Elderflowers

It's that elderflower cordial time of year again. Out for a walk in Hartshill Park, a little bit of semi-wilderness between the A52 & the D Road, we found some trees with a decent number of flowers for taking home and turning into cordial. This year we're using the recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Book, which makes a stronger cordial than our other recipes. Delicious with still or fizzy water - and even better with gin, mint leaves and fizzy water (a Devon Lemonade). Here is our first batch (today's pickings are the second) steeping, before being heated up with a load of sugar:



The weather's gone a bit dismal but at least the water butts are full up now - and things are continuing to go well. One job that needs doing from about this time of year is training the loganberry. It's going to be full of fruit this year:



A good way to grow a loganberry up the wall is to train all the fruiting growth in one direction and the new growth in another. This means when it comes to autumn and time to cut back all the fruited branches, you can just cut back one side rather than hunting for what's old and what's new growth. This year's new stuff will fruit next year. So here's the before and after: first the before with all the new stems growing in with the fruit:



And now the after, with the new growth trained to the left:



You can just about make out what I've done I think!

To finish this post, a couple of pics of some of our 'late' seedlings. First, for the person who described Seasonal Matters as my 'cabbage blog' :-), a tiny cabbage seedling:



And to finish, the very vigorous looking broccoli seedlings:



All this and we're going on holiday a week on Sunday. Ali at Craft Matters and I are slightly nervous about leaving the garden to fend for itself, even with friends to keep an eye on it - *and* we're only going away for 5 days or so..