Its a miserable day out so I thought I'd entertain myself by organising my tins of food into date order so that I use the oldest stuff first. I found a few surprising items that may appear on this week's menus. The oldest tin maybe older than some of our members. 
I have 3 tins beside me - would anyone like to guess what they are and their Best Before Dates? 

Today and the rest of the week I’ll be working with Bob. Helping with the strimmer work on all his gardening jobs. Because he’s an old cripple at the moment, with a buggered knee. The twisting motion of strimming isn’t doing him a lot of good. So in desperation he asked me to help. 

This is the view from the first garden

   

View from the second garden. I am actually stood on the lawn to take these photos.

         

Garden 3. This one was great. Not much strimming, did some apple scrumping ( the most stunning looking apple tree I’ve ever seen. Beautiful bright red apples. Love flavour, absolutely disgusting floury texture    , they’ll make a great crumble ), collected some alstroemeria seeds & took a rose cutting. I’ll be asking about that on the rose thread very soon.

   

Unashamedly pinching a Subscription Box idea (5 packets of flower seeds to sow each month in order to grow and make bunches of flowers to give away -  £30 a month for the pleasure).
I suggest that we do something similar at a much lower price (unless you want to send me £30 a month for the idea ).

Tell us what flower seeds you plan to sow during the month - preferably cheap, easily available and easy to grow seeds. Then we each decide which 5 flowers we'll sow and, of course, grow them. In a few months time, when we have some actual flowers, we'll share some bouquet photos with each other and boast about how well we've done.
We can start this month, even though we're a week into September but, probably better to work a month in advance to give ourselves time to find the seeds!

Hope this makes sense! If it does, its a miracle.

My London daughter is looking to plant a short length of hedging, 3 to 6 metres and is looking for something that would only need trimming once a year and ideally have some edible interest for herself or possibly wildlife. It is quite sunny with, I suspect, poor soil.

I'm shaking with rage which is rather unusual for me as im normally the placid one of the family.  We have a semi open plan  front garden with nextdoor, laid to lawn with ornamental spring flowering shrubs down the boundary.  Nothing special in the way of shrubs, lilac, forsythia, weigelia & philodelphus.  The shrubs having been cut back last year, had put on good growth this summer ready for flowering next spring.  The 'gardener' keeping the empty house garden looking tidy has now just shorn off all the new growth on the shrubs like topiary, removing all the likely flowering shoots.  I've had my say and he knows I'm not impressed but the damage is done.  Asking him whether he knew the varieties of the shrubs met with a blank gaze.The shrubs will recover and so will I in time 

Just interested how everyone collects and cleans seeds?  
Today I had a light bulb moment ( don’t know why it’s taking me so long!! ). While trying to work out how I was going to remove the quite tight fitting homemade net bag from my Bombay cockscomb without loosing all the seeds ( especially as they fall through the net bag with to much disturbance, I discovered     ) . I got one of the spare little metal pet food dishes. You have to have spares, you never know when or who you’re going to need to feed     . It’s a life changing, time saving little metal miracle! 
I managed to catch all the seeds that fell from the bag and plant. Also using the same dish to clean the seeds/ remove chaff was brilliant and so quick compared to how I usually do it.

   

Is this a “special” lobelia?
Leathery, reddish trailing leaves and pretty pale blue flowers.
Perennial/tender??
Anybody know, please??

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Plenty of information on youtube but I found this quite interesting?

https://youtu.be/pRQzusfirJ8

My diet is carnivore based but I can see the sense in probiotics from fermented food. I have an onion glut and thyme in the garden so may give this a try to be able to use it as a condiment to whatever meat dish I am having.

Anyone else on here do fermented foods?

You do grow some incredible tomatoes TMTT. I really wish I had your talent. I’m not to bad at chilli growing. Everything else I’m average, but tomatoes I’m absolutely dreadful at growing them. I’ll keep trying because I like them a lot.

I’ve had lots of tomatoes all come in together, I’ve been giving them away to friends and family and still have excess tomatoes, so I’ve made tomato sauce by roasting them with some of my home grown garlic and rosemary with some added balsamic vinegar sprayed over them, then blitzed and finally into containers for freezer. These containers has just enough sauce as a base for a curry, chilli, or savoury mince for 2 people.