Advent 2024 and the Meaning of the Evergreens

 I went all over the place to find the evergreen bits to bring in for the Winter Solstice. I wanted as many different things that it's possible to have in a Mid Suffolk winter.

Bay from my own small Bay tree in a big pot in the back garden.

 Bay was used to aid healing and protected from lightening, snakebite, disease and witchcraft. Sacred to the Romans and worn by their emperors, heroes and poets. It was planted by the house door to keep away plague.

Holly with just a few berries from a back lane near where I used to live and I also snipped a couple of bits of variegated holly from the car park of a village hall on my way home from town on Thursday.

In Roman times Holly was given as a gift during Saturnalia. A Holly tree planted near the door protects from storm, fire and the Evil Eye. A holly collar protected a horse from witchcraft and coach men preferred whips with holly wood handles. Chilblains were cured by being whipped with a holly branch.

I stopped at the churchyard in the same village in the hope that some mistletoe would have been blown down from the huge churchyard trees and got lucky as there was a branch down, including mistletoe, although it must have been down a while as  most had lost it's leaves. There was one berry! 

Mistletoe - the most mysterious and magical plant, a parasitic plant suspended between earth and sky famous since the Druids. It symbolised peace and hospitality and the berries were used in love potions and kissing under it was once a fertility rite, rather than just fun!

A piece of Yew from one of the many Yew trees over the road in the Churchyard in my village.

 Yews have been planted in churchyards for many 100 years, although exactly the reason for the connection is not known, but it is thought they were sacred to pagans who had used the site before Christianity and they were often used as the spot for village meetings. They were thought to symbolise eternal life and cutting them down would bring death.

And Ivy growing on a post also in the churchyard, although it's everywhere of course.

Sacred to the Gods of wine it would hang outside a vintners premises to show that good wine could be had there (ale houses had a bush hanging outside)There is a traditional rivalry between the holly and the ivy. The holly is masculine and the ivy is feminine. Ivy leaves soaked in vinegar are said to be a cure for corns and whooping cough in children could be cured if they drank from a ivy-wood bowl.

And finally a piece of Rosemary also from the churchyard, didn't need secateurs for this as it was half broken and hanging down so not really 'stealing', just tidying!

Rosemary was both sacred and magical. Tradition says it had white flowers until the Virgin Mary spread Christ's  clothes on it to dry during the flight into Egypt. Tudor brides always carried rosemary in their bridal wreaths. Rosemary was once put into the hands of the deceased and mourners would carry rosemary to throw into the grave.

And altogether in the living room

There were some small bits left for another jar full which is on the kitchen windowsill. 

Back Tomorrow

Sue

December 24th and All Things Green and Colourful

After cutting a few bits of holly with berries from a tree down the road I went round the meadow and garden for some more greenery to bring indoors

I found Bay, Rosemary, Spruce  and Ivy to go with the Holly. Sometime in the future who ever lives here will have their own holly too, but holly is so slow growing so the saplings planted 2 years ago are still only 18 inches tall.

And for colour.......... a bunch of flowers I bought myself for Christmas. I was too mean to spend much, consequently lots of the flowers fell off my £5 supermarket bunch before I even got it home into it's vase!

 Over the last few days I've had comments from so many new people - it's been lovely to find who's reading and enjoying the blog and more folk have tapped the follower button too - welcome. I enjoy writing the blog and it's been a brilliant thing to do since Colin died. As I said to someone recently "without the blog I would have had to keep busy doing more cleaning!"

Didn't get to sing any well known Christmas carols at church on Sunday, I forgot that The Methodist church follow an advent plan so we sung advent carols - some I'd never heard  before and I don't think the stand-in organist(because the usual one had flu) had either! Lunch at Col's brother's house was delicious - out of necessity over the last years on his own he has become very good at roasts.

Now we are round to Christmas Eve, I've brought my pressies into the living room and tomorrow will put on the tree lights and open them - being alone will be odd.  Then I shall finish making a trifle to take over to SiL's. It will be a grown up Christmas this year - my niece is the youngest and she's nearly 30! There will be 9 of us altogether and it should be a lovely day.

(Ho! Ho! Ho! - yes that is a Santa on a stick in the middle of the flowers....it came with them, I hope Santa comes to your house tonight.......bringing you all the gifts you wished for)

Back tomorrow........briefly
Sue

The Bay Tree

The page below is from The Calendar of Garden Lore by Julia Jones

 The Romans brought the Sweet Bay......Laurus Nobilis........Noble Laurel to Britain. Leaves from the Bay had traditionally been made into wreaths and given to successful warriors and worn as a symbol of high achievement. The Romans had borrowed this idea from the ancient Greeks who awarded their poets and artists with a similar wreath.

The Romans called the Bay 'the plant of the good angels' and it was thought to give protection against lightening, storms, witchcraft, snakebite and disease and  a Bay tree planted by the house door would keep away the plague. Shepherds would always wear a sprig of Bay in their hats in case of being caught out on the open meadows during a thunderstorm.
It was used as a decoration for the Roman feast of Saturnalia and brought into the house at Christmas when Christianity arrived along with holly, ivy and mistletoe.

My first Bay tree was taken to the smallholding in a pot in 1992. We planted it in the centre of a big triangular herb garden and it grew and grew until it was blocking all the light from the kitchen and taking all the moisture from the herb garden. Colin cut it back several times but in the end we took it right out. By then it had produced seedlings all over the place which I would dig up and grow on to sell, I also had some success with cuttings from it to pot up and sell.

I kept one of the seedlings to take when we left the smallholding and it stayed in a pot for the year in Ipswich. When we got here I planted it on the edge of a ditch in a spot where it wouldn't matter how big it got and actually the bigger the better to keep some of the wind off the house. Because of last years dry summer it's taken a while to get going but it's nearly as tall as me now.
Which means it will be too big to move whenever I decide this place is too remote and too big. And that's why I picked up a small Bay at a boot sale a few weeks ago.

I don't get to use it as much as in the past but I still wouldn't want to be without one in the garden somewhere.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Growing Herbs

I've been growing herbs since the mid 1980s, when I discovered that many were interesting to grow and easy to sell. In the summer of the year before I had Youngest, when the older two were at school I used to pick raspberries to be frozen for a PYO fruit farm and then went on to sell the herbs there and then after we moved to the smallholding I grew for several years to sell at the gate and at the Suffolk Smallholders Annual Show. Eventually I found all the greenhouse space was needed for starting tomatoes, cucumbers and all the other things we  grew for selling and ended up only sowing parsley and basil each year.

Way, way back I wrote a page for Suffolk Smallholders Society monthly newsletter all about which herbs I would grow if I only had room for a few. Back then we had a huge herb garden which was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time but needed too many hours spent on it to be sensible for a busy smallholders. We cleared it all when the Bay tree centre-piece got to 15 feet tall and more than 8 feet wide!

I can't find a copy of the page I wrote years ago so started again and I can't find the list of herbs we had growing - I'm sure it was more than 20 different ones - several were more like weeds than herbs - Tansy for instance.........I had to pull it out from the flower garden for years after removing the herb garden.

Anyway,  if I only had room for a few Herbs they would be............

Parsley
Slow to get going from seed, it's the one thing that I make sure to buy a new packet of seed each year. It can be sown quite early and there are all sorts of old wives tales about the best methods of getting it to germinate. I usually pour really hot water over the compost before sowing (the old way was to pee on it!) then sow quite thickly and cover with a plastic lid, then keep it in a warm place.
I prefer curly leafed rather than flat-leaf but proper chefs usually seem to use the flat-leaf sort. Parsley will often survive through the winter outside in a sheltered spot giving some new growth early before running to seed in June - that's when I pull up the old clump and start using the new plant. My favourite way to use it is in potato salad and fish-cakes.

Chives
First to reappear after winter, so bits can be snipped to add to sandwiches before there's any other sign of green stuff. Difficult to start from seed but once you have one clump you can easily divide them and re-plant. I like to have two clumps around the garden, so one lot can be left to flower for the bees and another can have all the flowers taken off so there are no thick un-edible stems. Also use this in potato salad and with scrambled egg in sandwiches.

Mint
Either grown in a pot - which it hates, or left to spread in the ground .....depends how much room you have. Another herb hard to grow from seed but once you have a pot it should last years and is ever so easy to propagate from a rooted cutting. If grown in a pot dig out some with a root on to move into a new pot each year. If grown in the ground it might take over but I just  pull out some  each year. If you cut some down when it starts to run to seed in late summer then new growth will appear for the autumn. I use this when cooking new potatoes from the garden and for mint tea. I've tried umpteen times to get Peppermint to grow for me but found it always crossed with the common spearmint so ended up all the same. (I remember a slightly tetchy discussion with a man at one of the Suffolk Smallholder's shows when I had Eau-de-Cologne mint for sale. "How can there be Eau-de-Cologne mint - it's a contradiction and impossible". Oh no it isn't!)

Basil
I love pesto stirred into pasta and tomato/basil sauces also for pasta so always grow some. It needs heat to get started and then a warm place to grow. Some people swear by a pot on the windowsill but whenever I've tried that it's got invaded by greenfly. I nip out the flowering tip when they get to about 9 inches tall to get lots of branches. There are lots of different types of basil but I reckon the big green leaved Sweet Genovese is the most useful. I've seen on youtube that it's easy to take cuttings from basil just by growing in water - must give it a go although I don't need tons.

Thyme
No matter how many times I bought a pot of this to plant in the garden at the smallholding (another herb fiddly to grow from seed) it never lasted more than a few years. Yet in many places in the country it grows in the wild and often seeded itself easily at the smallholding so that I could dig up seedlings to sell. Lemon thyme is lovely but I don't think it's as hardy as common thyme. On moving here I found a patch of common thyme growing in next to no soil right by the paving slabs at the edge of the patio and it's looking well again this year. So maybe at the smallholding the soil was just too rich. Most useful with chicken I used to put a big handful inside the chicken when roasting and more between the skin and breast. Don't use it so much now as I rarely roast a whole chicken.


I've also got a very large Rosemary in the flower garden, some Lemon Balm and Common Sage at one end of a veg bed and lots of golden Feverfew that comes up every year in the rose garden. And of course Laurus Nobilis........... the Bay Tree.

And another good reason for having herbs..........There's a class in the Produce and Flower show for 'A Vase of Herbs' which I entered last year and came second. Hope to do one better this year! And today is the day to decide what to enter as entry forms have to be taken to the village this evening.

Last years 2nd place

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Didn't Do Much

In the end I didn't go very far over the Bank Holiday Weekend.

Car-boot sales of course -  the Big one at Needham Market was HUGE and I came home from that via the Art Exhibition (photos tomorrow).  The small local boot sale wasn't as big on Sunday as last week when I was there selling, I was home after looking round  by 9am and they've started having sales on Bank Holiday Mondays too and that was even smaller - home by 9 again.

All together at all the boot sales I spent a grand total of £10.60p

I found...........................

A bright pink ceramic pot  for 50p to put my money plant in on the bathroom window-sill. The plant had been in a brown -glazed flower pot (with a bit of plastic in the bottom to cover the hole) and I'd been searching for a replacement for months - it's still not big enough but better than brown.

The brown glazed flower pot now has a baby Bay tree (£2) in it. I've got a Bay tree that came here in a pot and is now nearly four feet tall so it will be too big to move when the time comes. This new one can be potted into increasingly larger pots for several years ready for whenever I decide that an acre is too big.

Someone had lots of  my everyday crockery - Johnson Brothers Summer Chintz - for sale. I wasn't short of plates and didn't need teeny coffee cups, a serving dish or very small bowls but she did have one breakfast bowl, which seem to be the thing that gets broken more often- so that was 50p.

I picked up this little set of lift-the-flap books for £1. Willow loves lifting flaps in books.

Any minute now I'm about to become a Great Aunt when my nephews partner gives birth, she's a few days over due already poor girl. I found this (for £1.50) to send down to London when my sister goes to visit her first grandchild.

 This, below, is a plastic "float" inside a net. I bought it for 50p in the hope I could get the net off and use it for the green glass globe I bought from an antique shop when we were on holiday. But no - there's no way to undo the net so I've hung it up outside anyway......it looks like glass from a distance!

 Is there anyone out there who knows how to make a macrame net like this?

Another Kilner flip-top bottle to use for the Limoncello I'm planning for the Christmas Hamper presents - another 50p.

I bought a big tub of strawberries for £1 - they needed eating so no picture and a large  slice of banoffee cake - that's gone too so no picture of £1.10p worth of cake either. Yes I'm a greedy guts!

And then this,  ahem, yes it's another bit of Portmeirion Holly and Ivy ware. Its rather large - that's a £1 coin in the middle -  and should have a bowl in the centre making it a plate for things - crudities?-  to dip in something - hummus?.

 I didn't really intend to buy it but as it was £2 - it seemed a shame to leave it.(poor excuse!)

Problem - it won't fit in the dining room cupboard! Too wide..............

I now  have 5 Holly and Ivy things, 4 from boot-sales/charity shops and one was  a Christmas present............ officially a collection?...............bother!

Many thanks for comments yesterday.Smoked Paprika is now on my shopping list

Back Tomorrow
Sue