THURSDAY 2ND JUNE- FIRST DAY AT BLOOM

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Silver Medal for The Garden School stand at Bloom 2011

Our day started early. With a raucous choir of bird song under a low grey sky, I watered the plants in the tunnels at home. We fed the cats, drank some coffee and loaded the last few items into the car. We closed the garden gate in Mayo at 6 am and hit the road for Dublin. Just after 8.30 am we entered the Phoenix Park. Last minute preparations continued for about 90 minutes until the doors opened on the garden festival, Bloom 2011 commenced. The judges gave us a silver medal for our interactive educational stand in the floral pavilion, which is a nice recognition of the preparation and work which we had carried out. It was a good start for what proved to be a very busy day, As the morning progressed the low grey cloud which had stretched all the way from Mayo to Dublin blew away in the breeze. The temperature soared and happy faces were everywhere, a blue sky stayed until the sun went down.

We did not get  a chance to see any of the show apart from our own stand and a quick glance at some of our heighbours in the floral pavilion. Kilmurry Nursery, run by the energetic Orla and Paul Woods, based in Co. Wexford won a gold medal and best in show award for nursery display. Packed with colour and floriferously desireable herbaceous perennials, a central mirror multiplies the colour display. A rich blue Delphinium hansenii ‘Independence’ caught my eye, The more demure Lychnis flos-cuculi ‘White robin’ is a supernb plant gracing their stand. We bought it from them a good few years ago and it flowers for months on end in our garden where it self sows in a polite manner. Our own stand is enhanced with Kilmurry Nursery plants. Needing height in a corner, we went searching for some interesting plant. Orla gave us three plants of Iris ‘Tol Long’. A blue flowered iris with dark desirable flower stems. One which she recommends for any reasonable garden soil, they grow it in their garden and we will soon grow it in ours.

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LYCHNIS FLOS-CUCULI 'WHITE ROBIN'
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IRIS 'TOL LONG' FLOWER

From our stand we could admire the beautifully blousey blooms of herbaceous peony roses on Leamore Nursery’s display. Paeonia ‘White Wings’ is a cool single white while Paeonia ‘Coral Sunset’ is a sumptuous frilly peachy pink. The floral pavilion always ahs so many plants to tempt and beautiful displays to admire. We will be up early tomorrow morning, aiming to get to Bloom early and view more of the displays and show gardens before the show opens at 10 am.

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PEAONIA 'WHITE WINGS'
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PAEONIA 'CORAL SUNSET' FLOWERS

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BLOOM 2011

 

BLOOM IS BACK, AND WE WILL BE BACK AT BLOOM. OUR STAND IS IN THE FLORAL PAVILION, NUMBER 40.

The Garden School will have a stand and I will also be doing a daily blog, and may be a little more about BLOOm 2011. Using my iPhone I will be snapping pics of garden and plants, and maybe a few people too. This year I will also be able to share photos taken with my camera, letting you see the best of the show garden, well, my favourites anyway.

BLOOM is Ireland’s flag ship gardening event of the year, with lots of show gardens and loads of nurseries selling a great range of plants in the floral pavilion. there are lots of other things to do for kids, great food stalls. Something for everyone, and the weather is promised to be fabulous!

 

Our theme this year is Monocots v Dicots, a short botanical lesson illustrated with Hanna’s fabulous drawings and diagrams. We have got lots of magnifying glasses so you can see up close plant parts and learn about different plants groups and their role in feeding the world.

Hanna and I will be there everyday to talk to you and tell you about our courses and help you learn a little bit of interesting botany.

 

So if you are heading to the Phoenix Park in Dublin to attend BLOOM between Thursday 2nd of June and Monday 6th of June we hope to see you, at the stand 40 in the floral pavilion.

Enjoy the show…

 

 

Day in the Botanic Gardens

I have had a great day with some students in the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin. Paeonia rockii in flower, flowering ash, Fraxinus ornus, in bloom and Spanish bluebells flowering under Laburnum trees. Looking superb!

Here are a few pics I took with my phone…

Leg of Lamb With Coffee Sauce

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ROAST LEG OF LAMB

For Easter Sunday last weekend, we bought a half leg of lamb from the Irish Organic Meats stall at Boyle market in Co. Roscommon. I wanted to do something a little different. Hanna suggested cooking it with coffee. This is a traditional Easter lamb dish in Hanna’ family which here grandmother always cooked back in Helsinki, Finland. Hanna phoned her Mum to get the recipe, which she had close to hand, as she was preparing the same dish.

Ingredients:

Coffee
  • 0.5 Litre of strong coffee – by no means use instant!
  • 2 tablespoons of Muscavado sugar
  • Cream – Hanna’s mum says enough that if looks like what granny used to drink!
Preparing and cooking the lamb
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LEG OF LAMB STUDDED WITH GARLIC AND PLACED IN TRAY WITH BAKING PAPER
  1. Season with salt and fresh ground black pepper
  2. Cut slits into the lamb fat and push slices of garlic under the fat
  3. Place on a baking tray lined with baking paper
  4. Place into a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees Celcius for 15 minutes
  5. Then lower the temperature to 180 and start to baste the meat with coffee
  6. Spoon coffee over the lamb every fifteen minutes
Lining the tray with baking paper prevents the juices released from the meat from burning. Roast for one hour for the first Kilo and half an hour for every additional kilo.
When the lamb is cooked, pour the juices into a measuring jug, allow to cool a little and then remove fat from top. Keep lamb warm.
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MAKING THE COFFEE SAUCE
Pour into a saucepan and heat. Stir in an equal amount of coffee. If you want a thicker sauce you can thicken with cornflower.
Carve meat and serve with rosemary roast potatoes. Delicious at any time of year, not just Easter!

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Autumn Pudding with White Chocolate Sauce

It all started with a trip to a nursery. We went to purchase named female cultivars of our favourite berry plant, sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides. The nursery is Fruit and Nut, part of the Sustainability Institute in Westport, Co. Mayo.

We had selected three different cultivars, we already have a female plant and one male plant in our garden. We also had picked out a Jostaberry, a hybrid between a blackcurrant and a Gooseberry and two cultivars of Cornelian cherry, Cornus mas. We were chatting with Andy, the mind and the energy behind the nursery, sharing our enthusiasm for berry growing and the concept of woodland gardens when he asked us where we lived. As I described how to get to our garden he stopped me, and asked in disbelief if we knew his friends, they lived very close to us. Apparently they also shared a common interest in woodland gardening, we did not know them yet. he gave us their contact details and directions to their house, he was sure that they would want to meet us.

On our way home we decided to call in and meet our neighbours, people that lived so close to us with a common interest in gardening and woodland gardening in particular, yet we had not ever met them. We drove up their lane and parked outside their house. They were surprised to see a caller, we introduced ourselves, explained what had happened at the nursery. They asked us in. Cy and Cleo invited us to a “pudding evening” the following Thursday. “Pudding” is a term that English people use to mean dessert, not literally a pudding. We could make and bring anything as long it went along with the theme of Italian or Chocolate. We accepted.

What to make was the question. I decided to make an autumn pudding, from the freezer I could use elderberries, blackberries and sloes, all picked from the hedgerows in our locality last autumn. I had a cooking apple there too, and Hanna had been baking lots of spelt bread. We had all the ingredients, but to fit in with the theme of the evening gathering I would have to make an amendment; cover the finished autumn pudding with white chocolate! The tanginess of the fruit and dark colour of the pudding would both contrast with the sweet white chocolate, Green & Blacks would be perfect, not only organic but also they have a generous amount of vanilla pod in their white chocolate.

We made the pie the night before. Cooked up the fruit, sweeten with honey and fruit juice concentrate. took the crust off a number of slices of the homemade spelt bread and soaked them shortly in some apple juice. In a bowl we poured the cooked fruit and then pressed in the bread torn into pieces. Covered it and placed it in the fridge overnight. The following morning we made the white chocolate sauce.

One bar of chocolate was finely chopped. In a saucepan we melted a knob of butter, added 200ml of cream and heated to near boiling. This we then poured over the chopped chocolate and after letting it sit for a couple of minutes we stirred the mixture to fully melt in the chocolate pieces. After allowing to cool a bit, we spooned the chocolate sauce over the pudding. It looked fantastic, the creamy sauces dripping over the dark pudding, collecting in a pool around the base.With strong resolve we resisted having a taste and returned the dessert to the fridge.

We had a lovely evening with our new friends, and met more of theirs. Everyone had brought a dessert “pudding”. We tasted each others creations, sipped elderflower champagne, drank coffee and chatter. A lovely evening, four desserts and good company, does not get much better than that!

Autumn pudding with white chocolate sauce

Autumn Pudding Recipe

This recipe I had originally included on my other blog LINK

Ingredients:

After the fruit has been cooked for about ten minutes transfer to a bowl and press the bread pieces into the mixture until the fruit is pulp is absorbed. Cover the bowl with a plate and place in the refrigerator over night.

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Admired plant

P70

This is Asarina scandens, much admired by students on the home study course at one of the regular garden visits to National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin in Dublin.

It is a tender perennial herbaceous climbing plant. It always self seeds into the old stone walls at the bots where in trails downwards. It can grow to 2 meters or more. In cold areas it makes an excellent conservatory plant. It is easy to grow from seed.

Facebook friend offers free weedkiller for my talk

Tonight I am doing a talk for the Oranmore GIY (Grow Your Own) Group. The title of the talk is “Top Fruit, Soft Fruit and Strange Fruit”. I announced the talk on my Facebook page and then I got an email from a Facebook friend who I have never met, Oisin from Irish Organic Weedkiller. He kindly made the offer of some free samples of his new innovative product made from acetic acid that kills weeds quickly and is 100% biodegradable.

I have never used the product but I will give it a try. I have two boxes of the ready to use bottles to give away at the talk that takes place in Oranmore Public Library this evening at 6.30pm.

Thanks Oisin for the gesture.

http://www.owk.
http://www.giyireland.com/