Wildflowers, brandy & manure

There seem to be a lot of flower photos turning up here at the moment. One of the pleasures of May is seeing all the flowers and blossom transforming the garden and turning it towards summer. The picture at the top of this post is a lovely wildflower, sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis). And the next one is of the first flowers coming out on the loganberry:



After I hacked the thing back over the winter, I wondered what sort of growth we'd get on it this year. It seems to be growing back with some vigour and we should have plenty of loganberries at the end of the summer. One of their most important tasks will be to go into our Rumtopf, preserving the summer's fruits in brandy through autumn and winter to enliven Christmas trifle, or to turn into a wonderful 'Rumtopf sundae', with brandy-soaked fruit, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and a few Belgian chocolate sprinkles on the top. Yum.

For those who don't know, Rumtopf is traditionally made in Germany with all kinds of fruit, sugar and rum in an earthenware crock. But there are versions pretty much everywhere, including a Swiss version called 'Officer's Jam' and one from Suffolk apparently called Hodgkin. Whatever you call it, it's great. The fruit makes the best bottom layer of a trifle and the liquid, strained from the fruit, a delicious liqueur. Anyway, here's our sundae. You can just about see a loganberry peeping out on the bottom right corner:



On a slightly more prosaic note, our thicket of green manure (see this post) is no more. Or rather, I strimmed it down to ground level and then pegged some garden membrane over the top. This is a 'no-dig' method of getting the green manure to work, so we'll see how it goes. You can see our next crop of green manure in the raised bed on the right in the picture below. This is going to be cut down and then dug in to the bed with some more compost and will probably then be used as a bed for veg like cabbages, onions, shallots, garlic...