Winter arrived at the end of January with the snow and frost, but before it did, I had managed to plant some extra irises and a Delphinium from the Old Place in the herbaceous border in the back garden. I don’t know how they will tie in with the Hesperis, aquilegia, Rudbeckia and other established shrubs. I am nowhere near being a garden designer – I am just someone who plants stuff in borders and hopes for the best.
With little to do in the garden, planning is what this time of year is about. There is an anticipation of what might be, which is why all those seed catalogues land on your door mat post-Christmas. It is a time for some horticultural pornography, turning the pages with your hot sweaty fingers (better than them being frozen in the garden) as you imagine which hot chilli is going to steam up your greenhouse this summer.
I ordered up some of the early planters from a major seed company for convenience, but have also ordered some of my favourite niche herbs – like Pipiche and Korean mint – from Real Seeds. And of course the annual Red Letter day for veg gardeners round these parts was the Castle Cary Potato Day when Pennard Plants rolled into town like the horticultural circus with the finest range of seed potatoes to wow the thronging hordes. We duly went and paid our dues.
And last night, when doing boarding duty at school, I took a few minutes away from watching dull-witted Beautiful Young Things bitching and flirting on “Shipwrecked” to buy some flower seeds from Higgledy Garden. If I have bought an excess of seeds I will blame it on a temporary paralysis of reason caused by the stun-gun effect of listening to bronze-skinned, bikini-clad structured reality TV. But the flowers will look wonderful (in my imagination, at least, which has little structure, or reality).
Sarpo Mira – in the bag
Real Seeds
Bulbs coming up around the Greengage
Snow Drops. (No shit Sherlock)
Snowy garden – this will be a blaze of colour in June…
It was back to school for me this week, but with no Saturday lessons, weekends really are weekends: two full days of fun and frolics. The intention was to start planting in the new garden, as I last weekend I had ransacked the Cut Flower Patch at the old place for a load of stuff to start populating borders. But in between a trip to Hive Beach and visits to the sick and elderly (our three surviving parents are taking it in turns to be Harry Hill’s “Most Sick Person of The Week”) we did not get do anything till Sunday afternoon.
But we got a lot done for what was officially our first proper stint in the new garden. Mrs B wanted to start with the back yard border which last summer was inundated with geraniums that had taken over the place. A new challenge for us here is to sort out a pond, so with images of Monty (or more pertinently Charlie Dimock) in our heads we donned wellies and started dredging our water feature. It turns out that not only was the pond a lot bigger than we thought, it also contained a wealth of plant life that seemed to be choking itself – though not apparently a large number of frogs that were idly lolling in the bottom.
We took a lot of water lily out (laying it on the side to allow any fauna to find its way back, just like Monty had told us) then cleared geraniums, rearranged some of the bog-type plants around the pond and planted irises. I say we – actually it was mainly me as Mrs B was obsessing about the frogs that both intrigued and repelled her. She did not want to go near them, but was equally worried that they would be unable to escape the pond if we did not put a stairway of stones for them to ascend.
Elsewhere we planted snow drops which are the harbingers of our wedding anniversary in February. And in front of the house I started digging up part of the lawn to extend a flower bed into which the echinacea and more irises went. All-in-all it was a good afternoon’s work which augurs well for the future.
The recent dry weather well and truly broke last week. The fact that it was half term holiday (and the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations) only added to the air of despondency at the inclement weather. The wind was threatening to knock over some of the newly planted veg and evidence of the strength of the gales was there in the morning in the shape of large parts of the walnut tree lying like bones on the grass. I had transplanted my lupin from behind the hostas in the middle bed (I had not noticed the “dwarf” descriptor on the label) into the more exposed Silver Wedding Bed and the flower subsequently got knocked off. The rest of the plant does not look too happy either. I guess it was happy hiding behind the hostas.
The weather put paid to the wisteria blossom as well as finishing off some of the irises.
Iris in sun. For a short while.
Wisteria always conjures thoughts of mullioned windows and Oxbridge courts, so seeing a fine wisteria blossoming on my father’s tool shed still feels a little incongruous. But I do love the fine new leaves and the stunning flowers. They dazzle in the sunlight. Just not so good in the wind and the rain.
But overall, everything was sound. The mature trees – many of which my parents have planted over the years – give good shelter for the garden.
So not too much doing this week. We put in a row of purple sprouting, planting them closer than I had the Brussels. The Brussels I had put well apart, still thinking about how my father would probably say I had put them too close, only for him to say that I had put them further apart than he normally would. You just can’t win sometimes. I didn’t worry. It will be easier to pick them. But we seem to be balancing our relationship now, with me doing stuff and him offering simple advice where necessary.
Black fly, black fly, little black fly…they make me itch just looking at them.
We planted another row of mixed lettuce and also some pepper plants in the greenhouse. However, my experiment with parsnips in newspaper or toilet rolls seems to be floundering as the green shoots are curling up under an aphid onslaught. We will have to see what can do about that. Black fly is another potential problem on the broad beans, but with a little advice from the old man I have started picking the tops out of the plants.
But this has proved too late, as there are plenty of the little blighters crawling into the folding fans of the early leaves and getting milked by the ants on the stems. But fear not! My dad pointed me in the direction of a can of bug spray. It has been sitting on the gas canister outside the greenhouse all winter as far as I can tell and I did not dare ask if it was really full of toxic aphid slaughtering chemicals. Well apparently it is.
One little tyrant making my parsnips curl
So I gave them all a good going over – including the harbingers of destruction on my nascent parsnips. I tend to hold to the policy of “if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing quickly”, so when it comes to controlling pests, I am rapidly finding myself in the spray, swat and splat school of bug control. None of the organic, let’s encourage ladybirds and hoverflies to come and eat them all, “third way” kind of liberal nonsense. No: Direct Action. And fast. That’s what we want. We can send invitations to the ladybirds for next summer. If it means preserving my darling beans of May (or June, or whatever) spraying with Bug Off is what I’ll do.
And I hate myself for it.
The Lost Front Garden raised (or shoud that be razed?)
Meanwhile out the front, I spent a happy afternoon in the rain doing the nearest equivalent of slash and burn on the front garden which some years ago we made into a gravelled patio area but which in recent times has become somewhat overgrown. Judicious use of the strimmer – just a little worrying with shingle stones in the grass – and other destructive tools, and the sweet Monsieur Hulot type path was retrieved. And in the process, more nettles (otherwise known as Ladybird heaven) were destroyed.
Oh dear, no more green planet. A few toxins won’t do any harm, will they….?!
