Reluctant Writers and Hard Winters

You know when someone sends you an email, leaves a phone message or text and you don't reply immediately. A few days go by, a week, a month!  Before you know it you want to reply but it's been so long you don't know what to say!!

That's how I feel with this blog.

The reasons for not writing are numerous. Builders, sleepless babies,

It's not that I've not been doing anything, there's been so much I don't know quite where to start.

So I'll make this post a quick run down of the past 8 months (I've even had to look back on my last post to see where I left off).
So I was last seen pruning my red currants in the garden.  I chucked loads of compost from my hot composter around their bases in the spring and they are now covered in little green flowers.

There are so many red currants on the bushes that the branches are bowing.

Due to the dates of my kitchen build being changed, Grrrrr, I missed my course on winter pruning fruit trees. But I couldn't wait another year to go back so I read some of my copious gardening books, scoured the Internet, sharpened my tools and took a deep breath. By the time I had finished most of my apple trees were on the floor. My dear supportive husband came home took one look and said. "You've killed them".

Hard pruned Brambly apple tree to get it back to looking slightly like an espaliered tree.
 It was already tilting!

there was great relief when the apple tree began to bloom!

It was a long cold wintery wait til finally small green buds began bursting out all over the now much smaller trees.  (And yes I couldn't  help feeling smug when I pointed this out to Bjorn).

While he was convinced of my killing ability, Bjorn did put up my greenhouse on one of the coldest days of the year. So now that too is bursting with little green shoots in trays.  Some waiting for a place in my garden others of on a short journey to my allotment.

I haven't talked about my allotment for a while. (I haven't talked about anything for a long while, I hear you say).  I managed to plant onions, garlic and purple asparagus in the autumn.  But as you all know the winter has been, well how can I put it politely... Lets say I wouldn'teven put it in my composter.   Freezing, wet, and windy.   So there was not much action going on over at Wash Common.

Until finally there was a break in the weather, luckily my plot had not been under water for the cold season so I got to transplant one of my red currants and my summer raspberries. I also planted autumn raspberries, white and black currants.

This is turning into a list so I shall digress. The pond at the back of my allotment has a leak in the liner and has been dry all winter, even with all the rain. The problem is, no one told the frogs!  They laid masses of spawn in there, destined to dry up and stink.  So I commenced operation tadpole!

one dried up leaking pond, watch this space for how I'm going to restore it.

We have an old butler sink in the garden that I had ear marked for a dipping pond ages ago but never got around to it.   I'd been uming and ahing as to how to seal up the plug hole so I finally went and asked the experts at the pond shop. The simple solution was to get a piece of butile and some goldseal glue and glue the butile over the plug hole. Then I covered the bottom with pea gravel and with some old broken bricks creating steps up one side of the basin. Voila! A small and simple pond. Zooming back to the allotment I scooped up some frogspawn from the middle of the blob (so that it wasn't crispy and dry) and plopped it into the new pond with some oxygenating pond plants. And waited. And waited. And waited through two snow storms and multiple frosts where i was breaking the ice off the top. In fact i waited so long that I thought that it was dead and was starting to make up stories in my head as to how to explain the lack of tadpoles to Holly and Lottie. The one day the eggy goo had disappears and there were these tiny little tadpoles!  I don't know who was more excited me or the girls!

 

Holly calls them "Tampoles"
Lottie thinks we have Turtles in the garden.

 
Any way now they are massive and there are loads of them!  My slugs are not going to know what hit them!

fever, Olympic and pruning

smoking hot! Monarda Gardenview Scarlet

If you want to stay fresh go back to school.  Others called continuous professional development, I call it dusting of the cobwebs and re-energising.   I've just spent a most glorious morning at Wisley Gardens on the Summer pruning of fruit bushes and trees course.  Though the day didn't start too well. 

I dropped the girls off at nursery and drove away with a skip in my step. Half way to Basingstoke I realised that I had left my purse in Holly's bag!  It had my ticket and RHS membership card in it so I couldn't even get into the gardens without it. So I high tailed it back to nursery, snuck in so that neither of the girls saw me and zoomed off again. Luckily I'd given myself 2 hours to get there and nipped into a parks space just in time to join the group by the gooseberries. 

Cordoned red currants, something to aspire to!

It was the hottest day in July and I had no hat, but really didn't care.   Now my garden is still a mess, I know and accept that, but these gardens fill me with awe and put me to shame, they are beautiful.  

The gardener who was leading the course was lovely, Becky Bevan, she made it all sound so simple (and it mostly is, with some complicated bits just to confuse). We started at gooseberries and red currants (these are pruned in the same way) then on to black currants followed by hybrids such as Logan berries.  We moved on to trained apples and pears, a particular interest to me since I have 3 overgrown espalier apples trees in my garden.   We finished with trained  stone fruit trees; cherries, apricots, plums. These are the most complicated to prune, but still Becky explained it with clarity and patience. 

stepped apple trees, great for small places

At the end I wanted to zoom back to start pruning my red currants, but was waylaid by the stunning riot of colour in the long herbaceous borders. I was so glad that I had my note book with me and was frantically scribbling down planting combinations while wishing my garden was SO much bigger that I could fit it all in.

Giant Echinops, (the blue globes) towering over the other plants

Phlox Blue Paradise, beautiful plants and great fragrance

Agapanthus Midnight Blue, such a rich clour

Hunger finally dragged me home and after a quick bit to eat I sharpened my secuaters and dived in to the currants.  A couple if hours later I'd cut out about half of the branches of the bushes and it looked so my lighter! 

wild red currant bushes

after pruning, so much lighter!

While pruning I'd also found some branches that had naturally layered themselves. This is when low branched get covered with soil and send out roots creating a new plant.

I dug these up with a few rogue raspberry canes and took them over to Holly and Lottie's nursery for their little garden.   holly was delighted that mommy was at nursery for the afternoon, especially as she was practicing for sports day. 

do they do the obstacle course in the olympics 

I am very proud to end this blog with a non gardening note. On the eve of the Olympic opening ceremony Holly won the obstacle race at nursery. 

Anybody building an ark out there?

This was last week but I thought id post it anyway!!

Thursday 12 July
Well it's been truly British weather this week.  I had planned a night out with my sister to go and see a fire art installation at Stonehenge.   I was really looking forward to getting close up and personal with those ancient monoliths. 

I'm so upset that I missed this

It didn't start well, not only was it raining, and had been torrential all week, Lottie was teething and Holly just wouldn't stay in bed. 

torrential downpour drowning my plants!

Just as we had got both children in their own beds and quiet.  Bridget checked her email only to find out it had been cancelled due to high winds and biblical weather. 

We did the only thing sensible in the situation and opened a bottle of wine. 

The next morning we ventured into my garden to check the condition of the gooseberries. Bridget loves them,  (can she really be my sister?) so Holly showed her where they were and warned they they were spiky and couldn't understand why she couldn't eat them straight from the bush.  We sent Aunts Boo on her way with a bag full of ripe  goosegogs with the hope of seeing her next Friday at RaRa's. 

watch out they're prickly!

Not much has been going on in my garden work wise as its been so wet. Apart from feeding my hot bin and lifting some pots. My Casablanca potatoes were a great disappointment with only four pots in the bag, that's one less than I put in!!  But my Anya's have been great and very delicious, fabulously nutty and with a lovely bite to them. 

Anya Potatoes waiting to be eaten

Since all that rain two weeks ago it's suddenly turned glorious, it almost makes it worth it!  On Friday we hightailed it to Wales to see my mom(RaRa to the girls) armed with rhubarb, goosegogs and some beautiful Mayan Gold pots, beautiful golden flesh, but watch out they boil very quickly so you want to be careful that they don't turn to mush.   There we spent two heady days on the beach splashing in rockpools, eating ice cream and I saw my first starfish! 

happy days

not just a red bucket, there is a starfish in there

Back in the garden I've taken advantage of the sunshine by purging the weeds and finally trimming the hedge, though I've only managed to give it the sides of the short back and sides as I can't reach the top without a ladder. 

clear space for planting the sunflowers

But most of all I'm very excited that tomorrow I get to go to Wisley to do a summer fruit shrub pruning course. I'll report back after the course when I've hacked, I mean pruned my currants. 

Black Gold!

Sunday
I have been digging, but not that deep.

No I haven't struck oil in the heart of Berkshire. I'm just very excited about my new toy.  Boys have their cars and power tools. Some girls have shoes, some have make up or even dresses. Me I have a hotbin composter!

not really appropriate for gardening

Silence, as the tumble weed passes........

all shiny and new

Okay so you may not see the wow factor of a black polystyrene bin but to me, this is exciting. As anyone who has a garden compost heap knows there are things you can and can't put in it.

• Bindweed and brambles? NO! A garden compost heap just doesn't get hot enough to kill the roots and you'll end up spreading bindweed all over your garden.   
• Meat and bones? NO! Do you really want to have to call the pied piper?  
• And it takes so long. Well the hot composter, well it gets hot and hot kills the nasty roots and hot composts quicker breaking down the meat and bones so no lilting pipe music and you get to keep the kids. 

 I finally persuaded Bjorn to mow the grass before we lost Lottie in the back jungle, then filled the composter with its base layer to get it started up. Once the heat has got going we can chuck pretty much anything that is biodegradable in there.

 I'm checking the temp tomorrow!

 (Fast forward) Monday
It's tomorrow and already the composter  is 40•C!! That's so cool, er ..... I mean hot! So I've brought it some more kitchen scraps. Mixing it in with some bark chippings and this composter is going to be so happy. It's promising to give me compost in 90 days so watch this space.

some blogs have beautiful pictures........
the base layer for the compost

Friday
Well the rain is back with a vengeance and I am in the house with two toddlers with cabin fever. The solution to this situation, get creative.
Holly has been asking for ages to make a scarecrow. I had thought to make a small scarecrow out of Lottie's old clothes. I then thought that might be too creepy. So I rooted around and found some old long johns, tights and some fabric. Luckily I still had some stuffing from making toy rabbits  and lots of shredded paper. We had great fun with the shredded paper, most of it went on the floor but then where's the fun in tidy play!  Then Holly spent a while creating a rather scary face, it's as if she'd seen me falling out of a club at 6am back in the 90's.
So now our garden is protected by the princess scarecrow with her shimmery skirt and long johns, like some bedragled raver, as she slumps in the strawberry patch with the two sparkly windmills care of grandma.

someone is watching the house......

I just don't want to catch a glimpse of her as I draw the curtains at night, think Jason from Friday 13th!

Weeds and Deeds

A man of words and not of deeds

Is like a garden full of weeds

And when the weeds begin to grow

It's like a garden full of snow

I know, I know, I'm a bad blogger. Its not that I've  been lounging on the sofa being fed peeled grapes my my daughters. (I've tried, they just sqwish them up my nose). 

there really are fairies at the bottom of my garden

I've mostly been dealing with sleepless nights from teething babies and toddler nightmares.   I have managed prop my eyelids open with matchsticks, drag my weary body into in the garden and have started and re-written this blog four times.  It's been so long now that i cant remember where to begin.  

Ah yes there was a hosepipe ban.  Drought and disaster looming while at the same time, water water everywhere, well definitely in my three water butts.  Then Thames water finally  lifted the hose pipe ban after some of the heaviest rain fall in May and June.   Being on a water metre means that I am still hoping that I don't have to use the hose pipe too much. 

With all the rain I'm tried to stay off the soil as much as possible, so as not to compact it and destroy the structure.  I managed to do some weeding, though it's a constant battle as they are growing ..... Well ...... like weeds!

I haven't cut the hedge yet as it was too wet and i cant find the hedge trimmer since we moved.  I haven't cut the grass, you guessed it, to wet. (though i probably could now) .  

So I thought its about time to get those reluctant gardeners back on track.  

I followed my own earlier advice and cheated. I didn't buy tomatoes as I had already sown some, I bought some pumpkin seedling and some chilli seedling. For the pumpkins I formed three little mounds, apparently they like to trail down little hills. To stop the slugs I put tumble dryer fluff round one, oats round another and the last had to fend for itself as the sheeps wool is in the post???  Now whether it was the high winds or the slugs the porridge oats lost. Slugs 1- Mum in wellies 0. (I now have two flowers on my pumpkins, so excited!).   The slimy ones have also been chomping their way through my lettuce and my strawberries.  So I went mad with the slug pellets all around the strawbs as I don't have enough tumble dryer fluff. (the td fluff seems to be working as my beans have remained intact). 

I digress. Reluctant gardeners I have a task for you. A simple and inexpensive was to increase the amount of plants in your garden, presents for friends or to get in the good books of the church/school/village fete committee. 

Soft wood cuttings. 

There are loads of plants that you can take soft wood cuttings from both perennials and shrubs. Too many to mention so here are just a few. 

Perennials

Erigeron - evergreen ground cover big blouse daisy flowers 

Penstemon - classic cottage garden plant comes in an array of colours

Nepeta - catmint I love it but do does my cat so I can't grow it in my gardened he eats it, rolls in it and goes nuts. 

Shrubs

Lavendula - what can I say, everyone know this one and it's a great way to get tons of it!

Buxus - only if you have the time and patience,  it's slow to propagate. 

Buddlejia - don't knock this train line plant it has some lovely cultivars and is great for wildlife.  Black knight is beautiful, deep purple flowers with orange centres

Hydrangea - aborescens Annabelle is my favorite big white pompoms

The soft new shoots on plants is what you are looking for. Preferably non flowering shoots as they will root more easily. 

from left: lavender, sage, ceanothus, flowering currant

Take off up to 10cm of a shoot just above a bud on the parent plant.

feeling a little cold: stripped of their lower leaves

Strip the lower few leaves so you have a decent length of stem to plant in the soil. 

I've used John innes seed and potting compost, but you probably could you a good multi purpose compost. 

please ignore my bad manicure!

Dip the cutting in some rooting powder or liquid then make a hole in the compost (fingers, dibbers, a pencil what ever suits). Then put in the cutting and firm it into the compost. 

Water well. 

now wait

I put two to three cuttings per pot (just because I'm tight!). 

Mine are in a sunny sheltered area in my garden as my greenhouse isn't up yet. But a window sill would do of you haven't got the space outside

Leave them for 6-10 weeks. Remembering to keep the compost moist. 

Then your only problem is finding places in your garden to plant them. 

I have cuttings of

Lavendula  Hidcote

Salvia officinalis

Rosmarinus officinalis

Ceanothus Concha

Cistus Sunset

Buxus semirvirens

Ribes sanguineum

I do get quite carried away taking cuttings as its SO easy!

just a few strawberries, red currants and sticks of rhubarb

my little star

I've also been collecting the strawbs and red currants which, even though we've been sharing them with the slugs and bird population of Newbury, seem to be an unending harvest.  Lottie like Holly before her has acquired a taste for red currants straight from the bush so it's a battle between them as to who will get there first, all fear of spiders and other crawlies banished. 

no spider can stop the intrepid strawberry hunter

Unwelcome Visitors

When I first got back into gardening as an adult I'd just moved into a basement flat in Camberwell which had a garden. It was mostly paving but had some borders and an enormous elder tree at the back.  As I was pretty poor I decided to grow all of my plants from seed. With no greenhouse and much to the annoyance of my boyfriend I had seed trays all over the kitchen floor. I had cleared the borders of weeds and just planted out some of the seedlings when I had to go on a two week tour with the dance company I was working with.   I was welcomed back by my very proud boyfriend who said he had been looking after my garden, watering and weeding. He took me outside to view his work, when I looked out in the garden I found a lot of bare earth. He'd weeded all of my seedlings. What could I say.......... 

As this dear boyfriend is now my dear husband, I thought I'd do a run down of the weeds in my garden, just in case. 

There are two main types of weeds, annual (grow, flower and die in one year) and perennial (the buggers that keep coming back). The former and quite easy to get rid of if you get them before their flower, the latter are a pain in the arse. 

(I'm using botanical paintings just to make them look nicer)

Perennials pains

Brambles

Mixed feelings on this one as blackberries are so yummy. But I think on the whole I'd prefer to forage them elsewhere .

Broad leaved willow herb

Quite easy to clear with a fork but can tear, leaving the roots behind for another year. 

Wood Avens

Annoying as it does look like a it's cultivated cousin until it flowers but quite easy to  lift.

Bindweed

is there any garden that doesn't have this strangulating pernicious pain! if there is I'd like to move in!  it seems that I have two types.  hedge bindweed Convolvulus arvensis, the white flowering one that most gardens seem to have, and field bindweed it travels along the ground pulling things down rather than twining up and strangling everything.  Both are as bad as each other. But I only seem to have them in a small patch so operation strangulation has begun.

Annuals

Goose grass

One of my favourite weeds on that it is fun to play with and quite easy to clear.

Common field speedwell

spreading suffocating, but pretty blue flowers.

Chickweed

Easy to clear with hoeing.

A tip I remember from Bunny Guinness off gardeners world was, if you don't have time to weed the garden properly deadhead the weeds to stop them flowering. That way you are at least stopping them from spreading.   But do go back and clear the weeds at a later date, otherwise you'll never get rid of them.

I must say that Bjorn is very proud that he can now discern many different types of plants, but he does steer clear of doing the weeding.

So I'm sitting here trying to stay calm, waiting for the dentist to fill my life with pain.  (2 fillings, I blame all that Ribena).  So I'm thinking of the lovely week I've just had filled with beautiful walks in stunning landscapes with friends and family. 

mown path through the orchard at The Vyne

On Friday I thought it was a out time I used that national trust membership that I got for Christmas. (thanks mum). So I packed a picnic, sun cream and picnic blanket(thanks again mum) and of we drove to The Vyne near basingstoke. Half an hour of windy roads and a dozen "are we there yet"s we arrived, bumping over the cattle grid.  I was slightly condemned that although I would love ambling through the beautiful gardens Holly might get bored.   In true jubilee/Olympic spirit they had a scarecrow trail through the garden so Holly had the time of her life searching for scarecrows and choosing her favourite. In fact she enjoyed it so much we had to take her Daddy there again in the Monday and we will be making our own scarecrow for the garden. 

Holly wasn't impressed with his cycling style

My second venture into sublime landscapes was a wonderful  surprise.  While visiting  my friend Marneta in Oxfordshire, not only did I get to while away the hours in her beautifully serene garden, but she took me to a capability brown landscaped garden just down the lane.  What a fabulous surprise that was.  

Grecian temple in the gardens

Immaculately restored with formal gardens around the house, spreading out into acres of landscaped views out into the Oxfordshire countryside. It never ceases to amaze me how Capability Brown had such vision. 

While out on our stroll with Ronnie Barker, a dog with special privileges. We came across some lemon sorrel, great in salads and other dishes too.  

Ronnie was quite taken with the Wedding Cake tree,
Cornus controversa Variegata

And so a mini wild forage began. We also collected some hedge garlic and by the time we go back we had enough for a small bowl of salad to accompany a beautifully healthy vegetarian lunch. 

my new friend

Back home in Newbury the wild foraging inspire me to get out into the garden and see what was on offer.  All my life I have. Even convinced that I don't like rhubarb, now it's in my garden I've been converted. Thanks to a simple recipe for rhubarb syrup. Holly drinks it as a cordial but we've also had it on ice cream and I'm waiting for a garden  party to try it with gin!

there may be a small child lost in there

Having spent so long in the back garden I have been ignoring the front which has turned into a bit of a wild meadow. So one evening Bjorn mowed as I edged. Though after it was finished it looked more like a moss lawn than a grass one. Ah well. Maybe that will be inspiration for my Japanese garden. 

short back and sides please