Kitchen Garden Forum

My friend in Australia e-mailed me last night to advise me a parcel of seeds are coming my way for Xmas. Mainly pumpkins & lettuces - she knows my favourites!

Can't wait to see what they are going to look like and trying them out next year, mixing them up with the more traditional crops. She's even going to try to squeeze some Aussie sunshine in the parcel! I driven everyone I know mad telling them about it! Rolling Eyes all round!

When they come & I see how many I've got in the packets will let you know & if anyone is interested happy to share! (Hopefully they are a wee bit more generous than some of the companies over here)!

Westi

Importing foreign foodstuffs doesn't go down too well with their Border Control bods.
I wonder how ours will react?

I have a thing about gardening anoraks. Have a friend looks out for them at her neighbouring charity shop. Zip went in my current one recently so went to Mountain Warehouse in a local mill shop while my wife was at the dentists and found a super one for £12 on the sale rack (they were selling off a lot of small sized ones). Trouble is it's too good for gardening, had to go back and get a cheap fleece gilet to under another old anorak that isn't warm enough! Oh dear, wrong anorak.

Hello fellow anoraks I took part in a European seed swap a few years ago and someone started it off with a dozen or so veg and flower seeds, then we forwarded it to the next person on the list after selecting any varieties we liked and replacing them with an equal number of ones we had. She updated us where the parcel had got to and who was next on the list. It got really exciting when it was coming up to your turn and we got some very interesting new seeds to try. It went round Iceland, France, Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy as well as the UK. The person from Belgium even included a couple of geranium cuttings (possibly illegal) which I still grow. I still save seeds from some of the fruit and veg varieties too.

My favourite gardening jacket is now about 20 years old and was made from fibres spun from old plastic pop bottles. It is the best fleece I've ever bought warm, non-pill, good pockets and strong zip and a nice shade of dark green. It does have a couple of small holes from bonfire sparks, but is still going strong. I wonder if they still make them although they've probably gone bust if they never wear out.

Hi Westi, I'm an anorack though not in my opinion keen enough to be a gardening anorack.

Obsession level depends on who is judging, I seem to be an anorack in most things I tackle according to those who are half-hearted dabblers in everything they do.

I'm told by dog training people (hesitate to call them experts) that my dog only needs ten minutes walk twice a day, or twenty minutes or thirty minutes depending on the advisors. What a lot of nonsense, twenty minutes walk by a fat and lazy person with hip replacements will be quite different to twenty minutes by a doggy anorack.

I can't wear working clothes unless they are old, preferably been repaired, faded and worn out.

Oh I don't know Richard!

You, like most of us strive really hard to grow what we grow well, even if nature throws up more challenges than we can handle some years! That's pretty much an anorak - plodding on, sharing outcomes & ideas, doing more than our bodies advise us to & boring some folk crazy as if we were chatting on her with fellow gardeners!

As for dog trainers - Hmm! On our 4th dog & have listened to so much nonsense over the years with very little positive results. Have learnt that each dog is individual & they show you their personality (when over the really silly puppy phase) & you manipulate these traits to train them. Mr Westi took our Ambush Amber out for a 2hour trek in the New Forest today. Ambush met her first pig up close & personal when it was silly enough to sniff her ball. Pig decided against being slobbered on!

Westi

anorak?

just spent acouple of hours tackling my veg patch that hasnt been touched for two years, the late morning january sun with an air temp of about 10 degrees made such a thing redundant.... wellies and gardening gloves were quite sufficient.

that must have been quite the sight Richard

I even give the gloves a miss....

Oh no! Not the sock incident again OH!!

oldherbaceous wrote:I even give the gloves a miss....

You've got to hand it to OH, brave or what

oh dear, just had a mental vision of OH in just a tin hat and wellie boots on the plot.

I can foresee OH writing a article for one of the spring issues of KG, four pages on naked gardening

Pa Snip wrote:I can foresee OH writing a article for one of the spring issues of KG, four pages on naked gardening

100% organic then?