Category: Gardens and landscaping

Avatar Generosity (apples)

Blessed as we are to be alive in the year 2025 so that we can witness, ummm, the release of the Lego Gameboy after all this time. Praise be, we are blessed.

We’re also blessed for a number of reasons which I won’t go into here. That’s too boring. What isn’t boring is talking about apples, right?

Right?

Last year after we moved into the house, we noticed that one of our neighbours further down the street would regularly leave a box on a little table with a sign saying, ‘help yourself’ or, ‘free to a good home’. In said box were apples and sometimes pears. I took a couple home and they were delicious, all the more delicious because they were free.

Fast forward to a week ago and there’s a knock on the door. Our next door neighbour held a bag of apples in her hand, handed them to me and said, “if any pears from our tree happen to drop in your garden, take them. They may need a few days to ripen but otherwise they’re fine to eat.” Unbelievable generosity. I had ten free apples in my hand and carte blanche to gorge myself on pears. Pear gorge? Pear gorge.

Fast forward to Friday afternoon. I’m still making my way through the apples when there’s a knock on the door. The husband of the neighbour from the previous week hands me a black bin liner containing roughly twenty-five apples. Twenty-five! I have to ask.

“Does every house on this street have an apple tree apart from us?”

The neighbour laughs. “Possibly. Before the houses were built, this was an orchard. There are some houses that have plum trees, pear trees, cherry trees, all kinds of fruit.”

Out of all the fruit in the world, what did we get with our lovely house? A f*cking gooseberry bush. Nobody wants gooseberries. They’re about as versatile as a quince. I also now have to find some way of consuming twenty-five apples on my own because Vikki is more into strawberries and other berries. I’m not being ungrateful, I am super pleased to have free fruit in my fridge, and *somehow* I will chug my way through all dem apples. Look at me and be inspired.

Avatar Grow your own

Do you want to grow a large meeting of delicious, slightly tapered fruit? Do you want to witness a big hall full of stands offering fruit merchandise, and large seminar events with panels of fruit speakers? Do you want to see fruit lining up for famous orchard fruits to sign photographs and t-shirts and have their picture taken with people?

You do? Then I have the exact thing you need.

Grow your own Pear Conference

Avatar The best home owner job

We talk a lot about what it’s like owning a house. Kev has been renovating and expanding his vast property empire for many years now, of course, while I have been steadily improving our premises with the aid of a toolbox large enough to use as a double garage. Now that Ian has joined the home owner club we have been doing our best to gently and constructively guide him in his new duties.

But I sometimes think that all too often we discuss the downsides: the amount of maintenance work, the unexpected costs, the speed with which nature will reclaim your carefully tended garden as wilderness. So I thought it might be nice to talk about the good bits of owning a house, because some of the things an Englishman has to do to look after his castle are actually very satisfying.

I will open the bidding with pressure washing.

Pressure washing is brilliant.

I love my pressure washer, but for whatever reason I hadn’t taken it out for a spin for about 18 months. Then, the other day, we’d had a drain unblocked and the drainage gully running through the paving down the side of the house needed clearing of all the crap that had built up, so I got the Kärcher out of the garage and fired it up. And once it was out, that was me set for the afternoon. Everything got jet washed.

The best part was discovering that the paving stones around the front and side of the house actually have a colour, as pictured above. I spent a very happy hour effectively colouring them in.

Avatar Midlife Crisis

I’m not sure if a building built in the 1500’s can be said to be having a mid life crisis in 2024, but if it can, then this one is. Like a post-divorce Michael Gove popping up in an Aberdeen nightclub, Temple Newsham is entering it’s “rave stage”.

We visited on Sunday and it was off it’s tits on something. The whole garden had been filled with mysterious lights (and hairy balls) and it had put it’s loudest attire on to have a good old boogie.

Fair play I say. Happy New Year all!

Avatar Moderately Merry Christmas

To add a bit of festive spirit to the Beans, I’d like to share with you the Christmas decorations from the suburban shopping centre near our house.

Naturally you will be feeling envious about your own comparatively tepid decorations. All I can suggest is that you try harder next year. And if that’s not the Christmas spirit, I don’t know what is.

Avatar Dear Beans… troubling transformations

Dear Beans,

I am currently undergoing a transformation and there’s nothing I can do about it. I am not the same person anymore; I am slowly morphing into something else and how it will end I do not know.

It all started earlier on this year when I bought a house. It was my first time, a life-changing event, one that was met with equal parts joy and exhaustion (I’ve got the plug!). We moves in no problems and set about doing the usual shuffling items of furniture about and redecorating.

It was slow to begin with, almost crimsonly even. Rambling about a garden centre, I noticed the garden tools and took one off the shelf. Normally I’d make a beeline for the chainsaws and start swishing one around like a child only this time I removed a reasonably-priced garden strimmer and thought to myself, “hmmm, this would make work in the back garden next summer a lot easier.” I immediately noticed what I was doing, put the strimmer back and quickly made off in the opposite direction.

Last weekend I was out with the dog for a morning walk. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet although there was enough light to make out the specific details of each house as we passes them. I saw one on the other side of the road with what seemed to be a brand-new roof that seemed to sparked in the almost dawn. “That is a fine-looking roof,” and I almost spoke out loud, the words dancing on my tongue, the thought hanging in the air with the morning frost.

What is happening to me? Why am I behaving this way? Should I seek help or am I a lost cause?

Yours vexingly

Shoutpad O’Plaxingdale

Avatar Seeds

Kate has been very much getting into gardening lately, and in particular, growing vegetables. Our back garden is on its way to becoming a vegetable garden. Last year we had home grown tomatoes, potatoes, rocket and carrots, and this year we’re being even more adventurous.

Since all this stuff is being grown from seeds, I am enjoying discovering that mundane vegetables have impossibly exciting names for their varieties.

Some tell you where it’s from, like our spring onions, which are White Lisbon, or the Brussels sprouts which are Evesham Special. Others tell you what the cultivator was hoping for, like Elegance salad leaves or Sparkler radishes or our yellow courgettes, which are called Gold Rush. I see what you did there.

We’ve got some flowers with descriptive names too; our sunflowers have been set up for greatness with the name Titan while the dahlias are Showpiece. We have high hopes for them both.

I don’t know what to expect from our aubergines now I know they are called Jewel Jet F1. But I am a big fan of the classical names. Our spinach is Apollo, and we have two varieties of parsnips, one called Palace and the other called Gladiator. I have checked the packet and Gladiator parsnips are a “vigorous hybrid” with “large, canker-resistant roots”. Just like real gladiators were.

Thrilled and exhilerated by all these names, I then turn to the packet of beetroot seeds, and see that they are Mixed. It had to end somewhere.