Midlife Gardener

Clean Green

Good Friday was exactly that in terms of weather and we headed for the garden like a herd of heifers let out in a new field.  Even JB Jr was involved and we cleaned the big  greenhouse in next to no time then put more compost on the veg patch.  In the warm sunshine I was inspired to plant 75 onion sets and 20 shallots, even though I knew that storm Katie was going to drench them and send the soil temperature spiralling downwards.  I reckoned they’ll be tough enough to survive, though after the weekend of wind and rain followed by short fierce cold showers I am not so sure.

Meanwhile, back in my clean greenhouse I was madly filling seed trays with a random selection of stuff:

Moneymaker Aubergine
Sweet Million Tomatoes
Rudbeckia
Zinnia (two types)
Cape Daisy
Cavalo Nero
Summer PSB
Brokali Apollo
Leek
Kohl Rabi (two types)

In addition, I had ticked the “mystery seed” box with my online order so – for possibly the first time in this garden – we are attempting to grow Orange Sherbert Melon and celery.  I cannot believe that we can get a decent melon crop in Somerset, but you never know, and although Mrs B has a particular aversion to celery we will see how .

So, despite the weather, we have things going for the 2016 season.

Hotch Potch Bed

Mrs B – despite being primarily vegetarian – has started looking for more pigs to raise for slaughter.  Every week she looks through the Blackmore Vale magazine scanning the pages for houses (which we are never likely to buy), puppies (which we do not need – although Ella is the unwitting product of Mrs B’s browsing prior to her 50th) and weaners.

We now have a policy now of only get pigs in the spring, as Mrs B does not like to see them hobbling around in the winter, slipping on their own frozen footmarks like overweight ladies of the night walking cracked icy pavements in stilettos.  So the search for livestock is on, and in readiness we have cleared the dead nettles from the pig paddock.  If there can be such a thing as salt marsh lamb, why not nettle pork?  Being fed on nettles would add some piquancy to the meat, I am sure.

Broad Beans Rising

Coincidentally I have been reading Simon Barnes’s latest book “The Secret Combe” (bought from my local bookshop – online orders accepted) in which he explores our atavistic craving for some kind of return to nature – to our own personal Eden, if you will.  The book is a series of short essays – it’s the sort of work which might easily have started out life as a blog – and suits my reading habits perfectly as I can just about read three pages in bed before I fall asleep.  He ponders the change from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian.  He describes life for top-of-the-food-chain carnivores as a sort of reverie occasionally interrupted by an hour or so of hunting for a kill, followed by debauched eating and back to resting and playing.  We went from this lifestyle to one in which we were able to tame nature and use agriculture to grow our own food for a more reliable source of sustenance, but in doing so sentenced ourselves to endless hours of planting and harvesting.   “We traded fun and leisure and uncertainty for greater certainties….and it’s half-killed us ever since….We found freedom, and the price was slavery”

Selective cultivation

It’s a fair point, but when I see my neighbour from down the road – a gunsmith by trade –  sweep around the corner into the lane, giving me the cold hard stare of the hunter behind the wheel of his land rover, the four stiff legs of the slaughtered deer in the back pointing skywards as he roars away from me at a speed that assumes he knows the road better than anyone else who might have the temerity to be using the highway at the same time as him, I think I am happy to be a slave in my own garden.  The instant gratification of a kill pales in comparison with the earned rewards of a season’s work as each fruit and veg is harvested.  And the feeling that one is constantly creating rather than destroying.  Seeing the dumb insolence of my neighbour I don’t feel any urge to go out and kill something.   I feel more in harmony in garden.

In growing plants we are creating our own Eden, one in which I can stand at the window (as I did this morning) and watch a Chaffinch wooing his partner in a funny little slalom courtship dance along the ridge tiles, and feel that this is a patch in which everything has its place.

Still Green

So last Sunday I did not really get much done and the next week has not been much better.

But the sun has finally broken through.  I took my leggy tomatoes out to the greenhouse to man up and fend for themselves although I am not sure they are tough enough.  They seem to have survived a week in which there have been sunny days but chilly nights with hints of ground frost and a cold north wind.  It was the cold north wind which spooked our otherwise chilled Labrador when she saw a white plastic sack blown against the top gate.  She’s not the sharpest tool in the box – but a good blunderbus when it comes to rabbit catching.

We did get the mower going and Josh did a good job with that while I managed to sharpen up some of the edges of the beds, so it actually appeared as if the place was being looked after.  Large amounts of the walnut tree had to be cleared as much of it had been scattered across the grass after the winter storms.  And I’ve also cut the raspberry canes in the veg patch.

Cut grass and sharp edges

So everything is beginning to come under our control.  I feel like we are just preparing the canvas for the summer artwork which will be the garden in full flourish.  And as part of that we need the tools to create it so it was our good fortune to find ourselves in Lidl on the first day of “garden week”.  I always used to think that Lidl was a supermarket that operated life by dice theory:  if they roll a six they will stock gardening equipment this week.  If it is a four they will be selling women’s thermal underwear and disco balls.  But actually, over a period of years it is clear that there is method in their apparent random selling patterns and it was not a surprise to see so much good stuff there for the gardener at a time when gardeners are finally coming out of the shed, as it were.  I could not help myself and bought propagators, secateurs (which will probably end up on the compost heap soon enough) and odd packets of seeds,  as well as a locking mini hack saw (to paraphrase Crocodile Dundee “call that a saw?……That’s a saw”).

There are those that want to be wooed by a supermarket, seduced by the soft lighting, emotive marketing and sexy packaging, but I have grown to like the Lidl way of doing things and – like many other consumers – am happy to roll my sleeves up and grapple with toilet roll holders and knitted skull caps for kittens (I think I made that one up) in order to find a good value seed tray.

So, I’ve got the “brushes” – and I have even got the “paints” for my garden art work, as I finally took delivery of a box-load of seeds off the internet.

Just need to get to work.  Roll on Easter.

Frost on Brussels plants

It’s been a busy half of term. There have only been a few weeks, but the weekends have been full of school-related activities and if they have not been happening it has probably been because of another popularly-named storm making itself unpopular with the populace, and any garden-related activity virtually impossible.

So on Friday I broke up for half term and, before packing my bags to take my daughter back to Liverpool and my black labrador to Arran, I did manage to quickly throw some chilli seeds and – more importantly – some tomato seeds into some trays. This was in an effort to get early germination and (hopefully) avoid the sumer-long needling from Mrs B about how late our tomatoes were compared with those down in the village. We’ll see.

Not chitting you

Earlier, before school, I had laid our seed potatoes out in the morning – yes the perfect way to prepare for the day: chit, shower and shave.   Potato Day had been a week or two earlier and I had been rather slow in get my littler chitters out of their bags.  Well, they weren’t going to get good strong shoots in a brown paper bag were they?  (No chit Sherlock).   This year we have gone for some regulars:  Bell de Fontenay, Cherie and Anya; we have had to change our Sarpo as they did not have Una, and we have gone Axona for the blight-resistant main crop, and this year’s “guest Spud” is Arran Victory – named in 1918 for apparently obvious reason.   So I have driven north feeling that stuff can be going on in my absence.