Cabbages – Garden Gate Flowers

Lockdown: Plant Me Out

As we move into phase three of Lockdown in the Midlife Garden, restrictions are being gradually lifted as seedlings and young plants are allowed into raised beds and borders. We remain confident that the garden economy will make a recovery and start to get back to normal. Whatever that is.

Of course, we have no statistics or evidence to support this policy and, although we profess to be guided by the signs (more sunshine, longer days, that kind of thing), we are, for the most part, acting on gut instinct. Put another way: we’re winging it. We were winging it when we forgot to water the strawberries and they nearly died in the heat. We were winging it when we found random sweet peas and nicotiana in amongst the sugar snaps and we were definitely acting with little or no planning, fore-thought or intelligence when we left the beans out and let them get hit by the frost.

So now we are trying to look organised and have gone back to the core policies of social distancing and quarantine. We have applied these policies to the brassicas: the Purple Sprouting, Kholrabi, Sprouts and Cabbages. When they entered the garden from the greenhouse they were initially quarantined (hardened off) for fourteen days before they could take their place alongside the onions in the raised bed. There they were carefully placed a socially distanced 18 inches from the other plants, as we made the natural assumption that they probably all have underlying health issues. Initially, the policy seemed to be working, with all plants looking healthy with no symptoms of dry leaves or wilting stems. But that was when they were young. It seems almost as if, the older they get, the more susceptible they become to whatever it is that kills ’em. We started getting random casualties, just keeling over and dying, like sheep in a field. We Googled possible causes – club root being one, but discounted that. (We also discounted ‘Club Foot’, which, being a Kasabian song, has nothing to do with cabbages but does evoke memories of a very different time).

But the good news is that the social distancing measures are working, as there appears to be no spread of whatever it is that is killing the plants. When one plant dies, its neighbours are still able to survive – so now we are employing a policy of local lockdowns, even though no one knew we had such a policy till now. Including us.

In the absence of any conclusive evidence to explain these isolated deaths, we have come to the conclusion that these plants – unlike our Prime Minister – simply were not ‘fighters’. It is generally assumed by many that if you get ill, your chances of survival are greatly enhanced if you possess a pugilistic outlook on life. So we replaced the flattened plants with others who had been sitting warming the proverbial subsitutes’ bench in the seed trays. We put them in with a managerial motivational speech along the lines of “here’s your chance lads, go out and prove yourselves”. Results were mixed (even they weren’t all fighters, apparently) and we are down to our last super-sub for the Sprouts. But then, as 52% of the population would say, what have Brussels ever done for us?

In other news, we have had a delivery of PPE for the brassicas and the fruit. We have actually had two deliveries as we accidentally double ordered because the first order took so long to arrive – despite sending planes to Turkey to collect it. So we now have plenty of netting to prevent birds and cabbage white caterpillars from decimating our crops, although the holes in the butterfly netting look suspiciously large. But it’s not as if we would order PPE that is not of the correct standard, on a whim, or in panic, is it?

And as for questions concerning the spread of whatever is destroying the brassicas, we are not worrying. Why? Because (apparently) lockdown plants don’ give to you…

Don’t believe me? Just watch.

(repeat to fade)

One Month On

170614 (3) It’s been a month since I put finger to keyboard (or for some I know it would be thumbs to keyboard). It is an interesting comparison to see how stuff has panned out in the past 30 days.

A month ago it was raining, I was at the end of half term, looking forward to a mad month of end of term activities and report writing. Now the sun is shining and I am on holiday looking forward to weeks of no school and starting to reap the harvest from the springtime planting, potting on and general nurturing.

In June I was worried the garlic was going over and rotting. It was suffering rust (was it the rain?) and some did – but most are now drying nicely and have been joined by the shallots, spread out in the garage, away from the joists where the swallow fledglings sit and shit. The Old Man’s reaction to the harvesting of shallots was typical:

“It’s a bit early for shallots”.

“Try telling the shallots” I replied: “they’re falling over”.

It’s been a good year for them (early or not) and many are the size of decent onions. I wish I had planted more now.

Up the top of the garden, a month ago the pig pen was a tangled mess of three foot high weeds. I put my back into clearing a particularly fertile area of the pen (resulting in a trip to the osteopath) but I reckon it was worth the effort: the new squash patch is thriving on what I cleared and what the pigs left behind.

Early June the runner beans were just beginning to grasp the canes. Now they are over-topping them. The first beans are formed. The curly kale was being protected by boards – now the kale is big enough to stand by itself and the boards are protecting the cabbages, which suffered some mouse damage.

Mid-June saw the first Cosmos and sweet peas – ahead of the regular 10th July Sweet Pea Day. And veggies came on stream: courgettes, new potatoes, peas, mangetout and any amount of kale. And second plantings of lettuce leaves are in full swing when they were non-existent a month ago.

While the over-wintered chillies were originally small and red, they became large and yellow in June and have graduated to orange to proper sized red chillis now. And this year’s new chillis are starting to bud.

And….much to my relief and Mrs B’s delight…we have the first tomatoes.

(A bit early for tomatoes wouldn’t you say?)

Of Mice and Moles

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.

April Unfurls

It’s Easter and bunnies are very much of the moment around here as Ella once again caught her very own Easter Bunny when VB took her for a walk. In Ella’s defence (and the rabbit’s for getting caught by a lugubrious black lab in open grassland twenty hops from the safety of the burrow) there is a lot of myxomatosis around at the moment. So perhaps Ella is doing a merciful task putting rabbits beyond pain before they become too sick. A canine Dignitas for rabbits – though not so dignified for Verity who struggled to get her retriever to drop the still warm, possibly breathing, rabbit.

Who's been digging in my bed? — Who’s been digging in my bed?

Down the garden there was evidence of rabbits in the garden as one part of the chicken wire seemed to have been pushed down before a couple of random holes were dug in the onions. No onions were harmed in the skirmish but I have since got another couple of rolls of chicken wire from Swift Huts and renewed the rabbit proof fencing around both veg patches.

The main item on the list of jobs is PLANTING. The greenhouse is fit to bursting with seed trays full of Broad Beans, Cabbages, Curly Kale, Cavalo Nero, Kohl Rabi, Leeks, Mangetout, Sugar Snap Peas, Peas, Purple Sprouting, Butternut Squash, Uchiki Kuri Squash, Sweet Peppers, Chilli Peppers, Tomatoes, Coriander, Basil and Aubergines.

In addition to a mass of full seed trays, another sure sign of spring is the sound of the rotovator. The old Howard never fails you. It can sit in the Cow Stall all winter, unloved and seemingly forgotten, but comes out in the spring like a Grizzly Bear from hibernation ready to take all before it. It never fails to start and apparently needs no maintenance. It is a marvel. Or so I was saying as the clutch went half way through digging the salad bed….

I had a feeling it would be easy to mend, but neither myself nor Jim could see it so I was forced to ask the OM to tell me how to re-attach the wire. I am increasingly worried by his lack of mobility and unwillingness to walk further than the garage and back, but such was the importance of the issue, he made it down the garden to stand on one side of the chicken wire and instruct me on how to mend the machine. Fortunately it was done in a trice and hopefully the exercise did him good

In the main veg patch I have gone all “No Dig” this year, with the cardboard keeping the weeds down, so I was able to plant the spuds with relative ease. I have a combination of Belle de Fontenay, International Kidney, Cherie, Pink Fir Apple, Sarpo Mira and Sarpo Una. It looks pretty good – apart from the cardboard bits. While digging them I got an ear worm of “No Surprises” by Radiohead…”A heart that’s full up like a landfill…”

But this job is not going to kill me – it’s what makes me feel alive.