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 …..