Plant to pan

So eight years on we're still planting seeds, putting the plants onto a pan and onto a plate!  At the moment it's purple sprouting brocolli and leeks going in the pan. There's also a selection of herbs available. Sage and butter with pasta is my current best way to incorporate herbs into the dinner. The purple head of the brocolli is pretty as a picture and it's worth capturing before they turn to yellow flower which are pretty and delicate in their way too.

Herb Garden March 2013

The city is awash with sound, so that you switch off your hearing a lot of the time and run on automatic, dimly aware of the cocktail of noises all about – a constant undercurrent of traffic, wind and rain this time of year, people’s voices, dogs barking, sound systems. But every so often an anomaly breaks through.

It being Saturday in the garden, and my gardening buddies away, I did a solitary round of the plots, checking up on the plants, looking at how the turning of the season shows itself. The blackcurrant and raspberry bushes are dropping their leaves now and are ragged and battered after the storms of the last few days. Our winter onions are doing well: the couch grass attack has been held back. The rhubarb is dissolving back into the ground. Herbs alone – especially the oregano – seem to be blooming.

A metallic ‘chip-chip’ sound registers: an unfamiliar sound. I look around towards the birch trees and there’s a flurry of a couple of small birds: what are they? We’ve seen robins, blackbirds, sparrows, pigeons - even the occasional bullfinch and wren up here – we’re close to the edge of Dublin and the wilds of Fingal I suppose, and there’s a nice mini-wilderness at the back of the garden.

I follow the two over to the trees around the edge of the school and hope they’ll stick around and stay still long enough to see them properly…one of them sits, I move over slowly: it’s a tiny little thing, surely a wren? But without the perpendicular (tell)tail sign. Closer: a bird shaped like a ball, about the size of a pool ball, and a white go-faster stripe against a brown body. Haven’t seen this one before – some kind of finch? I’m gonna have to go to google images later. Then a name springs to mind – a goldcrest…I wait for the bird to lower its head and not long after it duly obliges, does a little bow and there it is – a little yellow mohawk: a gold crest. Another little gift; a short burst of melody – something like a blackbird, though a few octaves higher – and it bounces away to join its companion, maybe to a nest in a large conifer across the road. See what they look like below...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldcrest

Of cabbages and kings

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--"

Be fruitful and multiply

In the Genesis account of creation, God commands the trees and plants to be fruitful and multiply. The miracle of multiplication was brought home to me digging up some heads of garlic a couple of weeks ago. Where a single clove of garlic had been thumbed into the ground in November, there was now a cluster of cloves, maybe fifteen on a head. This garlic seemed different to the larger yellowish bulbs that are for sale in Dunnes Stores and travel all the way from China. The Finglas garlic is whiter with papery purple skins.

This year we are going to try and stretch the planting season. Joey and Seán have planted sets of red and white onions over the past couple of weeks and also winter spinach. I put down some leeks at the end of August. Now that the light decreases and we are for the dark days, it is comforting to think of the onions and garlic underground fixing to multiply.