Wet wet wet

We've been abroad for most of February, watching the weather reports of repeated storms hitting the UK (and much of the rest of Europe).  The heavy rain, falling on what was already waterlogged ground, has caused much flooding, with the Severn valley hit badly as usual; up here we are clear of any standing water, but the ground is very wet and I don’t think I’ll be sowing any seed in it for a little while yet.  The gales have brought down a lot of dead ash wood, and more strong wind is forecast for this weekend so there may be more firewood to come.  Today started with a light covering of snow that had fallen overnight, the first real fall of the winter, but it melted quickly – adding to the general wetness.

When we left there were a few daffodils already in bud and I rather thought that more of them would be out when we got back, but only some of the miniatures are actually in bloom; the others are sitting there waiting for some warmer sun.  The snowdrops and winter aconites are past their peak, but some of the crocuses are out; sadly the rain and wind have battered the little Crocus tommasinianus ('Tommies') ‘Whitewell Purple’ which are delicate little things, and they’re mostly lying prostrate in the grass.  However I’m pleased to see that the tulips which I planted (shamefully late) in pots before we left are producing healthy-looking crops of leaves (whether they flower is another matter; a lot of them are last year’s bulbs).  The pulmonarias and sweet violets are coming out – I have a little posy of the latter on the table here, pumping out perfume; and of course the hellebores are in full flow.  

Battered Tommies

Helleborus x hybridus - a nice pink form

Rhubarb 'Timperley Early'

The veg patch is looking a little dishevelled, with bits of ash twig everywhere and some of the plastic covering one of my ‘no-dig’ beds having blown off, so some tidying up is in order.  The garlic and shallots are sprouting, and from a quick peek under the fleece I see that the broad beans are germinating.  The Rhubarb ‘Timperley Early’ is ready for picking, though its immediate surroundings are in need of some weeding.

Now I’m back it’s time to get on with the indoor sowings.  The aubergines were sown in January and have germinated, and the peppers and chillies are next on the list.  They need warmth, so spend their first weeks in the house (on a radiator to germinate, then on a sunny windowsill), where they will be joined in due course by the tomatoes.  I ought to get some salad crops going in the greenhouse, and perhaps some carrots in lengths of guttering.  It will soon be time to start the dahlias off as well.  The greenhouse has not been heated this winter – it hasn’t got really cold, and even without the heater the temperature hasn’t fallen below 1.7C – but it should be suitable for the non-tender subjects.  Depending on the weather I may need some heating when we get to the big seed-sowing operation later in March (although the propagator will help there).

The birds seem pleased with my return, especially given the snow this morning; the feeders have been replenished and a rotten windfall apple put down for the blackbirds.  The long-tailed tits have been busy at the peanuts and fatballs, and while I was checking progress in the veg patch my bottom-of-the-garden robin friend came and talked to me - whether it was a "welcome back" or a "where do you think you've been all this time?" I'm not sure.

A day under the hazels

After weeks of mostly wet and miserable weather, at last three beautiful, sunny days – a chance to get out and get on with garden jobs, despite the frosty weather.  (It didn’t last long; today was foggy, damp and milder, and there’s more of the same in the forecast.)  The frost only melted where the sun got on to it, which limited access to some parts of the garden to avoid walking on frozen grass, and the soil was still wet and sticky after all the rain, so I spent time weeding the vegetable garden paths and tackling the bottom corner of the veg plot. 

Work in progress

The far end of the veg garden contains a shelter belt consisting of two big hazel bushes.  When we moved here, I brought several plants in pots with me, and two of the pots sprouted hazel plants – some of our squirrels had buried nuts in there as a farewell present.  I planted them on the edge of the veg plot, to protect it from the easterly winds, and they have grown into quite tall trees, which I have dismally failed to prune over the years.  As a result they not only cast shade in that corner, but also sprawled out over the path adjoining the corner bed, making access, and hence maintenance, difficult.  That bed currently contains a few aquilegia plants grown from seed and awaiting more suitable quarters (one reason I want to get on with clearing the shady area behind the front garden wall) and not much else; the space right in the corner has for some time served as a parking place for buddleja prunings used as bean poles and the like, and the strip under the hazels had been colonised by herb bennet (a wildflower, not edible) and damson suckers.  And the boards that are supposed to demarcate the bed edges had fallen over and were lying in the path, making access even more tricky.

Serious pruning of the hazels has been deferred to another day, but the first step was to clear proper access to the area by cutting back some of the lower branches, so that I didn’t poke myself in the eye while weeding.  Most of the damson suckers were dug out, although a couple have come up in the cluster of hazel trunks and nothing will get them out, so I’ll just have to keep an eye on them and rub off any shoots that appear.  An old and unproductive rhubarb plant was also dug out and thrown away.  Weeding the area was less of a struggle than I had expected, although there are a lot of weed seedlings appearing, so once I’ve tackled the hazel pruning I will mulch the area heavily and probably leave it for a year or so.  One legacy of the lack of attention given to the area is that fallen leaves have just been left there to rot, so I’ll pile up those leaves that haven’t yet made their way to the leaf mould bins and leave the worms to get on with it, with the mulch on top.

My gardening companion

At least there are quite a few worms in there, although some of them fell prey to the bottom-of-the-garden robin, a friendly and trusting little chap (or chapess) who pops up whenever I go down there and sings to me.  Much of the singing is territory-defending, directed at the other local robins, of which there are quite a few, but sometimes it’s a very quiet warbling clearly directed at me; I’m never sure whether it’s a ‘please go away so that I can safely come down and look for food’, a ‘please carry on and dig up more worms’ or just ‘this is really nice’.  Anyway, he had a very happy afternoon picking over where I had been working - and I thoroughly enjoyed his company.

New Year in bloom

Galanthus elwesii

A gardening journalist the other week wrote about flowers open at New Year; every year he counts how many types of plant, including weeds, in his garden have at least one flower on New Year’s Day.  His total this year was lower than usual, despite the continuing mild weather, probably because it has been (and still is) so miserably wet.  It prompted me to go out and take a look round our own plot, albeit a few days into January, and there were more flowers than I had first thought.  It does depend a bit on what you count as an ‘open flower’; I discounted a single bloom of each of Geum rivale and Welsh poppy (Meconopsis cambrica), both of which were really the sad half-mummified remains of autumn flowers rather than fresh blooms.  But it was interesting how many plants were actively flowering regardless of the mist and murk.  Of course there were the usual winter suspects: winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum), Mahonia ‘Winter Sun’ and Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ (also Viburnum tinus ‘Gwenllian’, which has lovely dark blue berries as well as flowers, but only one viburnum can be counted – we’re totalling general types of plant, not varieties).  There are also some isolated flowers on the winter honeysuckle (Lonicera purpusii), but fewer than usual thanks to the assiduous attentions of three bullfinches, a handsome male and two elegant females, who find the buds irresistible.  A little out of sight and out of mind are two other early bloomers, the rosemary and sarcococca (sweet box); I must find a better site for the latter where we can enjoy its scent.  The first snowdrops, Galanthus elwesii, are out, as are the primulas by the drive entrance, and at least one viola left over in a pot from last year’s plantings is still in flower; so too are a couple of stems on the senecio (now called something else by the botanists, I forget what) and two tiny blooms on the little red chrysanthemum in a patio pot.  More surprisingly, the ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ rose still has a few buds, one of which opened fairly satisfactorily when cut and put in a vase indoors.  There are flowers on several of the ‘Baron Solemacher’ alpine strawberries that are scattered around the garden, and let’s not forget all the daisies in the lawn, and clumps of meadow grass between the paving slabs (grass is a flowering plant too).  The hellebores are well in bud but not yet in flower, so weren’t counted.

Viburnum tinus 'Gwenllian'

Hellebore in bud

I make that 14; I must repeat the exercise next year for comparison.

What I did do on New Year’s morning was to count the number of bird species that put in an appearance over the course of a leisurely breakfast: 16, not counting the red kite that cruised by overhead.  I hope they stay around for the Big Garden Birdwatch later in the month, though the windfall apples are now all eaten and so the number of blackbirds – at least 15 at one point – has reduced substantially, and the regular skirmishes between the mistle thrush and his enemy the fieldfare have stopped.  But spring is in the air – two of the robins have paired up and a blackbird has been occasionally heard singing on dry afternoons.

Coriander, dill - and daffodil shoots

The weather hasn’t been good for gardening; even the greenhouse isn’t tempting me out much.  I have managed to get the shallots planted and broad beans sown (and covered up with fleece to prevent the squirrel from digging them up; he has a lot of hazelnuts buried in that area), and made a start on pruning the apple trees, doing a little out-of-season thinning on the cordons and tidying up the smaller tree before starting on the big tree – still more to do there.  Meanwhile the garden has little to offer on the edibles side other than the cooking apples in store, some remaining leeks and various herbs; the dill and coriander that I sowed in the big patio tubs, on top of the miniature daffodils, have produced a small but welcome harvest (and the daffodils are starting to push up between them).  With the weather as mild as it is, and not much cold in the medium-term forecast, I’m tempted to try sowing some seeds early, although that might really be pushing it; February is still to come, and anyway the ground is so wet that it might really not be a great idea.  On top of the rain we are now having a very windy week; not much sun forecast before the weekend.

Damp and dank

December weather has been pretty miserable this year: wet, wet and more wet, little sunshine and very little frost.  Although it has felt chilly a lot of the time, it has been damp chill rather than real winter cold.  Christmas Day bucked the trend, with a light frost first thing and a sunny day, but since then it has been damp, dank and foggy.  The next couple of days are supposed to be brighter (but unseasonably warmer).

Gardeners used to be expected to ‘put the garden to bed’ in the autumn, by cutting down all the non-evergreen perennials, pulling up annuals and generally tidying up anything that wasn’t wanted for spring.  The thinking now is that we ought to leave most of this stuff in place until spring (other than sweeping up fallen leaves to prevent them from messing up paths and the lawn) to provide a habitat for overwintering wildlife, and in general I’m all for this.  What I don’t get is the other argument, put forward by proponents of the New Perennial Movement or whatever they’re calling themselves these days, that we will all enjoy looking at the architectural forms of the dead seedheads and plant stems, especially when they are glittering with frost during the winter.  This might well work in places where they get frost in early winter, but what happens in the west of England is that in autumn the dead plant stems get rained on, collapse, fall to the ground and rot there in a nasty heap, and any frost that we get (not a lot in the greater scheme of things) doesn’t much enhance the black and soggy remains lying spread across the flower beds.  Some plants are worse than others; my persicaria covers a fairly generous area which is now just carpeted by the blackened, ruinous mess of the persicaria leaves and stems but is fortunately disguised by other plants in front (including the Big Yellow Thing – bupthalmum – which I do leave as an architectural skeleton because it stands well through the winter and the goldfinches like the seeds).  Crocosmia is a little better in that its leaves don’t go quite as soggy, though they too are prostrate now.  My Sedum ‘Herbstfreude’ seems resistant to anything I do to keep it upright and, being partly succulent, the stems rot quickly once any cold weather gets to them; it and other seedheads are lying at all sorts of angles.  A little tidying up is probably in order, just enough to make things look a little better without robbing too much wildlife of its shelter!

Any work in the garden at the moment rejoices the heart of one of our three robins (there have been skirmishes between them), who comes and sings to me while I’m working, and likes to examine what I’ve been doing in case I’ve turned up anything edible.  My most recent foray into the garden was to clear fallen leaves from one of the veg beds, spread old leaf mould on there and plant garlic cloves; the robin was delighted until I covered the planted area with fleece, to protect it from the larger birds and the dog (or fox?) that uses any clear ground as a toilet.  There has been no gardening this past ten days or so, partly because of the weather and short days and partly because of the seasonal celebrations and the resulting festive-induced lethargy, though there’s still plenty to do out there.  I have got most of the tulip bulbs planted, but other garden jobs are piling up on my conscience; I ought to use the better weather in the next few days to get on with them. 

Still plenty of birds in the garden; in addition to the usual wildlife, a nuthatch has been coming to the fatballs, and a male bullfinch has been munching on the flowers of the winter honeysuckle (a favourite winter treat for them).  A mistle thrush had a set-to with a fieldfare over the fallen apples this morning, and there are lots of holes in the lawn where the squirrel has been digging up buried nuts.  Another job that needs doing is to clear out the excess vegetation in the pond; the water lily and iris have tangled up together and have created a raft of solid growth across half of the surface.  Lefty the lame pigeon managed to wade out to the centre of the pond for a drink the other day; and it’s not as if the water level is low given the high rainfall over the past few weeks.  There ought to be a foot or more depth in there, rather than a couple of inches to wet a pigeon’s feet!

Plans for the dark days

During the year I’ve been earmarking various garden jobs as ‘to be done in the winter’.  The plans include digging out what used to be the herb garden, and tackling the bed behind the front garden wall, especially the end by the holly tree.  The herb garden never really worked; the idea was to have it as near to the back door (and hence the kitchen) as practicable, but the Mediterranean herbs like rosemary and thyme sulked, possibly because the soil was too rich for them, and the oregano and chives ran riot.  The latter two are still in there, along with a big clump of dianthus, competing with weeds such as the horrible creeping potentilla, creeping buttercup, couch grass and another invasive grass whose name I don’t know.  The plan is to dig the lot over, removing as much as I can, and plant it next year with temporary inhabitants such as dahlias or annuals so that I can repeat the process again next winter if necessary.  The bed in the front garden once held alpine strawberries, and some of them or their descendants are still fruiting away, but there are a number of undesirables (ground elder!) that need removing.  I have plants that I want to put into that bed, and winter is a good time to do that unless I decide to bite the bullet and try to move Mahonia x media ‘Winter Sun’ a foot or so to one side – early spring would be a better time to do that.  I would also like to get my pruning saw in to the two big hazel trees before the sap starts to rise in early spring, and to try to do something about the damson tree whose main stem is leaning across the entry to the dump corner and sinking lower and lower.  And some of the veg beds still need to be mulched as part of my new ‘no-dig’ regime.

The problem that I can see looming up before me is that it’s mid-December and already I’m behind with even the ‘must-do’ winter jobs.  I haven’t yet got my tulips planted, and that’s the top priority now that most of the fallen leaves have been gathered up, at least from the lawn and veg plot.  Last year’s hellebore leaves need cutting out; some have been done but there are still a few to tackle.  Another ‘must-do’ in winter is to prune the two freestanding apple trees; the little one can be done now, but the cooking apple tree needs to wait until all the apples have fallen off (some are too high for me to reach).   I know that the latter tree can take two afternoons to deal with, factoring in time to consider just what needs cutting out, and to find suitable level-ish spots on which to position the stepladder.  And I always overestimate just how much time is available in winter to do jobs.  I forget that it’s mostly cold and/or wet, which does rather dampen my enthusiasm for getting out there and cracking on with things; and digging weeds out of wet ground is a messy business.  Also I forget that the days are so much shorter in winter.  At the moment there isn’t much good light after 4pm even on bright days and, although the days will start getting longer in a week or so, it does curtail the working day.  All too soon it will be March and I’ll need to start seed-sowing!

Aucuba and iris seedpods

Winter jasmine and parsley

There’s not much good cutting material for indoor vases, but I’ve had some sprigs of old faithful Aucuba japonica teamed with seedheads of Iris foetidissima going for a few weeks now.  Another vase has some winter jasmine with the last of the parsley seedheads, which makes a lovely bright and fresh-looking little arrangement, especially in sunshine.  Sunshine has been at a premium lately, but we have had the odd bright day; the general weather theme has been showery or downright wet with some strong winds, a very few frosts but overall not unusually cold for this time of year.  However there’s still January and February to come!