Monthly Archives: July 2008

Gooseberry Ice Cream (Utterly Delicious)

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Gooseberry Ice Cream Recipe to make at home

I know this blog is themed around hedging, but…. June and July is the time of year that your gooseberries should be ready for picking – traditionally this is at Whitsun (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter Sunday) but as Easter this year was the earliest that it has been since 1913, on 23rd March, this means that you traditionally would have been picking by 17th May, which would have been far too early!

(Pub quiz trivia – And why was Easter so early? It is affected by the lunar cycle: Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs after the spring equinox. This year, the first day of spring was 20th March, and the full moon after was 21st March).

Gooseberries are better for cooking when they are slightly unripe (hard and green) and they certainly keep in the fridge longer when they are like that. Invicta is far and away the best in this category; it has a richer flavour and crops better than Careless gooseberries do.

Gooseberries make a wonderfully different ice cream. Ruth’s recipe, shown below is the tastiest and easiest we have come across:

Gently cook 1lb of gooseberries with very little water (just enough to cover the bottom of the pan) and sugar to taste.
When the berries are soft, puree them and leave to cool.
Beat 4 egg whites to the soft peak stage and then gradually beat in 8oz of caster sugar
Fold the gooseberry puree gently into the egg
Whip half a pint of double cream
Fold the cream into the egg white mixture and freeze


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Gooseberry Icecream Recipe (Utterly Scrumptious) by
Ruth is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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the Ashridge Trees site.

Oh, by the way – Gooseberries are best planted before the New Year (in November and December) so they have more time to establish before they come into growth in the spring.  If you are planning on planting some, take a look at the Soft Fruit bushes on our main website.  We have a great range of soft fruit and there are good tips as well.

Enjoy your plants

August Jobs

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I will be adding to this over the next week or so.

Yew Hedging

If you are planning on planting a yew hedge this autumn, now is the time to start preparing the ground. Mark out the area you are going to plant – bareroot yew hedge plants are always planted in a single row in a trench about 60 cms wide – so that is what you are going to weedkill.

Weeding

Ugh! However, this is the number one month for weed seeds ripening, falling to the ground and waking up in Spring.  It really pays to at a minimum hoe (and preferably hand weed) borders, rose beds, veggie patches and the like.  Get your weeds before they get you.  Collect them up and either take them to the dump or burn them.  DO NOT put them on the compost heap – we had a gardener when I was a lad – Mr Carter – who used to say (in a broad Kentish accent) “One yur’s seeds is suvun yur’s weeds”….

Apply a non residual weed killer (any one containing Glyphosate is fine) following the manufacturer’s instructions anytime between now and the middle/end of September. The sooner the better as it works best on plants in full growth and you also get a chance to spray a second time to get the stubborn b*****’s like bindweed.

If you do not like chemicals, then lay ground cover fabric, black polythene, old carpet, broken down cardboard boxes (anything that will keep out the light and stop plants growing through it. That will kill anything except Japanese knotweed and horsetail by the time you get to planting in November.

And that is it – the hard digging happens later.

If the soil is soft enough for you to push a spade in full depth then you do not need to dig the ground at all. If it harder than that, then dig over short strips and rotavate long ones. Remove large roots and big stones.

The Latest Leaf

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There is hope after all.

Most of our business happens in the winter months.  We sell about 2 million bare-rooted trees, hedge plants and the like between November and March.  Over the years, the success rate has been very high indeed – we end up with the reported death of less than 1,000 plants a year on average.  However, a larger number of plants are worried about in April and May as some, random trees and shrubs can take a little while to show signs of life.  We always ask our customers to be patient, tell them to stay in touch but to hold on until May, and sure enough 70-80% of the plants that had looked dead have sprung into life before June.

Not so this year (hence the opening line).  We go the usual rush of worried planters in April, but they kept in touch through May and June and into July.  We were bracing ourselves for a grim period of customer service and were wondering what had gone wrong, when on Friday (11th July) I noticed that a copper beech sapling that had been potted up here in February and had been put to one side as being dead, wasn’t.  Its buds had started to move and the sun on Sunday meant that its first leaf was fully open this morning.  It was the herald of brighter things because the three biggest “worriers” ALL rang to say that their plants seemed to be sprouting all over the place. I suspect most of the others will follow suit.

I am not sure if this is caused by global warming (or more likely a grotty spring and summer) but either way the moral of the story is to have a little extra patience when the weather is gloomy.  Everything takes a bit longer, but in the end Mother Nature, as always, tends to work it out.

So relax, have fun and enjoy….

P.S.  (Blatant plug for our hedge plants) if you would like a superhuman copper beech hedge that like the plant above has defeated global warming, the crunch, street crime and goodness knows what else by the middle of July, just visit our Copper Beech hedging page where you can preorder hedge plants for delivery in the autumn.