Veggie Patch! 2014

I moved to the wonderful county of Essex eight or so months ago and I have a garden now rather than just a back yard with a scrap of dirt which is what is I had in London. Since I have moved I have bought some lovely flowers I also inherited some gorgeous specimens too, like the Passion flower and a Clematis. I finally have a space for a veggie patch. So on a whim I bought some new railway sleepers, can't use old ones on food stuffs (boooooo, I like old tatty ones). I filled it with home made compost and planted some, blue Sweet-peas to attract the bees over some spring onions, a couple of different lettuces and a row of Nasturtiums as you can eat the leaves and flowers on them. This joins my old sink filled with herbs and an aluminium bucket of mint so I am very very happy with my edible garden now.

Passion Flower

my unripe passion fruits

my mint in a bucket so it doesn't go wild!

So my Passion Flower is covered in unripe passion fruits, who has some ideas or recipes for me? I must have 45-50 fruits so far and the season is so young, please add any ideas for things I can make with them as it will be such a waste to pick them for the slugs to eat!



Take care
Love Clara x

Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/clarashandmade
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClarasHandMade
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/clarashandmade

Spring clean and Wanelo update

Had a little bit of sunshine this week and that always overfills my energy so my dad and I decided to cut down some trees in the garden as they were overhanging the neighbours and they were really too close to the house that the roots may do future damage. So sadly they had to be chopped back quite a bit.  I also cleared out some fabric for the charity shop. I love a clear out the light feeling of making space. I seemed to have a growing pile of fabrics that I knew I wouldn't be using for myself or to make things with for the shop. An afternoon was spent sorting out and stacking them up and then taking them to my local charity shop. The lady in my local shop was thrilled with the fabrics as well which made it an more enjoyable good deed. Though I hate clearing out fabric it just feels wrong as I see so much potential in fabrics and even now a couple of days after clearing out I still worry I have done the wrong thing and think I should have kept it all for the future. Which is crazy I know! Stop judging me ;-)

I have also opened up a Wanelo account. If you don't know what this is, it is an online community of shops where everyone can share images from these shops in to groups. I am not loving it at the moment I have to say. It doesn't seem to make sense. My feed is full of products I don't like and I didn't put them there.They have categories but I can't choose where my products go except the basic Woman, Man or Home. It seems a bit odd and more geared to big shops especially the trending tab. How can a little shop like mine compete with massive home retailers in terms of traffic? Any way I shall keep trying to like it and see how it goes over the coming weeks. If you are interested here is my store link:
http://wanelo.com/store/clarashandmade
If you are on there and can give me any tips please please leave comments I need all the help I can get. Heehee :-)

My pinterest page this week was followed by PinterestUK, which I was very excited about and then they emailed me with an interesting proposal which I can tell you more about soon hopefully.

Take care
Love Clara x

Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/clarashandmade
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClarasHandMade
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/clarashandmade