We can’t actually remember when we did our first Newport Show, but it must be about 12 years since our late neighbour John Byrd (who just happened to be show president that year) knocked on our door, and cajoled us into taking a stand.

At the time it seemed like a huge leap into the unknown, and THE BIG LEAGUE, because we’d never done a show so large, or laid out so much cash for a single event.

A strange twist of fate ensued a few weeks later when the horticultural secretary ‘phoned and explained that one of the show’s long standing exhibitors had pulled out, and asked if we’d put on an extra large display to try and fill what would otherwise have been a bit of a void on the show ground.

And so began an annual routine that would see us fronting the horticulture marquee for something like the next dozen years.   It was a mutually beneficial arrangement – we got local publicity and sold some plants, and the show ground got a special bit of plant-based animation and colour.  In truth, it was an arrangement and a feature on the nursery calendar that we thought would continue until we became too infirm to carry on (which is a few years off yet, hopefully).

Newport Show holds a special place in the hearts of thousands of Novaportans; we’ve met people who’ve been to every show in their lives, and stewards who’ve volunteered at the show, year in year out, for decades.   It’s a local institution, and generates a fierce pride amongst many of the townsfolk.   And it’s a lovely community to be part of – there is real magic in the air on show day, and being part of it is genuinely exciting.  The sense of anticipation as the sun rises over the showground is electric (yes, we’ve been there before dawn some days!).

And so it surprised nobody more than us to find that this year we spent show day serving customers on the nursery, and not on a showground stand.

It’s always been part of the Barlow Nurseries business plan that we’d do fewer and fewer shows each year, and skew the business more and more towards sales from home.   Shows are phenomenally hard work, and it’s not a lifestyle that you can continue into your dotage.

The plan has been going well – in our early days Louise was selling at shows on about 35 days each year;  this year we’re down to just 4 show days.   But we always assumed that Newport Show wouldn’t be part of the wind-down;  it’s extreme proximity (the show ground is about 3 miles from the nursery) made the logistics pretty straightforward, and it was fun – we’d see huge numbers of friends and customers there, and it was as much a  social occasion as a sales opportunity.

But in the end, the economics defeated us.   The grim reality is that agricultural shows tend to be too expensive for horticulture exhibitors.   We’ve tried all the nearby shows (and some not so nearby ones!) over the years (Nantwich, Stafford, Oswestry, Burwarton, West Mids (RIP!) Bakewell) and found them all too expensive.   We hung in with Newport for sentimental reasons as much as anything.   Then, about 4 years ago the committee decided that they were out of step with what they perceived to be the going rate for agricultural show fees, and that they would wind their fees up (in “manageable” steps), until they achieved market rate.   This, combined with a less relaxed attitude to the amount of space we could consume, meant that our 2009 fees were about 3 times what we’d paid in our first year.

This is all dead normal stuff of course;  we have no problem with the show getting as much as they can from their exhibitors.   And no problem with the rules of supply and demand which inevitably apply – just a bit sad that we find ourselves low down on the curve, so our demand is going to drop off quickest!

In reality then, the writing has been on the wall for a few years.   We could see the fees escalating beyond reach.   We tried to put a case forward for special horticutural rates, but our pleas fell on deaf ears.   We tried to cost the show in a way that would make our attendance worthwhile, but even with our most creative accounting hats on, we couldn’t make it work.  Economically, the show doesn’t make sense anymore.   And the grim reality is that we’re here to make a living, so if it isn’t working we can’t do it, no matter how much we’d like to.

And so, we’re not!

We were expecting our Saturday at home to be very quiet, but someone somewhere must be looking out for us because we had one of our best Saturdays of the year.   In July, in a business which peaks in spring.   Completely inexplicable, but wonderfully reassuring.  If we’d been at the show we’d have missed that custom entirely, and left those customers disgruntled that we’d been closed when they came.

So a decision reluctantly reached, but happily concluded.   As one of our visitors said – “you don’t need to go to the show – you’ve got your own show right here!”

It was but a moment between us consigning this bundle of fleece to a cardboard box in the polytunnel (it had just been doing duty keeping the pigeons off our newly planted runner beans) and Spot deciding that it would be a waste not to find another use for it….

Time for a quick nap....

It’s been a while since our embryonic veg garden appeared on the blog (in the bleak mid-winter actually) so here’s a picture showing where we’re at right now.   We managed to get 3 of the 4 beds we’d planned dug out – the final bed can only be installed after we’ve dug out several tree roots, and shifted a few tonnes of soil to level the area into which it will extend (just out of shot in the pic) so that’s a job for the autumn.

One bed short of a rotation

In the meantime we’ve planted raspberries (summer and autumn varieties) a loganberry, winberry, potatoes (pink fir apple, because we love the idea of maincrop spuds which taste like first earlies) courgettes, broad beans, french beans, runner beans, leeks, radishes, parsnips and beetroot. And in other parts of the garden – butternut squash, garlic, blueberries, all sorts of salad leaves, rhubarb, red currants, gooseberries, tomatoes (5 different varieties) cucumbers, sweet peppers, chili peppers, carrots, more parsnips (we like parsnips!) and salad onions (which last forever – we’re still picking a batch we sowed in the polytunnel about this time last year).

Does that count as self-sufficient?   No, nowhere near, but it’s wonderful to be able to supplement our diet with really local food, which we can eat within minutes of it being picked, and it really doesn’t involve very much effort.

We haven’t suffered too many set backs (yet?).   Our only real challenge so far has been to keep the pigeons off the newly planted runner bean plants – the little devils shredded virtually every leaf as soon as they were planted out a few weeks ago.  We solved the problem by wrapping the whole bean pole construction in fleece for a couple of weeks, until the plants had climbed out of reach (we’re not saying our pigeons are lazy, but they’re showing absolutely no interest in the leaves now that access to them involves actual effort on their part).

OK, we are saying our pigeons are lazy.  And fat.  They’re the B52’s of the bird world (in the sense that you watch them trundling towards take-off, and just can’t help thinking “that’s not going to happen…”).

And the blackbirds think the pigeons are fat too – we’re sure they’re singing “who ate all the pies” when the pigeons belly-flop onto the lawn….

..it must be time for the Arley Garden Festival

We’ve been going to the annual Arley Garden Festival for maybe a dozen years, and have achieved fame (or perhaps notoriety) amongst both visitors and fellow traders for the carpet of Coreopsis with which we front our stall each year.

A week away from perfect....

Every year is different of course. In previous years we’ve sometimes had to dead head the plants because they’ve flowered a little early (they’re such floriferous and obliging plants that there are always new blooms ready to take the place of any you remove) but this year, with everything blooming late, we were worried that they might miss the Arley boat.

But no, reliable to the end, they’ve just started to show colour, and with warm sunny weather forecast for the coming week, they should be in peak condition for next weekend’s show.

If you’re within striking distance of Arley, it’s a grand day out – there are glorious gardens to explore (including a spectacular herbaceous border, reputed to be the oldest in the country) loads of nurseries and garden paraphenalia stalls, floral displays, foods, crafts, gifts, children’s activities and loads of other stuff to keep you entertained.

The field behind the nursery was awash with wild poppies last year – gazillions and gazillions of them – to the extent that passers-by would detour onto the nursery to stare at them, and the field was almost more red than green.

OK chaps, stand at ease...

This year, probably thanks to a more intensely sown crop, the poppies have been largely defeated by the wheat – except here, where we have a line of them, less than a metre across, stretching right across the field.

Presumably the precision seeder was missing a station or two, and the wheat was sown just that bit thinner on this strip….and delivered the most unlikely crop of wild flowers we could imagine.

Or maybe there are alien forces at work, contriving signals to their mother ship disguised as agricultural machinery failures….

Our soil is rubbish.   More dust than soil really, and very free draining dust at that.   We’re constantly chanting our mantra “improve the soil, improve the soil,” and have shovelled tonnes of compost onto the borders we’ve added to the garden recently, but there’s still some way to go….

Looks alright to me...

This was brought home to us last week when we revisited a garden in which we’d installed some borders last year.   We don’t often get the chance to review borders after we’ve designed and installed them (and often find ourselves worrying about their upkeep and performance as a result) but we have a small number of clients who call us back from time to time to do extra work, and it’s aways interesting to see how things have progressed.

One of these clients lives 45 minutes south of here, and has soil in their garden.   Real earthy stuff, loamy, with body, and nutrients, and everything.   The sun always shines in their garden too (tho’ we’ll concede that this is really just because we only make the trip if the weather is nice and we can be sure to get a good days work in!). And their plants grow, properly.

The plants in our garden grow properly too of course, but there is a noticeable difference between the two, and it can only be down to the soil.   We’ve duplicated many plants in both gardens, and while they all look fine and dandy viewed in isolation, we repeatedly found ourselves thinking “that’s doing better than at home….”

We have another client for whom we built a new border a couple of years ago, and were back in their garden last week too.  In their case we imported 20 tonnes of topsoil to make up a new raised bed, and the plants in there are doing very well.    The rest of the garden however is not – it’s a new-build house, on the site of an old haulage yard, and while the builder obviously imported some topsoil, we can’t help thinking it must have been poor quality, or that it’s just been dumped onto whatever surfaces were there before – concrete, tarmac, gravel, 50 years worth of oil contaminated and compacted soil?   The builder “landscaped” the garden with amenity type shrubs and they are coping, but that’s about the best you can say for them.

“Feed the soil, not the plant” sounds like a phrase conceived by one of the more puritanical and masochistic wings of the organic gardening movement (unless you like shoveling soil conditioner of course) but it really isn’t.   If you want a quality product, you need quality ingredients, and soil is the key ingredient in a garden!

So back to our mantra – “improve the soil, improve the soil”……we’re lucky in the sense that the nursery and garden  produce far more compostable waste than we could ever use, so we have an inexhaustible supply of soil conditioner.   And it looks as if mulching is going to feature on our “to do” list for some time to come.

Geranium sanguineum striatum

Geranium sanguineum striatum

Photographed on our sales benches this morning, Geranium sanguineum striatum (sometimes known as G. s. ‘Lancastriense’) is a ground hugger, never getting more than about 6 inches tall, with foliage dense enough to out-compete any weed!   It’ll spread, but not invade, and in early summer, as you can see, it has lots of delightful light pink flowers.

As with all hardy Geraniums, shearing hard back after the first flush of flowers have faded will produce a fresh clump of foliage in just a couple of weeks, and a second flush of blooms soon after.

It has been awarded the RHS Award of Garden Merit, indicating it’s an all-round good do-er.

If you’re after some effective and elegant front-of-border ground cover, this should fit the bill!

And they're off....

It’s been a long time coming, but finally, after the longest coldest, and maybe driest spring for ages, we’ve had a decent period of warm and wet weather, and stuff is growing at last.

Activity on the nursery has concentrated our minds away from the garden for the last few weeks, so it was almost a surprise to walk through the garden last evening, and see how much it’s changed.

It’s still some way off its blousy mid-summer best of course, but it’s reassuring to see the seasonal progression somewhere near on-track, and to be able to look forward to the glories still to come.

The planting in the foreground is our “just-outside-the-back-door” potager, with herbs, garlic, variegated yellow rocket, and just getting their heads into shot, blueberries (this year we have enviromesh ready to confound the blackbirds!).

Off in the distant right of the shot you can just about make out the lozenge borders (still unplanted) with our new, and growing very nicely, yew hedge down the middle.

We love living in the country, and we especially love springtime (did we mention that already?).   We love the rituals of the changing seasons, and get unreasonably excited when we see our first swallows, and hear the first cuckoo.

But our joy is wearing a bit thin this year as we worry that there may not be that many cuckoos around to herald future springtimes.   According to the BBC Wales website cuckoo numbers declined 37% between 1994 – 2007, and judging by the apparently solitary existence of our neighbourhood cuckoo, things really are getting tough out there in cuckoo land.

We heard our first cuckoo some weeks ago, and have been hearing him sporadically ever since.  But this week things have been hotting up, presumably as the poor chap gets more and more desperate to find a mate.   For the last several days our local bird has been calling pretty much continuously from dawn to dusk, enchanting us and visitors to the nursery, but apparently not charming any lady cuckoos.

You can have too much of a good thing of course, and while the cuckoo’s call is undoubtedly captivating, it can be, well, a bit intrusive when it starts at 4.30 am, and frankly, a bit monotonous after 5 or 6 hours.

It must be the same for the poor bird tho’ mustn’t it?   Imagine having a total vocabulary of just two syllables, and having a charm offensive consisting of nothing more than continually repeating them.  And then having to repeat them to the point that you get the ornithological equivalent of laryngitis – grim times indeed in cuckoo land.

Actually, we’re not sure whether our local bird is struggling, or just introducing a bit of contrived variety to relieve his own boredom.  Or perhaps he’s going for the sympathy vote…..but every so often, he loses it, and his normally sonorous “cuckoo” comes out as a wheezy “cu, cu, a, hooo”.   Or the second syllable comes in for a bit of improv croup, and we get “cuck, ah, ah, hoo”.

All we hope is that he finds a mate soon, and comes back next year….

Does this count as burgeoning?

We had the annual visit of one of our local gardening societies last Thursday evening, and this time, for the first time for a few years, the weather was kind.    In fact, absolutely wonderful.    A balmy evening, barely a hint of a breeze, and warm enough for nowt but t-shirts until well after dusk.   A band of happy people exploring the nursery, then being fed tea and biscuits in our getting-more-like-a-garden garden, sitting on chairs borrowed from our local village hall, and generally having a jolly old time.

We might have mentioned this before, but May is our favourite month.  The plants all look lovely, the nursery is stacked to the gunwales with spring stock, and when the sun shines, and the nursery is full of happy customers, its glorious.