Looking back - and forward

Looking back - at my overly optimistic promise of a post before Christmas and lots of blog-visiting. Where did the autumn go? Weekends were swallowed up, and for the most part the plot has been unvisited. A question of out of sight rather than out of mind: I've been very conscious of it just 10 minutes walk away, hibernating under its (patchy) covering of green manure. It will be quite a reunion when we do get along after the New Year.

Looking back also at these retro illustrations. They almost have the look of engravings from a Victorian gardening treatise.



In fact they're from the Reader's Digest 'The Gardening Year', 1968. Don't you love it? "rewarding but seldom grown vegetables". Courgettes, seldom grown??? But who grew courgettes in 1968, at least in Scotland? I remember my first taste of green pepper - in 1977. Incredibly exotic. I remember the first time my mother and I ventured to use garlic in a recipe, circa 1976. We asked the greengrocer (NB greengrocer) for two cloves of garlic, being wholly ignorant that garlic was sold in bulbs.

I've been sorting through boxes of books in my Dad's loft this week, and have been enthralled by the discovery of The Gardening Year. A first edition too. Perhaps it'll be really valuable in about 200 years time.

Among the lurid-hued photos of bedding plants and flowering shrubs, the instructions for pruning newly planted floribunda roses, and the never-ending list of 'general tasks' for each month, was this little global warming prickle of anxiety.


This December's temperatures have seldom dipped below 4 degrees, it seems. And taking as a yardstick the year of my son's birth, 21 years ago, I remember watching for the first spikes of crocus and daffodils in February. For the past few years, despite frigid December temperatures, the spikes have been showing before Christmas.

But the looking forward I'm doing just now is to carving out a bit of time for the allotment. Perhaps I'll use The Gardening Year as my guide. So, for January: "The coldest month is the time to plan ahead with seedsmen's (sic) catalogues and to send mowers and other equipment for servicing." And "General Tasks: order seeds, gladioli, onion sets and shallots, and garden sundries such as tree stakes, pea sticks, bean poles, string, canes, insecticides, fertilisers and weedkillers." How many different kinds of stakes and sticks and poles and canes were there in 1968?

Getting the garlic in

Just in time too, before the frost and snow came this week. I was even later than usual in ordering garlic this year. Somehow I was trying to avoid my order arriving too early and starting to sprout before I could plant it. Too early turned into too late, and my supplier of preference, the Scottish Really Garlicky Company, had sold out. I did the rounds of the Organic Gardening Catalogue, Suttons, Thompson & Morgan, and finally found some at D T Brown's.

Above, my first foray into elephant garlic. And if you look closely, you can see a little triangular shard of glass just to the left of the bulbs. Where does it all come from?

Below, Tuscany Wight, a softneck grown on the Isle of Wight and said to store well. I hope it stores better than the bulbs I was sent, one of which was soft and rotting. Of course I should have sent it back, but life was far too busy for frills like that, so I popped in the good cloves and will hope for the best.


The Chesnock Wight bulbs below were in much better condition. A hardneck bulb, meant to have a distinctive, strong flavour.


I meant to take a photo of the green manure, but it took all the time I had available to dig over the bed where the garlic was to go. Not much change really - the phacelia and white mustard were growing strongly, the grazing rye most definitely was not, and the alfalfa was being taken over by a vigorous crop of shepherd's purse, which seemed to relish its bed of alfalfa seed.

Soon I expect to feel the first stirrings of winter planning fever, when gardening books and catalogues will suddenly become compulsive reading. It hasn't stirred yet, however. Perhaps it's because of our exceptionally mild autumn. Now that the cold has arrived, I'm relishing it, and want to enjoy the season rather than gloss over it and look ahead to Spring. It feels like a physical lifting of the spirits to have frost and snow. A bit of balance has come back into the world.

Greening up

How can it be nearly two months since I've last posted here? Our visits to the plot have been almost as rare, with just a couple of kitchen waste runs and a strimming session. Life has got in the way with a vengeance, including that novelty for us of weekends away. But I don't like the separation of life and growing/gardening. We're planning a foray to the plot this morning so that rain forecast for the weekend doesn't get in the way. I actually feel nervous about what we'll find. What will have been the outcome of Weeds v. Green Manure?

The shots here were mostly taken at the beginning of October. Above, my unique green manure patchwork. From the top, phacelia, alfalfa, grazing rye. Below, a close-up of the phacelia and alfalfa. The latter was slow to come through and germinated sparsely. It was probably sowed too late. The light in late August/early September is really waning, so another year I would sow in July.


My medieval peasant seed-broadcasting technique wasn't up to much in the case of the rye, below. Or perhaps the pigeons got the best of it. The seeds are large and although I raked them in they still seemed to shout 'eat me!'


Most successful of all has been the strip of white mustard. Was that because of early sowing, or the fact that this small strip has the best soil of the whole plot, a rich, leaf-mouldy loam due to the annual dump of leaves from the nearby sycamore trees?

Or at least that was the state of play at the start of the month. Who knows what awaits us today?

As well as posting an update this side of Christmas, I really hope to get round some other allotment blogs. I have a lot of catching to do.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - September 2011

Not a huge amount of change in my garden since the August Bloom Day. Still, the season is moving on, and Autumn is definitely here. There was a day last week when everything that was growing seemed to shrink back slightly. The light is declining, with sunrise nearly at 7 am, and sunset by 7.30 pm. The equinox approaches.

Above, a marigold droops in the rain. Marigolds are a cottage garden favourite that I can't get enough of in Autumn. The sowing I did this year seemed to take reluctantly, and so the blooms are very sparse and all the more precious as a result. I don't know what happened to germination of my seeds this year, either in the garden or at the allotment. I'm going to read up about biodynamics over the winter, although I can't quite get my head round the preparations such a horn silica.

Below, autumn colours are beginning to appear on my blueberry bush.

Still a few fruits appearing on the woodland strawberries, and strangely the slugs don't seem to have found them.


Below, red clover which I sowed in a border as a mini patch of green manure, but which has also failed to germinate well.

Roses are making a brave second showing, although I doubt if the profusion of buds will all flower unless we get a very balmy spell now.

A bit of confusion here: a Spring-flowering polyanthus has decided to bloom, behind the seed pods of 'Love-in-a-Mist'.

A climbing fuchsia is doing well, but has a long way to go before rivalling the hedges we saw in Skye this summer.

Visit Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day at May Dreams Gardens to see what else is blooming this month.

Shades of green

Some things are flourishing this year. The 56 leeks, minus 2 or 3, are looking more leek-like by the week. Grass seems to be our best crop, helped along by a stream of busy weekends and darker evenings. Even the emerging green manure, to the left of the lush central path, can't compete.

Grass apart, however, this has been a mean summer. Of my first sowing of lettuce, chard and beetroot, only a few seedlings emerged. The second sowing made a couple of weeks ago is marked by the faint lines of sawdust in the shot below. There are some healthy weeds, but not much else.

The close-up below reveals what might be some carrots pushing through. 'Grudging' is the best description I can come up with for this season. In my more fanciful moments I imagine that the plot knows that our attention has been elsewhere.


We have to face the fact that we are likely to be just as busy through the next year, and so we've been making plans for an ongoing regime of green manure that will take us through this winter, then next spring and summer. We'll keep smaller areas under cultivation but we won't try to be productive on a scale that we can't maintain. In the end the soil will benefit, and we'll arrive at this point next year with both children away at university and the plot serving as therapy for the empty nest syndrome that we can see looming.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - August 2011

This summer hasn't been the kindest for flowers. Plentiful rain, yes, but grudging sun and even more grudging temperatures. So it was a surprise when I set about taking photos for this month's GBBD to find just how much was in bloom.

Above, my container clematis, Anna-Louise. Below, a nameless fuchsia that I nurtured from a sad, dried out stick of a plant thrust at me by a friend.


Cheerful daisies beside the front door.


This fuchsia did have a name, but of course I've forgotten it. It came as part of an order of 12 mini plug plants from Thompson and Morgan, in a plastic container with letters beside each plant, and a key to the letters in the accompanying instructions. Mail order plants always arrive when I have minimal time to deal with them, so inevitably after the initial potting up and then the potting on and finally the planting out the identity of 'A' or 'F' has long been mislaid.


A sweetly scented sweet pea beside the front door. The packet was a freebie from Gardeners' World, about four years ago, and I took a chance that the seeds would germinate.


My stalwart hydrangea, nameless of course, but I do remember that I got it from Burncoose Nurseries in Cornwall. Quite a transition to make, from the south western tip of Britain to the east coast of Scotland, but it's hung on through the worst of our winter weather.

This year's surprise: a self-seeded hollyhock.


Cheerful violas, somewhat eaten round the edges by our ever-present snails.


For real snail damage, this is what remains of some busy lizzies. They were untouched until a couple of weeks ago, when overnight they were reduced to bare stems.


Below, the crocosmia is still blooming - the latest it's been in flower since I planted it in 2004.


Climbing courgette 'Black Hawk' is doing well in a flower border, producing just enough but not yet at glut stage.


Jasmine 'Clotted Cream' has had its flush of blooms. With the light declining now I doubt there will be a second flush, but it has been a lovely addition to the patio.


Chives are still blooming and appreciated by the bees. In the background is what has turned out to be a total thug - lemon balm. It has taken over a border to the extent that I may take it out in the autumn.


Finally, two more nameless mail order beauties.



More blooms, many of them with names, are at Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day at May Dreams Garden.

Marking time

A summer of marking time and clearing the decks at the allotment. We're having the raised beds debate, and so to give us a blank canvas we've opted not to fill up ground as it's vacated by crops. We're using the opportunity to improve the soil structure by sowing swathes of green manure. Above is the first sowing, of alfalfa. Last weekend I sowed phacelia in the empty area at the top of this large bed, and white mustard in a strip beside the blackcurrants at the other side.

We've also been concentrating energies elsewhere, enjoying the company of our children, one home from university, the other going into her last year at home before university, visitors, holidays, home improvements. Sometimes when I've gone along to the plot I've done half an hour's work and then sat and taken in the way the light falls on the plot and the bliss of being outside in summer. I should feel some Calvinist guilt, but I don't. It's been good to have a pause.

Meantime the fox has been enjoying marching through the alfalfa.