1. Baked a cake and decorated it with home grown items from packets of £2 seed – I baked a simple chocolate sponge cake, filled it with layers of fresh cream, then topped it with last years home grown frozen strawberries, viola flowers (they are edible), and blueberries – though I did buy the blueberries from the shop!
2. Got completely lost in a really good book – my book of choice and recommendation here is Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller – it completely transported me, and I felt like I’d been transported on holiday reading it. Probably my favourite read this year, psychological thriller, but it also has elements of the supernatural, glamour, and a lazy English sun drenched summer. Just amazing.
3. Made handmade chocolates and strawberry sugar – Again, putting the home growns to use – the strawberry sugar I made by defrosting my garden strawberries, blending into a puree, and adding to a bag of supermarket bought white sugar – I then just left it to dry out overnight, blended, and voila – perfect for summer cocktails and cake toppings. Then the chocolates, I literally melted down a bar of supermarket dark chocolate, and added the flowers that my rosemary bush had produced (they’re also edible). Great for gifts – or just a treat to yourself.
4. Made a micro pond – I had an old watertight garden container and some leftover decorative garden stones, so I filled the bottom of the container with stones, popped in some aquatic plants from my local garden centre, and some hornwort for oxygenation that I picked up on Etsy for £3, and bam – micro pond! The plants are thriving in there and have shot up by about 3 inches in two months; everything is still settling and some days the water is crystal clear, sometimes it isn’t – but I’ve been reliably informed this is normal and part of the settling process, and we should hopefully start to see some wildlife soon.
5. Got completely lost in the English countryside – and when I say countryside I feel like people think they need to travel far; when actually, one thing the lockdowns taught me, is that there is much much more on our doorstep than we realise. This picture was taken 10 minutes from my house – and I promise you, before Covid was a thing… I honestly never even knew this field existed. Ice cream is optional.
