Feed the Birds

Posted on January 5, 2016 by midlifegardener
Pied Wagtails in central Bath (poor pic)

Pied Wagtails in central Bath (poor pic)

Mary Poppins the musical is back doing the rounds and so I somehow got an ear worm in my head that is straight out of the show. Ear worm is an apt description as the song is “Feed the Birds”.  It was always something that the parents did and the Old Man has always been diligent in keeping the feeders full of nuts.  in recent winters the main recipients have been rats who have climbed the wisteria to hang on the wire cage and feast.  This year TOM has not been putting food out for the birds (or the rats) yet. Whether this is because the weather has been so mild our feathered friends really do not need any more sustenance I am not sure.

In years gone by we would be asked to delay pruning the Cotoneaster until the birds had been able eat all the berries, but frankly I have never seen any self-respecting fieldfares helping themselves to the red plenty.

But we have found other ways in which to provide for the wild bird population.  A year or two back the starlings would flock around the hen run and clean us out of layers pellets and corn. It cost us a bomb to keep re-filling the feeder – making for some of the more expensive free range eggs around. We now have a feeder that is not accessible to small birds so that is sorted.

Equally, I have put an end to providing fodder to the pigeons, who after I had netted the purple sprouting, turned their attention to the kale and when I covered that, they started to shred the brussels. Can’t fault them for taste, but it amuses me how easily they are put off feeding by a bit of green net.

Birds I am happy to aid in their five-a-day nutritional requirements are obviously the robins who appear as soon as I pick up a fork. Robins act like they are your chums and at Christmas they appear all sweet and festive on cards and the like. But they are fiercely territorial and pretty damned belligerent towards each other. So not all that cute.

The other piece of bird-friendly activity I finally did yesterday was to take the netting off the raspberries – thereby allowing birds to rummage in amongst the canes for any old fruit or other stuff.

And all day long I was humming along “tuppence a bag”…

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A Walk with a View #3

Posted on December 20, 2015 by midlifegardener
A new path

A new path

Last night we spent an evening imbibing at the house of Love (Juliet and Tony) which included less dancing than usual but concluded with the consumption on my part of an interesting blend of vintage port and non-vintage sloe gin.  So this morning the knees were in a better condition than expected, but the head was in need of some clearing.

So Mrs B decided on a plan to get out for a walk in the village.  We went along paths that she herself had only discovered recently, which considering she spent much of her teen years walking dogs or exercising horses around the byeways of Galhampton, was quite a find.  It certainly did the trick for me and along the way we saw the usual squirrels and other vermin as well as a deer, which our trained attack dogs failed to spot.

Lunch was taken at the Orchard Inn (formerly the Old Pub and even further back, The Harvester).  So a properly restful lazy Sunday.  When was the last time we had one of those?

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Bleak Mid-Winter?

Posted on December 19, 2015 by midlifegardener
Winter sky

Winter sky

The sky was opalescent yesterday morning as I took the dogs out for their daily ramble. The clouds were grey and wind-blown, but a small aperture had been rubbed away by the elements to reveal a patch of blue with some pink-tinged wisps of cumulus. Even the most dull walk can be enlivened by the smallest sight or the greatest view. Even in the depths of winter there’s always something to brighten your day such as a patch of blue sky, a flock of fieldfares taking flight or a sparrowhawk hunting along the hedgerows.

December mow - the mole hill reappeared within minutes

December mow – the mole hill reappeared within minutes

But it does not feel like the depths of winter.  Since the frost of a few weeks ago it has remained steadfastly mild – warm even – and the garden continues to grow as if summer had not ended. It is mid-December and we have alstroemerias blooming as well as other blossom in the borders.   The penstemons still bloom and the grass has simply kept on growing.  But combined with the amount of rain we have had, cutting it has been nigh on impossible.  Yesterday, though, as it did not rain in the night, I took a punt and jumped on the mower and had a go.  The mower was not happy, and I could only imagine the stirrings from next door as the Old Man would be turning down his TV to listen to the grinding of the blades against the damp grass.  Even now I still do stuff around the house and garden with a vestigial sense of doom wondering if I am doing it correctly in the eyes of my parents.  I guess most of us do this to some extent but when the eyes and ears of one parent are only the other side of the kitchen window the lingering nature of the affliction devolves to a more clear and present danger.  On the up side, though, The Old Man is not walking too far these days, so even if my concerns about his thoughts on mowing in such conditions are real (and not imaginary) then at least he’s not likely to run out in to the garden to voice his disapproval.

So I clattered on with the mower thinking that I could get away with whatever lack of foresight or good workmanship I might be displaying.  And yet, when I saw TOM this morning he announced that it was an all-time record to be mowing in December.  “But it did need it” he affirmed – thus giving approval to my bleak mid-winter mow.

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“Goes back to the beginning…”

Posted on December 15, 2015 by midlifegardener
Best brussels since...

Best brussels since…

In amongst the usual TV series that appear this time of year to lead us into winter, like Strictly and I’m a Celebrity, some proper wintry drama returned with the third series of The Bridge.  The theme tune was in my head the other morning – partly as a result of the gloomy nature of the programme, but also because we had our first (and so far only) frost of the winter and that reminded me of how this whole gardening thing really started with me.  A frost, in the eyes of The Old Man, was critical before we would be allowed to start picking the Brussels Sprouts.  It was the lack of a frost back in 2010 that meant that the stampeding heifers who trampled through the garden one November night destroyed the whole crop in one fell swoop.

So I went out and picked the Brussels which are looking pretty good for the first time in years.  It was a proper Sunday roast with veg from the garden all done to perfection by Mrs B.  And delivered to the table at exactly one o’clock.  Sunday roasts are in our British DNA – though each family has its own take on how it should be done.  Mrs B combines all the best ingredients from both sides our families.  We use the veg from the garden (my family’s habit) but it will – almost without fail – be served at one o’clock.  I have fond memories of going to the pub with my father-in-law when we came down to visit in our young newly wed days.  He and I would have a half of IPA in the Catash while Bren cooked the lunch.  I was his partner-in-crime as we would “roll” back at ten past one, just a little merry but subject to a cool steely gaze from the disgruntled chef.

It seemed a jolly jape at the time, but these days it is I who gets the hard stare from Mrs B if I do not get myself together in time to be sitting down for the roast at 1 o’clock.  It seems we are doomed to become our parents in so many ways.  As The Bridge theme song wails…”goes back to the beginning”

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Season of Lists

Posted on November 4, 2015 by midlifegardener
Echinacea in the Boomerang

Echinacea in the Boomerang

I’ve rewritten this post about three times as I have tried to get the tone right.  Autumn has always been to me a time for reflection though in my younger years it was enlivened by my birthday in October which would be closely followed by Guy Fawkes night and then on to Christmas.  These days another birthday is of little consequence – although the arrival home of Verity for my birthday was a wonderful surprise.  This, sadly, was tempered by the premature passing of my cousin Dave at the age of 55, which put me back into reflective mode.  Attending a funeral of one of our peers reminds us that there is no point in hanging about – life is out there and it is not waiting for you so it was apt that two days later Mrs B was running 10 miles in the Great South Run to celebrate her own good health three years on since Lymphoma and stem cell transplant.

Squashes - not too large

Squashes – not too large

So as the clocks go back and the nights draw in one must be thankful for one’s blessings and to look forward, which is exactly what one does in the garden, as we start planning for next year.  We have been designing a new border, planting out Sweet Williams and other perennials, and planting garlic.  We have also cleared the last of the squashes (much smaller than last year for some reason) and harvested the last of the green peppers and aubergines – which were also disappointing in size and number.   So we will be looking to rectify what might not have gone right this year and trying to add new and different aspects to the garden.

Halving the irises in the Silver Wedding

Halving the irises in the Silver Wedding

So, as I had a couple of spare days at half term I took time to make the extension to the Boomerang bed.  Not sure what to call this…the didgeridoo?  I shuffled plants in the Boomerang and the Silver Wedding, putting the Veronicas together in the former and splitting the irises in the latter (hard work, that one).  I surprised myself by how many plants I had for stocking the bed:  as well as the Rudbeckia Marmalade and leftover Sweet Williams that we had grown from seed, there were a whole bunch of perennials that I had acquired as a bargain plug plant offer last year, and a lot of them have been doing nicely up by the top greenhouse over the summer and look ready for planting out now.  It’s almost like a planned it all along.  It was potentially back-breaking work, but immensely satisfying.

The great summer of 2016 starts here (or at least the planning does).

 

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What’s the title of this blog?

Posted on September 29, 2015 by midlifegardener

Red AdmiralIt’s getting towards autumn – in fact Mrs B observed to me last week that the day and night were at that point of equal length.  “Aha – autumnal equinox” I said.  She just sneered at my nice-boy schooling which got me a C at latin O-level to provide me with the ability to throw in some long words in short sentences.  Add to the equinox a lunar eclipse which coincided with the harvest super moon and it is all beginning to feel just that bit chillier and darker around these parts.

Boomrerang Bed in Autumn

Boomerang Bed in Autumn

In gardening terms this is a time to plan, as the seed catalogues start to thump on the front door mat.  But it also prompts an air of melancholy which puts me in a reflective mood.  A constant topic of discussion with Mrs B is the reduction in the OM’s capabilities as he struggles with his breathlessness and decreasing mobility.  But a lessening in mobility is something that guess I am coming to terms with as I ponder the fact that I will no longer be able to play competitive hockey or tennis again, as my knees and back have put paid to that.  I feel old.  But I’m not am I?  I reassure myself that I can still dig the garden or plant up the Rudbeckia or Sweet Williams.  And I also had my best round of golf the other day.  So I tell myself that I am still active and reasonably fit…..but then I’m reminded that I am fit only within the parameters of someone who has truly hit middle age.  So yes, if that is the sum total of my achievements then I guess I am getting old(er).  Just check out the title of this blog for confirmation of where I am in life.

Lord of All he Surveys

Lord of All he Surveys

But the garden keeps me stimulated as we plan extensions to borders and think of new veg for the spring.   And in the spirit of reflection I happened upon some old photos of the boomerang bed when TOM and mum first planted it.  The pics tell a story of how much the garden has matured in the intervening years, but also give some insight into the division of labour in the household in those days.  We can see TOM standing tall and imperious as his life partner bends to do the planting.  It might be an unfortunate moment, but I think it illustrates how this garden came to be.  Other photos show the bed planted up for the first summer with begonias – Mrs B’s most loathed flower – and it brought back memories of how my parents would assiduously fill the borders with bedding plants every year.

How times have changed: now the vogue is to emulate Piet Oudolf with drifts of perennials, an example of which we viewed the other day at Hauser and Wirth.

If only we had planted them a bit to the left...

If only we had planted them a bit to the left…

I remember TOM as the manager from the time I helped mum to plant the five acers at the end of the garden.  I must have been in my late teens.  We put in the best part of a day’s hard labour digging the holes and planting the sizeable saplings in the rough field while the OM was at work.  On surveying the work his initial reaction was to point out what we could have done better  – which was not unusual.  He told us they should have been three feet further to the left.  The news was not received well: I suspect it was suggested that if he did not like their positioning, he was welcome to move them himself.

They stayed where they were and thrived.

He must have been about my age when the boomerang bed was planted, so it fills me with hope that the garden has come so far since then and continues to stimulate, challenge, frustrate but ultimately reward the work that goes into it, and will do so for many years.  Hell, TOM is still around and able to gain some pleasure from the garden so I guess there is still plenty of life left in this Midlife Gardener yet.

 

 

 

 

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Garden Surgery

Posted on September 13, 2015 by midlifegardener
Lavender and Bean

Lavender and Bean

More rain for the garden at the end of August meant the flowers were looking battered and the veg bedraggled too.  So we did some more structural maintenance on the trees and larger shrubs in between the downpours.

The boomerang bed came in for some trimming, as – quite randomly it seems – a whole branch of the Indian Bean Tree (Catalpa) simply died for no apparent reason.  One day it was healthy, with flowers just blooming – the next day it just withered.  Amputation of the dead limb was the clear solution.  While I was at it I gave the shrubs underneath it a hair cut too as they were beginning to overcome the Catalpa – although I don’t think the branch died through overcrowding from some jumped up shrubs.

Elsewhere I tidied up other stuff in the drive and I even managed to get JB Jr to hack and prune the Cotoneaster at the front so we still have a room with a view.  He loathes the task, but I reckon his youth and height qualify him far better to do the job than his slipped-disc-cartilage-deficient father.

Down the veg patch the battle still rages with the caterpillars.  An acquaintance the other day proudly announced that she did not believe in killing the Brassica browsing thugs, and said that her plants would survive intact with happy butterfly larvae.  We do not hold with such do goody good liberal-minded hippy shit.  Mrs B takes it as personal affront that anyone other ourselves is eating our plants so the other day we donned the gloves of doom and squished caterpillars till we had both broken the three dart maximum of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIGHTEEE!  We thought our cabbages, purple sprouting and brussels would be much better off without nearly four hundred predators munching their leaves.  The only misjudgment we think we made was Mrs B wearing a white shirt to squish green caterpillars.

(I can see this being the next washing powder commercial….Anguished housewife to camera: “but how can I get squashed caterpillar stains out of my husband’s white t-shirt?”).

 

 

 

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Dead Air

Posted on August 24, 2015 by midlifegardener
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.

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A Walk with a View #2

Posted on August 10, 2015 by midlifegardener

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”

 

 

 

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The secret of good timing

Posted on August 5, 2015 by midlifegardener
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…

 

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