Little winter wonderland

The banana trees are all wrapped up (apart from a few of the larger ones), the apple tree is all bare and has lost its leaves, the nectarine tree is bare too, the blackberry bush needs some pruning and the vegetable patch is empty with a few hardy shoots of green manure peering through the remaining ice and snow. It's not very exciting at the moment in Cowick Garden. The paving and fencing is collapsing in certain parts too so in the spring we will have to look into replacing most of our paving and repairing a large part of our fence.

Though the snow caused quite a bit of havoc and the banana trees certainly didn't enjoy it, it was very pretty to look at, so below are a few photos of Cowick Garden wrapped up in a fluffy blanket of snow. You can make out the brown withered leaves of a couple of the larger banana trees in a few of the photos and on one you can just about see the leaves of the bamboo under all the snow. Many of the palms struggled under the weight of the snow and some bent down almost blocking the way to the rest of the garden. The garden table shows exactly how much snow fell in one night.

Luscious caramel apple loaf

We're still trying to get through the last of our apple pickings. After the cold snap, the blackbirds decided to have a hearty feast of the remaining apples in the tree so there aren't any more apples to be picked but still a very large pile of apples in a large bowl in the kitchen.

Last weekend we decided to make a caramel apple loaf and it was so delicious we made it again yesterday - and it's going fast! We found the recipe on BBC Good Food but decided to increase the number of apples seeing as the recipe didn't call for very many and we had very many indeed! This is the perfect gooey sticky cake to curl up with on the sofa with a hot chocolate or a big cup of tea on a cold dark winter's afternoon.

Ingredients


175g soft butter
Margarine (for greasing)
175g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
225g self-raising flour
2 tsp cinnamon (though I think we added more!)
4 heaped tbsp Greek yoghurt
3 apples
50g walnuts (plus some extra for topping)
50g soft toffees
2tbsp double cream

Method


1. Heat the oven to 160 degrees C

2. Grease a 2lb loaf tin with the margarine and line the base and ends with some baking paper

3. Beat the butter, sugar and vanilla until pale. (Melting the butter for a few seconds in the microwave makes this whole beating process a whole lot easier!)

4. Add the eggs in one by one to the butter mixture and beat together.

5. Add the flour, cinnamon and yoghurt.

6. Peel, core and chop the apples into small chunks and add to the bowl. Mix all together with a wooden spoon.

7. Scrape the mixture into the loaf tin, smooth the top and scatter the walnuts down the middle.

8. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 1 hour 20- 30 minutes until a knife poked into the centre comes out clean. Cool the tin.

9. Now for the yummy gooey bit. Put the toffees in a small saucepan with the double cream. Gently heat, stirring the whole time until the toffees have melted.

10. Drizzle the toffee sauce over the top of the cake. Scatter with a few extra walnuts. Leave for ten minutes before serving and then enjoy!

Over-wintering banana trees

What a week it's been! Wind, snow, frost, rain, sleet, black ice. Just the type of weather banana trees don't like. Fortunately, before the big chill hit the UK this week, I wrapped up most of the banana tress in Cowick Garden.

Last year it was a little easier to wrap them up as by the time the freezing cold temperatures arrived, the leaves had already withered and were hanging by the stems so it was easy enough to throw over the frost jackets. This year the cold arrived so suddenly that all the leaves were still green and spread out so wrapping up proved a bit tricky.

I started by making sure the base of the stems and the ground around the plants were covered in bark chip as that protects the soil from frost and keeps it 'warm'. I then took some sheets of frost fleece, folded them in two and wrapped the fleece around the stem several times all the way up until I reached the leaves. Then, on the smaller banana trees I gathered the leaves as close to the stem as possible and covered the entire tree with a frost jacket. I've read that some people remove the leaves, however the leaves are added protection against the frost so I'd advise leaving them hanging around the stems (even if it doesn't look very decorative!) as this will give your banana plants an extra buffer against the cold.

On the larger plants it was not possible to put a frost jacket over them as they are too tall and the leaves are too spread out. However, the larger plants should be fine as they are quite hardy by now. It's the smaller banana plants that we need to worry about so they are the ones that have frost fleece all around the stems and a nice cosy frost jacket on top. Some of the larger plants haven't been wrapped up at all as we didn't wrap them up last year and they were fine. However, this winter is proving to be a very cold one (-5 degrees tonight apparently!) so we may have to wrap the larger ones if this cold weather continues.

If we could, we'd take ourselves and our palms and our banana trees off to a sunny warm tropical island right now -which is where we all really belong!