially walked past but did a U turn and asked “What fruit are they?” as we were so curious as we walk past the tree on a near daily basis. She replied still eating the fruits and not really turning around “It’s a strawberry tree, the fruits are lovely but do go for the red ones as they’re the ripest”. Because we spied the loppers and that she was wearing toecaps we had a daft idea that we could trust this person. We didn’t worry we may be sitting on the loo a few hours later or possibly in Lewisham A&E, so we sampled one of the fruits and do you know what, they’re very pleasant and taste like, Strawberries.

A quick search on the web brought us more about the plant Arbutus unedo, it’s the national tree of Italy (as the leaves are green, its got white flowers has red berries, the colours of the Italian flag) and sometimes known as Killarney strawberry tree. It looks like when they are established the tree is quite hardy and can tolerate temperatures down to -10°C.

We’ve also just found online a recipe for a strawberry tree crumble cake which looks great here so we have to strongly resist the urge of carrying down a pair of stepladders and a dessert bowl to said tree or we may get done for filching of fruit (AKA Scrumping)!