Tag Archives: sugar snaps

I Don’t NEED to Go to Chelsea

A few weeks ago Mrs B and I were lucky enough to be able to go to Chelsea flower show. A generous birthday present forom friends, this was my first visit to the highlight of the horticultural shows.

Our tickets were for Saturday so we had scoured the TV coverage from Monty and friends as they roamed the avenues and spoke in glowing terms about the planting of this or the stonework in that, with the occasional oblique cristicism of water features or colour schemes. So we felt like we knew the gardens already. And yet the reality of them was often in contrast to what even 4K TV conveys, and our opinions altered. For example, the Nurture Landscapes garden had looked arid and colourless on the TV (despite effusive gushings from the GW team) but it really impressed me with its subtlety and sparse planting.

This garden was unusual, inasmuch as none of the flowers were ones I could claim to have in the Midlife Garden or have even seen elsewhere. Most of the gardens at Chelsea had the same plants that we have dotted around the beds in MLG. And many were often of a type which you could easily find in your average hedgerow, such is the fad for re-wilding. So wild flowers (‘weeds without a PR campaign’) and fallen trees were the order of the day.

We pushed our way through the increasing numbers of elderly gardening fans (a club to which, I guess, we are affiliated) and got our complimentary glasses of rose, courtesy of The Newt in Somerset. We sipped the chilled wine and pondered the irony that The Newt should be supporting Chelsea flower show at a time when re-wilding is all the rage. The Newt sometimes appears to have the same relationship to re-wilding that Boris Johnson has with honesty in Government. Just saying you’re doing it does not mean you actually are.

Upon returning to our own garden in Somerset (with our own newts) it was reassuring to see we ticked many of the boxes that were being displayed at Chelsea. We have beds that are bursting at the seams with irises, roses, lupins and foxgloves. We have show gardens for all tastes.

The Spursy Garden, which like the aforementioned football club, has some standout performers (for Harry Kane, read echinops and silver birch) but the overall performance the squad might not match the sum of its parts.

Elsewhere, we realise that in order to Chelsea-fy our veg patch, we simply need to call it a potager, and put a bit of picket fencing around it. Possible gold medal for the impressive sugar snap peas, but maybe take that down to a silver gilt as the garlic has rust on it.

In the rear garden category the “warm welcome” rose has been in the finest form ever in the back fence New Zealand garden, where the Cordyline Australis dominates. And to keep Monty happy, our water feature / wildlife pond is teeming with life, although it is getting clogged by weed. But we have placed a wedge of straw in it which has cleared it for now.

At the front is the most contentious area of garden which many would describe as a a poorly maintained drive, but which we like to think of as an arid garden with hardy bienniels and native plants (gravel with foxgloves & weeds). We are still deciding what to actually do with it, but it has a certain charm and could be a medal prospect at next year’s chelsea re-wilding show.

Nurture Landscapes Garden
Wildlife Pond
Blooming
Posh allotment Chelsea-style
MLG Potager…
Shot Leek – hoping for a late allium flower
Sugar Snaps on the way
Ammi Majus with Spursy Bed
Spursy Bed – Alliums & Silver Birch

Preparation & Performance

Spursy Bed still winning Gold

This week I learnt that plans are afoot for the 2022 Open Gardens Day in the village. I have been told the date (confidentially), but as it probably needs to go through the usual committees and organisational debates, I am not allowed to say what it is. But suffice to say, we are all excited here at the Midlife Garden to think that we might be making our debut in the biannual village event. The Open Gardens Day is an opportunity to raise money for charity, while giving villagers the chance to enjoy the gardens of their near neighbours. But we all know what it really is: it is the Village Horticultural Olympics.

With the date set for next summer I was motivated to get going on preparation for big day. Initially, I needed to take stock of the current state of the garden. Is it under control? What has grown well and what has failed?

The mid-season performance review has not been positive. Yes, visitors to the Midlife Garden have been extremely complimentary on the state of the beds but, like a British Olympian crying over gaining a bronze medal instead of a gold, I see failure all around me. The broad beans that I did not tie up properly or keep weeded; the kohl Rabi that got eaten by slugs; and the kale that has struggled under the same onslaught, until I belatedly sunk beer traps. The late and lacklustre crops of cosmos and sweet peas and the negligible numbers of sugar snap and ordinary peas. It has not been a classic year. The review reads like the inquest into British Rowing. Ok, millions of lottery funds leading to five 4th place finishes and a lack of gold medals sounds might sound more serious in comparison to the Midlife Garden – but your opinion would change if you could see how the bindweed has clogged the echinacea or saw the total failure of this year’s Rudbeckia Marmalade.

While underperforming athletes are pointing to tough lockdown training conditions, in the Midlife Garden we have had to contend with the weird weather of a cold dry April, followed by a wet and windy May and then flaming June. Plants have struggled to adapt. But ultimately, I need to take a long hard look at my systems and procedures. I need to improve my funding and support for these plants and apply my experience to plan and monitor performance.

In short: I need to be more like The Old Man. Suddenly his insistence on slavishly doing things to a strict and regimented timetable seems laudable, contrasting with my approach which at times borders on laisser-faire.

But the impending announcement of an Open Gardens Day has provided fresh impetus in my gardening. In my thirties I used to run regularly, but rarely for the sake of getting fit: I needed a goal over and above the simple essential of BEING fit. Which is why I regularly entered half marathons and even one wet and windy marathon in Dublin (finishing time: 3 hrs 43 minutes, thank you for asking). Training for an event was what kept me focused and committed. So now, in a summer in which I have been, at times, going through the motions in horticultural terms, I find I have something specific to plan for, and I need to get going.

So, biennials are frantically being sown (a month late) and more hardy annuals are being purchased for autumn planting. It seems a long way off, but time will fly, and as Auden wrote:

“We are left alone with our day, And the time is short and History to the defeated May say alas but cannot help or pardon”.

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.

We Will Grow Them in the Raised Beds…

We have moved beyond the longest day of the year, although for anyone in quarantine, or shielding, there have been a lot of “longest days” in the past few months. Not that everyone is exacly paying any heed to what is required of us any more as the new conscience-free, apology-avoiding “Dominic’s Law” seems to have been adopted by large swathes of the population as they congregate in anti-social distancing on the streets and beaches.

Despite this, here in the devolved region of the Midlife Garden we remain cautious in easing restrictions and feel that the ends are justifying the means. The PPE on the brassicas is remaining in place for the foreseeable future as we continue to register zero cases of Cabbage White caterpillar. But we have decided to comply with the Government’s pubs and restaurants policy with regard to opening up the nasturtiums. There will, no doubt, be a large spike in butterfly larvae numbers over the coming months in this sector of the garden economy, but that is our cunning plan: a sacrificial crop they call it, just don’t mention herd immunity, please. That is NOT the plan, or ever was, OK?

The PPE on the strawberries has been equally succesful with the first bowlful arriving this week. The blueberries are looking good too, happy in their world behind the curtain of netting, but will need a little longer to ripen. And elsewhere we have had the first potatoes, sugar snaps, and kale. There was some concern at the lack of social distancing between the sugar snaps and some errant self-seeded sweet peas, but we have decided to turn a Barnard Castle eye to this and wait until 4th July when, if our reading of the regulations is correct, the sweet peas will be able to be next to the sugar snaps, so long as they are wearing a bandana over their faces, have the same middle name and remember to remain unrepentant at all times.

The heart-warming success story of the garden, so far, has been the courgettes. After several weeks in ITU they have been applauded on their recuperation from frost damage and have produced their first (albeit pencil-thin) mini marrow. Those courgettes are clearly fighters, as we have said before. Let’s hope they do not follow the lead of some of our courgette-headed brethren and carry that fight onto the beaches.

The secret of good timing

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…

 

April Unfurls

Easter Buns
My Easter Buns

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.

Old Faithful
Old Faithful

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.