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Grow, Grow, Grow

I was as excited as any other birdwatcher when I read about the Bearded Vulture that has been spotted in the Peak District and Yorkshire. Also known as a Lammergeier, this is only the second time such a bird has been spotted in Britain this century. Which makes it almost as rare as a Cabinet Minister telling the truth. Or a Special Advisor admitting an error. It is thought that this is a juvenile Lammergeier that has simply got a bit blown off course – admittedly by a few thousand miles. The bird obviously thinks that we still live in a Europe of open borders and no distrust of foreign immigrants. Oh, the naivety of youth.

When I was a naive youth, the Lammergeier was top of my must-see list of birds on the occasions when our family French camping holidays took us to the Pyrenees. We saw lots of other eagles and vultures, but never a Lammergeier. It would be amazing to spot one, but I will not be making the trip to Yorkshire to try and see it. Even without the lockdown restrictions having been lifted (for those of us who abided by them in the first place) I will not be leaving the garden for any of length of time at the moment. Because this is the time of the year when the hard graft finally pays off. It is the time of the year when my parents would say that there was no way they could go on holiday, because the peas will need picking, then the beans, the courgettes and all the other veg that they grew on an industrial scale.

And I now understand their sentiments. The scale of my veg and flower patch is nothing to compare with theirs. Mrs B and I are not interested in the long hours of blanching and bagging veg which my parents engaged in, to enable them to freeze enough greens to see them through the winter. But we currently have more peas, sugar snaps, courgettes, kale, carrots and runner beans and french beans than we could shake a big Tory Lie at. Not to mention salad leaves, cucumbers and, this week, the first tomatoes in the greenhouse.

The sighting of a rare vulture in Britain is a relief from the other depressing news (although it also brought into focus the illegal persecution of birds of prey such as the hen harrier on nearby grouse moors). Being in the garden has also provided solace for me and Mrs B. The flowers are looking particularly fine at the moment and Josh’s Spursy Border is performing far better than I had any right to expect in its first season.

All this has happened not because we made any spurious promises or deadlines, or pretended we had seeds in stock when, in fact we had not. We did not double count plants or make up random straplines like “We will get digging done” or “pick, pick, pick”. No: we just got on with it.

And now, like the Lammergeier in Yorkshire, who must have been a bit tired after its long journey over half of Europe, we will take stock and enjoy the fruits of our labour.

Planning for Growth

Winter morning Beds

It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter.  The clocks have changed back, the evenings have drawn in and every day when I get in from school one of the first jobs is to light a fire in the log burner.  The leaves have gathered in the corners of the back garden (when they are not clogging the gutters) and two panes of glass were blown out of the greenhouse the other night.  

I have not been overly busy in the garden although I am optimistic about this winter and the promise beyond it.  Despite the gloomy repetitious idiocy that passes for news at home and abroad, I am taking winter as a time to prepare for the spring and ensure that come March / April all will be well in the garden.  To quote my favourite gardening character from a movie:

“In a garden, things grow . . . but first, they must wither; trees have to lose their leaves in order to put forth new leaves, and to grow thicker and stronger and taller. Some trees die, but fresh saplings replace them. Gardens need a lot of care. But if you love your garden, you don’t mind working in it, and waiting. Then in the proper season you will surely see it flourish.” (Peter Sellers as Chance, “Being There”).

In the movie Chance,  the simple gardener, is mistaken for political savant.  The words are as easily applicable to the current political storms as they are to gardening.  The meteorological winter is likely to come to an end around March.  I suspect any Brexit-induced winter is going to last many more seasons or even years.  Is this why so many voters ticked the “leave” box? 

I think not.

One day this Brexit war is gonna end.  I just hope that there is something left at the end of it worth having.  In the meantime my therapy remains in the garden, planting bulbs (ranunculus, daffs and aliums) as well as sweeping up leaves and pruning roses and fruit trees.

“As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all be well.” 

Let’s hope our political roots are as well cared for as our horticultural roots so they are still intact when Winter is over.

Red Sky In the Morning…

 

 

 

Laughter and Forgetting

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Overwintered kale and kohl rabi planted out

My memory fails me.  It always has.  But these days I do not seem to have the faculties to hang on to the most basic information.  I could not even remember the names of charities I give regular donations to so trying to remember the names of flowers is mostly beyond me.  I have taken up learning Spanish in a vain attempt to kick-start my neurological faculties, but so far my elder brother’s fears that I will soon start speaking  espanol more fluently than him are completely unfounded.  No te preocupes, Paul.

One of the unfortunate side effects of living next door to my father and delivering his paper to him each day is that I can see first hand where my symptoms might have their origins and where they are headed.  Genetics can be blamed for so much.  The other day the OM told Mrs B that he was thinking that we could make a wooden herb trough  outside the back door and that he knew where to source some wood.  The fact that the trough was my idea, the wood had been sourced by me (discards from the edge of the astro at school) and that Mrs B would already know all this, seemed to elude him. Selective memory, perhaps.

And yesterday he was cursing his luck that a birthday invitation he had received fell on the exact same day that we have agreed for the family party in the summer:  11th July.    I demurred and told him that the family party was on 2nd July.  He was relieved – but then exasperated and even a little deflated when I took a look at his invitation to see it was for 11th JUNE. He had not only got the date of his own party wrong, he had mis-read the date of the new invitation.  I don’t get annoyed – I worry that this is what I have to look forward to.

And I pity my wife and children.

Mind you, Mrs B already has a handle on this.  I identify with Tim Lott writing in the Guardian, speaking for many middle-aged men, who claims his memory is not as bad as his wife and kids tell him it is – but he has no way of knowing.  How can you know?   There is probably a way of ascertaining it, but I have will have forgotten it.

In the garden the only way I remember what tasks await me is to walk around and actually SEE what I need to do.  Always been a bit of a visual learner, me.  Mrs B makes plans; I just react to what I see and take it as it comes.  I guess that is one of the reasons we have made it thus far in our partnership, still able to remember the good bits and laugh about whatever might have slipped my (our?) mind.  Milan Kundera had it about right when he wrote that

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

(The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

What’s the title of this blog?

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.

 

 

 

 

Live and let live

White Rose
White Rose – black spot

The garden is coming on a-pace at this time of year and the new seedlings have managed to hang in there despite some rough weather. At the beginning of May we had high winds to contend with and more recently another area of low pressure has tested the resolve of the pea plants and the young cabbages and brussels. What the latest anticyclone did bring was some welcome rain as the ground was beginning to look a little parched in the intervening dry spell. That’s not to say that it has been warm – far from it – with this having been a very cold May.

Runners and French ready to climb
Runners and French ready to climb

And there have only been minor incursions from critters intent on ruining the planting. In the flower beds which we have planted with perennials and annuals, we have put chicken wire to stop the rabbits eating the cosmos, and this also discourages Ella with her size 15 paws from trampling them too. She seems to understand that jumping over chicken wire is a bad thing after being shouted at a few times when taking an “as the crow flies” route across the veg patch.

The evidence of badger foraging
The evidence of badger foraging

The only major incident of pest control has involved the rose that we transplanted from a tub to the hotch potch border. When putting the rose in its new home I thought I would give it the best chance of survival by using some blood and bone fertilizer around the roots.  Unfortunately I had forgotten b n b is attractive to omnivores such as dogs, who tend to take it from the pots of roses.  This pilfering of plant food was taken to a new level by another intruder – I assume a badger – which dug a monumental hole under the newly transplanted rose.  It looked like some sort of Great Escape tunnel, it was that well constructed, though the earth had been less well concealed, being sent across the grass rather than subtly kicked into the dirt of the exercise yard.

Elsewhere we are looking to contain an outbreak of leaf spot on the roses, and the first black fly are beginning to appear on the broad beans and – I am disappointed to see – on the Sea Holly.  This comes at a time when the Sea Holly (Eryngium) is finally beginning to look like the illustrations suggested, as up till now the leaves have been more oval and broad than I was hoping.  But they have finally settled into their new environment and sent up a central spike which is actually showing spiky leaves.  I thought I had been sold a dud, but now it looks as if a separate plant has been grafted on the base.    It’s all such a voyage of discovery.  You never know what’s round the corner with this lot.

Outside we have not – so far – had any mice eating the young plants so have not had to put up too many barricades as yet but in the greenhouse the row of Pak Choi shows signs of rodent attack, while down the borders (well I know) the lupins will just fail to show.  The heads have been eaten.  I am not suspecting mice – perhaps some little weevil I guess.

But the predators do not have it all their own way as I did find a dead mole on the grass – apparently giving itself up to the authorities, hands in air.   Ella has an occasional go at digging them up, so maybe I just leave it to her to police the beds.

Live and let die.