One of my favourite things to do is foraging, especially when it involves cooking what you’ve spent backbreaking time collecting. So being here in the gardens, with fruit and veg at my fingertips is a dream. A few days ago, quite unexpectedly, the Gardeners World Magazine team took photos of my blackcurrant bush in the Compost Garden being pruned, and I was left with branches coated with lovely juicy fruit, which I hadn’t seen, hidden in the depths of the plant. I gathered every tiny morsel and made jam in the evening. It was so good that I was worried the amount left in the pan wouldn’t be enough to fill a jar, after removing copious amounts for taste testing. Luckily I have another bush in the Cook’s Garden with fruit ready to pick, so I’ll be showing how to make blackcurrant jam in my next video diary.
We’ve begun learning practical skills for the diploma this week, and started with a module on propagation, so yesterday morning our head gardener, Andy Strachan taught us how to take woody cuttings. Matt, Claire and I ventured out into the orchard to take the cuttings and simultaneously prune some of this year’s new growth of the ‘Winter Gem’ apple tree. Cuttings have always been a mystery to me, yet in actuality they’re relatively simple. You don’t even have to be delicate, and I have a theory that the more you mollycoddle a plant, the less strength it builds on its own. After all, natural selection discards the weak and maintains the naturally tough.
On that note I’m going to head back out in the rain, and finish some weeding!
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