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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….
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
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.