A taste of spring

Galanthus elwesii

Pink pinks

The weather has become a little less mild (but still above zero) with less wind and rain (but still damp and breezy much of the time); the forecast for next week actually suggests that temperatures will dip below freezing some nights.  I need to re-secure some of the greenhouse bubblewrap, a couple of panels of which have become detached from their fixings.  It hasn't mattered much up till now!  The few houseplants that were living in the greenhouse have been brought indoors for better protection, but some of the osteospermums and argyranthemums are still in their outdoor pots; I need to get them under cover.  I must also bring in the larger of the two blue echeveriums; it spent all last winter outside (admittedly up against the patio doors so it would have benefitted from some of the indoor heat), but I don't fancy risking it a second winter.

Now that the Christmas greenery has been taken down and sent for recycling I've started cutting flowers for the house again.  Quite a bit of choice at the moment!  There's a little posy of snowdrops (Galanthus elwesii), some slightly battered pinks and a lovely off-white hellebore with a slight pink flush and pink rim.  I'm sure that latter one is new.  Many years ago I bought a couple of hellebore plants and, having nowhere to plant them out at the time, I left them on the path under the dining room window.  I was less careful about deadheading in those days, and they seeded into the cracks in the path, giving me a nice collection of hellebores of various colours, but I don't remember this particular one.

The winter aconites are also in flower, and the comfrey has been blooming for a few weeks now.  No shortage of stuff to cut in the coming weeks unless we have a really cold snap!

Pink-and-white hellebore

The garden is still very wet (and smells strongly of tomcat, which isn't nice).  What little time I've had to spend outdoors has been used to tidy up a bit and do a little light pruning; although this isn't the time of year to prune cordons I've thinned out some of the spurs on the apple cordons while I can see what I'm doing (no leaves to get in the way), and removed a few spurs that are too low down.

The birds are almost in spring mode, quite sprightly and apparently minded to pair up.  We had two dunnocks feeding together the other day, which isn't usual at this time of year.  The bullfinch has been back a few times, on one occasion with another male bullfinch; the attraction has been the seedheads of an oregano plant that was never deadheaded.  There are a few chaffinches around too.  And, as usual in wet winter weather, one or more moles is tunnelling enthusiastically under the veg patch; I hope my tulip bulbs by the wall haven't been disturbed.

In the mild midwinter ...

The wind is certainly making moan - every few days another gale - but it's not at all frosty, and there's absolutely no prospect at the moment of snow falling on snow.  Plenty of rain falling on sodden ground, though.  Today I tried digging over the ground where the dahlias had been in the hope of getting some tulips planted in there, but it was much too sticky for any planting.  At least we haven't had as much rainfall as the north of England, which is currently flooded.  It is still ridiculously mild; a little fresher today, but not anything like December ought to be. The plants think so too.  The cistus is flowering happily, presumably under the delusion that it's a Mediterranean spring.  Unfortunately the Iris foetidissima behind it has its orange berries on display, and it's not a happy colour combination, but never mind.  The Geum rivale is in flower too as is one of the Welsh poppies, there are still some pinks in bud and flower, hellebores are blooming all over the place and there's a Sweet William even having a go.  The early snowdrops are out, but the Galanthus elwesii is hidden because the geraniums haven't died back, and one of them is trying to flower too.  The daffodils are shooting already, and the little rhubarb plant that I planted earlier in the year has one perky little leaf out.  It's all wrong.  On the plus side, the winter flowering shrubs haven't been knocked back yet and there's a lovely display of winter honeysuckle.

The more opportunistic weeds - herb robert, bittercress - are still growing too, as is the grass.  The lawn is much longer than it ought to be but it's far too wet to cut.  The horses which are currently pastured in the field behind us occasionally come to the fence and look longingly at it.

There's another storm - heavy rain and gales - forecast for Wednesday.  But a little sun tomorrow, which will be welcome in this very depressing December.

The mild weather has meant that there isn't the range of birds turning up that we usually have in winter.  A male bullfinch dropped in the other day but otherwise it's mostly our regulars.

Belated bulbs

I'm still planting bulbs.  A lot of those removed from last year's summer pots - the ones that still looked in reasonable condition - have gone in the bottom of the veg patch, next to the place where next door's lily of the valley has spread under the wall.  I'm not expecting great things, and the plan (at the moment) is to dig them up and throw them away next summer, but it's worth a try.  I've given them some bonemeal each in the hope of giving them a kickstart.  Down there are the remnants of 'Jan Reus' and 'Veronique Sanson', at the back by the wall; in front are a couple of the yellow tulips rescued from under the dining room window and 'Purple Jacket'; in front of that are 'Cairo' and 'Antraciet' on the right and some more yellow tulips on the left.

Meanwhile I've managed to get the alliums ('Purple Sensation', 'Purple Rain' and unifolium) into the bottom border under the ash tree, along with tulip 'Menton'.  This is a stonking great late pink tulip which I first saw in a garden nearby; it's supposed to be good at resisting the elements, which will be a useful attribute in this garden.  I'm gradually getting the other new bulbs (and some saved from last year) into their winter homes; some more 'Cairo' have gone into a pot with crocus 'Gipsy Girl' and some wallflower 'Sunset Red', while the Tete-a-tete daffodils have gone into the windowbox as usual, with blue violas and crocus 'Blue Pearl', and a small Carex testacea to provide some structure.  Further planting has been frustrated by the weather; we've had a couple of bright, sunny half-days but otherwise it's mostly damp or wet, with wind.  Today we've had gales; the village Christmas tree was going up this lunchtime and it will be interesting to see tomorrow whether it's still upright!

Yellow chrysanths, wallflowers and winter jasmine

It's still mild for this time of year, though.  The hellebore, and its offspring in the front garden, is getting into its flowering stride; some 'Sunset Red' wallflowers that were never potted up last winter and are still where they were sown are coming nicely into flower, the chrysanthemums are still going and there are odd flowers on the Centaurea montana, pinks, cistus and a Welsh poppy. The birds still come for their crumbs, seeds and water, and the blackbirds are still enjoying the occasional apple, but there's no sense of urgency in their feeding - plenty of wild food still around, I suspect.

Another pigeon, another gooseberry bush

One of the recurring themes in my gardening is the task that can only be completed once something else has been done, and very often that something else is dependent on yet another job being done first.  Usually it's not being able to plant something until its new home has been cleared of weeds or otherwise prepared.  Today it was the burial of yet another dead woodpigeon, which - given the lack of suitably deep soil in a place where the corpse wouldn't be dug up accidentally - meant first clearing another bit of the overgrown gooseberry row and selecting a reasonably young bit of plant with roots to replant there.  A very mature gooseberry plant was eventually dug up; it had enormous roots and digging out took some effort, but in the end I managed to create an appropriately sized grave for the pigeon, with the new gooseberry plant alongside (with lots of homemade compost and Rootgrow to help compensate for putting it near where the old plant had been).  It was quite a satisfying job in fact, as I was able to get some couch grass roots out at the same time.  The robin was also very satisfied with my digging; it checked over the area very thoroughly when I came in for some tea.

The pigeon was found tucked in between one of the compost bins and one of the leafmould containers, in a confined and very sheltered spot.  I don't think a predator could have taken it in there (although there were a few small feathers about, which might have been pulled out of the corpse by a secondary predator such as a rat); I suspect it was a sick bird (it may have been another juvenile, I couldn't tell for sure given the state it was in) just looking for a sheltered place to lie down, as sick pigeons do.  (Perhaps other birds do that too? I don't know.)  I rather wish they wouldn't do it in this garden; I'm running out of places to bury them!

The dahlias have been cut down and dug up.  'David Howard' had rotted completely, while 'Jescot Julie' is still one enormous tuber, which looks partly eaten away and had a lot of little worm things and larvae on it when I dug it up.  I decided to leave it lying there overnight - the weather is still very mild for the time of year - in the hope that the local biological control (robin, wren) would deal with the pests.  Certainly they seemed to have gone by the next morning (though they may have retreated into the tuber, I suppose!).  All the tubers are now drying out in the greenhouse, where I've also started potting up the half-hardies from the summer pots - argyranthemums, osteospermums, nepeta variegata etc.  It's still mild enough for that not to be a desperately urgent job; the weather has been damp and very windy and there's no real cold in sight.  The birds are still coming to feed on the fallen apples (the green woodpecker was there today) but without much sense of urgency.

Hellebore in flower

Colour in the garden is mostly from the chrysanthemums and the winter shrubs, but the big hellebore (argutifolius?) under the dining room window has started to flower, and the orange Iris foetidissima seed pods are showing.  The Lonicera purpusii is hanging on to its leaves as usual, and flowering nicely.  There are also a few last roses but I doubt if they are going to open properly, and the dianthus plants are producing sporadic blooms (being cut for the kitchen windowsill).

Four-and-twenty blackbirds

Ok, not quite four-and-twenty, and not baked in a pie, although the apples that they've been eating could have made a great many pies.  But this morning I counted 15 blackbirds in the garden, mostly eating the cooking apples brought down by the gales, with others heading for the holly tree and its berries and yet more just hanging out round the summerhouse.  The weather did indeed turn cold at the weekend, with a light covering of wet snow on Saturday morning and temperatures down to minus 3 overnight, and the birds suddenly became a lot more interested in the food available in the garden.  I've salvaged a good few apples and stored them in the greenhouse (mostly for feeding to the birds later in the winter), and several stems of hollyberries have been cut (and are also in the greenhouse, as the coolest mouse-proof place for them).  Besides the blackbirds, the fieldfares and redwings are also about and busily stripping the holly, and this afternoon I was scolded by the green woodpecker when I went out - so it's also still around.  We also had a female bullfinch one day, and a family of goldfinches picking over the Big Yellow Thing, whose seeds they're particularly fond of.

Although I haven't yet got round to clearing the summer pots (too many non-gardening things in hand at the moment), the argyranthemums et al seem to have survived the cold.  A little more leaf-clearing has been done, and some desultory tidying up, but the only major gardening achievement this week has been making a start on replanting the gooseberries, which have layered over the years and become very congested.  This was prompted by the discovery of a dead juvenile pigeon under the holly tree and the consequent need to find somewhere deep enough to bury it.  It now has a bit of gooseberry bush on top of it, in a position where I will be able to continue digging up the row without disturbing it.

Back to damp and windy weather again now, a bit milder but very November-ish, and no change in sight for the moment.  At times like this a little Christmas cheer in prospect seems very welcome!

Clearing up

Back home after a trip away, to a lawn covered with fallen leaves.  The weather during our absence was mild and intermittently windy, and all the ash leaves are down (apple and hazel leaves still to fall).  Since our return it has been mostly wet and windy (very windy recently), so there hasn't been much opportunity for clearing up.  The lawn is now clear, and two leafmould bins filled; the veg patch and drive are still to be raked, although the wind is sweeping the leaves into convenient piles for me. 

The wind is also blowing down the cooking apples; quite a few are already safely in store, leaving plenty for the blackbirds, the green woodpecker and the fieldfares (who have arrived while we were away).  The eaters were picked and stored before we left; quite a good crop of decent-sized fruit.  The birds still have plenty of fruit and berries and are showing little more than polite interest in the bread and seeds put out for them; that may change at the end of this week when the temperatures are set to fall.  We have a robin coming regularly to the patio, and a wren has been coming to bathe; there have also been plenty of tits (blue, great and coal) as well as the family of long-tailed tits dropping in from time to time.  The sparrowhawk flew over the other day; it has obviously been here while we were away, as evidenced by some partridge feathers on the lawn.

Besides the leaves, there is a lot of other clearing up to do in the garden.  The remains of the annuals have been composted (the courgettes and aubergines having gone that way before we left).  Nearly all the bulbs are still to be planted, too, including a batch of Alliums intended for the bottom border.  I did manage to partially overhaul that border before our departure, splitting the Francoa, moving some of the drought-haters such as the Astrantia and potting up some others, and planting out some new arrivals in the hope that they might do better in that situation.  I hope I can remember where everything is so that I don't disturb them while putting in the bulbs.


There are few flowers about: still some Nerines, a nice display by the dwarf red Chrysanthemum and a rather less impressive one by the big yellow Chrysanth, a few rather tatty Argyranthemum flowers in the pots, some belated pinks and late marigolds.  Otherwise it's the winter shrubs: Viburnum 'Dawn', the winter honeysuckle and the winter jasmine.  Some primrose flowers by the gate as well.  In the summer pots, there are still a few flowers of Nasturtium 'Milkmaid' which I sowed in situ to provide some late colour.  The flowers were supposed to be white but in fact are pale yellow, which worked very nicely though actually they came too late to have much effect; they really came into their own as foliage plants, however, providing good filling and contrast with the other contents of the pots.  I'd never really thought of Nasturtiums as foliage plants before.

In the greenhouse, the tomatoes are fruiting madly (but not very flavourfully).  The contents of the grow-bag vacated by the aubergines have been supplemented with some of my home-made compost, and some small lettuce plants that were in the cold-frame have been planted in there, for winter salads; I'm sure you're not supposed to re-use grow-bags in that way, but I'm giving it a go.  I want to try to make better use of the greenhouse this winter, not just for keeping tender plants ticking over.  Most of the cuttings taken in late summer (Argyranthemums, Osteospermums, Penstemons mostly) have been potted on and are tucked under the greenhouse staging, except for the Southernwood (Artemisia abrotana) which is prone to damping off and which has gone into the draughtier conditions of the coldframe, alongside the sweet pea seedlings.  Looking at the forecast, I need to get the greenhouse insulation up and the heater up and running before the weekend - winter is coming!

Dark and crumbly

Although I diligently compost everything that can be composted, the end results are not usually very impressive - a bit sludgy, with odd bits of cardboard, twigs, eggshells and avocado skins dotted about in it.  Emptying out the black bin which has been cooking over the summer, however, revealed an end product that I was really quite pleased with.  It was properly dark, crumbly and well-mixed, with very few of the tell-tale undigested bits that have marked my attempts hitherto.  I was so pleased that I sieved some of it for use in potting mixes.  The bins have now been re-filled with the more recent contents, properly mixed with paper, cardboard and the clippings from the last lawn-mowing of the year, and some of the lovely dark stuff put in the bottom of trenches in the veg plot for the broad beans and garlic (both now sown/planted out). I hope they appreciate it.

Very small fig

Most of this year's beans have been pulled up; there are still a few runners producing, but otherwise nothing much is going to happen this year.  The borlottis produced a few pods, but the French beans ('Ferrari') sulked completely.  The sweet peas have also been composted as they had mostly shot their bolt.  In the greenhouse, the tomatoes have suddenly started to ripen, prompted perhaps by a week or so of nice warm and sunny weather, and the aubergines, which had done even less than last year, belatedly started to set a few fruit.  These could be the smallest aubergines ever as the plants aren't going to last much longer!  On the subject of small, our newly acquired fig plant (a gift from a neighbour), still in its pot, has produced one tiny fig, about the size of a marble.  This will have to be removed, as autumn figs don't ripen in this country, which is a pity!

Dahlias 'Ambition' and 'Blue Bayou'

The dahlias are still mostly doing well, with 'Bishop of Llandaff' finally producing a flower (though 'David Howard' seems to have succumbed to slug damage).  Most of the colour is still from 'Ambition', 'Bishop of Auckland' and 'Blue Bayou'.  The Zinnias are almost all over and have been pulled up, but the Cosmos continue to flaunt their pinkness across the garden.  The purple Michaelmas daisy is out, and the little red Chrysanthemum, which had a single flower on it, has suddenly sprouted a whole host of little buds.  There are also a reasonable number of Nerine buds showing too.  The most exuberant flowerer at the moment however is one of the Hedychiums in the greenhouse, which has a huge, scented orange head on it.

The birds seem put out by our absence for a few days and are sulking; but there has been a wren around in the hedge, a nuthatch hammering away in the tree and a big flock of long-tailed tits chattered through the garden today.