Garden January 2014

Remember Garden at the beginning of the month? I did that for over a year, ending a year ago, when I kept forgetting to take the pictures at the beginning of the month. You can see my past pictures on my photostream. I like using it as a way of seeing how the garden has developed, and how much work has already been done. In comparison, this is January 2012 and January 2011, when it really did look bare.

It's hard to take garden pictures at this time of year without the low sun making huge shadows. Everything's looking bare, but apart from all the flooding, it's incredibly mild. We've only had a couple of frosts, and they haven't been bad ones.

There's still some colour in the garden. These are a couple of primulas I bought at the church Christmas fayre in December. They're brightening up the container I can see from the kitchen window.

This is a winter flowering clematis ("Wisley Cream") which I bought in the summer, on a trip to the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley. You can see some of the other plants I bought then in a different post, but I never got round to blogging about the visit itself! I wanted to get more winter flowering plants in the garden to provide nectar all year round for insects.

Then the containers I potted up in the Autumn, with winter-flowering pansies and violas.

And bulbs already beginning to push through - you can tell how mild it's been.

Inside the house, this is the hippeastrum that Mum gave us for Christmas, now with four huge flowers at the same time!

Before Christmas I put two of the forced hyacinths on the mantelpiece. Our living room is quite dark, and there is a window at either end of the room, so the flowers have grown towards the light, but in opposite directions. Amusingly one appears to be trying to biff the knitted me on the head, and the other one the photographic me!

Marmalade

We get a veg box (and sometimes a meat box) from Riverford each week, and last week I couldn't resist adding a marmalade kit too, now that I have more time in the week. It consisted of a bag of Seville oranges and a couple of lemons, plus a recipe.

I'd never made marmalade before and had intended to include some more pictures of the chopping up process, but I ended up with two builders in the kitchen at that point so didn't feel like taking photos of oranges whilst they were there! ;-)

It turned out that I could have done with a proper preserving pan, as the largest saucepan wasn't really big enough.

 Still, it set fairly easily and went into sterilised jars (with a bit of splodgy orange goo landing in various places it shouldn't. If I do this again it will involve a proper preserving pan AND one of those jam pouring gadgets).

Knitting-wise I finished my Everyone outta the pool socks and am pleased with the effect of the stitch pattern. I deliberately went for fraternal socks rather than completely identical. It's a nice pattern that I'd definitely use again as it was easy to memorize and fun to knit.

I've cast on another Beyond Puerperium (my third!) for a friend's baby, due in a couple of months. This will be the 6-12 month size, and the yarn is Rico Baby Classic DK. It's synthetic but it feels lovely and soft and not plasticky, as well as reasonably priced.

The lace knitting has stalled as I haven't had much time to sit and concentrate on it - looks like I'm going to have to frog this attempt though as I struggled with the pattern and whether to knit or drop all of the yarn overs in the second section.

And I've realised that I forgot to do garden at the beginning of January  - as in totally forgot, as I haven't even taken pictures! But thanks to the astonishingly mild weather we already have lots of bulbs coming up and here is our first snowdrop:

And the temperature's now dropping down to the minuses!