Syssi
That sounds seriously yummy. I'm doing chicken breasts, salad and new potatoes this evening... When it's cooled off a bit! 25 degrees in the shade in the living room, closer to 30 outside. I'm wilting! Not sure we'll have the energy for dessert, but there are ice creams in the fridge...
My dad was a loony gardener. We moved a LOT with the RAF (parents lived in 22 different house in 21 years!), but every base we got to he ended up as Officer's Mess Garden Officer. He got all the lads on jankers out digging the flower beds, pruning roses... Turning boring square plots with daffs in regimental rows into mini versions of Kew, and our house garden into a tiny Risley! People used to say they could tell where we lived from the air, as it would be the garden with mad amounts of flowers and veg, and the lawn cut into interesting shapes!
When he left the RAF he bought a nice enough modern house with a BIG garden: 100 feet long and 60 wide. It also had a 12 foot long hardwood framed greenhouse... The place was a mess, but in the three years he lived there, he turned the garden into a great vegetable plot, cut the lawn into interesting shapes, fed it and cared for it until it looked like the greens at St Andrews, and filled the greenhouse with exotic fruits and multi-coloured peppers, the cold frame was filled with squashes and ridge cucumbers, and he even grew rhubarb... He'd have liked a few fruit trees, but felt the garden wasn't really big enough. The old boy next door had espaliered fruit trees up one side of his, so they got as many free apples and pears as they could eat, and he pbutted bushels of plums to mum for jam-making. She got the fruit free and supplied the sugar! He got home-made jam and knew the fruit wasn't going to waste. :) He and mum used to natter over the fence about saving sugar rations during the war for jam and bottling...
One of the things Dad grew in mad quantities was tomatoes! He grew about 7 different sorts, including those baby yellow plum ones, baby yellow cherry tomatoes, big yellow tomatoes, and big and little red ones... There were always tomatoes warm off the vine, from May almost to Christmas! Then the last bushel or two of green ones got chutneyed - most of which went off to village ftes to raise money for the church roof and things, as there's only so much green tomato chutney one man (and the occasional son or daughter) can eat!
Sadly, he'd just got three years in and the garden was fantastic when he died, aged 53, of a sudden and mbuttive heart attack. I had sweet peas he'd planted all over the church when I got married, and some of his beloved roses on my wedding cake.
PING: Christine Dabney 2505On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 12:00:54 +0200, Chatty Cathy Yes, it was hosted by Katherine and David Barto. I will have a ton more pictures...
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