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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

The plants were huge (you can see them in the bottom right of the picture here).    Each one – we had 4 – probably covered  3-4 square metres, and this is the crop we got :

That'll be about 2 square metres per squash then

The area they consumed wasn’t an issue – the ground was spare this year anyway – but if they’d been on a conventional veg patch, it would have been a spectacularly poor use of space.

We’re guessing that the very dry September played a part too – there were quite a few small fruits that might have made it to a usable size if they’d had a bit more water to bulk them up – but it didn’t rain for a month, and we clearly weren’t attentive enough with the irrigation.

That aside, if you’ve got the space, they’re an easy, if rampant, crop;  they cover the ground very efficiently, need no weeding (nothing competes with these guys) and in a normal season, would probably yield acceptably, if not well.

You can see from the picture that we had a bit of variation too – all 4 plants were from the same seed packet, from a very well respected seed merchant, and , well, some of them aren’t butternut squash are they??

This was going to be step by step “how to” blog, but then we realised it just didn’t need that much explanation, so here’s a picture….

All mod con's (but only if you're a ladybird, or lacewing....)

Mostly the contents are bamboo canes cut to the depth of the box (a surprising number of bamboo canes actually).   The rest of the stuff is old branches with holes of random sizes drilled in them, and rolled up corrugated cardboard.

Hang it pretty much anywhere in the garden, and wait for the guests to arrive!

Do our beneficial insect buddies need our help to find places to while away the winter months?   We suspect the answer is probably no, actually.   There’s loads of perfectly good natural nooks and crannies around the nursery and garden for them, but …. it’s a fun thing to do, it makes use of something that would probably otherwise end up in the kindling box, it looks nice (well we think so anyway) and if there is just a slim chance that we can increase the population of insect good guys by doing something as simple as this, why not ?