Category Archives: chicken garden

New beginnings

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in chicken garden, France, my garden

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Thank goodness 2016 is over.

I’m not sure things look a whole lot better for 2017, but like all gardeners I’m always up for a bit of optimism. And besides, within the safe confines of my garden it is easy to drift off into a world blessedly free of the likes of Herr Trump, Brexit and the wholesale slaughter of my popstar idols.

The world may seem a bit post-apocalyptic beyond the garden gates: but inside, there are sweet peas to pinch out, onions to sow, the last of the veg beds to clear and the compost to turn, just as there were last January and for every January before that. And – assuming Trump doesn’t, in another misguided attempt at ‘locker room banter’ decide to see what that big red button does – for every January to come, too.

I don’t really make New Year resolutions: much too vulnerable to my slightly distracted and forgetful state of mind these days. But January is always a time of promise: of plans made and not yet abandoned, events anticipated and surprises as yet unguessed-at.

So here is what this year promises: and I look forward to every minute.

  • A new life less plastic: I have for some time now been angsting about the quantities of plastic building up in my garden. So this is my year to cut it out, stop taking the lazy option and find some more environmentally-friendly alternatives. I will be blogging about it right here.
  • New fruit: You can never have too much fruit. This year’s trees are apples: James Grieve, Warner’s King and Egremont’s Russet, I think, all on MM106 rootstocks. I am also going to have a go at growing my strawbs up on shelving in a bid to save a few from the mice (who must, by now, be getting very fat indeed).
  • New tomatoes: I’m delving further into the intriguing world of heritage tomatoes, thanks to the packets of tomato seed sent to me from the collection from Knightshayes a year or two ago. Last year it was Sutton’s Everyday – great all-rounder which I’ll be growing again – and ‘White Beauty’, a white beefsteak which had good novelty value but not terribly productive and the flavour was a bit ‘meh’ too. I have half a dozen left to try and new favourites to discover.
  • La nouvelle vie en rose: I shall be spending a lot of time in France. First of all, beginning the long process of sprucing up a little house and garden the family have bought near Bordeaux; second, leading an HF Holidays garden tour around Provence in lavender season.
  • A new book: I have my first book out in September! Look out for it at all good bookshops near you: it’s all about fitting in self-sufficiency around everyday working and family life, from baby-leaf salads to meat and eggs. Basically what I’ve been doing myself for the last decade or two, really. Here’s the official blurb.
  • New days in the garden: Just try to keep me out. As well as my own garden, I’m looking after a beautiful rose garden, ably assisted by a bevy of feathery under-gardeners; building a kitchen garden complete with polytunnel; and tending two little gardens on hillsides where the view is breathtaking every time I raise my head. I anticipate much muddiness and quite a lot of happy days. Bring it on. 

A very happy New Year to you all, and may all your carrots grow straight in 2017!

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A new acquaintance

05 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by in chicken garden, unusual plants

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The thing I love most about gardening is that no matter how long you’ve been doing it, even if you’ve made it your life for the last 20 years as I have, you are never an ‘expert’; there is always someone, somewhere who knows much, much more than you. That means the learning never stops: there’s still new stuff to find out about, new techniques to try, and best of all new plants to get to know. It is never, ever boring.

So one of the big highlights for me this summer has been making the acquaintance of a plant I’ve never met before. I came across it en masse in the garden at Highdown in Sussex – incidentally, a wonderful example of how a garden run by the local council (in this case, Worthing Borough Council) should be. The whole thing is a National Collection, nestled in the side of a chalk quarry, with delights around every corner. And it’s free. Talk about breaking the mould.

Anyway, down in the bottom of the valley was a sea of little trees, each smothered in delicate white blossoms set off to perfection by cerise-pink sepals. The scent was intoxicating: it filled the air with a sweet, almost lilac-like perfume, heady and exhilarating. I had no idea what it was, so went off to find an obliging gardener (of which there are many at Highdown). And she informed me it was a Clerodendron.

In this case, I’ve later discovered, C. trichotomum, a summer-flowering and slightly tender shrub-or-small-tree. It can’t be that tender if it grows in such profusion on the South Downs, which I know, having spent a childhood there, is prone to a vicious frost from time to time – though admittedly these were in a very sheltered valley.

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Those white flowers are followed by fat, glossy turquoise berries that persist through autumn, again contrasted against those brilliantly colourful sepals.

As it happens, in one of those odd coïncidences, I realised on coming home that I had already come across this tree – I just didn’t realise it. Last year I was hacking back an overgrown bit of shrubbery in the chicken garden (more properly known as The Beeches B&B) which I look after not far from here, and pruned back a lilac off a neat little tree I couldn’t identify. It hadn’t flowered, but then not much would if smothered by a large lilac branch.

But when I went back to the garden only a week or so after returning from Highdown, the little tree had burst into flower in celebration of its release: and yes, dear reader, you have probably already guessed, I recognised it straight away as C. trichotomum.

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It is really a very elegant little tree: the ones I saw in Highdown and at the garden at The Beeches are no more than about 10ft or so tall. It has a nice neat umbrella shape about it, and the leaves are held in pleasing little rosettes. Altogether a thing of beauty. Its only slight drawback is that it does sucker rather a lot – which explains the size of the thicket at Highdown – so when it’s happy you do have to keep on top of it. But that’s a small price to pay for a thing so lovely.

 

A figgy pudding

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in chicken garden, pruning

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Now here’s a pretty mess…

Spent a happy day today pruning a large and rather unwieldy fig tree. This seems to be a theme of my gardening life at the moment: I look after two overgrown fig trees at the moment and March (I know, it’s late Feb, but we can stretch a point) is the time to have a go at them.

You don’t want to do too much all at once. The older wood is less fruitful, so that’s what you want to target, leaving younger wood to be productive later in the year (hopefully, if it’s sunny enough). Take all the older wood out at once, though, and you send the tree into a state of outraged shock from which it may never recover.

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First decide which of your big branches to get rid of. This one’s a goner…

So I’ve taken out one in four of the oldest trunks – which effectively in this case just means one major trunk, the one which was crossing all the others and going in totally the wrong direction.

I also removed the (smaller) side branches which were heading away from the wall into the path – necessity, this, as otherwise you couldn’t really walk past. It may have taken me over the top a little with the amount I’ve removed, so fingers crossed I haven’t overdone it.

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That should do the trick (I removed a lot of the ivy behind as well – training things against ivy never ends well). Good to see my assistant head gardeners inspecting my handiwork, too.

The eventual idea is to train this back against the wall as a fan, but it will be at least three and probably more like five years before we get there. You do need a little patience to be a gardener…

All tucked up

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in chicken garden, cutting garden

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Tuck dahlias up for their winter hibernation as soon as the stems are blackened by frost

I arrived at the Chicken Garden this morning to find the big, handsome dahlias hanging their heads, their lush leaves turned slatey black and drooping disconsolately.

Abbie – garden owner – grows dahlias by the armful to cut for guests at the B&B, and very gorgeous they’ve been for the last few months. So there are two whole rows of them in the cutting garden as well as a dozen or so in various spots around the main flower beds.

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If you’re leaving them in the ground, cut stems right back (if lifting, leave 15cm of stalk intact)

You can leave dahlias as they are till the blackened-leaf stage (and they’ll keep flowering, too, if you dead-head) but once the first frost has struck it’s time to leap into action.

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Mulch thickly – at least 15cm deep. Autumn leaves are ideal for this as they don’t hold on to moisture as much as compost.

I always prefer to leave a plant in the ground if at all possible, and in the balmy south-west we’re in just the sort of place where you can get away with it with dahlias most years. But you never know quite what the weather has in store: if it’s a really wet one, or possibly even a really snowy one, you could still end up losing the lot.

I decided to cut my losses: so I’ve left the bigger (and therefore, I reason, more hardy) border varieties in the ground and lifted any smaller plants and also those in pots and containers where the roots are more exposed.

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And finally: cover the whole thing with a layer of hessian (as here), insect-proof mesh, weed-suppressing fabric, old t-shirts… in fact anything that’s breathable. Two purposes: 1) it holds the leaves in place and stops them blowing off, and 2) it gives one extra layer of frost protection to the tubers. Pin down securely with bits of sturdy wire. And that’s it till spring (I hope…)

In the cutting garden, I have covered one whole row and lifted the other. They’re currently trimmed back to about 15cm and turned upside down to dry and drain, the shortened stalks poked through the slats of the greenhouse staging to hold them in place.

Next week, once they’re fully dry, I’ll pack them into boxes of damp-ish sand or spent compost and move them to the shed (drier than the greenhouse). After that I shall be going round with fingers permanently crossed till the spring warms up next year and I can pull back the covers to see if my luck has held. Here’s hoping…

Guard turkeys

17 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in chicken garden, poultry, self sufficiency

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guineafowl1One of the gardens I work in I refer to – possibly slightly rudely – as the chicken garden, mainly because whenever I go there I am surrounded by a bevy of under-gardeners in the form of a dozen or so hens.

They are the most free-range, happy hens I have ever met, despite being apparently totally unprotected from foxes: they live at the edge of a very rural village, fields all around, a few neighbours but nothing that would stop any self-respecting fox in search of his tea.

But – and I have all fingers and toes crossed and touching wood as I type – they are all still very much alive. And that’s because of the four little oddities which bustle around with them.

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These are the first guineafowl I have ever been at close quarters with, and they’re quite captivating. They look awful: they are possibly, in fact, the ugliest birds in existence from the neck up, where they bear more than a passing resemblance to a small and scruffy turkey.

From the neck down they are absolutely gorgeous: fluffy and puffy like great balls of beautifully patterned eiderdown. It’s as if whoever put them together got distracted halfway through and picked up the wrong pattern when they came back to the job.

They are also enormous characters. They are given to doing very odd things: yellow builder’s bags bring them out in mild hysteria and they will stand there for hours attacking it determinedly and ferociously. Cars suffer the same fate.

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But best of all (except for the neighbours) they make a huge racket whenever anything at all alarming comes near. It’s hard to describe the noise: a bit like a cross between an old fashioned car horn and a chronically creaky door. If that means nothing to you, just have a listen to this.

But it’s really, really loud. If you were a fox and you came within a snifter of this lot everyone for about fifty square miles would know all about it.

Keeping guineafowl is a little different from chickens. They’re very flighty, and not particularly tame (though they will follow you around the garden like a phalanx of little guard turkeys). They are extremely free range, wandering much further than a chicken would – these ones regularly go walkabout around the village. And they won’t roost in a house, preferring to fly up into trees, and lay their eggs all over the place. If you can find them, they’re small but worth having – a bit like a bantam’s.

And of course to include them in your self-sufficiency repertoire to the full you really ought to eat them. Guineafowl are among the most prized of poultry delicacies: I’m told the meat is rather like pheasant.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that – haven’t even screwed up the courage to despatch a chicken yet – and the eggs are too small to make me want to give them the field room. But the guard-turkey thing: that’s worth having. You could save yourself an awful lot of chicken wire with a few of these. Not to mention the cost of a TV licence too: guineafowl are much more fun to watch.

You can visit these particular ones yourself if you happen to be down these parts: they live at The Beeches B&B, and a very fine and beautiful place it is too.

 

Karma camellia

25 Saturday Apr 2015

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Hmm.

I’m never quite sure about camellias. On the one hand, when they look like this, they’re fabulous.

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But they all too often look like this.

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This is classic frost damage: something to which camellias, or some varieties at least, are particularly prone. You don’t need much: this one is in what I call the chicken garden I look after just down the road from me in south Somerset, where we have only very mild frosts – in fact I didn’t even notice the one that caused this damage.

It ruins the display completely: not just browning the petals but throwing them to the floor like a lot of used tissue papers. The odd thing is that another pink variety next door, with larger flowers, came through all but unscathed. So it’s clearly something to which some types are more prone than others.

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This one came with the garden so nobody quite knows what kind it is. Shame, or I would have been able to warn everyone off it. It’s small-flowered and a rather saccharine shade of pink: not my favourite.

As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, this is a plant I find hard to love. But nonetheless I have been assiduously dead-heading the worst offenders and take off a bucketful of browning pink petals every time I visit, in a (largely vain) attempt to keep it looking moderately acceptable for a day or two at least. I shall be roundly glad when it’s finally finished.

I am very gently trying to persuade the owner that its display is so liable to tarnish and never quite look what it should that it should become an ex-camellia in fairly short order. She’s quite in favour of a quick and humane end to the misery but I’m not so sure her mother is. Oh dear: I fear we’re stuck with damp brown used tissues for some time to come.

Pastures new

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

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IMG-20141208-00073 I am gardening again!

Well – I’ve always been gardening, but not in other people’s gardens for a while. That’s all changed in the last couple of months and I’ve taken on three large and beautiful country gardens.

The first I privately refer to as the chicken garden: slightly unfair as it’s a lovely 6 acres around a fine old rambly house. Or at least it will be lovely: I’m currently rescuing the cultivated bits around the house from a spaghetti-like tangle of bindweed and doing lots of new planting.

All accompanied by Henrietta here – my keenest fan – and her sisters, including three chicks and some guineafowl. They love it when I turn up as I’m Worm Provider Extraordinaire. So attentive are they I’m constantly worried about pinning one to the ground by the head with my fork.

They are very free range so we’ve developed a few ways of chicken proofing the garden. The main one is choosing the right plants.

Shrubs are easiest but boring planted en masse – so here’s my top 10 tough, more or less chicken proof perennials which will cope with a bit of experimental pecking.

  • Salvia ‘Mainacht’
  • Liriope muscari
  • Sanguisorba ‘Red Buttons’
  • Anemone x hybrida
  • Hellebores
  • Aster ‘Little Carlow’
  • Oriental poppies (these regenerate from the roots even when scratched to bits)
  • Ajuga reptans ‘Burgundy Glow’ (plants which cover the ground densely offer no scratching opportunities)
  • Cirsium rivulare ‘Purpurea’
  • Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue”