The turn of the year

 

Mahonia 'Winter Sun', brightening up the garden

It’s been a funny old year in several ways, and not a great one in this garden – but I’ve said a lot about that in recent posts, so I won’t repeat it here.  Suffice to say that my gardening New Year resolution is to get back to basics and sort out the important stuff first and foremost.  There have been a couple of sunny afternoons this week which have got me outdoors again and making a start on the overdue clearing-up jobs in the greenhouse and garden: cutting up and composting plants such as the tomato plants (which had been surviving – just – on the damp atmosphere in the greenhouse without watering), unusable brassica plants (there are still a couple of usable cabbages and developing broccoli spears) and the fallen climbing beans, and spreading the used tomato-bag compost on one of the veg beds. 

The weather this year wasn’t great either; nothing extremely dramatic, but there were long periods of static weather systems that were either not at all typical for the time of year or not at all helpful to the gardener.  The year started cold and, except for a couple of unseasonably warm weeks in February and again at the end of March, it remained mostly cold through to near the end of May, April being very dry and May being very wet.  The summer brought a spell of heat in July, but also some chilly weather, and there was little sun in August; the autumn gave us some very wet and windy weather in October, although September wasn’t too bad and November was overall milder and less damp than usual.  There was wind and snow at the end of November, then December has been mostly misty, murky and mizzly, unusually mild but with very little sun, and in the last few days quite windy. 

Some plants have been enjoying the recent mild weather and a few are putting out new shoots, and the winter shrubs are all flowering well. The forecast is for rather colder but a little drier weather in early January, which might make it easier to tackle more jobs in the garden.  Happy 2022!

... and the ornamentals

My last post looked at my 2021 veg successes (few), failures (many) and plans (probably over-optimistic).  It wasn’t a great year for the ornamentals either, in fact they were probably even less successful than the veg.  Some of the reasons were the same as for the edibles, especially the general inattentiveness to feeding and watering, and the cold spring that caused a delay in planting out; but my indecisiveness about what to plant with what was also a factor.

Re-using compost, I think, may be to blame for some of my failures, combined with my not feeding the plants growing in it.  This would affect my ornamentals particularly, since most of them were destined for containers, but also the courgettes in the plastic tubs and those veg seedlings grown on for later planting out.  One thing I’ve learnt (from a magazine article) about peat-free composts is that they have lower levels of nutrients and they get used up more quickly than those in peat-based ones.  I have had a container of comfrey tea steeping away for fertiliser for over a year now, down in the dump corner, but failed to do anything with it; that’s another job to do before the growing season gets going.  Lack of feeding would explain why the courgettes in the tubs started off quite well and then fizzled out, presumably as the nutrients were used up.  Most of my other containers also used old compost with a little 6X fertiliser added, and the plants did very poorly.  I had been fired up by my success in 2020 with old potting compost; when, in the spring 2020 lockdown, I ran out of compost, I scavenged any old compost I could find or re-use, with some 6X added, which seemed reasonably successful.  Peat-free compost doesn’t ‘slump’ like peat-based ones, and when it all looked to be in good condition at the end of the year, I thought I might get away with another year of doing the same thing; which might have worked, if I’d sorted out my comfrey tea and made use of it.

The sweet peas, though, had the same treatment but were a big success. The 2020 sweet peas had been planted in two large pots up against the house wall, with some violas at their feet, and at the end of the season I pulled up the sweet peas but left the violas, and compost, in place.  In spring of this year I just planted the new sweet pea seedlings – both those overwintered and those sown in late winter – where the old ones had been, also adding a few seeds to germinate in situ in the hope of getting a good succession of flowers.  This worked well, and I was able to cut a posy of sweet pea flowers pretty much all through the summer.  Why did it work with the sweet peas and not with other plants?  The sweet pea pots, being just outside the back door, benefited from having the teapot leaves and coffee grounds emptied into them occasionally, but I doubt if that would have had such a big effect.  The re-used compost, of course, came from a wide variety of sources, and perhaps that in the sweet pea pots was better in the first place.  Anyway, I don’t think I should push my luck for a third year!  The sweet peas this year were so successful that I can’t resist another sowing in modules this winter/spring; the colours are lovely and the scent (I only buy seeds of scented varieties) wonderful.  I’m sticking with ‘Fragrant Skies’ and ‘White Leamington’, plus my own saved seed of ‘Matucana’.

One of my sweet pea posies

Old favourites that did well, and that I’ll sow again next year, are Lobelia ‘Cambridge Blue’ (a light blue, non-trailing lobelia that makes a good filler in pots and that was one of the few successful annuals this year) and pale yellow Cosmos ‘Xanthos’ (ditto).  My problem with planting up the pots, apart from the quality of the compost, is that I find it difficult to decide what to pair with what.  If I put three seedlings of this variety in this pot (or will I need five to make a good enough show?), will there be enough left over to put in another pot?  Will the colours work together?  Do I have enough compost for another potful?  And then I dither and don’t plant any of them.

I’ve decided that I don’t need to sow so many varieties as pot fillers.  I have a number of small perennial plants, mostly grown from cuttings or divisions, which can fulfil that role.  These include various penstemons, the Erysimum ‘Bowles’ Mauve’ which needs to be kept propagated from cuttings as it’s quite short-lived, and the white osteospermum which is descended (via cuttings) from a plant that grew for some years in the front garden with no protection, even though it’s supposed to be half-hardy.  This year I also tried a couple of cuttings from my variegated pelargonium, which proved surprisingly tough for a house-plant.

Some seedlings didn’t do well at all – the mesembryanthemums were an example.  Maybe I’ll give them a miss next time.  But you can never tell: the nicotiana barely germinated, but then in October a plant appeared, almost from nowhere, in the big pot by the summerhouse.  Will it survive the winter?  More to the point, will the pot survive? – it is badly cracked after last winter’s frosts.

There are a few plants that I’ve decided to give up on.  I still have some didiscus seed, but won’t bother sowing it.  The photos in the catalogues look enticing, as is its name of Blue Lace Flower, but really it’s not blue at all but a pale lavender, and the flower heads are small and sparse; the seedlings need to be pinched out so that they branch and produce more flowers, but I always forget and only get one bloom per plant, which looks pitiful.  Another no-no is tithonia, the Mexican Torch Flower.  I once saw a splendid plant in a sheltered walled garden in Worcestershire and thought it would be wonderful in one of my pots, but I have failed to persuade my seedlings that a cold and windy patio on top of the Cotswolds bears any resemblance to its Mexican homeland, and realistically there is not much chance of my getting a decent show from them.

Didiscus (in 2020), with barely-flowering tithonia behind

As mentioned in a previous post, I gave up on some of my 2021 seedlings when I realised that I had enough self-sown seedlings in the garden.  The Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus), self-sown from the large patch in the veg plot, did particularly well; I planted some of them out down under the hazel trees to grow on for next year, and had a good show of cut flowers from the more mature plants.  There are now rather too many of them, so I ought to steel myself to pull some of the older plants up!  The antirrhinums also self-seeded, admittedly producing a more limited colour range than I might have hoped for, but one can’t be too fussy with plants for free.  I ought to be able to keep some of them, and their progeny, for next year, perhaps supplementing with a few newly-sown seedlings if the remaining seed is still viable.  A third annual that I won’t bother sowing next year, but will rely on self-sowing instead, is the panicum grass which produces a lovely frothy effect in a border.  It’s supposed to be half-hardy, but there are so many seedlings that I doubt if that’s actually the case.

A vase of self-seeded Sweet William

If my plan to cut back on vegetable sowing works, there ought to be a little more space in the veg plot for flowers, especially those for cutting: the Sweet William, antirrhinums and panicum would fall into that category, as well as the dahlias.  And I might sow some amaranth if there’s room; I sowed some (for baby salad leaves) in 2020 but it ran to seed early, and instead I got quite striking flower heads for cutting.  I didn’t get round to sowing any this year, but I’d be tempted to try again with the remaining seed if it’s not too old.

A vase of red amaranth, with statice, 2020

Underoccupied veg beds might also be the solution to all the little pots cluttering up the path outside the back door.  These are cuttings etc awaiting a permanent home, which of course I haven’t got round to finding for them; meanwhile they dry out in summer and freeze in winter, labels get lost, some of them die off ….. They would do better plunged in soil where I can better attend to them.  I have several penstemon cuttings that would benefit from this; tellingly, the only penstemon flowers I had this year were on a plant that was popped into the edge of the veg plot, whereas some planted in the pots as foils for dahlias did nothing at all.  I also have two small cuttings of the big cistus that grew by the driveway, taken in autumn 2020 (after a couple of failed attempts: cuttings need to be taken after flowering, not earlier, it seems) as replacement plants for the original which needed removing as part of a total renovation plan for that area.  In fact the big cistus almost died in the winter of 2020-21, and looked so miserable that I dug it out anyway.  I need to keep those two little cuttings going so that I can replace the original – the veg plot is the ideal interim home for them!

Miserable-looking cistus

I’ve already covered my dahlia failure in a previous post.  The poor dahlias are still sitting outdoors in their pots, and I fear that some of the tubers will have rotted in this wet weather.

As for the larger perennials, the appearance of the cream-coloured camassias in late spring made me realise that the blue ones, which always flower earlier, had been a no-show.  I’m hoping they might make a reappearance next spring!

A long hard look at the veg seeds

The seed order for 2022 has arrived, and the packets have been sorted by sowing date, along with the (many) packets, opened and unopened, left over from last year (and years before that).  As promised in my post earlier this month, I have cut back on varieties ordered, with a view to only growing what I need to (plus a very few ‘can’t live withouts’); and some of the oldest seeds that I’d been keeping have been thrown out, along with a few that I've decided I'm really not going to use.  In this post I’m going to review the edibles, leaving the ornamentals for another day.

I took a long, hard look at what has been successful and what not, and what got eaten and what didn’t.  And what never got sown at all, and whether I actually needed them. Admittedly it wasn’t the best growing year weather-wise; a cold spring, right to the end of May, delayed sowing and growing, and the rest of the year was mostly indifferent at best.  And I have to admit that I let too many other things distract me from looking after the garden.  So for next year, my plan is to stick to as much as I can manage and very little more.

First, the greenhouse crops.  The tomatoes did reasonably well this year, not as well as last year but quite a good crop.  I tried a new (to me) variety, ‘Apero’, a mini plum tomato, which was good to grow and eat, plus ‘Harzfeuer’ and 'Cherrola', both of which were less productive than last year, and of which few seeds are left.  I thought I’d add another full-sized fruit variety, ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’, to my sowing to ensure a reasonable range of types next year.  I can only accommodate 6-7 plants in the greenhouse so shall have to be rigorous as to how many seedlings I keep.  Much of this summer’s crop had to be picked green before we went away for an autumn break, but they ripened nicely in the kitchen and were very welcome come November.

Tomatoes ripening in the kitchen

The other greenhouse crops, aubergines and red peppers, were less successful and less useful in the kitchen, and I’ve decided not to bother with them for a year or two at least.  The aubergine crop was small; this was probably my lack of attention to their needs, as I gave some of my surplus seedlings to neighbours who grew them quite successfully.  The peppers produced fruits so small that they were pretty but not actually worth bothering with.  And the chilli pepper plants died on me; again, almost certainly my fault.  I still have lots of dried chillies from the year before anyway, so no pressure to grow more.

Aubergine 'Slim Jim'

I grow my courgettes outdoors, after sowing and bringing the plants on inside the house. Mixed results this year.  I ended up with three viable seedlings, two of which I planted on the patio in the brown plastic tubs which I’ve used before; this time, though, I didn’t bother to remove the miniature daffodil bulbs that occupy those tubs in the winter.  The old compost was left in there and only a little fertiliser added.  Whether this wasn’t enough feed, or whether I didn’t water them enough, I don’t know, but they didn't grow well and produced no usable fruit.  (The daffs are still in there, and it will be interesting to see what they do, if anything, in spring.)  Peat-free compost retains its structure well enough for re-use, but I need to remember that it’s low in fertiliser and I ought to feed, feed, feed.  The third plant eventually went out into the veg plot, where it did fairly well; two squash plants planted nearby were totally unproductive, and I won’t be trying them again for a while (the 2020 ones produced several fruits which rotted off on the plant, and the two survivors lasted just long enough to serve as Christmas decorations before suffering the same fate).

Courgette in the daffodil tub - it never got any bigger

For a few years now I’ve grown my garlic and shallots from bulbs saved from the year before, but my pathetic 2020 crop made me think of buying new sets.  My chosen varieties were unobtainable, however (a result of Brexit, I think; they’re European varieties), so I made do with my own old bulbs again.  The 2021 garlic crop was, once again, dismal; admittedly the plants were seriously overshadowed by the parsley and probably suffered from lack of water in the dry spring; but the shallots did surprisingly well.  So this autumn I bought new garlic bulbs (they come in packs of two, and I’ll share with a neighbour) but will plant my own shallots again – and take care to water them.

Shallots, drying off in the greenhouse

Leeks: total failure.  Probably my fault for sowing them in relatively unimproved soil and not watering sufficiently; but they only reached transplanting size (just) in late autumn.  They’re still sitting out there.  I might try transplanting them in spring and seeing what they do, if anything.  Usually I’m fairly successful with leeks, but this was a wake-up call to pay them more attention.  I’ve bought new seed for next year, anyway, so have a fall-back if transplanting this year’s runts doesn’t work.

I’ve become disinclined to plant potatoes, which don’t seem to do too well in my shallow and dry soil and which are cheap enough in the shops.  However in 2021 I found myself with half-a-dozen ‘Pentland Javelin’ seed potatoes hanging around in the greenhouse well beyond the usual planting time.  I tried a ‘no-dig’ method with them, planting them shallowly with a pile of old compost on top of each, which I added to once the stems started to come up, thinking that I had nothing to lose and that I might get a few new potatoes for Christmas.  In fact they grew very well, and I pulled them up in late summer (to my surprise, they came up easily when I pulled on the stem; very few tubers left in the soil, and those were easy to remove).  The result was a nice little crop of tiny new potatoes, the sort that are relatively expensive in the supermarkets.  I might do that again.  In contrast, a few ‘Belle de Fontenay’ tubers grown in the normal way did nothing at all.

Every year I buy carrot seed – it doesn’t seem to store well – and fail to sow it.  Must Do Better.

My 2020 brassicas, while not a great success, at least produced three quite usable Savoy cabbages, which encouraged me to persevere this year.  I learnt two lessons: pick broccoli heads as soon as they become usable, because they run to seed very quickly; and be meticulous about protection from butterflies and pigeons.  The cabbage white butterflies got in under the netting and their caterpillars turned most of my plants to lace curtains – at least there ought to be plenty of butterflies next year.  At least one broccoli plant produced a lovely head, but I left it too long on the plant and it flowered (I ought to have cut it off anyway to encourage sideshoots).  I shall try to be more attentive next year.  Some of the new varieties did better than traditional old Purple Sprouting, just as the new types of kale seemed to be doing better than ‘Nero di Toscana’ (at least until the pigeons ate them – another lesson for next year).  I never got round to sowing any Cima di Rapa (a multi-head brassica for cropping young as stir-fry leaves); my 2020 crop ran to seed very quickly, and I guessed that it does better sown later in the year, but, as with so much else in the veg plot, late summer sowing didn’t really happen.  I did sow a couple of kale and cabbage varieties in modules in autumn, and they're still in the cold frame; I'll try planting them out in late winter, under protection.

Broccoli - just before it flowered!

Broad beans didn’t do too badly.  Last winter I ordered a pack of ‘Superaguadulce’ for winter sowing, but it turned out to be out of stock; it eventually arrived in summer, much too late for 2021 cropping.  Instead I sowed the last of my old seeds – not a bad germination rate considering their age – and some of the remaining ‘Luz di Otono’ ones; both lots were reasonably productive, although the latter had fewer beans in the pod.  ‘Luz de Otono’ is touted as good for summer sowing/autumn cropping; I tried this but the plants succumbed to rust (a common problem with late-sown broad beans, apparently) and I won’t be bothering with that variety again.  I don't need broad beans in autumn, when there are still French beans to be eaten.  Instead I’ve got seeds of ‘The Sutton’ for normal spring sowing – a low-growing variety, good in windy sites apparently, so let’s see.

Being away in late May (and early May still being cold), I sowed my summer beans in situ in early June, rather than under cover for May planting out.  The non-climbing French beans didn’t do too badly, especially ‘Rocquencourt’ (from which I managed to save some beans for sowing next year), but the climbers took some time to get going.  I harvested a few of the latter, but their support blew over in early autumn and I didn’t manage to get it upright again.  Ah well, the wildlife will have enjoyed the beans.  Fortunately they aren’t hardy so won’t self-seed, and I still have seed from 2020 for use next year.  Reminder to self: need firmer bean poles!

The summer beans (and a row of peas in front) - before the supports fell over!

Given my experience with the climbing beans’ support, perhaps I’m being too optimistic in having bought in seed of the traditional old pea ‘Alderman’, which climbs to 6ft (just under 2 metres).  This year I got round to sowing some maincrop peas late, and managed a small but decent crop.  I also sowed some rather old seed of pea ‘Early Onward’, with the intention of using the pea shoots in salad assuming any of them germinated; in fact they germinated well, and quickly, so I planted them outside and ended up with some actual peas as a welcome result.

Lettuces – several varieties – did well, but as usual I didn’t get the succession right and had a gap in the middle of the year when the first sowing had run to seed and there were no new plants ready for eating.  Apart from a small amount of rocket, I didn’t manage any other salad leaves; a matter of finding time and a suitable place to sow them in.  I particularly missed not having any radicchio, which did well last year.  I’ve stopped trying to grow salad leaf mixes, as I find that the different varieties germinate at different rates and some don’t germinate at all.  The 2020 leaf beet plants overwintered and I got a few leaves from them early in the year, but then they ran to seed; a little of this has germinated in situ, and I’m hoping that the seedlings will survive into 2022, though I still have seed in the packet for a few more plants. 

A lettuce head ('Bronze Beauty'), about to flower but very prettily

I notice that I haven’t kept much of a record of my veg seed sowing in my blog posts this year; perhaps an indication of how little attention I had paid to it, although in fairness I had spent some time over the year sorting out the layout, the paths and the weeding – the sort of basics that I’m wanting to focus on in the coming months - rather than the sowing.  Maybe once I get that in a better state, I’ll be able to concentrate more on actually growing food.

Ashes to ashes, part III: A sad day

 

Goodbye, old friend - one last sunny day

It has been the dominant feature in the garden for the 30 or so years that we have been here, and presumably for long before that; it has provided shade in summer, some protection from easterly winds, autumn leaves for leaf mould and a perch for innumerable birds of many species – but the big ash tree in the field just beyond our bottom boundary is now gone, as of yesterday.  For some years now it has been slowly dying, presumably of ash dieback, and we had been advised by two different tree surgeons that it needed to be removed before it was brought down by the winter gales.  Now done.

The tree, and the field, belongs to the Big House.  They have had a forestry company in to deal with all the sick trees on their land, and the forestry guys agreed that this one had to go.  For a couple of weeks they’ve been working over near the church, and this week have got round to felling the three affected trees in the field – ‘ours’ (it wasn’t really ours, but we felt responsible for it, it was so much a part of our garden view), a slightly smaller ash a few yards along, by our neighbours’ boundary, and an even smaller one at the far side of the field.  Interestingly, a large ash next to the latter tree appears to be healthy.  We had expected that the tree would be dismantled bit by bit, but basically they tied ropes to the main branches, tied the other ends to a tractor, cut almost completely through the trunk and drove the tractor across the field (fast) so that the whole thing went in one go. 

The final cut

"Timber ...".

A shoulder-high stump has been left standing, and the main part of the trunk and a few of the larger branches are being left to lie in the field to rot down, so there will still be some benefit to wildlife, which is a comfort - better than turning it into firewood.  But sadly the pigeons, flock of goldfinches and other birds that sat in the upper branches in the late afternoon to catch the last of the sun’s warmth are going to have to find somewhere else to sit; the highest remaining trees, the hawthorn and maple behind the summerhouse, and the plum tree, are fairly high but still don’t catch the sun in the same way.  And their trunks are slimmer and less attractive to the woodpeckers, nuthatches etc that like to poke around in the crevices.

Talking of birds, the tree-cutting and subsequent wood-moving over by the church may not have been to the liking of the waterfowl on the small lakes nearby; one of the moorhens took to visiting our garden (for a bit of peace and quiet?) on several days. 

A moorhen visits

Big empty space

There’s now a big empty space down on the boundary; a better view, certainly, but it will take time for us to get used to it.  We intend in due course to plant something big (an oak?) to take its place, but the soil is shallow and I need to be sure first that we can prepare a big enough planting hole.  Maybe next winter, once our period of mourning for the ash tree is over.

A dose of reality

At this time of year, the magazines are full of ‘cut out and keep’ recipes for Christmas entertaining.  I’m a bit of a sucker for doing just that, but this year I’m being much more realistic about it.  I know by now that I will never look at most of these recipes again, let alone cook them.  And really, there is no point keeping a recipe for dishes that we’re not going to eat, no point in keeping a recipe that caters for ten when we will have no more than six, maximum, at any one time round the table, and no point in having instructions as to how to decorate your Christmas cake, however prettily, when we never have a Christmas cake.

Likewise, I’m intending to take a realistic view of the garden next year (and maybe the year after that, depending on how things go).  For the past couple of years at least I’ve been guilty of growing plants from seed, especially ornamentals, and then having to throw them away because I haven’t watered them, got round to growing them on or planting them out.  Or even sowing the seeds at all.  And then there are all the cuttings etc, tiny plants in small pots that freeze in winter and dry out in summer because I don’t have the time or energy to look after them.  There are just too many things to do at some times of year, even those times of year when I’m at home and able to spend time gardening.  One issue is that the garden has reached a stage where the basic framework needs an overhaul – large shrubs needing to be cut back or removed, borders where invasive weeds have got out of hand, half-finished (or barely started) plans for establishing a definite structure on parts of the garden.  I need to spend time getting all of that sorted before I start giving my attention to new planting.  It’s the old gardening story: we’re always told to get the structure in first before filling it with colour, but of course most of us start acquiring desirable plants and need somewhere to put them, and the basics get ignored until too late.  And there is only so much time in which to do all of this.

As it is, the garden work is several weeks behind schedule, and it’s now too late to do some jobs for this winter.  Some of this is bad planning on my part and some of it is my being temporarily incapacitated and limited as to what I can do in the garden for a few weeks yet.  The long hedge is only very partly trimmed, a lot of fallen leaves haven’t been swept up, and the dahlias are still waiting to be dug up and dried off.  Other tender plants are also still outside, waiting to be saved from the cold, such as my big pot of gazanias; these are perennial by nature but are grown here as annuals, but last winter I took a potful of them into the greenhouse and kept them alive until spring, since when they provided a splendid show of cheerful flowers all summer and autumn, one of my few successes this year – but is it too late to save them for another year? 

The gazanias in their prime

I had already decided to cut back severely on the less essential gardening tasks so that I could concentrate on the big stuff; for example, I haven’t bought any tulips this year (and the few bulbs that I saved from last spring’s display were eaten by the greenhouse mouse), so that’s one planting job that I won’t have to do this winter.  Just now I’m looking at the seed catalogue, with a view to deciding which seeds I really need to buy this year and which I can do without.  The idea is that I will take the same approach to my seed-buying as to my recipe-keeping – that ‘s the plan at the moment …..

November snow

Snow in November isn’t unprecedented – I can recall at least one very bad snowstorm some years ago – but it’s not usual.  November has been a relatively mild month on the whole, and not particularly wet as Novembers go, but this weekend we were hit by Storm Arwen that brought high winds, some light snow and sub-zero temperatures.  Our area was affected much less than others, but Saturday in particular was windy and bitterly cold outdoors, and the cold has continued through the weekend; reasonably mild today, reverting to something more normal for the rest of the week.

For reasons mostly beyond my control, I’m a few weeks behind with my gardening schedule, no garden work having been done since mid-October.  One of the jobs left undone is lifting the dahlias and taking them into the greenhouse.  Actually this is not entirely unreasonable; dahlias ought to be left until their foliage has started to blacken with the first frost, and that didn’t happen until Saturday, but they have gone from slightly tatty but definitely green to flattened and definitely black in the space of 24 hours.  I hope they haven’t been frozen too hard, especially those (the majority) in pots.  My little red chrysanthemums, in contrast, have bounced back as soon as the snow melted from on top of them, a very small beacon of colour on the patio in an otherwise rather sad-looking garden.

Little red chrysanths, with blackened dahlia behind

A sad-looking garden

The dahlias haven’t done well this year, and I have to admit that it’s mostly my fault.  I haven’t been a particularly attentive gardener these past months, I have to confess.  I started by cutting one corner: last winter was relatively mild, and partly because of that and partly in order to be ‘green’ I didn’t insulate the greenhouse, and only switched on the heater on a couple of especially cold nights; spring was mostly chilly, and when May came along (the usual time to put dahlias outdoors) I took the view that gradual hardening off was unnecessary, since the outdoor temperatures were little different to those that the greenhouse had been registering for a long time.  The dahlias didn’t seem to suffer from this.  However I then hit my usual problem of finding enough space in the ground and in pots to accommodate them, and finding time to do all the potting up; some of the smaller dahlia tubers are still sitting outside in the small pots in which they were brought into leaf.  Not only did this mean that they put on minimal growth and therefore the tubers won’t be in great shape, but being left out in small pots in cold weather will probably result in them being killed off.  We shall see.  Even those dahlias that were planted up didn't flower well; I admit to not having been careful about watering and feeding.  I had already been having thoughts about the number of cuttings and other small plants that I have hanging around in search of a home, and being more realistic about how many plants I can handle; that’s a subject for another post.  In the meantime, I shall have to take a good look at all my little pots and see what has survived.

Winter is coming

On our return after autumn travels, it’s clear that the garden has moved into early winter mode, with the wildlife that comes with that.  The weather isn’t particularly cold for November, and although there has been some morning mist there has been relatively little low cloud; but the light has moved from the soft yellow light of autumn to the cold blue light of winter, and the birds that had dispersed for the autumn are back in their winter quarters.  The migrants, fieldfares and redwings, have arrived too.  Although no food would have been put out for them in our absence, the plentiful cooking apples and holly berries in the garden are a prime attraction.

Plenty of cooking apples ...

.... and holly berries

The collared doves and woodpigeons, including our lame friend Lefty, never really went far away, and are still hanging around in considerable numbers.  Likewise the sparrows, who enjoy the bathing facilities, and our two robins, who are again competing for territory.  The thin nervous robin’s bad foot appears to have healed, and he/she is defending the patio from the other robin and occasionally from the dunnocks.  There are several finches around, including a small flock of goldfinches, a pair of chaffinches and at least one greenfinch, as well as blue and great tits and three or four blackbirds.  The pair of mistle thrushes have been sitting in the big ash tree from time to time, along with a large number of starlings; they like to sit in the top of the tree in the afternoon to catch the last of any sun.  They will miss that tree when it’s taken down.

There have been a couple of surprises: a male blackcap, possibly on passage to somewhere a little warmer for the winter, and a grey wagtail.

The hedgehog has presumably gone into hibernation, but other four-legged visitors have been seen.  The squirrel is a regular, digging up the hazelnuts that it buried in the lawn (and occasionally in the veg plot’s woodchip paths) over the autumn.  D spotted a fine adult fox one day, something that we suspect visits the garden from time to time but is rarely seen.  And another day we had a weasel running around the patio; it had obviously found a mouse or vole nest and was taking its prey, one after another, somewhere else to eat.  Well, if you encourage wildlife into your garden you can’t be too picky about what will turn up; not all wildlife is cuddly.

Ashes to ashes, part II

A long pause since the last post, caused by circumstances mostly beyond my control.  The circumstances are going to limit active gardening for a few weeks yet, but there are plenty of plans to be made, and there will be more about them in future posts.  For the moment, then, a look backwards.

Here one day ....

Before we went away for a short break, our neighbours bowed to the inevitable and had their ash tree, the one that overhung the veg plot, cut down to a tall stump.  The idea is to encourage the clematis montana that is growing up it on their side to cover the remains of the trunk.  Despite the height of the tree, remarkably little wood landed on our side of the wall (even though most of the crown was actually on our side).  The neighbours have gained a lot more light - the tree shaded their whole garden - and I gained another load of woodchip for my paths.  In fact, the removal of their tree and ours has noticeably increased the amount of light in houses and gardens across the road which I didn't think would be affected; you don't realise how much light these trees can block out, and at what a distance.

... and gone the next

The third, and most diseased, of the ash trees round our garden, the big one in the field beyond the bottom border, is scheduled to be taken down before the end of the year.  It's sad, but these are trees that could cause a lot of damage if they fell.  Leaving some of the stumps in place at least provides some sort of habitat for wildlife such as insects, even in the dead wood.

Don't sit under the apple tree

It has been a decidedly mixed growing year, and the fruit crop has been no exception.  One unexpected success was our first fig (just one); a little on the dry side, but a reasonable size.  There are several little figlets for overwintering, so I have some hopes of a few more next year.  The raspberries did quite well (one of the canes has now started to flower, very unseasonably – what’s all that about?).  However there were no gooseberries or blackcurrants worth mentioning, and some neighbours have had the same experience.   The cold spring weather, resulting in fewer pollinators?

Given the lack of soft fruit, I wasn’t surprised that in early summer there seemed to be relatively few apples and plums developing on the trees, and when it came to thinning the crops I erred on the side of generosity, to make the most of what fruit there would be.  This proved to be unnecessary and, in the case of the cooking apple tree, a mistake.  The plum tree actually produced fairly well, and the apples, the cordon dessert apples as well as the cooking apple tree, turned out to have the heaviest crop we’ve ever had; and in the case of the cordons, some of the individual apples are larger than ever.

Some of the plum crop

Dessert apple cordons

More cordons

Of course, this came at a cost.  Because I didn’t thin the fruitlets particularly thoroughly (though goodness knows I took a lot of them off the tree!), the cooking apple tree’s branches are now overloaded, bending down low and, in some cases, breaking off.  They’re big apples, and can be heavy.  It’s difficult to get underneath the tree where it overhangs the veg beds, as it’s bent down to the ground; some of those branches are going to have to be removed during the winter pruning, just to allow us to get under there, and to get the tree back into shape.  A lesson learnt: next year, don’t allow too many apples to develop near the ends of the branches, to stop them being pulled down.

Don't even try to sit under the apple tree!

Those branches nearest the veg beds have been a bit of a problem for a while now.  When I designed the vegetable plot, I put in the main access point, a little path through the bed along the edge, just where those branches are.  It was a geometric thing: the plot is three times as long as it is deep, so the beds are laid out in three equal-sized groups, and the central group has a path running down the middle which is aligned with the entrance path.  As the tree grew, it became increasingly difficult to get in and out without banging my head on the branches.  Over the summer, the obvious solution dawned on me: don’t do anything to the tree, instead move the entrance!  I’m in the process of creating two entrances, one each side of the tree, aligned with the paths separating the three bed groups.  You can see one of the paths, still under construction, at the bottom left of this picture of part of the plot.

Also visible in the pictures, and also still under construction, are some of the new woodchip paths that I’m creating in there, using woodchip from the felled ash tree.  The paths were originally gravel, but over the years this has disappeared into the soil.  There were also plank edges to the beds – some of the planks are still lying about, partially in use but no longer retaining any soil.  They were a mixed success, falling over a lot, easily kicked over and needing to be put back up again, and in the end I more or less gave up on them.  The final straw came last autumn when our local tree man removed the large overhanging branches from next-door’s ash tree; if a guy is prepared to climb 10 metres/30 feet up a tree and lower the sawn-off branches down, you can’t really ask him if he would mind not disturbing the bed edges while he does it (and could he possibly not disturb the parsley growing underneath? In fact the parsley survived very well).  Reasonably enough, the beds looked rather dishevelled afterwards.

Rather dishevelled (after last autumn's tree work)

Charles Dowding, whose no-dig methods I’m trying to follow to some extent, reckons that wooden edges are unnecessary and act as a haven for slugs and snails; he demarcates the paths and beds by using woodchip for the former and mulch for the latter.  You need an awful lot of mulch (compost, manure, leaf mould etc), but it does seem to work.  Some of the paths still need weeding before I can get the woodchip down – in particular there are a number of productive alpine strawberry plants (visible in one of the photos above) which will be pulled up once they’ve stopped fruiting – but already things are looking a lot better, and the woodchip should keep the weeds down.  It also allows me to widen the paths, which have been too narrow to be practical.  And I can now walk past the apple tree instead of ducking down under it!

Starting to look better!

Last of the summer wine

Weatherwise, it hasn’t been a great summer here, on the whole, and the signs are that it’s downhill from here.  After a very warm ten days or so in July, we had a mostly disappointing August – remarkably dull, grey and with a chilly wind from the north, for much of the month.  September has been better, with a couple of warm days but mostly just nice autumnal weather: plenty of misty mornings, pleasant days and cooler evenings once the sun has set.  Although the summer has been dry overall, it hasn’t been exactly the sort of weather that we might have hoped for, and now change is on the way, with wet and windy autumnal conditions for the next few weeks.

Lefty's morning bath

The depressing August weather was all the more depressing for coinciding with the end of the birds’ breeding season, when the juveniles start dispersing and the adults take themselves into hiding while they moult.  For a few weeks the entertainment of their comings and goings declines quite noticeably, as does their interest in the bird feeders, though they do enjoy the birdbaths; moulting must be a slightly uncomfortable business, and a nice bath seems to help.  The birds are still around, but often relatively inconspicuous (and mostly silent) in the tree canopies or out in the hedgerows, where there’s plenty of food for them, though a family of long-tailed tits did turn up on the fatball feeder one day.  They’re always a cheerful sight, clustering together with their tails sticking out in all directions, until they decide they need to be somewhere else.  A couple of warblers (chiffchaffs?) have been catching insects from the treetops, and a pair of tawny owls calling mournfully in the evenings.  The robins are marking out their winter territories with melancholy-sounding songs; sadly the thin robin who mostly hangs around the patio seems to have damaged its right foot, with the claws all clenched together as a sort of peg-leg, though it appears to be managing well enough.  Perhaps I ought to call it Righty the Robin, on the same lines as Lefty the lame pigeon.

Long-tailed tits on the fatballs

Lefty, with his lady, seems to have raised at least two youngsters; we watched them pester him (unsuccessfully) for food one day.  He wasn’t having any of it, even when one of them jumped on him like an overenthusiastic toddler, and they went off to find their own supper.  The pigeons at the bottom end of the garden, meanwhile, who are quite tolerant of our comings and goings, spent much of the late summer trying to nest in the plum tree.  It wasn’t much of a nest, just a few sticks high in the canopy, and the cold August winds destroyed it at least once, but finally they seem to have succeeded: a youngster has been calling to be fed from the nest over the past few days.

The August winds also gave a further battering to the poor old buddleja, which nevertheless managed to flower well enough to attract a good number of butterflies.  Red Admirals and small tortoiseshells were well represented, and there was a painted lady, but few peacocks this year; however I did finally manage a definite identification of a small skipper, which I thought I had seen several times in the past but which were flitting about too fast for me to see them properly (which is why they’re called skippers).  This one sat on the buddleja for long enough for me to get my phone and take a photo. We ought to have a healthy population of large whites in future, too; the netting over the brassicas failed to keep them off the broccoli, and their caterpillars have eaten the plants bare.

Small skipper on the buddleja

Red admiral

Painted lady

Large white butterfly caterpillars - no broccoli this year!

If the butterflies provide garden interest by day, and the owls by night, it's the hedgehog that we look for in the evenings; we've seen him or her a few times when we've been returning from supper in the summerhouse after dark.  Slugs do not seem to have been a problem this year, and this may be the reason why!

Ashes to ashes

The three big ash trees round our boundary are all suffering from ash dieback.  While the one next to our driveway was the least affected, it was the only one that was actually ours, the others belonging to owners of neighbouring land.  If it fell, as it probably would have done at some point, it would have landed either on our house, our garage, the neighbours' house and garage, or the overhead electricity wires that run past our property.  None of those options would have been good.  

Last day of the tree

So we finally managed to engage Michael the local tree-man to cut it down; a sad decision, but a necessary one.  It involved a very large cherry-picker to deal with the higher branches (that's the red thing in the 'before' photo).  Suddenly the view from the kitchen window is a lot lighter, and currently dominated by a very large pile of firewood; that should see us through a winter or three.  And the smaller branches produced a load of woodchip, which I'm using to renew the paths in the veg plot.

Afterwards

The stump is still there - realistically it was just going to be too difficult to grind it out - and from a quick count of the rings I reckon the tree was about 150 years old.  You can see the dark patches where the dieback had taken hold, and some of the firewood has nasty-looking bits in where the wood was affected.  The stump will become some sort of feature until it rots away; once the area has been cleared of sawdust (I can find a use for that too), I'll need to clear it of weeds and give some thought to how to plant if up.  It will now be considerably sunnier than in the past, though the tree roots mean that only the tiniest seedlings, or seed, can go in there, which limits the options.

As for the other trees, we're making noises to the owners about removal; neither of them would hit the house (just) if/when they fall, but they would make a big mess of most of the garden.  Sorry, trees - and the wildlife that enjoys them - but the alternatives aren't good either.