It was tough in horticulture in those days!

The plight of that bothy boy often comes to mind when we find ourselves facing adverse working conditions;  not because anything we have to face comes near the conditions faced by victorian gardeners, rather as a consolation that whatever happens, we’re so much better off than they were.

Brrrr

And so today we found ourselves contemplating the lot of that poor garden boy once again.  We decided to water some of the plants in one of the tunnels, and found ourselves smashing through a layer of ice to get to the water in the butt.

At midday, second week of March.   The weather continues frustratingly victorian!

Cold and dispiriting for us, very confusing for the plants.   Days are lengthening, and day time light levels have been good.  The plants want to grow – but temperatures in low single figures by day, and well below zero at night leave them thinking a bit longer in hibernation is in order.

It’s going to be one of those years where a late start is followed by explosive growth when the weather finally warms up.

Surely a sign that Spring is just around the corner?

The gardening blogosphere is positively awash with snowdrops right now, so it seems a shame not to join in….

We’d actually forgotten these guys were in the garden;  we remember seeing them when we first moved here, but then left that area to fend for itself, and the self sown holly thicket that we’ve just cleared grew and grew, and engulfed them.  So it was a real joy to realise that they’re still with us.   They must have had a pretty hard time competing with a dense canopy of holly, so they stand as testament to the resilience of the species.

We make no pretence that we’re any sort of galanthophile, so have absolutely no idea what variety they are – it seems unlikely that whoever planted them would have been any sort of connoiseur either, so we presume they’re the common or garden Galanthus nivalis.

And jolly charming, and very welcome they are too.   With precious little else happening in the garden at the moment, it’s reassuring that mother nature is out there following a schedule, even if most of the country’s gardeners have rewritten theirs pending better weather.

Today this field, tomorrow......

The real snowdrop surprise came when we peered over the rudimentary fence that separates our garden from the adjacent field, and saw that our little colony seems to have made a bid for freedom, and established an outpost next door.   These little guys really are surviving against the odds – the field is under regular cultivation growing maize, wheat and potatoes in rotation, and is ploughed and sprayed repeatedly.   This little colony is surviving in barely a yard of field margin, where the fence angle prevents the tractors getting right up to the edge.

So while we might be charmed by their delicate beauty, we can’t afford to let our guard down – snowdrops clearly have their own agenda, including world colonisation if the opportunity arises.

Their only problem seems to be that given a rate of progress which needs to be measured in feet per decade, it could take some time!

That'll fill a few hanging baskets.....

No hanging about for the first cuckoo around here – once the first compost delivery of the season arrives, and the Barlow Nurseries Great Wall of Compost has been reinstated, it’s Spring, and that’s that.

The weather still has completely different ideas of course, and with sleet and snow featuring large in the forthcoming weekend’s forecast, there’s still little chance of much gardening getting done (or compost being sold!).

But with compost piled high, we know the great british climate will come good when it’s ready, and when it does, we’re ready for it!

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.

Damn!

Well, maybe not then.

Taken just a few hours after the photo in our last post, this illustrates just how capricious our weather can be, and that the climate gods clearly aren’t looking to loose their grip on winter any time soon.

So guerilla gardening it is then – but not nipping out after dark to covertly plant up urban roundabouts, we’re going to have to nip out when the weather gods are taking a nap, and garden when we can.

We’re weeks behind where we’d hoped to have been by now;  we’ve grown used to mild winters when we’ve been able to garden pretty much continuously, and this years extended bittter cold and snowy weather has rather taken the wind from our sails.   The nursery keeps us occupied full time from Spring to Autumn, leaving only time for routine gardening for those 9 months, so we have to squeeze the structural work (which includes our currently 15 year old project to refurbish our house) into the 3 winter months.   And this year, for both family and meteorological reasons, it just hasn’t happened.

So the merest hint of sun has encouraged us to re-acquaint ourselves with spade and fork, and GET SOME WORK DONE!

And so….the side garden has had a few more hours attention, and the potager area is starting to take shape.   We’ve both felled and burned the last few trees so there’s considerably more light getting in now.   Hopefully, that’ll improve the grass (or rather encourage some to grow – the green stuff on the ground is currently mostly moss) and should give our fruit and veg enough sunshine to thrive.

Mmmm, the taste of summer.....

And the turf stripping spade has been out again.  If we were really smart we’d plan all our turf stripping for one day and hire a machine, but we’re not that clever, we garden spontaneously, and Nick’s back takes the strain.   And as you can see from the picture, the first of the beds has been dug, post and wire supports have been installed, and the soft fruit is going in (summer raspberries at one end, a single loganberry in the middle, and autumn raspberries at the other end).

This is nostalgia gardening for Nick – there was a row of raspberries in his childhood garden in Hastings, and they were always a highlight of his summer diet, so this is something of a trip down memory lane (I wonder if these will taste as sweet?).

We’ll devise some means of keeping the pesky bird population off the crop later!

The canes and string in the foreground mark the second, as yet undug bed, and that should start to take shape shortly (and will house runner, broad and french beans, courgettes, lettuce, radish, and no doubt a few other veg plot staples). We want to grow butternut squash again, but fear they’ll outgrow these modest 4 ft wide beds, so we’re ruminating on that one.

They are 4 ft wide for a reason – we seem to remember that was the late great Geoff Hamilton’s preferred raised bed width (so you could work without having to stand on the soil) and it seemed sensible to have conversion to raised beds up our sleeve as a future project. Probably a long-time-in-the-future project.

And yes, we remember Toby Buckland getting a beating on the beeb message boards when he encouraged Sara Cox to plant veg in an area of newly stripped turf in her garden…but this will be the fourth time we’ve done it here, and it’s been fine every time so far….

Light at the end of the tunnel

Rather late in the day of course – these guys usually wow us in early January – but we can understand their reticence given the Siberian weather we had this year. And they’re here now, so let’s just applaud their appearance.

This is Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’, and has just come into flower. It’s cousin H. i. ‘Jelena’ (a wonderful burnt orange which we were waxing lyrical about a year ago) seems to be a week or so earlier.

If you’re near RHS garden Rosemoor there are some spectacular specimens in their winter garden. Although ours are considerably smaller (well they’re the RHS after all) we keep reminding ourselves that Rosemoor is actually a very young garden, so it won’t be long before ours catch up!

If you’re nearer us here in Shropshire, there is a national collection of Hamamelis just down the road near Wolverhampton.

Cold, but not coldest!

So absolutely no garden or nursery work happening.    Not a jot.  Zilch.  Bugger all.   Which is all a bit strange really;  we don’t expect to do much during the winter months – we work 7 days a week from spring to autumn, so the winter is our “weekend” – but it’s very unusual indeed to have done nothing at all for as long as we’ve had to this winter.

And bizarrely, it hasn’t been that cold.   Well, okay, it has been absurdly cold, but we’re used to living in the coldest place in England, and during this cold snap the weather seems to have been happening elsewhere, and this part of Shropshire has been cossetted in its own little microclimate.

Cheshire, just a little north of here, and Oxford – that’s the soft south surely – both recorded temperatures around minus 17 centigrade last week, and all we could muster was a paltry minus 14!   And very little snow – less than a couple of inches, certainly substantially less than most parts of the country if the news media are to be believed.

Is that Doctor Zhivago over there?

So the world is on hold until the weather loosens its grip;  we can’t even manage the bonfire we’d been looking forward to following our tree felling – we did try, but the wood is just too wet and cold, so even that avenue of outdoor fun has been closed off to us!

It still looks rather attractive over there though, don’t you think?   Taking the trees down has allowed a lot more wonderful winter sunlight into the garden, and that must augur well for the fruit and veg we’re hoping to grow there later in the year.

And so for the moment, we’ll make the best of it.   The countryside looks wonderful, and if the weather men are to be believed this is a once in 30 years experience, so it’s one to savour rather than whinge about!

Kerria japonica (”Batchelors’ Buttons” is probably the most common of its common names) definitely falls into the “plant with caution” category.   Its a super plant – vigorous slender stems hold attractively toothed and veined deciduous mid-green leaves, and in late spring it’s clothed with loads of bright buttercup yellow flowers.   It’s up there with Forsythia in the spring colour charts.

The weeds have long since given up and moved out...

But you know there’s bad news coming don’t you?   And the bad news is that it’s not a plant that wants to share its space.  Put it in a spot that it likes (and that means almost anywhere) and it will spread, big time.   The picture shows a thicket in our front garden, planted as a single 3lt shrub only 3 years ago.   Its now covering an area maybe 2 mts x 2 mts, and advancing!

It’s very easy gardening, and if you have the right spot, we’d recommend it heartily.   It’s used extensively in amenity plantings (office block shrubberies, supermarket car parks etc) and is particularly good on banks where maintenance is difficult, because essentially, unless you’re worried about containing its spread, it’ll look after itself. It’s vigorous enough to out-compete weeds very promptly.

So if you have a “difficult” spot in your garden, Kerria japonica is likely to fill it nicely for you.   And in fact, although it grows like topsy, it isn’t difficult to control.   We’ll set about ours in late winter by going around the perimeter of the clump with a spade, and digging out the shoots which are exceeding the plants’ allotted space.   The suckers by which it spreads grow just below the soil surface, so it’s not difficult digging. Repeat every 2 or 3 years and this should keep it in check.

If you want to reduce the density of the thicket itself, prune the 2 – 3 year olds stems back to ground level, leaving just the newer (and frankly, more attractive) stems to flower. This greatly improves winter interest as the bare stems are attractive in their own right.

Down and out

We promised an “after” picture when we started project lumberjack in the side garden but as its not quite in an “after” state yet, this is by way of a “nearly there” picture.

As you’ll see from the photo, most of the trees have moved from vertical to horizontal, and the bits that aren’t suitable for the log burner (all the bits in the top photo) will soon be history, as we warm a winter day with a beast of a bonfire.

The big conifer in the “before” picture actually yielded very little useable fuel – conifers don’t make great fuel anyway, but we’re not going to waste it – and the second picture shows the logs from it that’ll go into store to season for next winter.
Most of the tree was thin branches, and these are destined for the bonfire.

Next years winter warmers

There are a few more small trees to fell before the clearance is complete (on the extreme left of the first photo) so we’ve got a day or two of good winter warming jobs to tackle in the next few days.