Where's that Steeleye Span when you need them?

Thursday brought welcome – but not overly generous – rainfall, and left the ground wet enough to deliver our first proper misty moisty autumnal sunrise yesterday; friends and neighbours are helping to stuff our larder with seasonal bounty from their gardens, and with breakfast time temperatures hovering only a few degrees above freezing, it’s really starting to feel as if winter must be limbering up in the wings.

The nursery closes for the winter next week, but with this seasons first bare root tree delivery scheduled for a couple of weeks time, it doesn’t look like activity levels will be dropping any time soon.

The soil is still just as dry as it was when we photographed our northerly neighbour harrowing back in September, so we knew there’d be some dust when our other neighbour started cultivating this week. His field borders the nursery to the south and east; sadly his ploughing was accompanied by a brisk south-easterly wind, so from time to time we were treated to the spectacle of there being enough airborne soil that we couldn’t actually see much of the nursery.

And now the entire site has a thick dusting of our neighbours soil over it.

Enough dust to write in -inside the polytunnel!

The Met Office are forecasting rain for tomorrow – hopefully it’ll be at least enough to settle the dust.

We’ve always thought of Shropshire as a wetter than average sort of place, so it’s something of a culture shock to find ourselves praying for rain – but if we don’t get a much-wetter-than-average winter, there’ll surely be trouble ahead.

Red Admirals love Sedum....

There doesn’t seem to have been very many butterflies about this season, but the Sedum coming into bloom seems to be bringing them in – this one, and two of his friends were feasting on our Sedum ‘Frosty Morn’ today, alongwith several small tortoiseshells (but they were rather more camera shy).

Watching the weather forecasts this year has been like one of those crazy dreams where you can never quite reach the stuff you need (everyone has those, don’t they?).   There has been lots of rain around, but as soon as it approaches Shropshire on the forecast maps it just seems to evaporate, and the clouds go everywhere but here.

The garden is completely knackered – we don’t water the ornamental garden at all, trying to work with plants that will cope with our always-less-than-moist soil, but even they’ve been defeated by this years conditions.   Our veg plots have only survived because we’ve spent hours (many hours) hand watering.

We could illustrate this with a photo of our parched garden plants, but frankly that’d just be embarrassing.   So we were pleased to have a different photo opportunity this afternoon, when one of our neighbouring farmers decided to harrow his field.   Normally this is an entirely unremarkable event, but today, rather than calmly breaking down the soil and leaving it ready for sowing, the process seemed to have been extended to include sharing a good proportion of the field with the neighbourhood – as we, and anybody else trying to breath nearby, were consumed in clouds of dust-dry earth.   If it had been windier, the ploughman could have extended his largesse to the neighbouring county.

Dusty

Dustier

There's a tractor in there somewhere...

The garden is knackered, but we’ve been irrigating the nursery – it’s seemed at times as if that’s all we’ve done this season – and there are still huge swathes of late season colour to enjoy. Maybe that’ll be tomorrows photo opportunity.

Gardening fashion is as fickle as any other of course, and the 80’s enthusiasms for Adrian Bloom, Foggy Bottom, Island beds and and all things conifer were soon cast aside in favour of the 90’s obsessions with decking, blue fencing, architectural planting and Groundforce stylee makeovers.

The noughties saw a bit of a hiatus in garden fashion, but Monty Don made a valiant effort to set a trend and revive the fortunes of the conifer when he planted one of the front borders at Berryfields(¹) with them;  sadly, it barely got its 15 minutes of fame before Monty crashed and burned from our screens, and Berryfields found itself consigned to TV gardening history.

A conifer for every occasion....

But where Monty failed, the great British weather triumphed – the last couple of winters have despatched an awful lot of the hoped-to-be-hardy plants that were planted in the Groundforce years, and gardeners looking for tougher replacements for their architectural specimens are focusing once again on the charms of the conifer.

We’ve always sold conifers here, but they’ve tended to get mixed up in the general melee of the sales areas, and have never been a proper feature on the nursery.   But no more!   With increased customer interest in them, and National Conifer Week on the horizon, we’ve made some changes – and the Barlow Nurseries conifer department is now open!

All our conifers (except the hedging ones) are now grouped together;  we’ve increased our stock, and now offer all sorts of shapes and colours, in all sorts of sizes – from smaller plants in 3 lt pots, up to well established 15 lt specimens.

So if you’re wondering what to put where that Phormium/Eucalyptus/Ceanothus/Bay/Trachycarpus/Tree fern/etc, etc used to be, we may be able to help!

(¹) Berryfields – actually Burmans Farm, Shottery, Stratford-on-Avon – was the TV garden from 2003 – 2008.

We were reminded of this recently when we read Andrew Mikolajski’s blog in which (eventually) he tells us that he doesn’t much like Buddleja weyeriana.

Now we do like B. weyeriana, and have grown it for many years (tho’ perhaps rather self indulgently, because it’s not a big seller).   But the plant we enjoy doesn’t sound very much like the one that Andrew derides.

If you Google image search the plant, you will see a fair bit of variation in the flowers, the majority of which do look rather more like the wishy-washy orange-purple that Andrew dislikes, and few (well, none that we found) which look as nice as the  plant we’ve been growing.

So can we safely claim to have a “good form” of Buddleja weyeriana?

Is this a good one?

But for a few short months between scalpings they’re allowed to do their own thing – and in summer, the parent aisle in the polytunnel looks lovely:

Make hay while the sun shines...

Sadly, they don’t enjoy a long life either – after a couple of years, just as they’re starting to think they’ve got a handle on the annual routine, the man with the secateurs comes around again, replaces them with one of their offspring, and consigns them to the compost heap.   S’not easy being a parent.

Our supplier's very first despatch of the new season...apples, pears, plums, gages, cherries, medlars, quince, kiwis, and all sorts of ornamental trees, all looking for a good home

]]> http://www.barlownurseries.co.uk/blog/2011/08/new-trees/feed/ 0 http://www.barlownurseries.co.uk/blog/2011/08/new-beginnings/ http://www.barlownurseries.co.uk/blog/2011/08/new-beginnings/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:46:20 +0000 Nick http://www.barlownurseries.co.uk/?p=2769

Maybe it's time we bought a seed sowing machine...

Last week we were mostly sowing seeds…..

And this week we’ve been mostly marvelling at the speed and enthusiasm with which so many of them have germinated.

Sempervivum take the prize for being both the smallest seeds, and the fastest germinators.   Their seed is vanishingly small;  according to the packet the contents weighed just 0.07 grams (¹) and we had to sow this microscopically small quantity into 60 separate plugs.   But barely had the seed  touched the compost than it was showing signs of life – miraculous specs of green were appearing less than 48 hours later.

And most of the rest of the seeds were equally enthusiastic – within the week, the majority of trays were showing green shoots.

Our favourites are always the Lupins – in contrast to the Sempervivums these seeds are huge, and get buried under a thick blanket of vermiculite; when they germinate, more or less in unison, they push their covers aside, and wave flag-like seed leaves to the sky.   Anyone old enough to remember is bound to think “Quatermass”.

They're coming to get you....

For our own sanity we haven’t counted the plugs; there was about 5 man days labour in the sowing – in just a few weeks time we’ll be potting up, and that’s going to take just a bit longer……

(¹) You have to wonder at the technology in use at the seed merchant to weigh and handle such absurdly tiny volumes;  and whether they have to screen their employees for hayfever (the comedic potential for sneezy operators would be huge, though we have to concede Woody Allen got there first – remember the cocaine scene in Annie Hall?).