Where are the songs of spring?

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cell.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Ode to Autumn – John Keats

 

The wind and rain are blowing Summer out of the door with some determination, so I’ve been putting the garden to bed and preparing for next Spring’s planting season … it’s entailed some reflection about what has gone well in the garden and where I need to adjust my thinking: I think the main conclusion on the veg front is that I’m going to grow more quantity of less variety … concentrating on the things we use a lot of and not bothering with the things that we tried and didn’t get on with – runner beans, radishes and broad beans, to name but a few!!

Legumes

Beans did very nicely this year, but next year I’ll grow more of the Cobra beans we all liked - and none at all of the runner beans or broad beans, which we didn’t - with a view to being able to stock the freezer for after the growing season ends. Likewise with peas – lots and lots more of them, the three sowings I did of them pretty much got devoured from pod to table in one fell swoop. The squashes and courgettes didn’t do well this season – I think a combination of slug/snail attacks and the dry summer did for them as the yield has been disappointing, despite annihilation of male flowers and nice soil preparation for them. I’m going to start the sweetcorn indoors a little earlier next year … I followed the packet instructions, but they are very late and the little cobs I’ve got now are in a desperate race against time with the weather to produce anything worth having – I need them to be better developed earlier, so they get out in the sun earlier in the year.

Root Crops

These, of course, are only just getting going due to the failure of my early carrots. I’m trying again with early carrots this year, and will use horti-fleece to protect them rather than cloches this time, to see if that produces any better results. It looks like we’ve got a good crop of autumn carrots, though, and they don’t seem to have suffered the same fate as my potatoes, which got badly mauled by either soil-living slugs or wireworm – either is possible in our heavy clay. I’ve decided that next year I’ll use my now-redundant bin and my defunct incinerator (as I need a new one anyway) and try growing them in a ‘barrel’ in a different position, to both improve the yield and, hopefully, avoid the pest attacks that spoiled this year’s crop. The parsnips are looking good, but I’m waiting for the first frost to sweeten them up before I see what I’ve got going on there – the plants certainly look healthy and well developed! Radishes were very successful, which is a shame because the children detest them … ah well, maybe they’ll come to them later in life. My beetroot suffered, too – again, I think the dry weather told on them … but at least they’ve not bolted, so they may yet come good. I live in hope eternal …. Florence Fennel was my only total failure (which is a pain because the herb fennel is absolutely rampant!) – next year, I’m going to try starting them indoors first, and see if that makes a difference.

Onions

The autumn-sown onions did spectacularly well – we’ve only just finished eating those, so it’s disappointing that the onion sets I planted this year have not done very well at all … I’m wondering if the fertility of the soil in the bed I used – one of the new ones – was lower than it needed to be for them? I’m not sure, however, whether this is the case, since the spring onions have done wonderfully, and the leeks are starting to come good as well just now – they’ve suddenly gone from looking rather spindly and pathetic to being as thick as my thumb and looking very sturdy and happy – earthing up to blanch them has been hopeful & happy!

Brassicas

My poor cabbages had a torrid time of it over the summer, whilst we were on holiday, but thanks to a great tip from Oracle of the Pearl, the application of neem oil and an army of caterillar-pickers (aka the children), they are now making a comeback and heading up nicely. For some of them, it’s a race against time as to whether we’ll get any use out of them, but others like the savoy and purple sprouting brocoli will overwinter quite happily. What’s disappointing is that my optimistic companion planting of marigolds, calendula and herb fennel had absolutely no effect on the quantity and appetite of the wretched cabbage white butterflies whatsoever, so that idea needs to go back for a rethink. I had hoped to be completely chemical free in the garden, but I might have to retract on that ambition until I can find more reliable natural methods of keeping my crops intact.

Still, the overall verdict is that I’ve saved more on my vegetable shopping than I spent on seeds, so overall, this season scores a WIN!

Salads

The lettuce and tomatoes were absolutely rampant this year – they did so well, I can’t wait for next year … I might even give indoor salad-gardening a shot, though I’m not sure I can fool the poor things into believing it’s summer. Cucumbers and peppers were a total wipeout – the seed I had was just too old, and I wasn’t organised enough to save seeds from last year’s crops to re-use this time round. Next year, with a fresh batch of seed, I’m hoping for a lot more success …

Fruits

We had a superbundance of soft fruit in the garden this year … strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants & blackcurrants all did splendidly well, though the children’s view of them as on-tap snack options meant that precious few ever made it into the kitchen … not that I have a major objection to that, but I was hoping to store at least *some* fruit for winter use! The blackberry season came so early this year, that by the time we were home from holiday in mid-August, it was pretty much all over. We managed a couple of great blackberry rambles, and had a good run of blackberry & apple crumbles & tarts, but again I’ve got nothing stored for the winter. The apple tree didn’t fruit well this year, which surprised me because it gave us a massive crop last year that we were still using well into May this year … something that made the seemingly endless hours of peeling, chopping and blanching last autumn worthwhile … but this year’s crop was poor in both quantity and quality. I’m not sure why, since the tree looks healthy and we’ve consistently had a lot of bees in the garden this year. I shall have to investigate.

I think the big objective for next year will be to try to grow more for storing on into winter – we’ve eaten well out of the garden as and when things come into season, but we’ve not grown enough to allow us to store things for later on in the year and into spring next year, which is disappointing. I’m hoping that by growing more of less, and making sure I’ve got better holiday cover for the garden, that we will not be in this same boat next year.

Other than an artemisia and some borage, I didn’t really add to our herbs this year … I did split thyme and sage and rosemary around the garden, and those have all done well in their new homes, though they didn’t have their hoped-for effect in terms of companion planting benefits, as far as I could tell. Still, it *is* good to have them in and amongst other plantings and a more integral part of the garden overall – it fits better with my long term plans and has helped me with my overall thinking about the garden’s structure.

Although we’ve been here 5 years now, very little time has been spent on the garden in between babies and refurbishing what was an old wreck of a house, so this was the first ‘proper’ year of the garden. It’s taken this year for me to adjust my thinking to the scale of this garden: my two previous gardens were small. The first was a mere 6 x 10 foot rectangle outside the front of our tiny terrace, and the second, although it was 60 x 20 feet, had only about 20 x 20 feet of garden due to shed/hardstanding at the bottom and a deck & pond at the top, and of that there was a 10-foot diameter circular lawn taking up most of the space. So those gardens were pretty small scale, and needed very little to make an impact. In this garden, sticking to the plants I’ve used before has made very little impression on the overall garden, and I’ve come to realise that I do need to be looking at the ‘architectural’ section to be able to make the same sorts of statements here – I need to think on a much bigger scale (the garden is 100 x 40 feet), and consider bringing into play some plants with a slightly more invasive habit that I’d previously ever have considered.

What I’ve also had to accept is that I currently don’t have the time for a full planting programme of both vegetables and more ornamental elements, so I need to move away from trying to do both and concentrate on the vegetables, and bring the ornamental plants in more slowly than I’d hoped. It means working one bed at a time, rather than taking a scatter-gun approach and trying to do a bit of everything, and buying in the plants at a smaller stage of development and allowing them to grow into their space … I’m also thinking that I need to go adventuring to the non-trade wholesale nurseries, and pay more attention to local village fairs etc, where plant stalls might be found – those, at least, will be a good bet for plants that do well locally. I’ve got tags, too, on plants in friends’ gardens, so that ‘when you split these’ or ‘can I have a cutting of’ is becoming a more common request. It will take a long time, but I had both the previous gardens for 8 or more years, so it’s good to remind myself that these things take time.

I’m still holding to my intention to make this a healing garden – not only in terms of a predomination of edible and medicinal plants, but also in spiritual terms, so that it’s a welcoming, peaceful place that enchants and intrigues, drawing people into it. At the moment, the children need the open space of the lawn (football pitch), but as their needs change, I’m hoping to change the garden with them, creating more complexity and privacy, little surprises and quiet corners where they can go and chat with friends or just be out of sight for a bit. Of course, to realise that, I *will* need the bigger, architectural pieces – plants & structures – to create the frame which places the rest of the garden in context, complementing & contrasting the different areas and making them into a coherent whole.

It’s a very long-haul piece of work, and sometimes it feels a bit daunting, to be standing at the bottom of the mountain and looking up, until I remember that the journey is already begun and I am in the foothills. Yes, there is a long way to go, but I have started and I will get there, eventually, if I just keep at it. Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’ll never finish – after all, they do say that a gardener’s work is never done – but in this case I am prepared to accept that the journey is as important as the destination, and I’m looking forward to spring, and to picking up where I’ve left off.

Bugz. I haz them.

I knew going away on holiday in the middle of the growing season would cause me problems … I hadn’t, though, quite anticipated the scale.

It’s so terribly demoralising. Two weeks ago, I left a bunch of good healthy crops all on the verge of being ready to harvest, and I was in lip-smacking anticipation that I’d come back from holiday to find my garden overflowing with good things – courgettes and beans and cabbages and squashes and lettuce and spring onion and tomatoes and and and and …

Instead, I come back to find that contrary to the reported weather, it’s been very dry in the garden, so although nothing has outright died, the ground is very dry and hard and there hasn’t been much productive growth.

That, actually, I could live with.

What is appalling is how quickly the pests have moved in and DECIMATED what I have. I’ve taken out my Rodale’s guide to Companion planting and given it a very stern talking to.

The companion planting of marigolds and fennel and other distractions has not deterred the various cabbage white butterflies one whit, and where I went away leaving burgeoning ranks of cauliflower and red cabbage and calabrese and savoys and purple sprouting brocoli, now all I have is stiff, pathetic, skeleton-veined remnants, fragments of their former selves. What’s more, those fragments were still crawling with the drasty caterpillar fiends that had so ravaged them.

War is now declared. The children are horrified at my casual genocide, but I’m going to save those plants if it’s humanly possible to do so. To that end, I’ve been out in the garden (with my gardening gloves on) hand-picking the wretches of my blasted brassicas and dropping them into a bucket of water. Caterpillars can’t swim, but, as I said to Honey: it’s them or you that gets the meal – what’s it to be?

I know I do tell them that one shouldn’t harm living things, but I find it amazing that they can get tender-hearted over ravening pests, but don’t turn a hair when they eat the ever-so-much-cuter lambs and pigs and cows and chickens that pass over their plates. Admittedly, the critters aren’t slaughtered in front of them, which I’m sure makes a difference, but to me a bug is a bug is a bug. Unless it’s a spider or a ladybird, both of which are very welcome in my garden.

It gets worse: the dry weather has destroyed my lettuce, and what didn’t shrivel has been mightily snacked on by the slugs and snails, as have the beans and peas, and they also seem to have a particular fondness for courgette and squash flowers. I’d hoped the gastropod effect would be pretty minimal whilst I was away, but it seems I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by their apparent absence and the dry spell before we went away.

I don’t use slug pellets: although I’m not an organic purist, I do try to avoid using chemicals on the garden as much as possible, and try for natural solutions to problems and pests as far as possible. With the slugs and snails, although there are organic pellets available, I worry about the onward effect in terms of the birds and hedgehogs that include these pests in their diet of wholesale elimination. I’ve tried various other deterrents – the ’slug stoppa’ granules had no effect, and, worse, looked like cat-litter on the ground which had obvious and unpleasant results. Beer traps just seem to attract more slugs into the garden, and copper rings are expensive and have little apparent effect, particularly when trying to protect a whole bed rather than an individual plant. I tried – once – my grandmother’s tried-and-tested method of going hunting through the garden and snipping them in half with a pair of scissors … whilst most forms of bug-death are tolerable, that’s one I can’t repeat – I almost lost my lunch, and just the memory of it makes me want to heave. My compromise had been to hunt them down in the early evening and collect them in a lidded bucket, and then alternate between releasing them into the woods, a good hundred metres away from my garden, and offering them up the next morning on the bird feeder.

This evening, my desire for vengeance got a bit blood-curdling: instead of my usual method, every one of the blighters got dumped into the bonfire pile.

Yes. I did light it.

I’m not sure how many of the plants will recover and go on to produce anything edible … but I’m going to be doing my best to help the garden recover in the next few weeks in the hope I can salvage something out of it.

What it means going forward, I’m not sure. It’s been a hard and painful lesson, but I’m loath to net the vegetable patches and swathe things in horti-fleece, purely because it is *so* unsightly, and I certainly don’t want to start spraying my food with chemicals just to keep the pests off – but they have been so much worse this year than in previous years, so I don’t know what to do for the best.

I guess the planning for next season will have to include some more research on natural pest control methods – and I’m wondering too, with the brassicas, if either spreading them out around the garden more, so that there’s less concentration of attractive fragrance for the butterflies and/or companion planting with different strong-scented plants might work  too. I sense some library time coming up. I guess we might also have to reconsider when we holiday, although I feel a little churlish refusing to holiday because of the garden. I wonder if I could find another gardener with co-ordinating holidays who’d sort my pests out & do a little watering & light weeding if I did the same in return? That’d be good ….

My one consolation is that the root crops – carrots and beetroot and parsnip and potatoes – are all looking very splendid. I just hope that I don’t find them riddled with carrot-fly when I dig them, or that the same evil weevil that tunnelled through my radishes with such abandon has also savaged my remaining healthy-looking plants.

Sweets of sun and flower …

 

Noon, hiving sweets of sun and flower

Has fallen on dreams in wayside bower,

Where bees hold honeyed fellowship

With the ripe blossom of her lip;

All silent are her poppied vales

And all her long Arcadian dales,

Where idleness is gathered up

A magic draught in summer’s cup.

Come, let us give ourselves to dreams

By lisping margins of her streams.

(From “A Summer Day”, L M Montgomery)

 

 

Summer has stolen over my garden, and the straggly, underpopulated days of spring have given away to lush, flower-crammed borders and burgeoning crops.

 

Garden Chair by Nutmeg66 (Flick Creative Commons)

For a gardener, it’s a difficult time of year, even more so than Spring’s mad rush to get everything planted.

In Spring, I’m rich with hope and the frantic need to get the planting done so that I can reap the benefits in the summer – the soil treatments and early bug treatments set the scene, and when those first shoots start coming, it’s pure heaven.

Sadly, that Spring euphoria fades and there are inevitable disappointments – something doesn’t germinate (none of my native umbelliferous experiments – angelica, caraway, anthriscus sylvestris, yarrow – amounted to much, and I only got two of the eight hyssop I planted to germinate), or else there are losses following potting on. These are particularly devastating, I think! I had a wonderful batch of 20 rudbeckia seedlings, and Bellaboo got hold of them and de-potted almost the whole lot, and I’m left with 3 now. Very demoralising, as is the realisation that the pace of work doesn’t ease up just because the weather is hotting up and the planting’s over – there’s still a huge amount of work to be done with watering, weeding, maintenance and pest control.

Come the summer, and just when everyone is coming over idle, the second wave of gardener’s enemies invade … weeds and pests come marching in, and the plentiful germination of spring gets decimated unless the gardener keeps a watchful eye out … and even then, there’s always casualties.

I try to take an organic, non-toxic approach to gardening – I use little in the way of pesticides and herbicides, preferring to rely on natural remedies and hard graft to keep everything healthy. I’m happier doing it that, in part because I grow a fair amount of my own veg and I don’t like the idea of ingesting nasty chemicals (it’s one of the reasons I grow my own), and in part because the children are in the garden almost all the time during the summer months, and I don’t want them eating slug pellets or other nasties by mistake. But it’s a labour intensive process and this weekend I’ve been sorely tempted to resort to chemical warfare.

We have a number of perennial pests – from slugs, snails and aphids to brambles, nettles and bindweed – that always threaten to rampage through the garden at this time of year, given half a chance. The slugs and snails I’ve been dealing with using nematodes, and the destruction of every single one of the nicotiana seedlings I planted out this week have pointed out that I urgently need to retreat. It’s also proved once and for all that the ‘Slug Stoppa’ granules I bought as backup this year are worse than useless, so I shan’t be bothering with them again. So far, I’ve been able to clear the aphid clusters on the roses and herbs using my gran’s old remedy of dissolved soap flakes in water and misting the infected plants … I’m wondering whether or not to order a job lot of ladybirds and see what they make of all the little critters. It’s strange that we haven’t seen nearly so many this year as we would normally. I’m a little worried about them.

Another reason I don’t use pesticides is the bees. I grow a fair old range of fragrant flowering plants, including sage, lavender, borage and rosemary, so we get a lot of our fuzzy friends in the garden. Despite the panic elsewhere about the declining number of bees, it’s been very busy with them in my garden – I just hope it carries on that way. Bees are on the list of things I ponder every year – alongside chickens – as to whether I can add them into the mix. This year, again, I concluded against, but I will, possibly when Bella starts school, see if I can spend a day or so with a local beekeeper just to see how I get on with it. It’s one of those things – alongside country wine making – that I long to be able to do.

It’s been good fun getting the two older children involved in the garden more this year: both on bee watch – which they’ve thoroughly enjoyed – and in clearing out the nasties. Honey, in particular, has developed a peculiar affinity with caterpillars, and has spent at least an hour every day in amongst the brassicas clearing all the cabbage white grubs into her caterpillar hotel – a move that I’m more than happy with! Rumpus has contented himself with the odd shield bug and a collection of ants in his bug gallery, but it’s a start, and they’re both getting good at spotting ‘good’ predator bugs and ‘bad’ munchers and taking action. I’m enormously proud of both myself and them that they’re much less squeamish about bugs than I am, and they’ve set up a protective watch over a mother-spider guarding her big bundle of eggs under the curved arch of a savoy leaf … they’re desperate to see the spiderlings hatch … I’m just hoping they don’t do what the ‘daddy long legs’ spiderlings do and eat their mother when they hatch out …

Of course, the real joy at this time of year is that we’re starting to pull in our first few harvests. The winter-sown Shenshyu onions and shallots came up last weekend and are drying on racks - I’m looking forward to plaiting them up and hanging them in the kitchen – and it was wonderful to see that my planning paid off and the peas and beans were just coming nicely in between the onion rows and ready to be staked: that bit of successional growing worked so well, I’m thrilled. The sweetcorn and squashes have gone out in those beds, and I’m just keeping a bit of an eye on their performance in case they need a feed. We’ve been getting young lettuce leaves for a while now – I’m so disappointed that the saved seeds from last year of cucumbers and peppers didn’t germinate – and we’re getting the first tomatoes, too, now – my taste buds are just tingling in anticipation, as there’s nothing as sweet as a home-grown tomato, even the organic ones don’t come close!

We’ve had a couple of early cabbage – Spring Hero – which worked so well I shall be putting them on the list for next year, and the first sowing of early peas – Feltham Firsts – is podding up nicely. I keep running an experimental hand over them but I think it will be at least another week before we can gorge ourselves on them!!

But the glory of this season is – and always will be – the strawberries. OH MY, the strawberries. We are in strawberry heaven, taking off a good punnet’s worth every day of the beauties, and most of them getting eaten before they make it to the kitchen … the crop this year is astonishing – such good size and wonderful flavour, and the quantities are just mindblowing. Bellaboo has eaten so many that she doesn’t want any more, but Honey and I adore strawberries and there’s no stopping us! But it is as much fun to wander around the garden with Bellaboo picking them – we have a little basket that she carries, and we pick them together and she carries them into the kitchen for washing – it’s such a precious little ritual we share because she’s so sweetly serious about it all – it’s her (first) very important job.

I’m over the moon that we’ve got little crops on both the blackcurrant and raspberry I planted this year – I really wasn’t expecting anything from them, so it’s lovely to see little cluster of black jewels on the currant, and the promise of a handful of raspberries on the canes. I shall be making sure I get to them before the blackbirds do!

It is gratifying that the hard work of the last couple of months is paying off, if rather daunting that there’s still a lot of hard work to be done when I’d like to be lying back and enjoying the sunshine – the front garden is a neglected, weed-ridden disgrace that I absolutely *must* attend to this week, so if the weather’s good the house may well have to tend to itself whilst I garden – but there’s something so relaxing about pottering one’s way through a vegetable bed and checking out what new delights are on their way – the first of the calabrese are starting to head, for example – whilst grubbing out the little weedlets, that it doesn’t always feel like work.

And, of course, now the summer harvest is starting to set, it’s time to start planning for the next rotation, and the next set of planting …. time to go back and see what worked and what didn’t, and to start pawing through those seed catalogues for the late summer/autumn plantings and the next wave of veggie delights …

It’s true what they say: a gardener’s work is never done, but I don’t think I’d want it any other way.

Garden diary: late April

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! Ev’n as the flowers in spring;

To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

Grief melts away

Like snow in May,

As if there were no such cold thing.

(George Herbert, ‘The Flower’)

The garden at this time of year is pretty much full throttle – there’s the big planting programme to get through, and of course the vegetables and flowers aren’t the only things getting busy – the weeds are awake and active, and so are the pests. This weekend has been all about the garden, and between glorious sunshine & the children’s desire to get involved, it’s been a wonderful experience. However, taking the truism ‘a gardener’s work is never done’ to heart, we only managed to get halfway round the garden. I’m hoping that next weekend the weather will hold so we can get around the other half, and who knows – maybe even the front garden will get weeded, too.

Come with me on a tour …..

In number 1 bed, called ‘The Boat’ because of its shape, closest to the back door & nestled between a curved block-paved path from the patio around the outside of the garden and the lawn, brassicas are succeeding legumes in the crop rotation. In the centre is an ornamental cherry (inherited the vile thing), and I have permanent sage and rosemary shrubs – our favourite herbs need to be close on hand. The sage isn’t looking very well - the leaves have all died on the central stems, although there is a lot of new growth at the base, and on the outer stems.  I’m not sure what that’s all about, but a little concerned as a Rosemary died there before – I did think I’d cleared out any possibly contaminated soil, but now I’m wondering. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it’ll be alright, but it seeded last year, so I’ve got plenty of little sage seedlings in the worst case. I need to find homes for them – can’t bear throwing out healthy plants! The early peas aren’t doing as well as I’d hoped, but considering they came from saved seed, this batch of Feltham Firsts looks wonderfully healthy, even if the germination didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. I’ve consolidated them into a smaller run over half the two-metre-wide bed. The early-sown brassicas have been planted out now, and are thriving, and successional sowings of Cauliflower (All Year Round), Cabbage (Savoy, Hispi & Kalibos), Calabrese and Purple Sprouting Broccoli’s are coming up – a further succession of everything went in this week. I had Calendula and Fennel in there last year, and although I thought I’d collected all the seeds to transfer down into the ‘hot’ bed down by the shed, I’ve still got a little population starting. I’ve moved around a third of the Calendula, kept a third of them in place to be companions for the brassicas, and dug the rest of them in. The Fennel has all been moved down to the hot bed – experience tells me it doesn’t transplant terribly well, but I’ll give it a good try. In one section, I’ve got a catch-crop of salad leaves alongside the Caulis – those were left from last year’s final sowing to self-seed, and it looks like I’ll be able to get me first harvest out of there as early as next week, which is tremendously exciting. I’ve planted dividing rows of parsley and sweet marjoram – one between Hispi & Savoy, and one between Savoy and Calabrese. There be strawberries here, too … I’ve interplanted one side of the bed with Borage, so it’ll be interesting to see how these stack up in terms of beneficial companion. The earlies have all got flowers on now, and they’re all putting on wonderful amounts of growth.

Outside the gate, down the side of the house in what was formerly a wasteland, we’re beginning to see signs of life in the fragrant wildflower meadow – I’m hoping that this is actually the wildflowers germinating, and not weeds . The transplants in – hosta for the dark corner, sweet rocket, german chamomile, heather, aubretia and the baby philadelphus in its outsize pot – are all thriving (though we could do with a day or so of good rain showers). The strawberry plant I moved in as an experiment is looking ill – a little extra tlc needed the next few days, I think.

In the corner, between the fence by the back gate and the boundary fence, there’s a wedge-shaped bed like a slice of pizza. Onion family are succeeding Brassicas in this one … though my brassicas from last year are rather feeble. (My defence is that Bellaboo was too small to tolerate extended gardening sessions). This is a problem area – one of two where we’ve had to clear building rubble to get a viable bed – and I despair of ever properly clearing it of white-tile fragments. I think I’ve got them all cleared, and then it rains, and there’s another crop, though fewer each time. I think that until it’s turned a couple more years of crops (and had the associated soil improvings) it won’t be happy – this is it’s third rotation – it’s done legumes and then brassicas, now into onions because I just don’t dare put root crops in there yet. But there is good news, despite the bolted Savoys! We have heads forming on the Cauliflowes – the children were impressed by that, absolutely awestruck, which made my day, and the purple sprouting brocoli is sprouting purple florets. Hooray!!! The calabrese is still looking a bit dismal, though – hopefully it’ll make a late comeback and surprise us. In terms of new sowings, I’m finally getting Leeks (King Richard) germinating, though I thought I’d blown it for a while there. Likewise, the spring onions are coming up, if patchily, but I’m pleased nonetheless because they’re one of those crops I can *never* get to grow. The onion sets I put in – red and whites – are sprouting prolifically despite Bellaboo’s repeated invasions and trampling, and I’ve put catch-crops of salad leaves in between one row and coriander in another. I adore coriander … I always have it growing inside in pots, but just think the outdoor-grown is so much tastier! The beetroots – another companion planting experiment – are coming on nicely inbetween the bolted Savoys and the just-coming-good Spring Heros. What’s surprised me most, though, is that I had some French Marigolds in last year as companions, and these have seeded and are coming up again this year! Wooot! (So are the nasturtiums, but you can’t keep a nasturtium down, I find).

Further down the boundary is a double strip of a couple of metres, either side of the path – this is Honey’s garden and is sown along traditional pretty cottage garden lines – she’s got an antique lavender and a wigelia (covered in buds, hooray!) and some hebe in there, and aubretia, dianthus, heather, thyme, campanula, geraniums and iris, and we’ve got lobelia, sweet william, cosmos and echinacea seedlings coming along for it, too – it’ll look glorious when it’s all planted & in flower. We had mystery bulbs coming up – neither Honey nor I could remember what we’d planted – with buds on, it’s clear they’re alliums. I am absolutely gobsmacked by the arrival of clematis in this part of the garden – uninvited & unplanted, it has popped up beneath the beech sapling (an invader from the woods beyond our boundary – more welcome than than the brambles & bindweed ) and is quit happily scrambling up the little tree. We’re wondering what colour it will be when – if – it flowers.

At the little paved patio at the end of Honey’s garden, about half-way down the boundary fence, the greengage I planted this year is putting on good growth and I’ll need to train the first cordon shoots very soon. Hopefully it’ll help make a feature of this little area – we don’t use it, and despite the pretty yellow tea-roses at each corner, it doesn’t get much notice. It’d be nice to change that …. though I’m not sure how, yet. With so many other areas under construction this year, I kind of want to wait to let everything bed in for a couple of seasons before I tackle anything as lare-scale as we’ve done this year.

Beyond Honey’s garden, and the tyre swing in the big oak – just outside our garden, but enough  banches overhang our garden that it might as well be in!! – is the ‘hot’ bed. It’s called the ‘hot’ bed because it gets full sun all day, but because it’s shaded by oak and palm trees, it’s desert-dry. At the moment, it’s got two massively overgrown Phormium’s in, and whilst I love the architectural qualities of the NZ Flax, two together is a bit overwhelming in that space (another inherited headache). This became (even more) apparent today after I gave them a good hard prune: the snow we had earlier this year damaged its leaves – they got bent & broken, & the broken parts are dying off – so they both looked very ill. Beneath them, the ground is dry and completely drained of nutrients, but there’s still a brave show of what looks like Crocosmia shoots trying to come up. I’m wondering if I should take a hedge trimmer to the Phormium every year to give the other stuff in the bed a chance. Ideally, I should take one of them out, but received wisdom is that nothing short of a mini-JCB-digger will get them out, & even then it’s a struggle to shift ‘em, once they’ve got to the size ours are. I suppose the other option is to extend the bed so that I can get some ground-covers in, which might hold in moisture a bit better, but that’s a lot of work & will incur further protest on the ‘enclosures’ act already causing lawn-based controversy. Anyway, with the dead/dying growth lopped out, the bed looks much better, so I’m going to extend the planned rudbeckia, calendula, sunflower, fennel & nasturtium mix a bit further and see how we get on. I’ve worked in some compost – from our own heap & lovely crumbly black-stuff it is too, whoo-hooo – and given it a good water for now, and hopefully it will take some planting in a few weeks time, once everything’s ready to go in the ground.

The small plot between the hot bed and the shed, where I cleared junk & built the children a den, got sowed with chamomile & an assortment of old flower seeds hanging around from previous years – there’s signs of germination there, which is tremendously exciting, and the lilac shoots I planted to start a living hut with - like willow, but I’m hoping that I can do the same with lilac: imagine a live bower covered in blossom – how heavenly (fingers crossed I can pull it off, eh?) – have all taken, so progress!!! It’ll be a few years before the vision is realised, but it’s a start.

And that’s as far as we got! Next week, I’ve got to weed and sow successions of root-crops in the raised beds, and clear the shady garden beneath the wisteria of rubbish & other pests, and, of course, the regular grim task of digging out dandelions, but progress this year is fantastic, and the garden is really starting to come together …. still a long way to go to the fantasy potager I dream off, but a good few steps closer ….

Warning! Cheese contains milk

It’s been one of those days today.

I took Honey and her best friend into town to see ‘Race to Witch Mountain’ – I enjoyed it rather more than I expected I would, which is a bonus, but it still wasn’t the greatest film I’ve ever seen – I thought that both The Last Mimsy & Nim’s Island were better both in terms of acting and storyline, but as an introduction to your general blockbusting thriller, it was pretty good. (The girls both had a wonderful time, which I guess is the main thing).

Anyway.

What bugged my bear was the immediate demands that we visit McDonalds, almost as soon as we’d arrived in the town centre. I was appalled. Not so much by Honey’s friend, but by the fact that HONEY wanted to go there – I’m blaming advertising and peer pressure on that one – and not all my arguments about the unhealthiness of the food, the environmental impacts of the production processes of that food, the unnecessary packaging &c held any weight with them. It got to the point where I thought that if I held out on them, then I’d have a major scene on my hands & I didn’t feel up to coping with it, so I caved in and we went in. It was every bit as bad as I remembered, and the handful of healthy options didn’t actually bear much resemblance to the cheery pictures up on the walls. They both had Happy Meals (I wasn’t happy, I can tell you) & I had a coffee. The coffee was like dishwater – just vile (the only coffee worse than that I have ever tasted, I had at Brooklands Museum last week) – and the food they got was horrendously oversalted (I use *no* salt in my cooking, ever) to disguise the fact that, actually, it had no taste. Honey’s friend wanted coke, and I actually phoned her mum to double check because I was so horrified by the request. IMO, children shouldn’t drink it, but her mum was fine & seemed a bit puzzled by my call. So, she had coke and I kept my opinions to myself. I don’t think Honey really enjoyed her meal (and she was hungry again 2 hours later), but I don’t think she’d ever admit that.

After the film, Honey’s friend came home to play for a while, and we were all out in the garden enjoying the sunshine. I was sowing seeds and generally puttering about in the garden, and Honey’s friend was watching me …. I invited them to help, and they both joined in quite happily with putting in the seeds and watering them and sticking in the plant labels on the end of each row. But I nearly knocked myself out falling over backwards when Honey’s friend announced that she didn’t realise carrots grew in the ground, and on that basis she wasn’t going to eat them any more ‘because they are dirty’. WTF?!?!?!? I know not everyone has the advantage of outdoor space to the same extent that we do, but we’re not a deprived inner-city urban area by any stretch of the imagination, and the school is quite hot on environmental issues and gardening etc – the children have their own veg garden at school, and suchlike. So it amazed me that the child was so ignorant of where food came from. And it took me aback that she viewed anything coming out of the ground as ‘dirty’ and hence not edible.

So, when it came to tonight’s dinner, and desert of apple-pie, with cheese on the side, and cream, and ice-cream, I was gobsmacked to see warning labels on the cheese, cream and ice-cream: “This product contains milk”. No kidding. (Do people really not know that?)

The whole sorry series of events has got me thinking, and drawing some pretty big pictures in my head. Firstly, about how detached we, as a society, are from food production, and secondly about a sort of squeamishness around dirt and food and our bodies which is, I think, connected to the first and not entirely healthy.

When children don’t know that carrots grow in the ground, something must be wrong with how we are buying our food. When food that is produced to the lowest possible cost, stuffed with fat, anti-biotics and growth-hormones, and then oversalted to disguise the bland taste, there is something wrong with how we are thinking about our food. When you can buy a whole chicken in the supermarket for £3 and no-one stops to think about how little it must have cost the farmer to get that chicken to the supermarket for so little money, there is something wrong with the way we produce our food.

All of these things make me feel that there has been, at some point, a fundamental disconnect between the production and consumption of food. It has ceased to be a means of fuelling our bodies, and has become …. I don’t know what. A leisure activity, that competes with other leisure activities for our time and financial resources? But somehow joyless, when flavour and texture and variety are replaced by some kind of homogenous paste calculated to be somehow inoffensive, rather than a healthful delight, and when it becomes more about consuming as much as possible of a given item, rather than anticipating and savouring rare and seasonal delights.

My asparagus is just starting to come up. I will have a month, maybe a little more, of asparagus frenzy, and then it will be over for another year. It’s worth the wait, and that single month of ecstatic gorging on my tiny harvest sees me through. I don’t get the same pleasure from supermarket-bought asparagus, forced on out of season and flown in from who-knows-where, and ultimately flavourless and unsatisfying, because it has been robbed of its unique rarity value. The same goes for strawberries, raspberries and the other soft fruit, and though I do preserve some of it, there’s little that can beat the joy of a sun-warm strawberry straight from plant to mouth. It seems to me that in our quest for instant gratification, we’ve lost both the pleasure of food, and the connection between ourselves and the earth.

The squeamishness and overly-fastidious obsessions with cleanliness seem to go hand-in-hand with that. Any number of friends think it’s appalling that I generate my own compost rather than buying it (sterilised) from the garden centre. Honey’s friend thinks it’s appalling that carrots grow in the dirty ground. My neighbour is appalled that I let my children pick and eat the (dirty) blackberries growing wild in the wood the other side of our garden fence. People don’t like to think about the food they eat coming from the ground, or walking about on it. They want it neat and clean and with no trace of a natural origin on it. They want it processed and neat, so that it gives no clue to its provenance. A friend of mine won’t handle raw meat unless she’s got latex gloves on her hands, won’t make stock because it means handling the bones.

These are not particularly enjoyable tasks, but they are not as disgusting as she makes them out to be, and what bemuses me is that her attitude is not untypical. The preference is for the ready-meal, so that the consumer doesn’t have to think about or handle the food in order to eat it; so that the food bears little resemblance to the plant or animal from which it came and the consumer doesn’t have to think about where it came from and what’s been done to it to get it to the table, totally divorced from the production process.

The fact that there even *is* a “production process” is appalling. Food is *grown* not *made*. It comes from the ground, not from factories, and the more steps there are between ground and plate makes it *worse*, not *better*. Just because these processes disguise the food so that our squeamish sensibilities aren’t offended by the identification of plant or animal matter on our plates doesn’t make it better – each step reduces the healthfulness of the food, both in the process itself, and in terms of the quality requirements of the original product. Arguments that there is insufficient land to support greater simplicity in the food chain simply don’t hold water – large-scale industrialised agriculture is massively inefficient in both land-usage and yields, and unsustainable in the longer-term because of the need to compensate the efficiencies with increasingly toxic chemical fixes.

The best food is the food that has not been messed about with, that comes off the land and onto our plates with the minimum of distance, time and interference, that has not been subjected to artificial growth enhancers and/or disease inhibitors and that takes account of natural growing rhythms, seasons and locality. I think we need to fundamentally rethink our attitudes to food and set aside our squeamishness to recognise that we cannot divorce ourselves from the growth of our food: we are all part of a great circle – from dust we came and to dust we return. The compost cycle is the quickest and easiest way to grasp that ….within a short period of time, plant matter is broken back down into earth, it goes into the garden and nourishes the food we grow that in turn nourishes us, and the plant waste is composted. And so it goes on. If it can’t be composted, then we shouldn’t be using it, IMO.

To make that connection again, to return to that sustainable cycle of knowledge and understanding  that the earth supports and sustains us rather than offering us a disease-ridden threat is something we need to do, urgently. To change our thinking so that we view food as an essential part of nourishing our minds and bodies rather than a leisure activity, is something we need to do, urgently. To turn away from over-processed zero-benefit food to fresh, healthful alternatives benefits us, and it benefits the planet. 

It’s time to change.

Cook from scratch, eat local food, in season, bought from local producers and *not* the supermarket.

It doesn’t take a lot of time, it will save you a lot of money, and it might just save your life.

Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.

The Enkindled Spring, D H Lawrence

Another day of gardening . . . . I finished the big clearout of the junk that had piled up beside the shed, and found a little area with potential . . .

Possibly, I am the only person who looks at this little scrap of wasteland and thinks ‘A-ha – magic spot for a fairy-den’, but I can see that it would work with a woven living hut – I’m thinking lilac rather than the conventional willow or hazel, because I already have lilac there, and just think of when it blossoms . . . . – and the ground carpeted in moss and with ferns and other woodland lovelies.

Of course, the compost bin will have to move, but that’s no great shakes.

So that will be my project for this year, I think. Which is good, because that means that the Great Lawn Battle can go into ceasefire for another year. We have a constant tussle, t’o-m & I, regarding the lawn. I think it’s a waste of space, and that the effort needed to maintain the thing far outweighs its benefits. He sees it as a necessary recreational element in the garden. We’re more or less in equilibrium on it – he does the heavy work, and I nibble away at the edges, guerilla fashion, coralling small areas around the edges into other uses. After spending a good part of today raking leaves & scarifying the wretched thing, I’d like to get rid of it all. Of course, I can see that with the children needing the space to rush about in, it will stay with us in some shape or form for the foreseeable future, but its days are numbered, mark my words . . .

One of the fascinating things is that, without any prompting, the children have already subjected the new area to a thorough exploration, and it is now opened ground for games and a new route for expeditions. In itself, that is well worth the effort of hoiking out all the old rubbish.

That clearout and scarifying the lawn took up most of the day, but I prefer to spend more time and get things done properly, than to rush through it just for the sake of ticking things off the to-do list.

And because gardening frees up my mind to do other things whilst my body is occupied in manual labour, I remembered how gardening helped me out of the big pity-party I threw myself when I was diagnosed with Aspergers . . . back then, I couldn’t see any benefits or advantages to it at all, I just saw a big fat label sitting on my social incompetencies confirming the view I held of myself as a total freak. Only by excavating and rebuilding a derelict garden did I come to realise that the obsessive detailing, systematising and compulsion to stick out a task until it’s done to perfection was actually a great strength, something that differentiated me from others (who got bored and abandoned the job) and that I could use to my advantage.

This came back to me whilst I was hand-weeding the miniscule weed seedlings springing up in the brassica beds. Anyone other than me would have picked off the bigger ones and left it at that, but I had to make sure I got every last one of the little swine. And found it interesting, comparing this year’s crop of weeds with last year’s.

We have three perennial nuisances in this garden: brambles, dandelions and bindweed. I know I will never eradicate either, so it will always be war. What is interesting is that we have a different ‘new’ weed invading en masse each year. In the first year, meadow buttercups – everywhere, until I rooted them all out. The year after – nettles. The year after that – willowherb. We still get the odd one or two strays of each, but nothing like the epidemics we faced in their ‘year’ of tyranny. This year, it looks like it’s going to be vetch – I have pulled monstrous handfuls of the little swine out already. I’m hoping I’ve got to it early enough, though I suspect that this is just the first wave.

Anyhow, with the sprinkling of early colonisers wiped out, and the beds given a light hoeing over (very heavy clay soil here, and though I’ve been improving it year on year, it’s still unworkable at this time of year), the brassicas are all looking very happy and healthy, though I noticed that something’s been snacking on the larger leaves. Will need to investigate that and put a stop to it.

This early in the year, it can only be slugs and snails. In part, I know I bring it on myself, because I persist in viewing the fallen leaves as a mulch to keep the worst of the frost off the tender early shoots so leave them on the flower beds, but I equally know that those same leaves are a nice cosy winternest for the dreaded pesties. A bit of a catch-22 situation, but I have a solution: nematodes.

Slimy things of my garden: you better run, because there will be nowhere to hide.

I have only got one bed left to weed and clear down in the back garden, and then I need to sort out the front garden. Now there’s a place that tempts me . . . our gravelled drive is the devil itself to weed, and I appall myself by dreaming of taking a blowtorch to the weeds and obliterating them for good and all. But we don’t do things like that round here, so I’ll be down on my knees picking them out one by one again this year. Sigh.

But on the up side, I planted some cauliflower seeds this evening. More to come tomorrow . . .

The sun does arise

The Sun does arise,

And make happy the skies.

The merry bells ring,

To welcome the Spring.

From The Ecchoing Green, William Blake (Songs of Innocence & Experience)

We have had the most glorious day today, and there was no way I was ever going to anything but work in the garden. Such a fresh and bright day to blow all the cobwebs away, and it stunned me, given that we had snow on the ground a couple of weeks ago, how far along everything is now.

Next to the pergola on the patio, the lilac has leaf buds, as does the tree peony. I’m thrilled, because that was a new acquisition last year, and I wasn’t convinced it would survive. The big rose (Generous Gardener) is covered in leaf-buds, all flushed and swollen, and there a little sheaths of garlic spearing up around its base. Walking off the patio, the apple tree is in bud, and its companion blackcurrant bush has tender red buds up its stems. The redcurrant is a little behind it, still dormant. Poking through the grass beneath the apple tree are the sharp green blades of daffodils and the feathery spikes of crocus leaves. The anthriscus and angelica seeds that didn’t germinate indoors last autumn . . . I saved the trays, so I just dusted them into the ground around the apple tree, and we’ll see what happens – they might be happier, tho I’ll admit it’s a long shot. Still, nothing to lose, and we’ll see how it goes.

The early raspberry canes either side of the pergola-path down the garden are showing buds, and the garlic is up  amongst the raspberry canes as well. The first whorls of aquilegia are fragile grey-green sparks against the dark earth, and we have pale tight buds nestled into the thick, fleshy leaves of the primula.

And there is pussywillow on the Kilmarnock . . .  showed them to Rumpus and he went wild for the softness and stood for ages, stroking them as if they were little kitten-tails.

Down at the bottom of the garden, it’s almost as exciting. Underneath all the leaf-litter, there are signs of life – the first shoots of lily-of-the-valley, anemones and more primroses, and then the horseradish and rhubarb are just poking themselves up out of the ground. The artemesia I thought was dead has got a couple of tiny pale-green leaf-buds, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed it will make a comeback.

In the raised beds, the onions and shallots have overwintered well, and despite my concerns about how damp and cold it has got, their doesn’t appear to be any lasting damage. I’m a little disappointed that I have no spring onions – I’m not sure whether I had a duff batch of seed, or if I’ve got a bigger pest problem than I thought at first. I fight a constant battle against the demon slugs, so they are prime suspects, but I don’t usually lose en entire crop. The same goes for the carrots I tried to force overwinter – despite cloching and fleece, they didn’t make it. I am wondering if I underwatered . . . . Sigh. I have cheered myself up by planting the first succession of this year’s carrots – Artemesia – in raised bed box #1 – it’s nicely fleeced and cloched for the next couple of weeks, and I’m going to nematode the whole zone tomorrow evening . . .

The weeds always seem to get a headstart on me, but hopefully they’re not too out of control just yet. I’ve been around the garden and uprooted the brambles making their first invasion attempt. Sometimes, it is demoralising to realise that this battle will continue for as long as we live here, given that I encourage them on the other side of my fence. Is that NIMBYism taken too far? I just love the fruit, but I can’t have them taking over inside the garden. I had to face my annual mora dilemma – it always seems criminal to me that I have to grub up and throw away so many oak saplings every year, but given we are surrounded by four big old oaks, I’d be overrun if I didn’t, and attempts to give them away in previous years to *anyone* who will have them have never been successful. So. Into the bonfire pile they go.

I did the first bonfire this evening – I always have an internal struggle as to whether or not to burn the rubbish or not, and usually end up doing it despite my anxieties about carbon emissions (& I don’t care who says bonfires are caron neutral, I don’t believe them!). I split the leaf litter between the bonfire and the compost heap, but there’s always so much else that just doesn’t compost well at all – phormium leaves & bamboo leaves are a disaster in the compost heap, and because we hacked out the monster grapevines last year, I’ve got all of those to deal with as well. Most of the bigger stuff we’re using in the woodburner (no better than the bonfire I know), but there’s still a fair amount that will just end up getting torched. I console myself that at least the nutrient-rich ash will get worked back into the earth from which it came.

The shed got a good airing out, and I’ve cleared the sunnyside shelf ready for planting (one day, I *will* have a greenhouse) and cleaned and prepared the seed trays.

It looked a bit of a daunting task to start off with, but it seems that the decluttering indoors has just resulted in a pile of random articles being piled into the shed by way of storage. Those will be cleaned up and freecycled when I get a moment, and the worst debris will be tipped. I was surprised that I only filled one old-compost-bag’s worth of proper rubbish – I expected there to be more, but then I didn’t do a full shed tidy – just the bit I needed!! (It is a task that needs to be attacked, but I didn’t have the energy today).

The mound of nets and canes that got dumped alongside the shed at the end of last season is no more - the canes are in an old bucket with the bottom knocked out, buried in the ground to stop it toppling over. The nets – still need to be unpicked of dead leaves etc and folded and mended for this season, but that’s one for tomorrow. The bonus was that I unearthed a pile of old seed trays (I *knew* I had more than I found in the shed!) so I dumped the spent compost into the big compost bin, cleaned them up and now they’re in the pile ready for this year’s seeds.

Today’s *ewwwwwwww* award went to a plastic storage that had been left outside all winter and was full of rainwater and decomposing leaves. A part of me was tempted to sink it into the ground and make a mini-pond of it, because I was convinced that it must already be a mini-eco-system, but I’m afraid the smell was just too vile so I dumped the lot. I’ll clean *that* mess up tomorrow.

All in all, I got about half-way round the back garden yesterday. The forecast is that the weather will hold tomorrow, so that should get me around the rest of the back garden, and then we’ll be all set and ready for the planting season.

And then, I will have to tackle the front garden. It’s an evil job, but someone has to do it, otherwise I’ll have nowhere to put my pear-trees when they arrive in March. And that’s a very exciting prospect . . .