Comparing Notes

We got back this afternoon from a pleasant weekend spent with Hazel and Alex in Cambridge. As is custom, we spent the time eating, gardening/walking, and playing board games. Hazel is an excellent cook, and produced a lovely slow cooked pork belly from a National Trust book we don't—yet—have. That may need to change. We'd taken a bottle of my elderflower wine, which went down very well—apparently, it's quite like a semi-sweet Reisling.

On Saturday, we walked over to their allotment, which has come on again since we last visited: they've basically finished the raised beds (about 3m x 0.8m), and installed a 5m x 5m fruit cage with a load of bushes. Gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants; and a jostaberry, Japanese wineberry, and a kiwi. The jostaberry is, essentially, a gooseberry/blackcurrant cross; wineberry is a type of raspberry; the kiwi needs no introduction. I shall be intrigued to try the first two, and to gauge their success with a kiwi—needless to say, I doubt we could grow one up here. The vines need decent summer warmth, and are vulnerable to early frosts: we have an insufficiency of the former, and a predilection to the latter.

Their potatoes are, I might say, behind ours: conversely, their runner beans are ahead. They grew over-wintering onions (Senshyu), so they're looking bigger than ours—no surprise, as they've been in since August 2010. However, Japanese onions don't store as well, and we've sown a year's worth, so we'll be well placed once ours are harvested. The strawberries are doing better, benefiting from the higher temperatures in East Anglia. Everything, though, is a bit dry: they've had no significant rain since the end of March.

It was, as normal, a pleasure to see them; and always interesting to see how someone else's garden's getting on!