Miss Manners and her rules, and Cyclamen and Tulip Cake! 🍰
Hello Friends!
It's been a while - sorry about that (!) I was sick as a dawg, and then I got better (thankfully) and I got on a plane and flew to paradise (Ravello, Italy) for 48 hours to celebrate ten years of marriage...Yes, TEN YEARS - It may not seem a lot to some, but for us, it's a big achievement, still to be chugging along like this, because marriage is wonderful and uplifting, but it is also challenging, and complicated, and it constantly requires you to consider someone else's feelings and wishes, and that, for me, has taken practice, because I was so used to being a lone wolf for so long. And then you add children into the mix, and you add all the sleeplessness, and lack of time and yes, I'm going to say it's a bloody miracle we are still laughing, and we deserve to celebrate that! Here is some bougainvillea to give you a feel of our 48 hours in the sky,
...but now, back to business!
Here are my five minute forays this week:
Monday:
It is my birthday. It starts marvellously when my son comes in at 4.30am and makes me do a treasure hunt for presents. It is so worth it. He has made me a beautiful paper boat, covered painstakingly in sellotape 'so you can float it in the bath mummy and it won't get wet'. I am thrilled with this, and the wonderful autumnal rain which is falling as the sun comes up, and keeps on falling all day. There is a break in the rain and I take my opportunity to start some leaf mould. I have several trees in the garden, and all of their leaves, (bar the monstrous sycamore) make fabulous leaf mould, which I make by gathering them up and storing in a big bin liner, punched with holes, and leaving it to rot down for a year or two. The result is a beautiful, crumbly mulch which is a perfect addition to ordinary compost and a great top-dressing for containers. But it can be a pain to orchestrate, all this leaf-gathering, so I have devised a system whereby I use two or three large, ornamental containers, dotted at strategic points in the garden, in each of which I put a bag, already punched with holes.
I then make the leaf-gathering a daily thing - five minutes or less, just raking them or blowing them into a pile from the lawn, or sweeping them from the terrace and plonking them in the bag. A quick twist to close the bag, and then I keep going each day until it fills up. I have found this daily thing to be the easiest way to keep on top of things. I should probably do the laundry this way too, except there is no joy in that.
Tuesday:
I grab the secateurs and finally chop all the agapanthus seedbeds off, because at a certain point they begin to look damp and brown instead of majestic, and that point has now been reached. Just removing these instantly lifts the two raised beds where I have my agapanthus, as the lushness of the evergreen leaves can now shine through without being marred by brown. While I'm at it, I hack away at my neighbour's honeysuckle, which is threatening to overshadow the agapanthus, and is steadily creeping into the shrubs. Finally, I cut off all the old gladiolus callianthus flowerheads. I have three pots of these on the terrace, planted a few weeks apart from each other, and this successional planting has rewarded me with constant fragrant flowers for months. To say I feel smug about this is an understatement and I will be doing it again, probably with every container I own.
I am toying with the idea of lifting and storing the gone-over bulbs this year (something I've never done before) and then plunging them into the flowerbed next year to fend for themselves. Has anyone reading this ever done this successfully? I'd love to know.
Wednesday:
It's time to get bulbous. I sneak out to the nursery and buy some iris reticulata and crocus, which I plant in bulb fibre, in a china bowl for indoors. It's always tricky knowing how much water is too much when there are no drainage holes in a container, so there's an element of jeopardy in doing this (too much water and the bulbs will rot off...too little and they won't grow).
I squidge them into the fibre, tips peeking out and bring them into the warm for what will be, in a gardener's world, instant gratification. Already I can see their tips growing, and the children are watching too. I also decorated my windowsills for Autumn in a sort of Martha Stewart-ish kind of way but for NO MONEY. Details on my journal here if you're interested.
Thursday:
What a bonkers busy day. But I managed to carve out five minutes right at the end, thanks to my NEW TABLE RULES. I have been frankly HAUNTED by my kids' lack of any discernible manners...how did this happen? What have I done wrong? Why are they doing this to me?...Enough is enough and I have been tackling this over the last two weeks using a points system. Every time they follow a rule, they get a point, and if they get enough points they get pudding. SIMPLE. The rules range from keeping elbows off the table, to offering food and drink to others, to sitting still on ones bottom, (message me if you want the list...seriously this system is working and it's UN-GROSSING my life.) but crucially they include a combined effort clearing the table after supper (something which I and my wonderful au-pair had hitherto, slave-like, been doing day in, day out. Not any more... They now all load the dishwasher and wipe the table, and sweep the floor etc together, and today I left them to it and made a delicious cyclamen and tulip cake in a pot (recipe below). Do I sound unbearably happy and smug? It's because I've had my first proper break in ten years and my kids are eating with their mouths closed #easilypleased 🤷♀️
Friday:
Some more lawn frolics with the bulb auger today...this time to put a few crocuses in. Now that I have the auger I wish heartily that I had ordered more fritillaries, and possibly some scilla for the meadow part of my lawn - I thought the whole thing of planting in the lawn would be so arduous I had better curb my enthusiasm. But this drill thing (see my last letter if you don't know what I'm going on about) is a total gift. I could of course go out and get more bulbs, but I think it's probably sensible to wait and see how these ones do first. I have a very wonderful, unspeakably wealthy friend who had an vast meadow which she filled with camassias at great expense. Not a single one came up. There's a lesson. 😉
A cyclamen and tulip cake.
This recipe is for a LARGE cake - the pot is 50cm x 50cm. Adjust quantities to fit your pot. The only rule is to plant the tulip bulbs at least 7cm apart, so if you have a small pot, that might mean just three cyclamen and three bulbs, or one cyclamen in the middle and three or five bulbs around the edge.
Ingredients:
One large pot filled with multi-purpose compost (mine has old compost in it from a previous planting.
12 Cylcamen plants (you can find these everywhere at this time of year. They come in white or pink shades and their leaves are TO DIE FOR. You can have them indoors or out, and you can plant them in the garden when you want to get rid of them, so they're NOT JUST FOR CHRISTMAS)
7 Tulip bulbs. Mine are a variety called Princes Irene. It's my favourite tulip by a country mile, so obviously I think it's be best, but you can use whichever tulip you want, or indeed whichever bulb you want.
More compost to back-fill
Method.
Decide where everything is going before you begin, remembering the bulb spacings. The cyclamen will be quite happy squashed next to each-other quite snugly, and in time, their leaves will cover the bare earth above the bulbs.
Plant the bulbs first - I used a bulb planter to make neat little holes but it's not essential. Plant them about 10cm deep.
Now plant the cyclamen, taking care not to put them directly over where the bulbs are, and back-filling with compost
Now water.
Now stand back and smile.
All the good things, always
xx Laetitia
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