We could set a quiz, but you’d never guess, and we don’t want to rival the rawlplug fiasco, so we’ll tell you …

More tree aisles!

This unassuming collection of tanalised timber is about to increase our tree display capacity, so we can offer customers an even bigger tree browsing opportunity.   We currently have about 250 trees on our sales area;  this timber will be used to build an extra 2 aisles, which will allow us to add another 100 or so trees to our display.   We’ll use the opportunity to stock the more popular species in depth, and add some more choice and unusual varieities, so we hope we’ll have something to suit most requirements.

And what better way could there be for us to spend our time in National Tree Week (which runs from 25 November to December 6 – that’s a week and a half isn’t it?).

And as it happens, the first tree delivery of this planting season arrives tomorrow, so we’d better start building!

Berryfields had its long borders, Sissinghurst has its white garden, Monty Don has his Jewel garden, even Barlow Nurseries has its Lychgate borders….everything needs a name.   So what shall we call these?

The expanse of grass separating the Lychgate from the still-work-in-progress pool clearly needed some enlivening, so one cold day a couple of weeks ago Nick set-to with string, tape measure, and spade, and came up with….these.

What do they look like to you?

There is a plan – we’re going to plant a yew hedge down the middle of both beds, running parallel with the Lychgate borders, and each side of the borders will then be planted up with a mix of shrubs and herbaceous perennials (probably).   The borders run east-west, so the new hedge will create beds with very distinct characteristics: one side will face due north, the other due south, so plant selection will be critical.

The borders were planned to create vistas – viewed from the house (where the camera was for this photo) there will be a view along mixed borders to the oak tree focal point at the end;  looking through the Lychgate there’ll be a view of the pool, framed through the “ends” of each of the new borders, just demanding that the viewer walks through to explore….

But what shall we call them?   In their current virgin state we’re haunted by their shape – there’s a serious risk that they’ll forever be “the lozenge borders”.   But hopefully, we’ll have a better idea.

You wanna be a record breaker ?

Don’t blame us, it’s the BBC’s pun.

‘Tree Time’ is actually the hour between 11am and midday on December 5th, when the BBC are hoping to establish a world record by getting 1,000,000 trees planted in 60 minutes. The current world tree planting record is held by the Phillipines  where over half a million people planted 653,000 trees on 25 August 2006.

The BBC has recruited members of the Horticultural Trades Association to help promote the event, and distribute some of the tree seedlings that they have to give away to help hit the target.

We’re very happy to be playing our part in this, and have a limited number of free tree seedlings available for anyone who wants to contribute to the record attempt (and of course, to the environment!).

All you have to do is formally commit to planting a tree on the BBC breathing places website and then e-mail them a photo of you doing so (with the time and date correctly set on your camera – the boys at Guinness need hard evidence to verify the record!). Then watch the press to see if the record has been broken!

The free seedlings available are Hazel, Field Maple, Cherry, Rowan, Hawthorn, and Silver Birch, and around 12 – 18 inches tall. If you prefer to source your own tree(s), of whatever size, that can still be counted towards the record attempt.

The free seedlings are available now – first come first served, one seedling per family – so if you want to take part call in to the nursery as soon as you can.

Less than a couple of weeks after doing our bit to help protect the nations allegedly dwindling Hedgehog population, evidence of success!

We’ve only ever seen one hedgehog here – maybe 10 years ago, we found one asleep amongst  a batch of plants in our sales area.   The area is enclosed by rabbit proof netting, with only one entrance, so the poor hog must have wandered in, and then been unable to find his way out again. Since then our only sitings have been of the occasional  “deposit”  to suggest that he, or his progeny, must still be around.

Just a few more beetles before bed...

It’s nothing more than a huge coincidence of course, but imagine our surprise when our second close encounter of the decade happened last week, less than a fortnight after we’d added the hedgehog suite to the Barlow wildlife hotel.   Nick went out after dark to fetch something from the pick-up, and found this little fella waddling across the car park.   They can really get a wiggle on when they want to – in the time that it took to return to the house and summon Louise, the hog had made it 20 yards towards the hedge;  another minute, and we’d have missed him.

It’s a rubbish picture we know – taken hurriedly, in the dark, and only one shot so as not to endanger the poor chap any further by stressing him out with the camera flash, but evidence!   Barlow Nurseries Hog Preservation Society is up and running!

Now all we’re waiting for is the aroma of fresh starch to start wafting across the lawn, and a procession of anthropomorphic birds and beasts bearing laundry baskets…

We have to exercise extreme self-control whenever we drive home from Newport at this time of year.   Our route takes us past Chetwynd Deer Park, and the pavement is always knee deep in newly fallen leaves just crying out to be collected up and turned into gardening gold – leaf mould!

I wonder if anybody would mind if we helped clear them up a bit?   Would a man from the council chase us down the road shaking his fist at us because we’re depriving him of a recyclable resource?   Or would he want to shake us by the hand for saving him a chore?   Do the council collect and recycle, or simply sweep and dump?

It would be a labour of love of course – you have to collect gazillions of leaves to make any sensible amount of leafmould, and there’s no way it would make any sort of economic sense;  but it’s still difficult to drive past all those lovely leaves and not ponder an industrial scale leaf mould cage.

If it's worth having, it's worth waiting two years for...

We do it domestically anyway -  we have enough trees in the garden to make a few barrow loads of leaf mould each year.   You can see our three stage leafmould cage in the picture.   Newly collected leaves go in the biggest bin;  after a year the resulting (almost usable) leafmould is transferred into the smaller bin, and after its second year it gets transferred into the tiny bin at the front, waiting to be used.

We have a variety of trees in the garden, and leaf fall is staggered over several months each autumn, so the largest bin is “filled” several times each year.   It gets stacked to the gunwales, and the contents always sink alarmingly (but obligingly) before the next batch of leaves are deposited.  That’s the trouble with leafmould – you start out with farcically large quantities of leaves, and end up with tiny amounts of usable compost.   Leafmould bins are horticultural black holes.

We usually manage about 4 “fills” before the garden is leaf-free, then we wait…and that’s all we have to do;  12 months later we move the leafmould from bin (a) to to bin (b) etc, and the stuff in bin (c) then becomes garden treasure – the finest mulch/soil conditioner/compost ingredient known to man, reserved only for our very favourite plants, or those needing the very highest level of TLC.

It’s a bit of a conundrum really – how can such a simple and straightforward process produce such a delectable result?

If you haven’t got the space or the leaves for large scale bins like ours, just stuff whatever leaves you have in bin liners, add water if they’re dry, puncture a few air holes in the bags, and leave them somewhere out of sight for a year, preferably two.

And enjoy!

Front border, tidied and duveted for winter

If you have been too impatient to wait for Father Christmas to bring you a copy of Monty Don’s new book The Ivington Diaries ¹ you will probably have noticed his enthusiasm for mulch.

It’s an enthusiasm which sometimes seems to border on mania as he talks of truck loads of mushroom compost being dumped in his yard, and then whittling the mountain  away as he barrows the stuff around the garden, spreading a 3 inch blanket over any patch of bare soil he can find.

Perhaps inevitably, the wild enthusiasm of the early years turns to angst as he realises that his garden borders are gradually levitating above the surrounding paths and lawns;  if you mulch long enough and hard enough, it’s only a matter of time before your borders become raised beds, and they get higher, and higher, and higher…..

Which is pretty much where we are now with our front garden border.   It was last revamped and replanted 3 or 4 years ago, and we’ve been mulching annually since.   We are luckier than Monty in that we don’t have to buy-in mulch – the garden and nursery keep our compost heap more than well fed – and in truth, it’s growing faster than we can use it, so we mulch whenever we can.   Our soil is exactly the opposite of Monty’s;  he is struggling to open up heavy clay, and we’re trying to add some body to very light sand, but that’s the great thing about soil improver, it really is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ product – whatever soil you have, adding organic material makes it better.

But our front border is reaching its limit – we’ve just done this year’s autumn tidy and mulch, and standing back to admire our work left us wondering whether this might have to be the last time.   We’ve had to contour the soil level downwards to meet the drive – another layer of mulch next year might leave us with a small hillock rather than a border….

What we need is some more borders to help us work our way through our compost mountain (you probably think we’re joking, but it was very cold last week, and Nick wanted a warm job, and what better way to keep warm than a bit of  turf stripping ?).   More on that later.




¹   Monty Don tends to polarise attitudes amongst gardeners – his stewardship of our flagship television gardening programme might have been ‘Gardeners World – the Marmite years’ but we’re not Sue Townsend, so let’s just say you probably either like him, or you don’t.   If you are a fan, The Ivington Diaries is a very pleasant ramble through his gardening styles and philosophies;  his gentle but ferociously focused enthusiasm shines through, and makes you want to get out there and garden.

If you’re expecting a sequential diary telling the story of his garden’s development, you’ll be disappointed – these are random selections from the diaries he kept over several years of making his garden, chosen for their content and literary merit;  it’s not a ‘how I built it’ narrative.

But if you like Monty, it’s a good read;  if you don’t want to buy it yourself, it’s got to be a contender for the Christmas wish list.

More autumn fireworks!

Well we think it’s M. m. ‘Charity’ – the label’s long gone, and there are a few cultivars which look remarkably similar.    It could be M. m. ‘Winter Sun’ (which is dwarfer) but as this one still appears to be growing, and is already bigger than Winter Sun is supposed to get, our money’s on it being Charity!

Anyway…the photo was taken today, and it’s been in flower for a couple of weeks at least, so it’s a bit ahead of schedule.  The schedule appears to be late autumn to late winter however, so there’s plenty of latitude.

It’s pretty much a go-anywhere shrub, which is why it’s used so extensively in amenity plantings, but it’s none the worse for that.   Its spiky evergreen leaves give it year round interest, and as you can see from the picture, its winter flowering really adds a splash of colour when there isn’t much else happening in the garden.

It forms quite a dense thicket once it’s settled in, so it’s a “get it right first time ” plant – relocating anything other than a very young specimen would be a very fraught affair.

According to the encyclopedias its ideal location is semi-shade (good under trees) but it’ll grow pretty much anywhere – we have it on poor soil in a sunny west facing border, and it’s thriving.

Don’t be put off by its ubiquity – common plants are usually common for good reasons!

We spent a happy hour or two a few weeks back making some winter accommodation for our beneficial insect buddies (here) and worried (a little) that we were probably indulging ourselves rather more than the insects.

Then last week BBC breakfast news featured a story about plagues of ladybirds infesting houses around the UK, suggesting our doubts were well founded – these guys are clearly well able to get by without our help.

And then, as if to underline our folly, we read in the Guardian that we should have spent our time making a hedgehog house.

Can it really be true that Hedgehogs could be extinct in the UK by 2025??

We googled around a bit, and there are lots and lots of people doing all sorts of good work to nurture the hedgehog population.  One rescue centre had a “sorry, we’re full” sign on their (virtual) door.   There seemed to be hedgehogs, and hedgehog rescuers, everywhere.   There might even be unemployed hog-fanciers wandering the country roads at night, searching for homeless hogs to re-house….surely animals with so many people looking out for them can’t be endangered?

But what if they are?   Hedgehogs are (a) lovable cuddly Mrs Tiggywinkle looky-likeys who (b) eat lots of things which would otherwise be eating our plants.   They need to be saved!   And just in case there aren’t as many hogs or hog-lovers out there as we imagine, we’ve done our bit and added a hog-house to the Barlow Nurseries wildlife motel complex.

All you need is an old pallet, a jig saw, hammer, nails, a bit of polythene, a couple of old paving slabs, some cosy dry straw or leaves, a couple of spare hours, and a desire to save Beatrix Potter’s heritage….

Take one old pallet....

After an hour or so we had the basic shape

Baffled entrance to keep slumbering hog safe from predators

Sitting on a paving slab for insulation from cold and damp, and with a supply of leaf litter bedding

Old compost bag to keep the rain out, paving slab for strength

Finished house buried under layers of twigs, moss, and leaf litter for insulation

All we need now is a hedgehog.

We know they’re in the neighbourhood because they leave “evidence” around the nursery – but where do they live? Will they prefer our precision engineered hog friendly design to their current housing? Will more hogs turn up now there’s more accommodation?

Watch this space!

You can tell it’s autumn when a crate of partly ripened tomatoes appears in the kitchen….

Its been another funny year for tomatoes – most people who tried to grow them outdoors saw their plants devoured by blight (again) and even those of us who had them undercover had to contend with low temperatures and poor light levels, which conspired to reduce and delay the crop.    But then autumn seemed to go on and on and we’ve been picking right up until today, so although the plants were slow to get going, they’ve kept going for ages.

We grow our tomatoes in an unheated, and very well ventilated polytunnel, so conditions are only marginally warmer than outside;  we don’t close the tunnel at night (because the other plants in the tunnel need the ventilation) so they’re grown pretty hard.

We grew 5 varieties this year :

• Gardener’s delight – an old stalwart, probably still the tastiest, easiest and most productive variety
• Sungold – an orange cherry, earliest to crop this year, very tasty, but not very prolific
• Sun Belle – a yellow cherry plum, very sweet, not very robust plants, but a novel colour and shape
• Roma – an italian plum;  slow and not very productive.   Almost tasteless raw, but very flavoursome cooked
• Tumbling Tom – a hanging basket type, we grew them in 10 lt pots.   Prolific, very sweet, but tiny fruits

But now, they’re all over for another year.   Night time temperatures are looking distinctly autumnal at last, and although we’ve only had very light ground frosts so far, the tommies were undoubtedly living on borrowed time.

So the remaining fruits have been picked, and brought into the house where they’ll ripen over the next few weeks.   Any that aren’t eaten fresh will make soup, or sauce which can be frozen and used on pizzas, or as an ersatz puree.

We’ll fill the space in the tunnel with nursery stock (which is what it’s there for of course) and hopefully find enough space to squeeze in a few winter salad leaves.  And then start browsing the seed catalogues for next years tomatoes.

Barlow Nurseries joins the establishment!   There are a lot of good reasons for a horticultural retailer to be a member of the Horticultural Trades Association but probably the most visible one is the National Garden Gift Voucher scheme.

Now sold and accepted here!

We’ve always sold our own Barlow Nurseries gift vouchers, but have had to turn away customers who wanted to spend their National vouchers here, and of course, have been unable to sell vouchers to customers who wanted to send them to people in other parts of the country.

But that’s all changed  – you can now spend your National Garden Gift Vouchers at Barlow Nurseries, and we can sell you vouchers to send to your friends and relatives around the country.   With around 2000 garden retailers in the scheme, nobody is ever far away from a spending opportunity!

And if you can’t get to the nursery, just give us a call on our order line (07742 367494) and we’ll take a credit / debit card payment, and mail the vouchers to you, or directly to your friends and relatives, in a seasonal greetings card!