Between the Storms

It has been a busy few weeks in the garden between the wind and the rain of February and early March, with the weeds, wildflowers, vegetables and garden plants beginning to grow rapidly. I took the plunge and cut the grass on a day when it seemed reasonably dry; the lawn looked awful for a few days but is now recovering. The clippings were mixed with shredded paper and put in the compost bin.

Borders are slowly being tidied; I have cleared a small patch near the fence and transplanted a Hemerocallis ("Day Lily") and an Iris to it from the vegetable patch where they had been overwintering. Another Iris has been potted up and popped in the mini-greenhouse as it hadn't sprouted. It has started now. The mixed border by the water butt has been cleared of pernicious Geranium seedlings, and everything remaining is flourishing, as is the Melissa officionalis ("Lemon Balm") by the compost heap. 

The Fuchsia 'Mrs Popple' that I bought in a sale last year has finally been planted in the flower border near the patio and is now sprouted. The Rudbeckia plants that were in the vegetable plot have been potted up until I have somewhere better to put them. On the opposite side of the patio I have planted, eventually, an Alchemilla that my Mum gave me last year, whcih seems to be taking, after months spent bare-rooted in a plastic bag in the lean to. I have put vine eyes and wire along the fence to support a thornless bramble I found there, which I hope that will produce lots of blackberries.

One vegetable patch has been cleared of overwintering perennials and weeds, with a daisy transplanted into the lawn! The garlic and elephant garlic planted on the Solstice is going strong. Seeds have been sown, including Broad Beans, Sugarsnap Peas, Kale, Cauliflower, Spring Cabbage, Swiss Chard, Sunflowers, Sweetcorn, Echinacea, and ornamental Alliums. Many of these are now sprouting.

Finally, green paint has been purchased and I have started painting the shed - the wood is rather dry and sucks the paint straight up!

February 22nd

We seem to have got away with little damage from storms Ciara and Dennis, but the garden is sopping wet from all the rain. However, there are flowers, with the miniature daffodils and the crocuses looking particularly lovely and the English Marigolds still as bright and orange as ever.

As there's not much I can do outside, I spent a peaceful hour sowing seeds in the lean-to, before putting them in my shiny new mini greenhouse. Neither lean-to nor greenhouse is heated so I may have been a bit optimistic, but have left the more tender seeds until next month. Seeds sown include sunflowers, celery, Swiss chard, cauliflower, spring cabbage, French marigold, sweetcorn, flat leaf parsley, and Kale 'Cavolo de Nero'. I realise many of these can be sown directly outdoors but we have voracious slugs, so I like to give the plants a head start.

I also planted some Sword Lily bulbs in pots as I haven't space to plant them out yet. Earlier planted pots are doing well in the other mini greenhouse, including Alliums and Honeybells. Spring should be busy!

February 2nd 2020

Out in the garden this morning as the weather was dry and mild, and I needed the feel of mud on my hands. I was surrounded by birdsong and could hear the burble of the brook behind the house. The garden is burgeoning with life; wildflowers galore (weeds....) are holding the soil together until I am ready for sowing and planting. I discovered the rhubarb poking it's  crinkled leaf into the air, stem the colour rubies. I am glad that has survived, my 50p purchase from a roadside stall.

Flowers are appearing: dandelions, common daisies, Scabious, stocks, English Marigold, hairy bittercress, crocus. In the local area I have seen snowdrops, catkins, Daphne and bergenia.

Bulbs are growing in the pots in the mini greenhouse and I have sorted out all the packets of vegetable seeds I possess. I am not sure where I will show them all! The garlic planted on the solstice is thriving, and nearly six inches tall. The elephant garlic is poking up through the soil and will catch up soon. This will, I think, be a busy year in the garden.

Solstice

I've not been out in the garden much as the weather has mostly been awful when I had free time and daylight! However, today the sun came out so I thought I would mark the winter solstice by planting garlic. Not sure if there's a connection, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I have planted three varieties: Lautrec Wight, Provence Wight, and Elephant garlic. These have gone in the patch where I planted potatoes; this experiment didn't really work as the frost came as soon as any shoots showed, but I did find a small handful of spuds today so will have them for tea.

The garden is still quite verdant, probably due to the relatively mild weather and lashings of rain. The English marigolds are still flowering, as are the wild deadnettles. The Gingko turned a beautiful shade of buttery yellow which lasted for about a week, and now the leaves are spread all over the garden.

In the coldframe potted snowdrops are starting to show their shoots, as are one or two other bulbs. The garden birds are singing loudly, and everything is looking promising for the year ahead.

Falling into Autumn

Autumn is upon us, with colder nights and damper days, and torrential rain interspersed with the occasional glimpse of welcome sunshine. I have continued with weeding and deadheading, but not much has changed. The grass grows longer as it is too wet to cut, and the spiders are hanging out in their webs hoping for food. They are fascinating to watch, rebuilding broken parts and testing each strand with a foot as they go.

Today I sat on the step of the shed and potted up bulbs of Allium and Nectoscordum ready for planting out in spring when I have cleared some more space. The mini greenhouse was put back together so that I have somewhere cool and sheltered from the elements to store the bulbs. I also planted crocus corms beneath the Gingko tree and in the wild flower garden. The leaves are starting to plummet from the Gingko, but not many are turning the bright, buttery yellow I have been hoping for. Maybe a cold snap will sort that out.

I have bought some quality garlic bulbs from The Garlic Farm in Merstone, for planting out as soon as possible. The varieties are Lautrec Wight, Provence Wight, and Elephant garlic. Hopefully we will get crops next year! Some of the potatoes I planted last month are sprouting, so we may get some new potatoes at the end of next month. Fingers crossed.

 

 

There are still a reasonable amount of flowers in the garden, including Verbena bonariensis, Rudbeckia, corn marigold, English marigold, dandelion, purple flax, soapwort, and borage. Celandine bulbils appear when I weed, and the primrose foliage is looking firm and healthy again, as is that of the foxgloves. Spring should be lovely!



Beautiful bracket fungi at the Garlic Farm



August and September

I didn't do a huge amount in the garden during August as it was so hot or so wet when I was free. However, I kept on with general maintenance such as hedge trimming, lawn mowing and weeding areas that had already been cleared. The bind weed is an absolute thug; as soon as you turn your back it grows a foot longer and entangles all the nearby plants. I spent a good half hour yesterday rescuing the hydrangea from its clutches!

I have had some successes and failures in the vegetable patch. The tomatoes have fruited heavily and I am in the process of making a batch of spicy tomato chutney, which will be followed by a batch of green tomato chutney, as the ripening of the fruit has slowed right down and the woodlice have been moving in to start devouring the fruit. Speaking of woodlice, the sweetcorn set lots of fruit which was quite slow to ripen, and when I checked inside the cobs, the little critters had made themselves new homes. I fed the lot to the compost heap. Ah well.

I had a good crop of onions and shallots, as well as spring onions and French climbing beans. The runner beans did not do well but they were in competition with bindweed, so I may try again next year and be more vigilant with the weeding. We had five very tasty carrots! The nasturtiums have flowered non-stop, and today I collected lots of green seed which is now soaking in a brine solution ready for pickling tomorrow night.

At the beginning of September I was given a large bagful of crab apples, and had an attempt at making crab apple jelly. I had done this once before and the end result was not good. This time the result was much better, coming out a beautiful shade of clear red, although perhaps not quite as set as it should be. It tastes scrumptious though. I have also picked a lot of blackberries and made apple and blackberry crumble for the freezer, and frozen the rest of the fruit to eat throughout the winter. Yummy!

This last week has seen me clear the sweetcorn patch, dig it over and replant it with seed potatoes that promise new potatoes in  time for Christmas. We'll see. The patch has been covered by netting suspended on wire hoops and held down with bricks in order to keep the cats off. The cats see this as a challenge. All the fruits on the tomato plants have been harvested and are being processed into chutney to help feed my cheese addiction. General weeding has begun again, and the lawn might get mown over the weekend. It is also seed collecting season, so until last weekend I had a ragtag collection of paper bags filled with desiccated seed heads, and then spent a pleasant morning sorting them and storing them in small envelopes. Spring bulbs have appeared in the shops, so I treated myself to some crocus corms, snowdrop bulbs (Galanthus nivalis, which I have planted in pots), and some Nectoscordum or Honey Bells. 

I do have a dilemma while gardening at this time of year, in that there are spider webs everywhere, home to the most beautiful garden spiders (Araneus diadematus), and I really do not want to damage them or interrupt the feasting on flies. Unfortunately I need to get to the shed, and all routes are blocked by these beauties so I shall have to be horrid to at least one of them. I had to stop cutting back the perennial sweet pea last week because I found an elephant hawkmoth caterpillar loitering in there. There has also been an abundance of hoverflies, honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, ants, grasshoppers, harvest men, blackfly, woodlice, shiny green flies, slugs, garden snails and banded snails (don't think that is the right name), cabbage white butterflies, moths galore, the occasional bat and a toad. Glorious!

Garden Spider

Elephant hawkmoth caterpillar

Toad

Garden Tiger moth

Crab apple jelly

July

July is two thirds of the way through; I have had a busy month with work, family trips away and holidays so the garden has mostly been left to get on with it on its own. Most of the month has been very hot and dry, but we have had rain this week and the water butts have refilled, just in time for the next hot, dry spell.

I attacked the hedge again with the hedge trimmer (get one, they're fun), as the brambles and ash trees were poking their heads out of the top and sides. I couldn't quite get all the way over the top as my ladder was a bit wobbly, so I popped a note through the neighbours door to apologise about the straggly bits and hoping nothing had landed their side. They were somewhat freaked out that I knew their names! They talk quite loudly in the garden....  Later in the week they were out trimming their hedges by hand, on the hottest day of the year so far, so I offered them the trimmer and built up good neighbourly relations! Go me!

There is, as ever, lots of wildlife around. The Red Admiral caterpillars in the nettles are pupating (small black cases), spiders abound, as do shiny green flies, hoverflies, blackfly on the beans and nasturtiums, the inevitable molluscs, ants, green shield bugs on the French beans, grasshoppers and various birds and butterflies. I found the corpse of a slow worm on the lawn one day. Probably due to the flippin' cats. They are still pooping and digging. Annoying. While working near the shed one day I heard a loud rasping noise, and turned round to see a wasp having a good chew on an old plank of wood. It's incredible the noise they make with such a small set of jaws, and that the chewed wood is then turned into such an intricate nest. 

There are many plants in flower (see the In Bloom page and the gallery), and I have begun harvesting the vegetable patches. I have had French beans, shallots, spring onions, and lots of herbs so far. The onions are nearly ready to harvest, and the runner beans are coming along nicely. The tomatoes are setting fruit, and the sweetcorn has male and female flowers - hopefully planted close enough together to cross fertilise. I have picked and eaten the broad beans in the veg patch (boiled, then mixed with mint, olive oil and feta cheese - yummy!), and there are still some growing in the flower bed. Most of the first veg patch has been harvested, so have interplanted with some perennials as a nursery bed until I have cleared the next flower bed. The annual sweet peas fell over in a storm so I had to cut them back hard, and rescue all the flowers. Hopefully they will grow back.  The wildflower bed is coming along nicely too, with a nice variety of species, which will hopefully self-seed and become even more interesting next year.

Nasturtiums and Salvia

Shallots, Spring onions and French beans

French beans, Swiss Chard, red lettuce and Sweet Peas