Still no chance of anything approaching gardening or horticulture going on around here, so we’re diverting ourselves by recording the extraordinary landscapes hereabouts. All the photos below were taken from the nursery today, but we drove between Newport and Market Drayton this afternoon, and the county was looking much the same everywhere. Surreal, but staggeringly beautiful.

Bird feeding station

There are loads of ornamental crab apples lining the tree aisles in garden centres around the country (and here!).   And they’re popular with good reason – lovely spring blossom, glorious autumn colours, and fruit that lasts well beyond leaf fall to give good winter interest.

The one in our photo is in our front garden, and pre-dates our time here – its label is long gone,so we don’t know which variety it is, but it does everything it’s supposed to, and we’re very happy to have it.

Right now it’s doing its winter larder act – the blackbirds are still busy stripping the holly berries (clearly a tastier treat than crabs) but in a week or two they’ll move onto these, and the trees’ final seasonal task will be complete.

That’s the usual routine anyway – a year or two ago a flock of redwings got in first, and stripped the tree bare in a matter of minutes.

According to the RSPB, 685,000 Redwings visit the UK each winter (and we have a resident Blackbird population of 10 – 15 million*) so maybe we ought to plant a few more trees!

* clearly estimating bird populations is a less exact science than you might imagine!

For the record, scenes from the coldest day we’ve known…..

Very, very cold!

Just a few days after recording a near record overnight low temperature, the record looks to have been broken – our thermomenter shows something around -17c for last nights low.

You can see that the temperature when the photo was taken, at about 08.45 this morning, had only crept a couple of degrees higher, to maybe -15c!

The garden this morning is a real winter wonderland – everything is covered in as thick a hoar frost as we’ve ever seen.   The bad news of course is that it’s rather too cold to make it a place you want to linger!

Another inch or so of snow fell overnight, so now we have 2 – 3″ of lovely powdery white stuff to kick through – but absolutely no chance of any gardening taking place!

So we have time to wonder at the icicles you get from a corrugated iron roof….

Freeze thaw, freeze thaw...

And time to worry about our leeks. We’ve never grown leeks before; all the books will tell you that they’re perfectly winter hardy, so we’re counting on them being right!

The few that we harvested before the arctic weather set in were delicious, so we’re hoping that like sprouts (allegedly) the flavour improves after a bit of frost!

They look hardy don't they??

Damn cold

In one of our first winters after we’d moved here we recorded a night time temperature of -16 centigrade, but then enjoyed a decade of relatively mild winters, and thought perhaps that such extremes had been consigned to meteorological history.

Last winter brought us back to reality with a start, but still didn’t challenge our “record” low.

When we woke up this morning to hear the TV weather man reporting overnight lows of -17c in Powys, and -13c in Shrewsbury, we had visions of our record being smashed….but didn’t quite make it!   As you can see from our photo, we dropped to about -15 degrees;   cold, but no cigar.

Perhaps more alarmingly, you can see that when this photo was taken at 10.30 this morning, it was still about -8c.

It’s not showing signs of warming up anytime soon!

Sometimes we watch the weather forecast, sometimes we just look out of the window.
This is the scene that greeted us this morning.   Today, it’s mostly going to be cold.

The weathermen are predicting this cold snap is going to continue for another 10 days, so it looks like we may be enjoying this view for sometime yet.

The temperature on the nursery dropped to -9 centigrade last night; luckily, Steve Nick and Louise spent most of Friday filling the front polytunnel with all our evergreen stock, so its safely tucked up for the duration.

We don’t mind seeing a gloriously frosty vista when we open the curtains of a morning, but we can’t help worrying that this might be a harbinger of a long cold winter ahead …. we’ve already had more frosts than we might have expected this autumn, and forecasters are warning of a repeat of last years bleak winter weather, so it’s time to batten down the hatches.

So cold, so early

Most of our evergreen stock will be moved under cover this week – not because its less than hardy, but if the root balls freeze for any length of time the plants can’t transpire, so they dehydrate, and then die.  This would not be good. The irrigation system will be drained so we don’t suffer too much frozen pipe damage, and we’ll start the horticultural equivalent of doing the hokey-cokey - opening and closing the polytunnels everyday. The plants need protection, but also ventilation, so as soon as the daytime temperature is above zero we open up, and as soon as it starts to approach freezing, we close again, and this shapes the rhythm of our days for the the next several months.

Looks like a ....

Some of the timber has been sunk into the ground, with concrete collars to hold them firm, and perimeter beams have been cut to size…

The weather this week has been ideal for a bit of al fresco woodwork, so progress has been steady.

It’s exactly the size of a domestic greenhouse (8 feet by 6 feet) but those posts are a bit heavy duty for that – aren’t they?

Readers with total recall may remember us asking the very same question about this time last year. Those of you who have honed their observational skills on rather more spot-the-difference competitions than might be good for you will have noticed however that this time there’s a trailer load of timber rather than a mere truck load…so this must be something bigger!

Watch this space….

Nick's latest project...