Tag Archives: Broccoli

Planting to the Music of Time

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Lonely as a Cloud

The rhythm of the seasons is changing its beat as summer segues into autumn.  In the past, it was a time of year I would associate with final harvests of the summer and then closing down for the winter.  I would clear the veg patch and cover it over to suppress weeds, allowing only space for Brussels, leeks and broccoli to battle the winter.  I would uproot the deceased annuals in the borders and tidy the beds to wait till the warm weather returned.  This year I have even managed to pick some mushrooms from a local field.

But these days I have started the autumnal season with a sense of anticipation for the spring.  Like a tight rope walker looking straight ahead rather than down in order to make it successfully to the other side, I am planting stuff for harvesting and flowering in the spring.  If I keep my eyes on the early summer of next year, perhaps I won’t even notice winter.

So over the past few weeks I have been nurturing and planting out my own self-grown flowers, like Honesty, Foxgloves, Lupins, and Echinacea, as well as Sweet Williams.  I have sown Nigella and Phaecellia in the new bed out front.  Instead of a fallow time, it is a season to plant and nurture.  And to sit back and see everything shoot and take root in the still warm autumn.

In the raised beds I have planted a Curly Kale, garlic, shallots and broad beans.  Broad Beans were something The Old Man never planted in the autumn as he claimed the flavour was not as good as spring planted.  But considering the disastrous crop of spring grown Broadies I had this year, any kind of broad beans in 2019 would be an improvement – whatever the flavour.  But, to improve my chances I have sown two types:  Aquadulce and The Sutton.  The first in the raised bed, the second (dwarf variety) in pots.

So now, with any luck, I will have the benefit of watching stuff growing – even in the dead of winter – which is what this whole gardening lark is about, isn’t it?

 

 

Picked these from the fields nearby
Foxgloves and Honesty in trays
Curly Kale
Broad Beans and Garlic either side of the rows of leeks n Khol Rabi

Of Mice and Moles

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.