Keeping it clean

Posted on August 10, 2016 by midlifegardener
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Athlete at rest

The Olympics have been dogged with stories of consumption of illicit substances and the availability or otherwise of athletes for drug testing.  I ponder this as I take a time trial trip around the garden with my fine athletic colleagues Ella and Fudge:  two canine athletes with distinctly differing body types and particular specialisms in athletic endeavour.  The older more experienced Fudge, with a lighter body for  exceptional agility and short sprinting speed is more of a gymnast with a strength on the floor exercises (though she prefers a bed).  The younger more heavily built Ella, whose brilliance at jumping onto a sofa is not matched by any ability to jump the same height into the back of a car,  is more geared towards to the water events, or ball sports.  She practices her ball skills around the garden, but she has a poor disciplinary record and repeatedly steps outside the competition area and into the flower beds resulting in constant warnings from officials.

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Full of beans?

To maintain their high levels of competitive activity, the dogs’ refuellng requires almost unbroken monitoring by the authorities.  Even though they are able to take in correctly prescribed amounts of pre-prepared, nutritionally well-balanced dry food twice a day, the dogs are always on the look out for any extra supplement to give them that competitive edge.  Rabbit droppings on the lawn are a favourite during competition, while the appearance of some recently picked beans by the front door proved too much of a temptation for Fudge.

Beyond the main Olympic Park, out in the counry the discovery of recently muck-spread fields provided the type of extra food stuff that is just so good you not only want to ingest it but smother your whole body with it.  So this morning both dogs got good cold showers after their walk.

Such behaviour flirts with illegality, but the bigger concern is Fudge’s failure to be present for testing.  The other night, when let out for her final chance to provde a urine sample before lights out, she simply failed to return.  As this is the third time in a year she has failed to be where she was supposed to be, she will have to accept the punishment that the is prescribed under the rules: namely the string of shame.  It is not the first (nor will it be the last) time she has fallen foul of the Whereabouts Rule, but like a Russian swimmer she remains unreprentent complaining of some big Labrador conspiracy to get her ejected from the side of the table.

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Currant affairs

Posted on August 10, 2016 by midlifegardener
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Blueberries & Raspberries

At the start of July we took a hard-earned break in the sun. Prior to our departure the red currants and black currants were just ripening up into what was promising to be a bumper harvest. With black membrane underneath the plants in the spring, they had not become overgrown with bind weed and nettles as in previous years and they were looking marvellous.  Not that red currants are a crop that I have ever felt any great joy in harvesting. When we were young all I remember them really being used for was an occasional summer pudding and copious jars of currant jelly. The kitchen store cupboard became a currant jelly connoisseur’s dream destination.

“What? you still have a case of the vintage ’78?”

“Yes we do – It’s still spreading well and has a lighter body and better bouquet than the otherwise equally fine ’82, with top notes of raspberry and new-mown grass on the finish”.

Yes – my parents went in for their currants in a big way.  So when we returned from holiday this year to discover that the birds had stripped every bush, I felt mixed emotions.   I was primarily relieved that I would not have to pick them, but also slightly guilty that I had not netted them and just a little awkward about how I would break the news to the Old Man.

As it turned out he broached the subject himself by telling me that he thought the currants “must be ready for picking soon”.

“No need” I replied, “the birds have already done the job for us”.  And what a job:  there was not a single currant of any denomination left on any bush.   Fortunately he did not seem too upset.  I suspect his jelly and jam-making days are over and there is only so much room in the freezer for bags of currants.

But with another holiday looming (we teachers have to squeeze our foreign trips in when we can) I realise the raspberries are just coming to fruition and I definitely do not want the blackbirds having them.  So I’ve erected the remains of last year’s wind-tossed gazebo with some new bird-proof netting so we might enjoy our raspberries properly.  The blueberries in the meantime have been happily ripening in their netted tent pole rig.

But I won’t be making any jam any time soon.

Raspberries
Blueberries
No Currants
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When the Living is Easy

Posted on August 1, 2016 by midlifegardener
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Veg Box: Peas, Courgettes, Potatoes, Black Kale, Radishes and Lettuce

The garden is in full swing giving up its gifts after the spring preparations and planting. In the past few weeks I have harvested garlic, shallots and onions.  While I see this as a continuation of what has been done in this patch for decades, I take some smug satisfaction from the fact that all three of these vegetables are crops with which I seem to have far more success than the Old the Man did in his day. He tells me that they never managed to get good hard onions which would store well and the garlic he tried only produced small bulbs of poor quality.

If this were a proper gardening bliog and I a proper gardener, this is where I would offer advice and some insight into my secrets for producing great crops.  Perhaps it is the spacing, the type of compost I use, or the thoroughness of my hoeing techniques. Maybe I make sure I harvest them only after three successive days of temperatures above 20 degrees and humidity below 50 per cent or maybe it’s how I dry them in a clean pine shed laid on galvanized steel netting three and a half inches off the floor.

But no – like most of my gardening exploits it is down to Google, hunch, and plain dumb luck. But it is always refreshing to hear TOM giving me praise on what I do and describing my efforts as superior to his. I don’t tire of receiving such accolades:  giving praise face to face to his off-spring is a habit which has taken him many decades to develop.  I will accept it with modesty and try to avoid the vanity and swell-headedness that it was assumed would inevitably follow any paternal approbation.

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Sweet Memories

Posted on July 22, 2016 by midlifegardener

20160717_184916Sweet peas are as good a reason to garden as any.  Their ease of cultivation along with the sheer abundance of flowers with their heady aroma make them the signature flower of any summer around here.

And they are a particular favourite of mine because they have always been associated with my mother who grew them every year in profusion.  Since she passed away we celebrate the first sweet pea of the summer with a small toast to mum as it will always, without fail, be blooming on 10th July – her birthday.  It is this connection with the past and with those whose passion helped create this garden which motivates me to continue.  I’ve said before how gardening gives me peace of mind and time to reflect and brings me closer to the memory of those no longer with us.

This summer we have another person to remember as we plant, weed and harvest.  Lynn finally succumbed to cancer in May, leaving the bookshop in Mrs B’s hands to continue in her name, but also leaving a wealth of anecdotes and fond memories of a lovely person who adored her garden (and allotment) as well as being delighted to help others.

When Mrs B was undergoing her course of chemo, it was Lynn who took it upon herself to come and clean the greenhouse (probably to a higher standard than she would have cleaned her kitchen).   When we started to cultivate the veg patch Lynn was always keen to pass on any plant that needed re-homing.  In that first spring she kindly planted some garlic and raspberry canes at one end of the veg patch.  I was never sure where the garlic was as Lynn was never great at labelling things.  But the raspberries continue to battle on alongside the gooseberries.  The thriving blue irises were conveyed to us by Lynn and latterly a large clump of white Asters will remind us once again of Lynn’s generosity when they bloom in a couple of weeks.

It is heartwarming that different plants can remind us of the good people and the good times. Not so much a garden of remembrance as plants of remembrance. The only small problem we might have created for ourselves this year is that the first sweet pea – incredibly for us – bloomed on 27th May: the day of  Lynn’s funeral.  The significance was not lost on us, so it looks like the annual celebration of the First Sweet Pea might have to be brought forward a month and a half from now on.

But sweet peas will always remind us of both Lynn and my mother..

 

 

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Of Mice and Moles

Posted on May 31, 2016 by midlifegardener

160504 (3)The sun lay on the grass and warmed it.  And across the expanse of green the midlife gardener looked and saw the soft volcanic shaped mounds of light brown earth stretching before him.  The moles had been working hard over the past week, striving to excavate their tunnels under the lawn and pushing the soil from the darkness to the harsh sunlight above.

The man walked wearily over the once lush lawn as he looked for the old rusted shovel and the wheel barrow into which he would clear the mole hills.  Ants worked the soil too, on the edge of the borders, where more mole casts converged with the flower beds and grass and the once crisply cut border edge was now covered in the extruded soil, spilling like an over-filled tub.  And the man sighed as he saw the damage done to his flowers which were wilting with the lack of soil around their roots and the dust swirled in eddies between the yellowed stalks.

The cold spring had been preceded by a mild winter and the mammals of the garden had – like the slugs and snails – survived the dark nights and short days in greater numbers than previously and they were now reeking damage on so much of what had previously been well-managed vegetable plots.  The mice had laid waste to the peas and beans and broccoli seedlings that the midlifegardener had sown weeks before.  And as the cold spring had given way to the long early summer days that bore intimations of drought and global warming in the time to come, the man had taken action to combat the ravages of the mice.  For four days straight his traps had been successful and this morning as he walked though the kohl rabi patch towards the newly planted cabbages and broccoli and brussels he pondered what he might find.

It was with mixed emotions he looked down to see another mouse caught, dead, in the jaws of the plastic trap.  He rigged some protection for the young plants, fashioned from the timber window frames from the old house, with ancient sheets of glass – unequal in thickness due to the slow flow over time.  He wanted to avoid the need to trap more rodents.  It had worked in previous years – but would it work in this changing, unpredictable world?  Only time would tell.

He picked up the shovel and went back to the lawn.

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Warming Up

Posted on May 8, 2016 by midlifegardener
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New Camellia and mole hills

Finally the cold weather has relented and it suddenly feels like summer might be about to happen. It’s the time of year when I personally get constantly challenged over where I have just come back from holiday. Answer: nowhere. I have naturally tanning skin and spend a lot of my time outdoors in the garden or shouting at school children in PE lessons. Others have suggested I might have some sort of Mediterranean genealogical predecessors.  Who knows.

It is also the time of year when stuff really starts to happen, with the perennials in the border suddenly getting going (I think they might have been growing for a while – I just did not notice the Echinacea as the rabbits kept grazing them back to the bare earth. I little chicken wire around them has worked wonders).

I’ve planted a camellia that the OM randomly produced from some mail order or other and I’ve had to earth up the potatoes as well.  In the background of the camellia picture you can see the moles are enjoying the sun as well…

But many plants are taking some time to get over the cold weather. The sweet peas might have been terminally affected by the frosts and the extreme temperature range in the greenhouse meant the tomatoes looked as if they had blight. They have survived but are struggling to regain their good looks and start growing properly.  And the melons, to coin some schoolboy humour, have gone from up and coming 34B’s to something akin to sagging, flaccid aged A cups.  No amount of surgery is going to help them, I suspect.

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Country Wedding Flowers

Posted on May 7, 2016 by midlifegardener

Bank holiday weekend and the weather remained resolutely chilly with hail showers carried on brisk northerly wind. But warmth was provided for us with the wedding of Steve and Les’s eldest daughter, Sara. The whole day was wonderful right from the entry of the bride to the church, and the subsequent exit (accompaniment: “Everybody needs somebody” from the Blues Brothers), to the reception which had the best food we have tasted at a wedding followed by some fine country dancing (I was particularly proud of my Gay Gordon) and a classic wedding disco.  No one fell out, no one fell over and everyone had a great time.

We were chuffed to be invited and even more pleased to be able to contribute to the day by providing the table decorations for the reception.  A combination of bluebells, forget-me-not and garden greenery worked well.  Even that was a group effort in which bride, friends, mother of bride and even the groom helped make the bouquets.  Of course Mrs B knew exactly which ones she had composed and which ones the groom or my good self had thrown together, but as a set of three jam jar posies to a table the results were pretty satisfying.

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Who’s a celebrity boy then?

Posted on April 24, 2016 by midlifegardener
Nigel

What makes you so special?

Fame is a choosy mistress.  It is clear from just a casual browse of newspapers, magazines and television that to be deemed a celebrity does not require talent, it is often a matter of coincidence and luck.

Take the celebrity dog Nigel who potters around the garden at Longmeadow with his erstwhile owner Monty Don.  He’s a fairly relaxed chap, with an easy way about him following a wheelbarrow with a spring in his stride and a wag of his tail.  And his dog seems pretty chilled too.  As co-hosts of Gardeners World the pair of them smile to camera every Friday evening while we sit and check what it is we should be doing in the garden this weekend.  It’s not like we don’t already know, it’s just that we like affirmation that we are doing the same as Monty and Nigel.  Needless to say I was a bit dis-chuffed when I saw the size of Monty’s potatoes in a bag, compared with my spuds in a bin, but we will gloss over that for now.

Black is the new Ginger

Black is the new Ginger

But I look at my gardening companion Ella and I reckon she has all the talent of someone like Nigel and surely deserves some fame beyond the narrow confines of a gardening blog read by, well, tens.  First off, she is a shiny sleek black lab: so much more stylish than the rather effete and, whisper it low – ginger – Nigel.  (Strawberry blond?  You’re having a laugh Nige).  Ella potters around the garden and is very knowledgeable about all areas of the beds and borders particularly the spots frequented by rabbits.  She actually despatches them occasionally too.  She actively digs the garden, albeit the lawn, in pursuit of moles, leaving craters into which the mower has on occasion fallen.  She can do cute, too, as she sits and stares into the middle distance, waiting for a rabbit to emerge beyond the tennis court; or alternatively she can tear up seed packets with the best of them.  When all else fails, she can sniff out a ball and toss it triumphantly my way, demanding I at least pick it up to extricate it from the pot I want to use. And maybe – just maybe – I will throw it for her so she can demonstrate her retrieval skills and her ability to stop and turn, throwing up clods of earth from those parts of the lawn not already destroyed by moles.

She clearly has the talent for TV.  The pity of it is that the mere idea of fame seems to have gone to her head and she has skipped straight to the level of the self-absorbed star.  Friday evening she disappeared up over the hill after we had fed the pigs and had to be tracked down by a stressed out Mrs B.  And yesterday morning we came down to a vast amount of dog poo which had clearly come from the larger of our two dogs.  It looked like two massive piles of large diameter black toothpaste.

It’s fair to say there has been a long history of stars going missing (I never got to see The Clash in their heyday because Joe Strummer went walkabout mid-tour) and the examples of celebrities trashing hotel rooms are too numerous to mention; although crapping on your bedroom floor might have been a bit further than most celebs would go and I think Ella might have just been a trifle premature in taking on the self-indulgent high maintenance celebrity role.  Until this blog goes viral she will just have to remain the most wonderful, chilled out labrador / retriever gardening companion any midlifegardener could hope for.

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New Term

Posted on April 18, 2016 by midlifegardener

160407 (11)And so here’s the summer, and what have we done? Another Easter over and a new term begun…

Easter is an exciting time of year, with the greenhouse beginning to burst at the seams with seed trays which themselves start to creak under the weight of rapidly shooting plants. The earth is beginning to warm under the longer days of a more powerful sun.

Not that the Old Man thinks that we should be thinking about planting anything out right now – way too cold. And my age is showing as I was in a mind to agree with him.  But Mrs B went on a day course to learn about preparing flowers for weddings (not one in our family I hasten do add) with Georgie Newberry at Common Farm Flowers (author of several books on flower farming – available, as always at Bailey Hill bookshop). Georgie was firmly of the opinion that down here in Somerset we are able to start planting seeds outside as we are not likely to get anything like a major frost. So what do I and the Old Man know about it?

So I will shortly be planting all sorts of exciting things in the garden, but in the meantime I have, over my luxuriatingly long school holiday, managed to plant and germinate a whole host of stuff:

160407 (7)Courgettes (two types), Chillis (three types), Purple sprouting, Brokali, Peas, Sugar snaps and mangetout, Broad Beans, Runner Beans, French climbing beans, Squash (three types), Aubergines, Sweet peppers, Brussels Sprouts, Cabbages, Leeks, Basil, rocket, lettuce and tomatoes.  In addition there are some random seeds that came as a surprise package from the seed company such as celery and melons.  I have also planted numerous flowers to stock our cut flower patch:  zinnias, Rudbeckia, Nicotiona, Cape Daisy, and some marigolds which are being grown to be a companion plants.

We did plant stuff in the great outdoors over Easter getting the potatoes in on time and also onions and shallots.  And this weekend we broke out from the greenhouse by planting the broad beans and sweet peas.  Fingers crossed we don’t get that late April cold snap the old gardeners like to warn us of..

Please throw the ball

 

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Laughter and Forgetting

Posted on April 2, 2016 by midlifegardener
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Overwintered kale and kohl rabi planted out

My memory fails me.  It always has.  But these days I do not seem to have the faculties to hang on to the most basic information.  I could not even remember the names of charities I give regular donations to so trying to remember the names of flowers is mostly beyond me.  I have taken up learning Spanish in a vain attempt to kick-start my neurological faculties, but so far my elder brother’s fears that I will soon start speaking  espanol more fluently than him are completely unfounded.  No te preocupes, Paul.

One of the unfortunate side effects of living next door to my father and delivering his paper to him each day is that I can see first hand where my symptoms might have their origins and where they are headed.  Genetics can be blamed for so much.  The other day the OM told Mrs B that he was thinking that we could make a wooden herb trough  outside the back door and that he knew where to source some wood.  The fact that the trough was my idea, the wood had been sourced by me (discards from the edge of the astro at school) and that Mrs B would already know all this, seemed to elude him. Selective memory, perhaps.

And yesterday he was cursing his luck that a birthday invitation he had received fell on the exact same day that we have agreed for the family party in the summer:  11th July.    I demurred and told him that the family party was on 2nd July.  He was relieved – but then exasperated and even a little deflated when I took a look at his invitation to see it was for 11th JUNE. He had not only got the date of his own party wrong, he had mis-read the date of the new invitation.  I don’t get annoyed – I worry that this is what I have to look forward to.

And I pity my wife and children.

Mind you, Mrs B already has a handle on this.  I identify with Tim Lott writing in the Guardian, speaking for many middle-aged men, who claims his memory is not as bad as his wife and kids tell him it is – but he has no way of knowing.  How can you know?   There is probably a way of ascertaining it, but I have will have forgotten it.

In the garden the only way I remember what tasks await me is to walk around and actually SEE what I need to do.  Always been a bit of a visual learner, me.  Mrs B makes plans; I just react to what I see and take it as it comes.  I guess that is one of the reasons we have made it thus far in our partnership, still able to remember the good bits and laugh about whatever might have slipped my (our?) mind.  Milan Kundera had it about right when he wrote that

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

(The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

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