Time to tidy the Greenhouse

It's that time of year again - the summer is over, the nights are getting longer and the days chillier which means only one thing. It's time to clean the greenhouse. This was a task that I undertook today, cleaning all the gunk from the sills and giving the glass a scrub with water and a little washing up liquid. I also decided to create myself some new staging - i've been making do with an old outdoor plastic table and have had staging envy ever since we went to look around a garden in Ravenstone during the summer. I still had a load of decking wood left over from the summer decking project so along with a bit of 2x4 I created myself some new staging benches. The grooves I figure will help let the water run off after watering. All the leftover decking screws came in handy too so in all it only cost me about £10 in materials.

So now I have a tidy clean greenhouse and have evicted all the snails - I counted 17 this time round. God knows how they get in there.

Change is afoot at Lavendon Garden

Last week we completed on the purchase of additional land that will be turned into the new and extended Lavendon Garden. We've been after the land behind our current garden for ages and finally a month or so back it came up for sale, so we bought it. We now have twice as much space. Sure there is loads of work to do, everything from the levels through to the work we've already done in the garden is going to have to be looked at but it's a challenge I'm really looking forward to.

I'm going to be able to double the size of my vegetable patch next year which is so exciting.

Strawberry Jam

We're getting towards the end of summer now and the strawberry glut needs sorting out. What better way to use up all the stragglers than to make up a glorious batch of late summer jam? For some reason I had it in my mind that Jam making was a difficult thing to do, an activity only carried out successfully by life long WI members but thanks to this great recipe I think anyone can do it.

With only 4 ingredients it's dead simple, 350g strawberries, 450g of jam sugar, a squeeze of lemon and crucially a drop of Balsamic Vinegar as this enhances the flavour of the strawberries. I also like to add half a vanilla pod. The method is really simple, put a spoon in the freezer and then stick all the ingredients in a heavy based pan. Stir them all together and then turn on the heat - keep the heat low, stirring occasionally and bring to the boil. After about 5 minutes test the mixture with the spoon from the freezer, if the setting point has been reached the mixture will become firm and sticky. Leave to cool for a bit - 15-20 minutes, extract the vanilla pod and then decant into clean dry jars.

Lovely with fresh butter and crusty bread or on a scone.

Trying to find a plant database

This post is a more of a request than anything useful. I'm currently trying to find an open source plant database to seed a project that I currently developing. It doesn't have to be 100% complete, as like I say I need it to make a bit of a start on something bigger. Essentially as a minimum I need it to contain each common name along with genus, species and if possible cultivar.

Does such a database exist. I can find lots of closed source projects from the RHS and BBC but nothing that it available to download.