Halloween Ready

If you've ever emptied an entire kitchen, stacked it all in the dining room and then sat on a kitchen chair in your own front room waiting for a knock at the door that never comes, pull up a bucket. You're among friends.

Regular readers will know about our plastering saga. Back in the spring (May, to be exact, and I'm not bitter about it, I just remember it very clearly) the council contractors were due to come and do the kitchen. Then it slipped. Then it slipped again. Then we got a text back in September, after a no-show, promising a proper slot. And this time, we were told, it was three solid days: Wednesday the 14th to Friday the 16th.

Sara, being the organised one in this marriage (it's been that way since 1986, I've stopped fighting it), sent them a text on the Monday just to check they were definitely coming. Polite, friendly, nothing pushy. And the reply?

Silence. Not a word. Which, if I'm honest, was about as much as we expected.

The Great Kitchen Evacuation

Now, you might think that after the last few false starts we'd have learnt our lesson and left the kitchen well alone until we saw a van on the front. You'd be right. But there's a little voice in the back of your head that says, "what if they do turn up, and the kitchen isn't ready, and they leave and it's another six months?" So we emptied it. Every cupboard, every drawer, every jar. And if you want to know what it looks like when the preserving queen of the house has to relocate her entire kitchen, I can tell you that it looks like a very well-organised jumble sale.

Fern came downstairs on the Tuesday evening, stood in the doorway of the dining room, looked at the towers of pans, the tubs, the kettle perched on a bookcase and the toaster sitting next to the telly, and said, "Dad, are we moving house?" I said no, we were just waiting for the plasterer. She said, "Same thing, then." Cheeky.

So Wednesday morning came. Eight o'clock. Nothing. Nine o'clock. Nothing. By ten I was peering out of the front window like one of those nosey neighbours in a sitcom, and by lunchtime I'd given up pretending I wasn't. Nobody came on the Wednesday, and nobody came on the Thursday either, and I'll tell you what, by the Friday I was just angry at myself for having hoped.

What a waste of our time. Three days of living out of boxes for absolutely nothing. I'll say this and then I'll move on, because I'm a happy-go-lucky sort and I don't like moaning on the blog: if I could plaster, I'd have done it myself. In fact, I'm fairly sure that if I'd started learning in May, when it was first due, I'd have been a master plasterer by now with a little van and a business card. Instead I've got a kitchen with no kitchen in it. Still, we'll keep ringing, we'll keep texting, and one of these days a van will turn up and I'll probably cry.

Right, Let's Get Outside

Thankfully the garden doesn't let you down. It might get a bit soggy, and it might grow weeds when you're not looking, but it never leaves you sitting at the window.

So, with the kitchen a write-off, I took myself outside and did the job I'd been putting off for far too long, which was trimming the ivy even though i removed the root over a week ago on the outside of the garden. I say outside, I mean the stretch along the boundary that faces the nieghbours, where the ivy has been quietly taking over like a very slow, very green burglar. It was long overdue, and I mean long. I took the hedge trimmer to the top and then went in with the loppers and a pair of secateurs for the thick stuff. It took a good couple of hours and a lot of bending, and by the end I had a heap of clippings you could have got lost in. But the garden looks much tidier, and the boundary looks like a boundary again, which is more than I can say for the kitchen.

Fence Panels, Round Two

Then, in the afternoon, it was fence time again. If you've been following the last couple of posts, you'll know that when I took the ivy root ball out a while back it revealed a fence that was in a far sorrier state than anyone had realised. Broken bits, rotten bits, bits that were only really being held up by the ivy, which makes you wonder what was holding the ivy up. We've already patched and painted a section, and this week it was the next two panels.

Me and Sara set to with a hammer, a pry bar and a bucket for all the broken bits. We pulled off what was snapped or soft, nailed the sound bits back where they should be, and then Sara got stuck in with the paintbrush while I did the big sweeps. It's a system that's worked for us for years: Sara does the neat bits, I do the quick bits and we meet in the middle somewhere. The aim isn't perfection, mind. It's to buy ourselves at least another year out of those panels. They'll need replacing eventually, but a good coat of paint and a bit of patching should give us the time to save up for the new ones. Fence panels aren't cheap these days, and I'd rather spend the money on something more exciting, like compost.

I'm quite proud of how they've come out. They won't win any prizes, but they're sound, they're painted and they'll see out another winter, which is all I ask of a fence.

The Virginia Creeper Has Put Its Frock On

And while I was out there painting, I couldn't help but stop and look at the Virginia creeper. It's gone to its autumn colours, and how beautiful does it look? Reds, oranges, bits of deep purple, all tumbling down the fence like somebody's tipped over a paint pot. For about three weeks every year it's the star of the garden, and then the first proper wind comes along and takes the lot down, leaving a lovely mess for me to sweep up. But for now it's glorious. I stood there with a paintbrush dripping on my boot for a good five minutes just looking at it. Sara said, "Are you going to paint, or just admire?" Fair question.

Now, About This Mystery at the Allotments

Here's one I need your help with. Up at the allotments, a plant has appeared that none of us planted. It's big, it's furry-leaved, it's a sort of silvery grey-green and it looks like it's wearing a soft felt coat. I'm fairly sure it's a mullein, and I'm basing that on the fact that it looks like the pictures in my books and the leaves feel like a donkey's ear. But I'm no expert, as you well know, so I'd love to hear from anyone who knows better.

If it is a mullein, I believe it's a biennial, which means it's the first-year rosette we're looking at now, and next summer it'll shoot up into a tall spire with yellow flowers on it. Bees apparently love them. How it got there, I haven't got a clue. The seed must have blown in or been lying dormant in the soil for years. Mullein seeds can wait a long time, I'm told. Sam looked at it and said, "Is it a weed?" and Iris said, "It's too pretty to be a weed," and that's more or less the argument that's now going on in our family. For the time being, it's staying. If it turns out to be something else entirely, please tell me gently.

Raspberries: Cutting Them Back (Properly Back)

Now to the big job of the week. Every October, when the weather's fine, we cut back the raspberries. And we don't do it by halves. We go full on, right down to the ground almost, with a pair of petrol shears.

I'll admit that when I first did it this way, I felt a bit like a vandal. You look at a row of tall, leafy canes and then you take the lot down to a few inches, and the whole bed looks like a dreadful mistake. But that's the thing with raspberries: they forgive you. They'll shoot up again in spring as if nothing had happened, and you get fresh, strong canes with all the fruit on them, not a tangle of old stuff getting in the way.

Sam did the first run with the shears and I came behind with the rake, and Iris pulled the cut canes into a pile for the bonfire pile and the shredder. Between the three of us, it was done in under a morning. A word of warning about petrol shears, though: wear gloves, wear goggles and keep your feet well out of the way. I work in a workshop , so I know exactly what a moment's inattention can cost. Treat them with respect and they'll save you hours.

A Little on Growing Raspberries

Since I've said I'd explain a bit on growing raspberries, here's how we do it. Remember, I'm no expert, just a bloke who's made a lot of the mistakes already.

Know which sort you've got. There are two main types: summer-fruiting and autumn-fruiting. Autumn-fruiting varieties fruit on the new canes they grow that year, so the whole lot can come down to the ground once they've finished, and that's what we do. Summer-fruiting varieties fruit on last year's canes, so with those you only cut out the canes that have just fruited and tie in the fresh green ones for next year. If you're not sure which you've got, find out before you pick up the shears. Learn from my mistakes, not your own.

Give them a sunny, open spot. Raspberries like plenty of light and soil that drains well. They hate sitting in wet ground all winter. Mine do best where there's a bit of shelter from the worst of the wind.

Plant bare-root canes in the colder months. Late autumn through to early spring is the time to get them in. Don't bury them too deep. The roots should be just under the surface, and a good handful of compost in the hole gives them a head start.

Feed them with compost, not chemicals. This is where my compost obsession comes in. Every year, after the cut back, I spread a thick layer of well-rotted compost around the base, and then in spring I top it up with a mulch of grass clippings or leaf mould. That keeps the weeds down, keeps the moisture in and feeds the plants slowly. They love it.

Support them. A simple frame of posts and wires keeps the canes upright and the fruit off the floor. Ours is nothing fancy: stout posts at each end and a couple of strands of wire.

Water in dry spells. Raspberries don't like drying out when the fruit is swelling. This is one of Iris's jobs in the summer, and she takes it seriously.

Pull up the suckers. Raspberries will send shoots up all over the place if you let them. Pull up the ones that wander off where you don't want them and either pot them up or give them away to a neighbour. Old Pat has had more of my spare raspberry canes than I can count, and he claims they're his own.

And here's my hard-won tip, learnt the proper way, by ignoring it first: don't dig around your raspberries. Their roots are shallow and they run just under the surface, and the first time I went in with a fork to "tidy up" the bed, I chopped through half of them and the cropping the next summer was a sorry sight. Now I leave them alone, weed by hand or with a very light scrape of the hoe, and let the mulch do the work. They're much happier for it, and so is my back.

One last thing: don't plant new raspberries in the same spot where old ones have been for years, as the soil can get tired and the new canes struggle. Give them a fresh patch and they'll repay you.

Pumpkins for Everyone

Now to something a bit more cheerful. All the pumpkins are home now, ready for Halloween. We've lined them up in the porch, and the family has a little tradition here: anyone who wants one can help themselves. Neighbours, passers-by, people who've just come to the door and been talked into a cup of tea, they all get the pick of the pile.

It's one of my favourite things we do every year. Sam and Iris did most of the lugging, and I'll admit I supervised from a bucket. Fern took charge of the arranging, and I say "arranging" in the loosest possible sense, because she'd put the biggest ones at the back, then the middle ones, then the little ones at the front, and then announced it "looked like a family photo". I wasn't going to argue with that. A porch full of orange, and a few of the knobbly ones that look like they've had a hard life, which, frankly, is how I feel after a week without a kitchen.

Already a couple of neighbours have popped by, and the pile is getting smaller. That's exactly how I want it. There's nothing better than seeing a child walk down the road clutching a pumpkin that's nearly as big as they are. If you're local and fancy one, you know where we are.

Because I Can't Resist a Recipe: Saturday Raspberry Swirl Buns

As you'll know by now, I'm a self-taught baker and I make the family's bread every Saturday without fail. Sara's the preserving queen, so there are always raspberries in our freezer from the summer, and when you've got a big tub of them and a Saturday morning with a bit of dough on the go, you make raspberry swirl buns. They're soft, a bit sticky, not too sweet, and they go like hot cakes. Which is fitting, because they're not cakes, they're buns, and they do go hot.

Raspberry Swirl Buns

Makes 12

For the dough:

• 500g strong white bread flour
• 7g sachet fast-action yeast
• 50g caster sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 50g butter, melted
• 250ml warm milk
• 1 egg, beaten

For the filling:

• 150g raspberries (fresh, or frozen and thawed, drained and patted dry)
• 50g caster sugar
• 25g soft butter

For the glaze:

• 100g icing sugar
• 1 to 2 tbsp water

Put the flour, yeast, sugar and salt into a big bowl, keeping the salt and yeast on opposite sides. Pour in the melted butter, warm milk and beaten egg and mix to a rough dough. Tip it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for about ten minutes, until it's smooth and stretchy. Pop it back in the bowl, cover with a damp tea towel and leave somewhere warm for an hour or so, until it's roughly doubled in size.

Knock the air out, then roll the dough out on a floured surface into a big rectangle, roughly 30 by 40cm. Spread the soft butter over the top, scatter over the sugar, then dot the raspberries over the lot. Don't press them in too hard, or they'll turn to jam.

Roll it up from the long side, like a Swiss roll, and cut into 12 equal slices. Lay them cut side up in a lined tin or roasting tray, leaving a little gap between each one, cover, and leave for another 30 minutes until puffy.

Bake at 190°C (170°C fan) for 20 to 25 minutes until golden. Let them cool for a few minutes, then mix the icing sugar with enough water to make a runny glaze and drizzle it over the top while they're still warm.

Eat them as they are, with a cup of tea. Just remember that if your kitchen's currently full of boxes, you'll need to find the oven first.

Over to You

So there we have it: a week of no-shows, ivy, fences, raspberries and pumpkins, with a mystery plant thrown in for good measure. The garden did me proud, even if the kitchen didn't.

Now, I need your help. Can anyone confirm whether the plant at the allotments is a mullein? And does anyone else cut their raspberries right down in October, or do you do it later in the winter? And has anyone ever had a tradesman who's turned up on time? I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

Happy growing, everyone. See you on the plot.