Manure & Odd Job Week

We have had a mix of wet and dry weather this week here in the East Midlands, but Wednesday was absolutely glorious and it felt like Spring was here already…the sun made everything look more beautiful, especially the waves of snop drops and crocus in our local park:

One thing I wasn’t expecting to see this early was my first dandelion of the year….this is a reminder that soon it will the time to weed my kitchen garden on a weekly basis:

The dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) is actually a wonderful plant, though we do tend to see it as a nuisance weed. In actual fact it is an excellent food plant for many beneficial insects and it provides an important food source to bees…and bees need our help in every way possible at the moment due to their decline in numbers over recent years.

I wrote a lot of interesting facts about dandelions here if you have a spare five minutes to read them….it does make you see this ‘nuisance’ weed in a completely different light.

This week in my kitchen garden:

This week I have been spreading manure over the beds that I will be growing my brassicas and potatoes in this year. This is usually a job I start to do when the beds become empty in November, but I am a little bit late this year:

I decided to buy bags of composted organic manure as I have nowhere to store fresh manure while it composts down. Ironically, the six bags I bought from the garden centre cost me £24 which is just £1 less than I used to pay the organic farmer who would deliver manure to my four allotments….his manure used to last me two to three seasons when I used it on all four plots:

“Animal manure is a wonderful soil conditioner which also adds a small amount of nutrients to the soil. Some animal manures add more nitrogen than others and if you apply it fresh, the nitrogen will ‘burn’ and kill plants. Compost fresh manure for at least six months before using it”

I lightly forked my new bags of organic manure into my beds and it looked and felt like compost. This is a long way from the manure I used to use from the farmer, as this was heavy and stuck in clumps, where as my ‘bagged’ manure could be raked easily over the soil….but it was expensive.

As I forked it into the soil I found quite a bit of different bindweed roots. I know from experience that you need to keep on top of this weed if you don’t want to use chemicals to kill it. I keep pulling it out as soon as I see it, as it spreads very quickly if I don’t. Eventually the plant will weaken and give up, but this can take a long, long time.

Eventually I want to stop using manure and just use compost (mainly made by me), but for now I wanted to put some ‘umph’ in the soil (as my wonderful old allotment friend Eric used to say to me), to improve my soil and add a few nutrients (though I will still be using a slow release fertiliser like blood, fish and bone before I sow / plant my crops).

This week in the home:

This week I have continued to clean my kitchen cupboards. I am very sad to say amongst my recipe books I found two of the same books, they were just printed at different times but have exactly the same recipes inside. This just shows me I don’t read my books enough after buying them, so I am going to try and make a conscious effort to look through and use all of my recipe books from now on!

I have also caught up with a few little jobs that I have been putting off, like cleaning my fridge:

…..And fixing the hook in the kitchen that for two years has twisted round and around when you hook the curtain tie back on to it! It took me less than five minutes to fix it with ‘hard as nails’ adhesive:

I also fixed the curtain holdbacks in the bedroom I recently decorated for my daughter:

So this bedroom is completely finished now and I am really, really pleased with how it looks and so far my daughter has kept it tidy:

This week I also made Mr Thrift some valentine chocolates. I managed to get a silicone mould in the sales last year for £2. I just melted a bar of Mr Thrift’s favourite chocolate in the microwave and then poured the melted chocolate into the silicone mould (I didn’t bother tempering the chocolate either). I let the chocolate set (out of the fridge) and then pushed the chocolates out of the mould.

I also had enough left over chocolate to make my daughters a few chocolate lollies using a silicone lolly mould I had tucked away.

If you look carefully at the hearts above, you can see that each heart has a couple of ‘valentine’ words on.

I wrapped them up in cellophane and gave them to Mr Thrift on valentines day. He really liked them thank goodness.

It just goes to show you don’t have to spend a lot of money on a gift…..it really is the thought that counts!

Finally last weekend we celebrated my daughters 18th birthday at a Toby Carvery. I wanted to mention this as the manager was absolutely brilliant.

My daughter said she didn’t want a party and asked us to go for a quiet meal with her….but then two weeks ago she decided she wanted to ask this person and that person, until the number of people she had asked totalled forty!

So we spoke to the manager at the restaurant and he arranged for everyone to be seated in just one area and allowed us to come a couple of hours earlier to decorate it with banners and balloons: