A Lebanese Feast

David created a magnificent culinary masterpiece - a dinner of traditional Lebanese foods. Here are some "recipes" I compiled from some stealthy spying:

Labneh: spreadable homemade cheese (similar to cream cheese)

1. To make your own yogurt: scald milk in a large pot without boiling, cover and let cool slowly until it is still very warm but comfortable to stick your finger in for about thirty seconds, add live culture (established yogurt) and let it sit for a long time

2. To make the cheese: pour homemade (or store bought) yogurt onto a tea towel and let drain into a bowl, tie the tea towel into a small sack around the yogurt and hang somewhere to drain overnight, after about a day much of the water has slipped away and you're left with a soft cheese, form into balls, garnish with a sprinkle of dried mint and a drizzle of olive oil, and serve with pita

Baba ghanouj: roasted aubergine dip

1. Put several whole aubergines on the grill and char the outsides, turning often to cook evenly, keep on the grill for longer than feels comfortable until all the meat inside is mush - warning: aubergines may explode when heated!

2. Let the aubergines cool a bit and then remove the skin either by peeling away or (if the skin is too crumbly) scooping away the flesh inside. Start mashing with a fork and just keep at it even though it will feel fibrous and tough for the first few minutes. Add some tahini, fresh garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper gradually as you continue to mash. Drizzle with more oil and serve with pita.

Kibbeh: puree of raw lamb meat, bulgar, cinnamon, and raw onion

Mujadarra: lentils and bulgar

1. Fry a finely slice onion until almost burnt - a nice, deep caramel colour. Mix with cooked lentils and bulgar and serve with sliced raw onion.

With all this, serve homemade pita. Sadly, I only witnessed the very end of the process.

Take that poppy seed, for instance: it lies in your palm, the merest atom of matter, hardly visible, a speck, a pin's point in bulk, but within it is imprisoned a spirit of beauty ineffable, which will break its bonds and emerge from the dark ground and blossom in as a splendour so dazzling as to baffle all powers of description. - Celia Thaxter

By any other name...

I must be turning into a proper Brit - I am tackling the delicate task of pruning roses. Roses are in a world of their own at the nursery, and this is a fantastic opportunity to learn the proper techniques to cultivate the thorny beauties.

- There are two major classes of roses: old English and hybrid tea. The old English shrubs are excellent for planting in a flower garden with well-filled foliage and aromatic blossoms. The latter are those seen in supermarket cut bouquets. They are cultivated for straight, thornless stems and bright flowers but lack the pungent fragrance of the garden varieties.

- When shopping for a rose bush, look for a circular bowl shape. The branches should be curving upward and outward with very little foliage in the centre. As it grows, the branches will have space to fill out while still allowing air to flow through the centre of the plant, reducing the risk of many diseases. At the end of the season, prune back to bowl shape, removing centre branches.

- There are three main problems to look for when taking care of a rose bush: stem rot, black leaf, and rust. Stem rot occurs where a branch has been cut or broken off - the living tissue starts to turn black and decay. When trimming, it's best to cut the branch about 3-4 cm below the end of the living tissue to avoid contaminating the clippers with the disease and transferring to other plants. Black leaf is just as it sounds, and rust is a brown fungus that eats leaves and appears on the backside as rust-coloured spots.

- When flowers are starting to wilt, dry out, or simply cease to look attractive, they should be trimmed off. The best place to cut is above the first protrusion with five leaves, and the stem should be trimmed diagonally at a 45 degree angle. This "five leaf" rule ensures that the stem capable of producing new growth is not cut away. Obviously, if the stem supporting the flower is connected to other buds, just the single flower head should be cut away, and then the main stem can be cut correctly when all the buds have blossomed.

- This spring was very warm in Suffolk, which caused the rose bushes here to bloom two months early! Many are coming into their second flowering in the next few weeks.

- Most roses do not like a lot of water, so too much rain can make them a bit unhappy.

Roses have vicious thorns, so as I'm learning how to maintain them properly I'm also becoming wary of their spiky branches. I was stabbed twice today - enough to draw blood - so I'm aiming to gain fewer scars tomorrow.

The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure. - Charles Dudley Warner

Garden countdown

Top ten garden tips from Darsham:

10. Educate yourself - the better you understand each component of your garden, the more successful it will be.

9. Just because you know what Helenium is doesn't mean you'll be able to help someone looking for Sneezewort. Common names often bear little resemblance to the formal Latin genus and can often vary between the US and UK.

8. Less can be more. When trying to fill a bed with a variety of flowers, don't simply head to the nursery and start grabbing a vine here and a shrub there all helter skelter. Your plants be much happier - and grow more fully - if choose fewer types and buy three or four of each so they grow together.

7. Take photographs of flowers - particularly in interesting sunlight and after a drenching rain.

6. Compost, compost, compost! (Except if the plant had a contagious disease.)

5. Plant fruits, vegetables, and herbs - they look beautiful and taste even better! Just be sure to check the best times to start each plant to have them ready to harvest at the appropriate time of the season.

4. Many perennials can be trimmed down to bare bones - or at least pruned of deadheads and ailing leaves - in the autumn. This encourages the plant to focus on developing a larger root system in the ground so it can rise from the ashes as a healthy, happy plant in spring.

3. Make sure that your garden is always colourful. Many customers come to the nursery in the spring when the temperature starts to rise, buy beautiful flowering plants, and then wonder why everything looks boring throughout summer and autumn. It is better to create a balance of plants that flower throughout the year so the garden can be full of vibrant colours in every season.

2. It's best not to transplant new plants from the pot to the garden while they are flowering. The plant will be focusing a lot of energy on creating enticing flowers and potential offspring, so introducing it to a new environment just adds even more stress.

1. Love your garden!

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life. - Jean Giraudoux

Top five perennials

Some of my favourites: Kniphofia, Fuchsia, Papaver, Sempervivum, and Crocosmia

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or squirrel of subversion, or challenge the ideology of a violet. - Hal Borland

Hedera to Yucca

More plants!

- Hedera: ivy; sneaks around wherever it feels like going

- Helenium: large, daisy-like flowers in burnt oranges and russets; also called "Sneezewort" apparently

- Iris: monocot leaves, sadly not in bloom currently

- Kniphofia: monocot with long blade-like leaves; the blooms are spectacular towers of thin tubules in cascading shades of pale yellows to bright oranges; breed names reflect the bright colours from "Tawny King" to "Light of the World"

- Lamium: simple groundcover plant with heart-shaped light green leaves with outer edges in contrasting colour; look like mint plants

- Leucanthemum: similar to white chyrsanthemum; different breeds can be identified partly by the shape of the flower, which can be flat (like a daisy) or rounded (like a pompom)

- Linum: simple clumpy plant with fine leaves and small, brightly coloured flowers

- Lupinus: small buds form spiky towers in shades of yellow, blue, white, red, and pink; I remember seeing it all over San Antonio as the "Texas bluebonnet"; a very pretty flower

- Paeonia: apparently in the UK the flowers are called paeonies (instead of spelling it as peonies as in America); shrub with dark, waxy leaves but not in bloom currently; varieties include the "Shirley Temple"

- Papaver: bright flowers with delicate, thin petals on tall, thin stalks; poppies!

- Phlox: small, simple flowers in a variety of shades on mounded cushions of thin leaves

- Phormium: palm-like leaves striped in shades of ivory and green or dark brown and crimson

- Potentilla: a nice, steady flowering plant with soft, thin leaves of dark green and bright flowers

- Primula: when not in bloom looks like old salad leaves

- Pulmonaria: small clumps of rather ugly leaves; not surprisingly, also known as "Lungwort"

- Sedum: an interesting, bright green plant that tapers upwards; leaves are waxy and shiny - might seem like rubbery plastic at a glance

- Sempervivum: AMAZING plant like something out of a Dr. Seuss book; leaves look like rubbery rosettes of light green and pink; flowers are spiky and pink and burst forth from thick, curvy, hairy stems; known as "houseleeks"; one of the favourites as the nursery, probably makes a good indoor plant

- Solanum: tall, climbing plant with purplish-blue flowers

- Trollius: leaves are very similar to those of a geranium; flowers are supposedly like rounded, chubby rose buds but not appearing at this time

- Verbena: can be either matlike or tall and gangly plant with dark green leaves and different types of blooms

- Yucca: a dry weather monocot; leaves are fairly rigid and sharp at the tips

This is merely a taste of the plants sold at the nursery, which itself only has a small fraction of possible garden stock. All these plants are perennials and can be viewed as "plants" rather than "shrubs" - though the distinction is hazy. Some popular perennials are kept separate for different reasons, such as hydrangeas and the classic English lavenders. Hopefully, I'll have to reorganize the shrubs soon.

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I'm going to snow anyway. - Maya Angelou

Achellia to Geum

We are reorganizing the nursery and attempting to place all the perennials in alphabetical order (by Latin name). The task may be daunting for someone with slightly OCD tendencies, but it's proving very educational as I learn about different plant genuses (geni?):

- Achillea: a fairly tall, stalky plant with delicate leaves and flat clumps of small flowers (like Queen Anne's Lace); varietal names general describe the colour of the petals such as "Cloth of Gold" and "Pearls"

- Agapanthus: sometimes referred to as Lily of the Nile, a beautiful monocot with slender, vibrant flowers radiating outward to form spherical clumps; most varieties we had in stock had amazingly colourful buds ranging from deep navy blue to an elegant grey.

- Artemisia: a beautiful bushy plant with silvery leaves that are soft and delicate like fern fronds.

- Aster: large, tall plants with daisy-like flowers in a wide range of colours with very slender petals

- Baptisia: a shrublike plant with beautiful light green leaves

- Begonias: the only breed we have in stock is a low plant with bright red flowers and dark mahogany leaves

- Campanula: a boring plant with tall, upright stems and droopy-looking flowers - not my favourite.

- Canna: an amazing, tropical-looking plant with bright red-orange blooms and beautiful variegated leaves with greens, yellows, and husky oranges.

- Crocosmia: a plant similar to a lily with long, narrow leaves and beautifully intricate flowers; one of the most spectacular flowers in bloom now is a breed of crocosmia with scarlet flowers with "arching spikes of upward facing flowers"

- Delphiniums: well-known plants with towers of small flowers standing on tall stalks; a wonderful palette of shades ranging from blue-blacks to soft whites, which seem to have romantic names like "Galahad" and "Black Knight"

- Digitalis: low plants with large, oval leaves and bell-shaped flowers; poisonous.

- Euphorbia: a gigantic genus of shrubby evergreen plants that like dry areas; pointsettias belong to this genus.

- Fuchsia: viny plants with astonishingly vibrant flowers; the double flowers - often in shades of violet, white, and (of course) fuchsia - hang down with dramatically long stamen; varieties include "Delta Sarah". Unfortunately, they can be very difficult to untangle from each other and the flowers are easily broken off.

- Gaillardia: a bushy plant with daisy-like blooms like beautiful little suns; the flowers start yellow at the tips of the petals and gradually turn to a rusty orange in the centre.

- Geum: small, boring plants with round-ish leaves

Conclusion: how will I ever learn common names?

Each flower is a soul blossoming out to nature. - Gerard de Nerval

The horticulture culture

Nature has been kind enough to do the watering for us the past couple of days and nursery work has been a bit slow while we dodge raindrops:

- Harvesting tomatoes - with all the interesting (and weird) varieties, colour is not a good indicator for ripeness. A gentle squeeze reveals if the fruit has ripened or remains stiff and firm.

- Harvesting broad beans. I learned that broad beans = lima beans in the US. Lightbulb! With such a small crop, I just pulled each plant out of the ground by hand. I miss my scythe.

- The vegetable beds here have luxuriously soft and dark soil. In addition to years of mixing in compost, they spread a thick layer of manure on the top in late autumn and leave it over the winter.

- Tamed the rambling vines of a climbing garden shrub. Tied stems to bamboo pole stuck firmly into soil in pot. Stems seem to naturally twist clockwise. Hmmm...

- Trimmed deadheads off hostas when buds dead and seeds beginning to form.

- Chopped off most of basil plant - leaving only a few leaves on each stalk - and planted in large pots with tomato plants. Tomatoes and basil - a match made in heaven.

And the chickens. Silly little ladies:

- We feed chicks a high energy, high protein food (they are kept in a separate enclosure) and the noisy hens get normal chicken feed - which looks like Gus's old pellets. The feed is scattered throughout their area and they go crazy, scurrying around to snatch the little pellets.

- They drink water from a couple big buckets. It's amusing seeing them drink - their mouths open and close several times to gulp down a swig of water.

- The eggs are laid inside the adorable little chicken coops. there are a few nests with comfortable straw beds for the would-be mothers and a hinged door overhead for easy access. If a hen is sitting around and doesn't get up when given a slight nudge, you have to gently pick her up and place her in a different nest because she is probably sitting on an egg. It's amazing seeing the range of eggshell colours depending on the chicken breed. My favourite are a light pink eggshell laid by rare black-and-white chickens. If the eggs are dirty, they have to be rinsed with very hot water before going on the shelf to be sold. Cold water will seep into the shell through tiny pores.

- If eggshells are brittle and crack easily, we feed the chickens broken up oyster shell. Theory says that the oyster shell gets somehow incorporated into the shell of the eggs they lay. Interesting.

- Chicken crap smells terrible. Absolutely disgusting. Rain makes it worse.

All nature wears one universal grin. - Henry Fielding