Bordering on Magic

The weather forecast was right! Saturday was awful but Sunday was dry, even sunny! So, after our morning dog walk and lunch, it was out with the trowels etc. as we tackled the top lawn border. At one a.m. British Summer Time, it looked like this;

But after relocating a couple of perennial shrubs, weeding, inadvertently removing some of the bulbs we planted last September (I bet even the most organized gardener does that sometimes), and filling the bald spots with the thirty plants we bought on Saturday, it looked like this:

We even finished in time to watch the Merseyside Derby! If you look carefully, it features one of those “guess the next in the pattern” patterns that you see in IQ tests. I probably shouldn’t admit that, but it kept me amused whilst Jon was wreaking havoc on creeping buttercup, chickweed and the odd daffodil bulb.

Our next mission is the vegetable patch. The ‘to do’ list comprises:

·        Looking up lunar planting;

·        Planning the composition of  the patch (allowing for a rotational policy);

·        Finding the propagators, slug traps and protective fleece;

·        Laying down the top soil and the markers for the drills;

and that doesn’t include actually planting anything. Suppose I’d better make a start …

 

A Shopping Expedition

• Spring onion seeds - Elody
• Lettuce seeds – Salad Bowl
• Leek seeds – Lyon Prizetaker
• 2 trays of Primulae
• Parsnip seeds – Gladiator F1
• Carrot seeds – Chantenay Red Cored 2
• Pepper seeds – Californian Wonder
• Onion seeds  - Alisa Craig
• 2 Italian tomato plants
• Potash
• Seed potatoes
• Shallot sets
• 4 bags of top soil

That should keep us busy ….

Allotting Allotments

I’ve removed a dead lavender and that’s about it. The weather is still too miserable to want to spend any length of time outdoors. We didn’t even get a proper snow shower, only the odd bout of hail and sleet.

However, there have been some interesting articles in the press as the ‘grow your own’ campaign gathers pace. In The Independent on Easter Monday, there was an inspiring four page article on allotments around the world. Although the crops grown may differ from continent to continent, what motivates gardeners is pretty much the same the world over. I was also, once again, struck by the Australian way of following the principles of permaculture and organics.

The article is currently available online at http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/

planet-earth-how-the-world-went-crazy-for-allotments-799770.html.

The same issue also carried an item on the growing demand for allotments. The Local Government Association is urging local councils to use the Planning and Compensation Act to force urban developers to provide more green areas as 200,000 allotments have been lost over the past thirty years. Apparently there is a waiting list of 3,550 in Yorkshire alone. In today’s local news, Plaid Cymru have also taken up the cause. They want Welsh councils to release public land to provide more allotment space as part of their “innov8” policy proposals. All good intentions, but I hope it’s not just the latest fad.

P.S. Caio Choccy. Not even s/he could sustain another attack of the dreaded Ich. We haven’t dismantled the Bi-orb yet as it still houses the plants, but it’s a bit like a garden without birds at the moment.

A lazy Saturday afternoon

After a night of carousing in the European Capital of Culture that stretched into the early hours of the following morning, I returned to a rainy Wales, too unpleasant to be outdoors but ideal for a quick wander around a garden centre. It had to be a quick one as well; any longer and we could have spent the equivalent of a small principality’s GDP as the place was stocked full of enticing young plants heralding the start of spring. However we showed relative restraint, just buying Easter presents and a couple of blueberry and gooseberry bushes.

Back home, my gardening activity was restricted to perusing the horticulture columns in The Independent. Cleve West warned against sowing seeds too early, even indoors. Although he didn’t provide an explanation in the article - a shame as I’m sure most novice gardeners would be interested in the whys and wherefores - basically, you may be providing a more conducive environment for germination by controlling temperature and moisture, but chances are you’re reliant on natural daylight unless you have invested in expensive lighting. The results are lanky, etiolated seedlings as the quality and quantity of light is insufficient. I showed this to this the other half, who likes to treat our dining room/conservatory as an upmarket greenhouse. As impressed as he was by my scientific explanation (?) I don’t think it will stop him from filling every available surface with propagators in the next few weeks. Cleve also mentioned ordering his lunar calendar. Sowing seeds in accordance with the phases of the moon is something I definitely want to investigate further.

Meanwhile, in the Bi-orb, Choccy is fighting another bout of White Spot. We did some investigation into the disease and one of the fish, probably Goldie, must have been infected before it left the pet shop so we don’t think we could have prevented it despite all the precautions we took. Who’d have thought owning goldfish could be so traumatic?

Goodbye Goldie, Shalom Shabba

I’ve been quiet of late about our “indoors” garden a.k.a. the Bi-orb tank. Within a week of purchase, Goldie had gone to swim in the celestial seas, quickly followed by Shabba. Choccy has developed white spot but is responding to the goldfish medicine so fingers crossed (s)he makes a full recovery. For those who know about these things, we tested the water for the pH, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate rates and they were all in the expected ranges for a newly established tank. The only explanation we can come up with is that maybe the fish were too young; they had only been in the shop for a couple of days before we bought them so they may have suffered stress on the journey home. 

There’s been no activity to speak of in the “outdoors” garden either. The weather is lousy and we have heavy machinery in the garden as the drive is being dug up to lay pipes to connect us to the water mains. The house is currently vibrating as the drills smash the concrete and the dogs have been barking incessantly all morning to add to the commotion, but it will all be worth it when the next set of frosts hit us and I don’t have to carry up buckets from the stream to fill the cistern as the pipes have frozen again.  

Alpine Garden: Stage 3

That’s it for now! We applied the finishing touches – a couple more bags of alpine mix and some home-mulched bark – so now it’s up to the plants to do their thing. We were considering buying a new azalea to fill in the bottom gap but opted instead for laying down a path of bark as we needed access to the top, something that’s all too easy to forget.

The section to the right has been left bare as we wanted a different view from the drive. Our intention is to plant more daffodil bulbs there although we have planted a couple of ground cover alpines that should provide some interest when the daffs have died down.

Recently, ‘Big Bird’ has been languishing in the rose garden looking lost so we decided to relocate him to a more prominent position. We’ll just have to see how stable his new home is the next time the wind picks up.

 

Other than that, we’ve done very little practical work in the garden this week apart from erecting a small wire fence at the top of the veg. patch to discourage the dogs from playing chase across it. Our main work has been planning. We reviewed what seeds were left over from last year and have now started a shopping list for our next tour of the garden centres. We’ve also come up with a few ideas as to where we want to relocate some plants. When we first acquired the garden we didn’t have a grand plan as such so it tended to be a case of: ‘Ooh! There’s a bare spot we can see from the kitchen window. Let’s fill it with a hydrangea / rose / lavatera.’ Consequently, we now have several small trees and bushes that no longer fit in with our current plans. I want the flower bed at the edge of the lawn to be restricted to annuals but it currently contains said hydrangea etc. that were bought on impulse. It’s always a bit of a gamble moving established plants but there are other more suitable sites in the garden, and it’s better than discarding a healthy perennial just because it has technically become a weed.

Spagger*sticks

The dogs have invented a new game for me, loosely based on Poohsticks. They drop their foam balls into the stream, preferably after a night of heavy rain so it is fast-flowing, then see how quickly I can run down to retrieve them. The wetter I get, the more points the dogs score.

No, I didn’t do any gardening, although the rose garden could do with a good hoe. Instead I’m going to settle down with a cup of coffee and watch Rosemary and Thyme. (It is a proper horticultural programme, honest. They even have Pippa Greenwood acting as their Gardening Consultant!)

* Spagger (n) an affectionate name for a Springer Spaniel, for those in the know.

Alpine Garden: Stage 2

We checked the weather report for the next ten days and no frost was forecast so we decided to plant the alpines on Sunday afternoon as it had finally stopped raining. If you squint really hard you can just about see the plants.

Okay, I admit it’s not quite there yet but all it needs is a few more bags of alpine mix and a lot of patience as the plants settle into their new home. I’m sure it’ll look great in five years’ time!

Whilst Jon planted and spread gravel, my conscience got the better of me so I decided to fork the lawn to aerate it. Fortunately, we’re not lawn-proud, we have come to accept the moss that has colonised parts, but some of it was looking far too muddy and suffering from soil compaction. As I was monotonously forking the ground – even the dogs thought it was boring and they think weeding is good fun – I noticed we weren’t the only active ones. There were various hikers on the path alongside the river, canoeists heading down the river and a herd of about twenty pony-trekkers wending their way up the side of the valley. Meanwhile, I was getting sore hands and feet, wishing I was indoors watching the Carling Cup Final.

Not so good news on the mushroom front. Naughty Megan found the box this morning, along with the fish food pellets. She’s already ate two watch straps this weekend (she carefully spat out the metal bits) and chewed a Swatch in half, so she is not in the good books. Hopefully some of the mushroom box is salvageable but we’ll have to cross our fingers and wait to see what emerges.

Almost forgot! (Because I didn’t do it.) We have planted our first new potatoes of the season. They are a second early, blue-skinned variety called Edzell Blue, which should make for an interesting looking salad when we begin to harvest them in July.

Any room for mushrooms?

Today we - I say we, I mean he - started the mushrooms off. I’ve got to remember to do something with them in ten days time; I think he said he put them in the guest bedroom. This is probably where we have gone wrong in the past as, we pat ourselves on the backs for opening the packaging, then stick the box somewhere ’safe’ and forget all about them until the flies give away their hiding place.

On a completely different note, we bought three fish yesterday for the Bi-orb after we killed the previous inhabitants by accidentally overfeeding them last year. So what’s this got to do with a gardening blog? Because we have replaced the old silk plants (I was concerned they were harbouring harmful bacteria) with ‘proper’ plants, so I now have a mini underwater garden on the table next to the sofa.

The Alpine Garden: Stage 1

It seems that ever since I put forward an argument for inaction during the winter months, I’ve been out in the garden almost every day as we’ve had such beautiful weather. Yesterday, we cancelled our planned walk into the village - and pub lunch - in order to do… yes… more gardening. After the previous day’s cycling exploits, a six mile round trek seemed a little too strenuous for saddle-sore bodies so we decided to start clearing back the site for our alpine patch.

We had an arsenal of tools at our disposal, an assortment of rakes, trowels, spades, secateurs and loppers, as we fought back against weeds, brambles and overgrown honeysuckle. A couple of hours later the battle was won: we were down to bare earth and the ‘wildlife area’ (i.e. the compost patch by the side of the drive where we dump anything too large to go into the compost bins) had grown by a foot or so. It wasn’t until we finished that we realized the potential of the plot. The area in question is roughly 5m x 6m / (17ft x 20 ft), approximately the size of my first court-yard garden, a.k.a. backyard, so it was a waste to leave it to go untended.

The final thing we did was to move the ‘annoying’ heather that I had pruned last week to a more suitable spot, between the trees next to the wall. Hopefully, pruning it will increase its chance of survival as the root system will have less mass on top to support whilst it is trying to re-establish itself. That’s the theory anyway.

Initially, we had gone out dressed in fleeces but were soon down to t-shirts in the warmth of the sun and the exertion of gardening. Meanwhile, a glance across the other side of the valley reminded us that it was still winter; the bare, black branches outlined against the frosty, white fields looked like a black and white photograph. I think we’ve completed as much preparatory work as we can for the moment and we’ll just have to be patient before we start sowing or planting outdoors.