garden gloom

I have resisted writing this blog post for quite a long time because it is so negative. Back in April I blogged enthusiastically about the garden and everything I’d got set up to produce food this year. Sadly, as all real gardeners know, growing things doesn’t always turn out like you hope. This year was particularly disastrous.

The herb garden wasn’t too bad, though none of the stuff that I started from seed this year came to anything. We had a few micro salads from our wall-mounted gutters, but they got very badly slug and snail infested and were very difficult to keep going.

We tried potatoes in bags again and the yield was even less worth the effort than in previous years. In fact I had to empty two bags (eight potato plants) to get enough for one meal!

We had about ten beans in all from the dwarf bean plants (the pots were better than the ones in the ground) and none of the peas made it past germination. The broad beans were pretty, but not prolific.

Most of the tomato plants drowned when we had torrential rain just after I’d put them out. I was then given three plants and this is what they produced!

We knew that the fruit probably wouldn’t really get going this year, but all the putative apples dried out and dropped off at a pretty early stage, there wasn’t enough rhubarb to pick and neither did the gooseberry or blackcurrants produce fruit.

Really the only modest success was the garlic which kept us going for a week or two.

I’ve even managed to make a disaster of the wormery compost which was just vile and I’ve had to start again, but am not convinced that it’s working any better. I thought wormeries were supposed to be easy to run!

This year’s winners were the nasturtiums which self-seeded from last year and simply took over the whole darn lot. I kept yanking them out, but finally gave up when everything else failed and let them run riot.

Finally two weeks ago Steve declared war on them and pulled them all out. The garden now looks bleak and unattractive, but I need to start thinking about next year and what might actually work.
This is a bit of a misery memoir, but I have a little bit of distance now from the really deep disappointment of getting so little reward for the effort (and money) I put in. I’ve got a lot of hopes pinned on the fruit to get going next year and I think I might move some of the herbs into the raised bed. I definitely won’t be growing from seed next year – it’s too heart-breaking when it all goes wrong.

white hope

A little bit of hope on a grey day!

For at least seven years we have had a window box of white pelargoniums sitting on the outside sill of the window in our basement light-well . It’s very sheltered down there and although it doesn’t get a great deal of bright light the plants have thrived on benign neglect, getting taller and taller and flowering almost all year round. I really love them; they’re not as intense and showy as the red or pink ones I generally put on the front windowsill (and have to renew every spring), but I love their quiet persistence and delicate old-fashioned blooms.

This year I have begun to fear that they are on the way out. They had become impossibly “leggy” in the continuing search for light and were falling and breaking. I decided it was time to have a go at taking cuttings. (Foolproof according to the BBC gardening website). These are the results.
Not only have they taken and rooted, but they are bursting into flower as well. I’m sure a gardening purist would say that I should have nipped off the flower buds to give the roots more chance to develop, but I just couldn’t bear to. This year’s gardening has been deeply disappointing after my enthusiastic start blogged back in April, so I’m just taking a little bit of encouragement where I find it.

16 x 16

Our back garden is 16 x 16 feet. I admit that it’s bigger than a balcony (such as the New York space where the resourceful and knowledgeable Marie has a veg garden), but by most standards it’s a small back garden and it’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve considered trying to grow food out there.

This week I have been busy getting it sorted out for the growing season. Quite a number of things had died during the severe winter and as I worked my way round I discovered a good number of the pots had succumbed to frost and fell apart in my hands. A lot of my time was spent picking rose chafer grubs out of last year’s compost so that they didn’t end up in any of the raised beds. I’ve got hundreds of the ruddy things, but have remembered that Hannah’s neighbour keeps chickens, so I shall be making him a gift of them later in the week!

The enjoyable part has been planting up potato bags, potting on and planting out seedlings and being able to sit out for meals, cups of coffee and reading in the extraordinarily lovely spring weather we’ve been having.

I’m so pleased with what I’ve achieved this week that I’d like to give you a little tour!

Out of the back door and turn left.

Here is our herb garden – all in containers at the moment, though I was thinking today that I could create a small raised bed along that short stretch of wall. At the moment there’s oregano (two different types), rosemary, parsley, celery leaf, french sorrel, several mints, sage. I want some more thyme, which was one of the winter casualties and I’ve got basil and coriander germinating indoors.

Next bags of potatoes – Arran pilot. Yield isn’t fantastic from these bags, but I love tipping them out and digging out a meal later in the year.

On the wall is our salad bar. In here are some mixed spicy salad sown a couple of weeks ago and some sulky looking lollo rosso, which was bought as plugs and may or may not survive. The gravelly looking stuff is a crushed ceramic product supposed to deter slugs, which is necessary as the radishes that were growing in the left hand part of this guttering pipe have all been munched. There are three of these pipes, but the seeds in the next one up have only just gone in and I’ll be sowing the top one next weekend.

Round the corner along the left hand fence. This is the raised bed that our lovely growzones friends helped us to build two years ago. In here I have just planted out some dwarf beans. We’ve loved watching these grow this week. Last weekend they were just breaking the surface in a seed tray and now they’re big enough to take their chances out in the big wide world! I sowed peas along the fence and one or two of them are just beginning to appear. The plants in pots are chilli peppers.

The chard has overwintered.

Next we get to the gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes, which I have underplanted with garlic. (And more of the dwarf beans in pots).

Round the corner again to the back fence which is now well covered with trachelospermum and honesuckle as well as an invasion of clematis Montana from the garden the other side. There’s a bald patch in this bed which never seems to sustain anything and is the spot where we had the root of a eucalyptus tree ground out a few years ago. One day we’ll have to dig out properly and start again, but at the moment I’m enjoying the wild acid green of the euphorbia and looking forward to the lavender flowering.

This recess needs some action soon I think. At the moment it tends to be the place where things get put (dumped). Like the big bin that I collect kitchen and garden waste in for Stu’s compost heap and pots that are not currently in use. As it’s the view from the back door I’d prefer it to look a bit more attractive, so I’m thinking of taming some of that honeysuckle around a mini pergola and putting a seat in there permanently. Anyway, that’s for another day.

Round the corner again to the fence on the right hand side of the garden. This is in shade for more than half the day.

First we have rhubarb – planted last year, so probably nothing to pick this year.

On the fence is the espalier apple tree planted last autumn. It has just finished flowering and was absolutely covered in blossom, so I’m hoping that quite a few of the little nodules will plump up and ripen. Next to it is a climbing rose. I hope that these can co-exist and grow together attractively without killing each other. No sign of buds on the rose yet.

Just breaking the surface in this bed are some broad beans. I'm looking forward to seeing these grow as I chose a variety with unusual dark red flowers.

In front of the bed (and the first thing you see from the back door) is another gathering of containers. Allium, peony, lilies (out of shot). Sadly missing from this group is the camellia which appeared to survive the winter and was heavy with buds, but then just gave up the ghost and turned brown. I assume it was a delayed reaction to frost, but could also have been lack of water.

Here is the business end of the garden – the worm bin and the store. And here we are back at the door again.

This is how the back of the house looks from where my little pergola will be.

like ground force - but much more fun

Our garden got the growzone treatment today! Growzones are an initiative of Earth Abbey to encourage a group in our area to start growing food in our back gardens and allotments. Steve has previously blogged about growzones and so has Gareth and today was our turn. Some of the gardens we have visited are quite substantial; ours is tiny – about 5m square and I would never have thought we could grow veg in it until I started to hear about permaculture.

In the space of three hours this morning eight people did a huge amount of work. A large pyrocantha bush was cut down and shredded preparatory to creating a veg bed just outside the back door.

On the other side of the garden pavers were lifted to expose the soil and then re-laid to create a small wall edging for a raised bed. This was then filled with manure, compost and topsoil ready for planting.

Three strips of guttering were attached to the wall to create salad beds.

And down in the basement light well a water collection system was set up.

It was all enormous fun and we enjoyed a very sociable lunch together afterwards. This would simply never have happened if it had been left to Steve and me, but because we all got together to help each other we have all benefited. I can’t express how pleased and excited I am by it all. I have planted up the raised bed with stuff I have grown from seed: peas, courgettes, tomatoes, swiss chard and have popped some shallots in there as well.

There are still some tomatoes and chillies to go in and our bag grown potatoes are looking very healthy.

Thank you Bruce, Chris, Bobby, Sara, Alan and Elaine!

copy cat

I'm such a copy cat! I noticed that Roobeedoo was making the Simple yet Effective shawl and she directed our eyes here to the one that Soulemama made. I loved it. I wanted it. I asked for the yarn for my birthday. Hey presto! Here's my Simple yet Effective.

It has to be said, that it's on the small side - dainty really, but gorgeous yarn and lovely to work.

And while I'm doing show and tell, don't you just love that acid green euphorbia?

learning to love you more

I need to start this post by explaining that several months ago I did something I had never expected to do - I joined the WI. A friend mentioned that a new group was starting in my area and did I fancy going along to see what it was like. I mentioned it to daughter R and she had heard about it too and decided to come along as well. It turned out to be a very well attended and lively meeting, with a committee of enthusiastic 30-somethings. Having been very much a rural/market town sort of organisation it seems that the day of the urban WI is dawning.

Anyhow, that preamble is to introduce the fact that Malago WI are taking part in the SouthBank Arts Trail and to make it easy for a disparate, not necessarily arty, group of women to take part they have adopted the Learning to Love you More website. This is the brainchild of artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher, who have put together a series of assignments that anyone can carry out. I have chosen the task "Make an encouraging banner"and have had a lot of fun putting it together using hand-made felt. After the exhibition's over I may actually hang it on the garden fence to encourage all the veg growing I'm planning to do!

The heading picture is a close-up of the lovely soft, woolly, felt

birthday list

No, not a list of the presents I want! This list is about a different kind of hope.

Some time ago my friend Gai blogged about the 49 things she wants to do before she’s 50. I found it a very inspiring list - a mixture of treats, challenges, resolutions and plans; things that can be ticked off in one go and things to incorporate into regular life. I thought I’d have a go at my own list. Trouble is I’m ten years older than G, so I decided to make it 50 things to do before I’m 60. It’s my birthday this week, so I’ve got a year to do all the things on my list.

I well remember that after I passed my fiftieth birthday I got a bit gloomy, feeling that there wasn’t much to look forward to, just the downhill slope towards old age. In fact that was untrue, the past nine years have brought lots of wonderful experiences, including a major move to a different part of the country, a lifestyle shift and the birth of three grandchildren. But I know that in my low moments I can lose sight of the good things and forget what it is that I enjoy doing. So this list is to remind me of all the stuff I have to look forward to and remind me that I can still make a contribution to the world.

1. Visit Cambridge
2. St Ives holiday with all the family to celebrate our 60th birthdays
3. Walk (part of) the Kennet and Avon canal
4. Make a daisy chain
5. Increase exercise to 10,000 steps per day
6. Reduce BMI to a healthy level
7. Find a tai chi, yoga or pilates class
8. Practise meditation every day
9. Learn more about meditation and other spiritual exercises
10. Keep a thankfulness diary
11. Plan a retreat
12. Take some kind of pre-retirement course or life coaching
13. Reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill
14. Where reasonable, avoid buying plastic
15. Increase loft insulation
16. Grow some vegetables and herbs
17. Take part in Earth Abbey’s GrowZone
18. Start a wormery
19. Make bread once a week
20. Take grandchildren on the miniature railway at Ashton Court
21. See theatre regularly
22. Read two books a month
23. One book in five to be a challenge of some kind – maybe a non-fiction book or a classic I’ve never got round to
24. Go to a couple of major exhibitions (maybe in London)
25. Give myself a weekly treat
26. Conquer lace knitting
27. Use the screen printing equipment I bought two years ago
28. Take an art or textile course
29. Get my Central Park embroidery professionally framed
30. Get properly fitted for a bra at Rigby & Peller
31. Clear cupboards and recycle junk
32. Learn how to make an egg custard with confidence
33. Continue to explore faith and doubt with my spiritual director
34. Do work filing once a month instead of a marathon when life becomes impossible
35. Make a simnel cake
36. Go to cinema once a month
37. Finish my "cortona" quilt
38. Research what I need to do to complete my OU degree
39. Make a range of "earth friendly" cotton shopping bags for the Arts Trail
40. Finish my mother’s florentine canvaswork. This was started in the 1960s. It’s never going to be the rug that was originally intended as some of the wool has run out, but could be a substantial floor cushion
41. Have a pedicure
42. Write up detailed job notes for my successor at work
43. Start an Etsy or Folksy shop to sell my handmade items
44. Apply for my bus pass, so I can go on jolly jaunts on local buses around the country
45. Get an indigo vat going and do some dyeing
46. Invite someone else to join in the fun of indigo dyeing
47. Try to save up some money to get my grandmother’s old armchairs reupholstered
48. Reawaken my interest in wildflowers and foster my granddaughter’s existing interest in flowers by teaching her the names of wildflowers and collecting some to press
49. Sort out the hopeless tangle that is my "jewellery box" and put things neatly (if temporarily) in nice new boxes in tidy little compartments
50. Make another list ready for next year!