Pallet garden extravaganza

If one enjoys growing plants... what does one do with a small walled concrete garden? That's what we wondered when we moved house (again!) and found ourselves in charge of about two square meters of concrete outside space surrounded by walls.

Especially if one's budget is tight...

We ended up resorting to what seems to be the craze of upcycling nowadays... pallets... to try and make some 'vertical gardens'.

So here are two of the five pallets we so gratefully received free of charge from a very kind colleague of Dan's:



We used the pallets as holders for plant pots. And added a little colour!

I said the budget was tight so there was not much room for buying extravagant paints. We used some cheap leftover white paint to paint the outer frame, and bought very small tester pots of coloured paint to decorate.

Below you can see the best part of the very small outside space we have available. 

 On closeup, one pallet is decorated with abstract flowers, another with garden bugs:

And also by the third wall some geometric creatures:
On a long wall that only gets sunshine on its upper side, we hanged another pallet decorated with folk motifs (with thanks to our nice neighbours who didn't mind the hooks over our common wall):

Finally, we harvested a few slats from a pallet and made two hanging boxes for pots:


Sure makes for a nicer view out the window than the blank white wall!

Wales' Brecon Beacons

Just a few photos from our weekend away in Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales to share how beautiful it is.

We stayed at at the wonderful Nant-Ddu Lodge, a relaxed spa hotel amongst wooded hills, perfect for being in nature all day and taking the afternoon to relax in the jacuzzi, steam room, or sauna. Delicious food as well.

On Saturday we took a long walk starting at the lodge on the Taff Trail, which took as by the ascent path to Pen Y Fan, the highest peak in South Wales (and Southern Britain). Here's the peak and us below.


The views are fantastic, north towards Brecon, the main town in the national park, and south towards the beautiful chain of reservoirs in the valley.  


But most spectacular are the views of nearby peak Corn Du and its steep glacier valley. 

 After reaching the peak, we decided to take a very windy ridge path back and enjoy more of the views,

and make our way to the lodge as we come down from the ridge using the map, although there was no footpath. As you might imagine, this was not as straight-forward as it looked on the map, as some map roads were in real-life absent, and fences had been raised along our planned route since its mapping.

There was a lot of walking on uneven ground, then walking through woods, and finally walking near a road and through buttercup fields.   


And all of this in hiking sandals, so that our feet collected the dust of the ridge path, the mud of marshlands along the way, the green of the grassy forest paths and not least a good amount of pollen from local flora. :)


We ended the day with a well-deserved sauna and steam, jacuzzi and float in the pool.

On Sunday we went to the Dan Yr Ogof cave at the National Showcaves Centre for Wales. The place is a bit kitsch (see the funny intro on the website) with its lifesize plastic dinosaur park, but the caves are wonderful.


The main cave (Dan Yr Ogof) provides a fairly long walk and interesting structures along the way, as well as several waterfalls.

Perhaps more impressive is the Cathedral Cave, with its tall ceiling and river running by the footpath,


which takes you to a large beautiful chamber of several tall waterfalls.


Finally, the small Bone Cave documents the bones having been found here, from cave bears to a group of warriors. If you are so inclined, the place also has a model Iron Age Village, museum, animal farm (some cute alpacas and llamas), and is very close to a large country park and 19th century 'castle'.

Gingerhenge


It was a few days before Christmas when we saw a gingerbread house being built on a cooking show. I am not sure what was it about a cake made of one whole pack of butter and half a pack of sugar that appealed to us, but we got to chatting about all sort of gingerbread architectural projects, until Dan came up with this: a gingerbread Stonehenge - THE GINGERHENGE.

So we got to work! We used this recipe for the gingerbread, only substituting light sugar for dark sugar. We did this because we wanted a lighter base in order to give a stone-like aspect to the gingerbread. To do this, we added some black food colouring to the dough. Because there is no water in the dough, only butter, sugar, and flour, normal food colouring doesn't mix in, as you can see below. We thought this gave it a more rocky aspect.


To my constant amazement, Dan spent hours researching the number of slabs at Stonehenge, how many large or small, so he cut the dough into the required shapes before going into the oven. Now, with hindsight, we should have realized that they would change shape in the heat and allowed for that, so in the end he still had to cut them into shape.

So, we also needed a base for the slabs to go on, so we baked a thin flat sponge (I guess it could be any sort of sponge cake dough, but we made a coffee and ginger sponge). Below, it is being carved to show the road into the stone circle.



To have a lighter icing on the base, we made a cream cheese icing. The problem with that is that it becomes dry and cracks after a few days. Still good to eat, but stops being esthetically pleasing. We thought it might be better to go with butter icing next time. We put some green food colouring in to give it a grassy aspect.



And now for the assembly. In the first photo you can actually see the plan Dan constructed of all the slabs at Stonehenge, standing or fallen down, at cake-scale. He secured the top slabs with bits of toothpick. 
 

Here it is, a loyal replica of Stonehenge in gingerbread, on which we sprinkled icing sugar to give it a wintery look.


 The project is madness, sure, but also a whole lot of fun!

New York

As a travel destination, New York is probably slightly more well-known than the Dacian forts of Transylvania or the Welsh mountains I wrote about in previous posts. Nonetheless, we wanted to share a few thoughts on what we found exciting about this trip. So, it was early December that we had the opportunity to combine a work trip with a bit of sightseeing. We spent the first couple of days in Port Jefferson, a small village on the northern shore of Long Island, 2 hours by train from New York City.


Although very small, Port Jefferson attracts a fair amount of tourists, since it has a very good ferry connection with the mainland. It is a very sweet place, almost too sweet, with lots of very nice cafes and lots of crafts and antiques shops.

We happened to be there at the time of the local Charles Dickens Festival, apparently the 17th year running, a weekend-long festival of parades, craft workshops, local music, etc. You can take part in events, or just walk down the street to wonder at the many villagers in period clothes reciting bits of 'A Christmas Carol'. We witnessed the final grand parade of the festival, where the village mayor and other council members rode on a miniature version of the aforementioned ferry. At the village hall, they all sang carols and released a few fireworks, all in all very sweet to be around to see.


We stayed at Danfords. This was the conference location, so didn't have much choice. The staff were mostly rude and the place was pretentious, so I wouldn't particularly recommend it, but then again it is the only hotel close to centre. On the bright side, the room overlooked the marina, so you can see below the view from our balcony. If you ever head Port Jeff's way, I think a better choice is the quirky family-run Golden Pineapple B&B.  


On a sunny morning, we walked along the beach you can see in the distance in the photo above. The whole Port Jeff experience was very pleasant, seems like a perfect place to rest and recharge.

But then, after all this peace and quiet, we headed off to New York City...



When getting off the train at the central Penn Station, we were hit by the crowds, noise, the chaos and mayhem, and it took hours to come to our senses after that...



Fortunately, our hotel was in a quiet residential area on the Upper West Side, not too bad and the price was really decent for NYC standards (outrageous by any other standards...). A few meters away from the hotel was the best diner, we had breakfast there most mornings, and it was finally a place where we could have some no-sugar yogurt, some fresh berries on cereal, and some food without masses of salt.

Since there was far too much to choose from in terms of attractions and museums, we let financial pragmatism decide. We got a NYC Pass, a discounted ticket for a number of attractions, and stuck to those. I won't bore you with details of the usual NYC attractions, since there are thousands of other such boring websites out there, but there were some things we enjoyed more than we thought we would, so we'll share these.

The Guggenheim Museum is a brilliant building to walk around. I had seen photos in the past, but it doesn't compare to being there, when we visited they had a Picasso black and white exhibition that somehow works really well with the building.

For Europeans, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is not all that interesting, a large part of it being European painters, Greek and Roman stuff, some Far East and African art that you would have seen in bigger European museums. One interesting section, though, is the Central and South American artifacts. Besides the usual Aztec objects, which tend to be intimidating and fear-inducing, there was much other wonderful, kinder art, that was a joy to look at, such as the ones below. The first image is from the West Mexico shaft tomb tradition, the following ones are Peruvian animal-shaped bottles.


The Museum of Modern Art is brilliant and definitely worth-while, with so many of the famous modern painting and sculpture, and lots of interesting newer stuff, with some very cool digitally-enhanced art displays. They had a temporary exhibition of Edvard Munch, including The Scream, which clearly inspired us...

 

And what is certainly worth it is the Museum of Natural History. The massive complete dinosaur skeletons will appeal to the child in you, at least if that child grew up with dinosaur books and toys. The Hayden Planetarium Space Theatre puts on an amazing show about the origins of the universe, galaxies, stars. The whole natural evolution galleries are very cool and really well organized. Unlike many museums of natural history, which are collections of separate objects, this one really does create a story and points out the underlying natural laws.

In terms of doing anything outside the museum, I think a really good idea would be to go on one of the cruises. Would have never chosen to do this if it wasn't already included in the City Pass, but it was a great way to find out about all the neighbourhoods, their history and character, before you explore each individual one. Plus the views are pretty cool.

 


Our cruise was at dusk, and it got dark by the time it finished.


Apart form all this, we did a lot of walking around the various neighbourhoods, from SoHo, Little Italy, West and East sides, central Manhattan and the Financial District. I think we were not overly impressed with what you can see as a tourist, but NYC generally seems like a pleasant place to live. I guess the most pleasant area we though was NoLIta, a few blocks at the North of Little Italy, an area that only recently acquired its own identity as an alternative, artsy neighbourhood, lots of lovely individual restaurants and shops.

There was much more we would have wanted to see, but we had to fly off. Into the sunrise.