Did you ever eat Colcannon, made from lovely pickled cream?
With the greens and scallions mingled like a picture in a dream.
Did you ever make a hole on top to hold the melting flake
Of the creamy, flavoured butter that your mother used to make?

Yes you did, so you did, so did he and so did I.
And the more I think about it, sure, the nearer I’m to cry.
Oh, wasn’t it the happy days when troubles we had not,
And our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot.
Colcannon (The Skillet Pot) Traditional Irish song

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Custom has it that if you are to find a pea pod with nine or more peas in it that you can make a wish for whatever you heart desires. Now with the cold snap that we often experience in spring I’m willing to bet quite a few early seed sowers would have wished for milder weather. Reports filter in to me each spring of over-enthusiastic gardeners who have had their young seedlings totally blackened by a late frost.

Amongst the usual casualties are cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, spring onion, and beetroot, both in the open ground and within unheated glasshouses or polytunnels. All I can say to them is keep the chin up, don’t be downhearted, as it’s early in the growing season, so you’ve plenty of time to set a new batch of seeds. Let peas be one of them, and I can assure you that with a little care you will have a bountiful harvest.

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Here’s a handy list that I compiled in response to that eternal vegetable growing query that crops up as soon as spring arrives, “Am I too late to sow… (Insert vegetable of choice here)? (more…)

Living in the countryside with roughly a half an acre site for my planting experiments, I sometimes tend to forget there are many gardeners who are less space “fortunate”.
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It all kicks off this month in the vegetable garden.

So have you got your gloves ready, your spade sharpened, and your special slug detecting goggles on?
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