Mostly what seems to happen is that visitors say “ooh, I like your bamboo” or, “what sort of bamboo is that?” or, “you’ll have to be careful,that’ll take over the garden!”

Salix, or Bamboo?

We could try and pretend that this is all the result of a carefully thought out plan, but as so often happens, this particular planting scheme is entirely serendipitous.

We’ve always liked the coloured bark Salix (there are some wonderful plantings in the spring garden at RHS Rosemoor) but when we planted these a few years ago their strongest talent seemed to be for sulking on our sales tables, and failing to attract many customers (they do look a bit dull in a pot!).

We never like to see good plants go to waste of course, so a small corner of the Lych Gate Border was declared a rest home for unsold Salix, and three of them were liberated from their sales table torpor, and planted in the garden.

And boy have they settled in! Conventional gardening wisdom is that you prune these things down to the ground each spring, having enjoyed their coloured bark through the winter, and the new stems which then regrow (with alarming speed) are ready to wow you next winter with colours which only the extremely youthful (or recently pruned) would dare sport.

But we forgot the conventional wisdom, or never got round to it, or…well, for whatever reason, we didn’t prune, and what should have a been a modest stool yielding a few feet of demure new growth is in fact a gangly thicket of yellow stems and lime green foliage, doing what we have to admit is a more than passably good impersonation of a bamboo intent on world domination.

But more (OK, entirely) by luck rather than design, it works doesn’t it?

We will prune it next spring – but all of it down to the ground, or maybe just half the stems?…we’ll think on that – and for the moment we’ll enjoy our “bamboo”, with none of the worry that we’re nurturing the monster that that genus so often entails.

All’s well with the world … Gardener’s World is back on the telly, and after a couple of years in the wilderness, it’s back where it ought to be – in the presenters own garden.

Monty Don is not everyone’s favourite gardening presenter, but his return to the helm of the country’s flagship gardening programme does seem to demonstrate that  the internet may have brought a new democracy to the way that decisions are made at the BBC.

The beeb’s attempts to modernise Gardeners World over the last couple of series have been pretty much universally lambasted, but the loudest, and most sustained critical chorus has surely been that on the corporations own message boards, where posters have roundly condemned virtually all aspects of the show over the last two years.

As a result, the (very expensive) garden created especially for the series (on a former rugby pitch in Birmingham) has been abandoned, 2 of the presenters have departed, and the programme has returned to its roots with a single presenter working from his own garden, and other items being contributed by other presenters from other locations.

A very substantial and costly change, in what appears to be a response to feedback from the (really very few) viewers who bother to post on the BBC’s gardening message boards.

And having started to listen to its viewers, the producers seem intent on continuing to do so – in the first episode last night, we had Monty showing us around his garden, and making the point that the flower borders were a central feature (many of the fears expressed about his return to the show concerned his image as a veg man, and that ornamental horticulture would not get enough coverage).

He also explained how his clipped box balls had been grown from his own cuttings (they would have cost a fortune to buy) and that his box hedging had been bought cheap from a newspaper ad, and that his avenue of pleached lime trees had only cost 50p each (20 years ago!) – all we suspect intended to address another message board worry that Monty might be a bit of a gentleman gardener, and not in touch with normal gardens, and normal budgets.

And he even tried to mend a few bridges with the horticulture industry (who he upset when he mentioned in a recent  interview that he hadn’t bought anything from a garden centre for 15 years) by explaining that although he was sowing his beetroot seeds in his own home made compost, he sometimes bought compost (no, really!) and it didn’t really matter to do so.   Nearly an olive branch to garden centres.

So, democracy works, feedback rules, producers reduced to putty in the hands of the message boarders.   What will they change next?

Next year, one plant per variety of pepper will be enough…..(what on earth are we going to do with all these?).

Capsicum 'Hot Cayenne'

Capsicum frutescens

Capsicum 'Mohawk'

Capsicum 'Bell Boy' and 'Romano'

A barrow load of knobbly goodness

We haven’t grown main crop spuds for decades, and hadn’t really planned to this year, but an impulse buy of a bag of seed potatoes in the spring (because the ones we’d last grown were Pink Fir Apple, and we came over all nostalgic) meant that this season we filled half of one of our new veg beds with these rather strange tubers.

And they’ve proved fantastically easy, productive, and very very tasty!

They are very slow – they need a good 20 weeks in the ground – and probably yield badly compared with conventional main crop spuds, but these are most definitely not conventional potatoes!

You can see from the picture that they’re small, and just a bit knobbly. The good news is that you don’t need to peel them, just wash and boil. And the really good news is that they taste wonderful – just like new potatoes, but in October (and November, and December…) So serve hot with butter, or cold, in potato salad…or any other way really.

Unless you’re really keen to grow everything yourself, main crop spuds seem a bit masochistic to us – lots of hard work to produce something that professional growers can do so much more efficiently (you can get huge sacks of spuds in our local farm shops for the price of a bag of seed potatoes). So it has to be something a bit special to get us tilling the soil for spuds – luckily our nostalgia wasn’t mis-placed, and these are going to keep us fed and entertained for months.

One of our customers leapt onto the grow your own bandwagon last year, but seemed ready to leap off it again when we saw him last autumn – his beetroot hadn’t germinated, frost had damaged his runner beans, the pigeons had eaten his brassicas…the list of problems and failures went on (and on) and he was seriously questioning whether the veg growing lark was worth the candle.

When we followed him into grow your own food land this year we were determined to keep the scale of our plots manageable (there’s only 2 of us, so we don’t need huge volumes of stuff) and to grow things which were both easy, and either tastier or substantially cheaper than the fare you’ll find on supermarket shelves.

Mmmm....

And boy have they grown!   The picture here shows our garden plots last week.   The picture here shows them about 6 weeks ago.    A bit of a difference huh?

We’ve already seen off the first batch of broad beans (and very tasty they were too) and we’re looking forward to batch number 2 cropping in a few weeks.   We’ve had courgettes on the menu for several weeks (but haven’t yet had the “what shall we do with all these?” moment) and have had a couple of pickings of runner beans (so far!).

We’ve had salad leaves and radishes from these plots too, and are looking forward to leeks and parsnips in the winter, as well as pink fir apple potatoes in the autumn.

And as long as you discount the effort in stripping the turf and digging the plots over to actually create the beds, the amount of work has been very modest.   And most definitely worth it. We’ve probably had some luck in avoiding the sorts of disasters that befell our friends’ forays into veg growing, but what the heck, you need a bit of luck sometimes! We’re definitely coming back next year.

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.

Hmmm

We thought our optimism might have been  a little mis-placed, so weren’t entirely surprised to see this when we flung back the curtains this morning!

Ho hum, no gardening today then.

Is global warming happening?    A good proportion of the scientific community seem to agree that it is, and a huge number of clever and important people currently gathered in Copenhagen will be wasting an awful lot of time and carbon if its not,  but the good old british public, veterans of more hysterical media reports than you can shake a stick at don’t seem to have been convinced (remember how we were all going to die from BSE, and how planes were going to fall from the sky as a  result of the millenium bug, and ….)

The problem is the weather.   It’s very difficult to draw the distinction between climate and weather.  And it’s even harder to try to do so when one of the agencies banging the climate change drum is the Met Office. Loved and derided in equal measure by forecast watchers across the land, their record of predicting what’s going to happen tomorrow is a bit flawed,  so you can understand a certain skepticism when they try to persuade us that they know whats going to happen over the next several decades.

And this is compounded by the fact that global warming is supposed to deliver hotter drier summers to the UK, and for the last 3 years we’ve had pretty much exactly the opposite.

To the climate scientists credit, and probably relief, we do seem to be experiencing 2 of the 3 weather patterns that global warming predicts – much longer and milder autumns, and warmer wetter winters.

Most of the winters we’ve seen since we moved here 13 years ago have been what you might expect;  perhaps less snow than the kids had hoped for, but certainly cold – we’ve recorded minus 16 in our potting shed (before hurriedly retreating indoors) – but the last few winters have been noticeably warmer, and most certainly wetter.

That's winter wet that is

Our picture is of the field behind the nursery, and shows what seems to be becoming an annual winter event – an impromptu pool.   It’s not a short term flood either – once it fills up, winter rains keep it topped up and it remains for months;  a couple of swans moved in for the duration a couple of winters ago.   And this is most definitely a recent phenomenon – we can’t remember the field flooding at all for the first decade that we lived here.

Similarly, our last few autumns have been very long and mild – we’ve gardened well beyond what would conventionally be the end of the season, so there does seem to be something afoot with the weather.

What we need now is a run of hot dry summers to add to the longer autumns and wetter winters, so our weather experience fully reflects the experts’ climate predictions.

Alternatively, the fickle british weather might deliver us a “normal” winter this year, and then the climate scientists will have a real mountain to climb.

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.