Monthly Archives: August 2015

Dead Air

Retaking territory after the weeds
Re-taking territory after the weeds

It rained yesterday.  Bucketloads.  Which was a good thing.  Not in the “It’ll do the garden good” kind of way, because the garden is plenty wet enough thanks.  No – it gave us the excuse to stay indoors and watch the battle of Good v Evil which was how the World Athletics Championships had been billed.  Having had the brilliance and farce / tragedy of the women’s Heptathlon as Ennis-Hill ruled supreme and Johnson-Thompson fouled out (tragically? stupidly?) we had the Bolt v Gatlin race for the soul of athletics.  The whole eternal battle thing was a little over the top, but it was pleasing to see the Good Guy beat the one wearing the metaphorical black stetson.  Usain rode off with gold on his golden Palomino.

Raspeberries are secure
Raspeberries are secure

After that breathless excitement it was time turn to our own Midday in the garden of Good and Evil.  There is plenty of decent stuff in the garden – such as my nice new fruit cage that I have manufactured out of the twisted remains of the gazebo that took a battering in the June gale, and the flowers that we planted are still blooming:  Cosmos are brilliant, Rudbeckia tall and proud, Gladiolae still glad to be gay and Veronica small but perfectly formed.

There are plenty of veg, if one looks hard enough:  courgettes ranging from petite to XXXXL, green beans, runner beans and dwarf french (although the climbing french for some reason have simply whithered on the cane).  Plenty of potatoes, summer psb, and spicy, peppery salad leaves.

Eggs have hatched
Eggs have hatched

But there is still a constant battle of Good and Evil here too.  The cabbage whites have managed to lay their eggs and we now wage war with the caterpillars which have stripped some plants clean.  The leeks which we planted before we went away, were razed to the ground within 24 hours so we raised the barricades for them and they seem to have recovered.  The lawn (well, grassy area) has more patches than a quilters’ convention with splodges of bare earth dotted all over showing a  constant reminder of mole activity.  And the roses have once again been given the sign of the black spot with death and decay to follow.  Not even the greenhouse is immune where the ants nests are abundant despite the ants always seeming to take to the air (I thought they all flew on one day and that was it?).  I am not sure how much damage they actually cause, but surely they cannot be helping?

But despite the dead air of the greenhouse there is still some promising news with the first two tomates finally making it to the table – about three months after the gardening giants of Galhampton had started cropping their wonder plants.   Ours will taste all the better for the wait – or at least that is how I try to argue it with Mrs B.

A Walk with a View #2

After the yellow weather warnings last night and the subsequent torrential rain this morning it seemed timely to post another photo album from one of our neighbourhood walks.  This morning as I set out at 8.30 with the dogs I looked west and where normally we can have views across to Glastonbury Tor and the levels, there was simply a grey curtain of doom. Within fifteen minutes we were all getting drenched. I was not too happy with it, but not half as pissed off as Fudge who slowed her progress to the point where it was difficult of ascertain if she was actually alive, with her tail buttoned down tight as if to keep her waterproof.  Only Ella – thick in the fur and thick in the head – was oblivious to the wet, romping through the wet grass.

Contrast this with Thursday when I was out at the same time enjoying a proper jamspangler of a day. In my previous post I captioned a picture “this is why we garden”.   I guess this album should be tagged “this is why we live here”.  In such warm – perhaps I would venture to say hot – weather I am always reminded of one of my favourite passages from John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath) as he describes a “land turtle” getting up and over a road:

“The sun lay on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding restlessly on many tender feet.  And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass: His hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along. The barley beards slid off his shell, and the clover burrs fell on him and rolled to the ground. His horny beak was partly open, and his fierce, humorous eyes, under brows like fingernails, stared straight ahead”

 

 

 

The secret of good timing

Michaelmas Daisies
Michaelmas Daisies

When my parents were developing the garden and working it up to produce vegetables on an industrial scale they used to start to plan their holidays around the seasons in the garden so that they would not be away when any particular veg was likely to be cropping, resulting in several tons of valuable fodder going to waste.

This is a state of mind that I have so far tried to avoid – with spectacular results if last year was anything to go by, as I spent most of July and August abroad, and the garden did its best to return to wilderness in my absence.

Where are the peas?
Where are the peas?

I did not learn my lesson this year:  at the start of July we decided to jet off to Cyprus – to the villa owned by my favourite brother-in-law.  The mangetout and sugar snap peas were peaking and by the time we returned the brief season was over apart from some very bumpy mangetout in amongst the weeds.  But I am pleased to say that my attempt at succession planting seems to have, well, succeeded so the later wave has enabled us to harvest plenty of peas over the last week or two.  By now though, they are beginning to gain the size and consistency of marbles.

Garlic in the barrow
Garlic in the barrow

Other stuff has happened to be ready to harvest while we were around, such as the shallots and garlic.  The shallots are fab and some of the garlic has been awesome – such as the Early Purple Wight and the Elephant Garlic.  The Lautrec Wight gave us smaller bulbs, but that might be something to do with it being a hard neck variety.

A trifle premature?
A trifle premature?

I have also gathered my onions in as the tops of some of them had “fallen” over so I thought I’d dig them all up. That might have been a trifle premature, but as the whole onion patch (along with the rest of the veg patch) was totally overrun with mature weeds, it was a bit difficult to to find the onions, let alone get an accurate estimate of their maturity.  I’m letting them dry a little before I store them.

On the upside, as they say stateside, ten days in Cyprus appears to have been the miracle cure for my back.  I still don’t know the extent of the damage as I had an MRI on 16th July but am still awaiting the results. But at least my vertebral column no longer feels as precarious as the piles of crockery in the Sword in the Stone kitchen scene so I have set to and cleared much of the undergrowth. I now have plenty of fresh soil to cultivate.  I can get back to the fun stuff now, planting and all that.  The leeks have gone in (finally – don’t know how they survived so long in a seed tray) and we will get some biannual flowers sorted too.  But there does suddenly seem to be a lot of spare garden and I have an overwhelming urge to plant.

So with a wave of the gardening wand…Higitus, Figitus…

 

Put your back into it

June Rose
June Rose

 

Back in mid June I suffered the ultimate gardening injury – a slipped disc.  Well, strictly speaking I understand it to be a herniated disc.  I wasn’t even gardening – I had simply been doing some house work in the flat, leaned across a table to straighten a piece of paper on the mantle piece and it felt like a piece of my back simply tore.  It was agony, though the next day it was not the back that hurt as much as my leg which felt like it had been hit repeatedly with a rounders bat.  I never realised this was what sciatica felt like.

So I was off gardening duties, but the same week the annual open day for Galhampton gardens took place.  We paid our monies and took our choice of the horticultural delights that the villagers wanted to display.  It was an interesting meander through gardens which ranged from little more than one herbaceous border and a lot of grass to others that had every last square centimetre prepped and planted with complimentary veg and flowers.  Others were open seemingly just to display their birds or their model railway.  It was an eclectic mix.

No Tomatoes
No Tomatoes

The one recurring theme that seemed to cause angst with Mrs B was the size of most people’s tomatoes.  Paddi’s already had good-sized fruit in June, while ours were only just ready to planted out, and other gardeners were seemingly about harvest a bumper crop when we made our grand tour.  Beware gardening envy – it is the green fingered monster that doth mock the peat on which it feeds.   Covetousness enveloped us as we viewed other tomatoes and devoured our horticultural self-respect as we ambled through in the warm June sunshine.

But when we got back to the garden we realised (or rather Mrs B accepted) that there were still plenty of good things in our patch that commended our piece of ground to us.  Like the mature trees such as the amelanchier and the bean tree, or the established herbaceous borders that we love so much or the more recent extension to the boomerang bed which we were hoping would come up strong with a range of perennials

Husband and wife back together again – with a tentative hug of unity (careful with the back dear).