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This month in the garden…

07 Saturday Jan 2017

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I left my overwintering broad beans and sweet peas outside this winter and they’re doing much better, far less leggy than usual – so as I suspected, it pays to grow them hard.

I have definitely been having a bit of a slump in the garden just recently. This occasionally happens, even to obsessive gardening types like me: you just sort of get out of the habit, somehow.

It’s usually in the dog end of the year that I lose heart. December is a prime month. By the time I’m home from work it’s getting dark anyway; the mornings are cold and dank and there are grumpy teenagers to boot out of bed. More often than not it’s raining, the ground is soggy and all the jobs that need doing at this time of year are easily put off till later.

January, though, is a different matter. I’m not sure why, as the weather is still foul – worse, if anything, than December. Maybe it’s just the symbolic beginning of a new year. And the turning of the solstice has a lot to do with it: it’s as though the extra few minutes on the end of every day tinge the ends of my fingers a deeper shade of green as the month wears on.

So I begin to steal half an hour after work, or just after the kids have left for school, to catch up on all that is left undone and stir into life the embers of another season. Here’s what I’ll be up to this month:

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Still plenty to pick: this is my ‘Dwarf Green Curled’ kale, and there’s sprouts, leeks, kohlrabi, cabbages and purple sprouting broccoli too.

Climbing apple trees: Not for fun (though it actually is, quite a lot) but to snip back last year’s growth and encourage as much fruit as I can. I only have one apple tree at the moment, my beloved Devonshire Quarrenden, and it’s a very early one so must be guzzled straight off the tree. Which is why I shall also be…

Planting new trees: I am planning three new apples for the top strip, where my orchard is sputtering into existence at last after several livestock-related setbacks. I’m after a cooker, Warner’s King – in tribute to a legendary apple tree which grew in my mum’s garden once – plus James Grieve, my all-time favourite storing apple, and Egremont’s Russet just because I adore russet apples.

Pruning blackcurrants: And autumn-fruiting raspberries: the fruit garden is in for a stern talking-to this month as it got well out of hand towards the back half of last year and became more impenetrable thicket than chi-chi fruit potager.

Sowing onions: An experiment this year, as I feel like having a go at some really good red onions, the kinds with pink flesh rather than just the red skins. Carmen sounds like a good one; or perhaps Red Brunswick. I haven’t yet found a good red onion from sets, so I’m thinking seed is the way to go.

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Freshly-turned compost, covered with cardboard to keep weeds out and moisture in: this will be ready to use come March.

Turning the compost: A great job for a frosty day, as you invariably end up in t-shirt sleeves and glowing pinkly: not only good for the circulation but also very cheering as it makes you feel like the weather’s much warmer than it actually is. I turn my bins about every four months, using the compost as mulch at six months old: the next batch will be ready just in time for the March feed’n’mulch routine.

Mending greenhouse glass: The football club next door has been using my greenhouse as a goalpost again and I have two or three panes to replace. I am determined to get this done now, in the quiet stillness of January, rather than leaving it till I’m filling up the greenhouse in May and everything moves into panic mode.

Building new beds: The very last corner of my veg garden is proving stubbornly difficult to get around to finishing. I’m at that pesky 90% done, 90% left to do stage: all it needs is three boards fixing into place and I’m there. This will be the month I manage it. I hope.

Raking up leaves: The otherwise robust and rudely healthy quince tree in the chicken run developed a nasty case of blight last year and I didn’t get a single quince off it. So this year I’m paying particular attention to raking up the leaves after they’ve fallen, to try to scoop up at least some of the overwintering spores in the hope that they won’t come back again next year.

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Garlic seedlings ready to go out: but how will they cope with the rust this year?

Planting garlic: I have had my little garlic cloves growing away in a module tray since I sowed them in November, and now they’re bursting out of the drainage holes in the bottom so I think they can go into the ground. These are the cloves I saved from the plants that held out for longest against garlic rust last year: with luck, they’ll have a smidgen more resistance this season and I might have half a chance of actually eating some.

Planning, planning, planning: The great veg garden plan for 2017 is well under way. I am religious about using the colder months of the year to plan in detail what I’m going to do next season. It’s a good way of keeping yourself optimistic through the dead days of December; and it also saves a lot of trouble next year, too, as you know what to sow and how much of it. It is the gardening equivalent of a hot chocolate by the fire while leafing through a holiday catalogue. You just know things can only get better from here.

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!

October garden: Greenhouses and fruit garden

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in garden design, greenhouse, landscaping, my garden

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It’s amazing what you can fit into an 8×6 greenhouse: here be melons, cucumbers, chilli ‘Razzmatazz’, okra, sweet peppers and my amazing tree chilli, now taller than me

The slow dying of the greenhouses is the swansong of my year. They’re the last to go: long after the veg beds outside are brown with dead foliage and slimy with rot, the cucumbers are still challenging me to find new recipes and the chilli peppers are suffusing with colour from green to orange to red.

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Smaller but perfectly formed: ‘Sweet Crunch’ cucumbers, still going strong

It’s been a good year: and a bad. I have two greenhouses, facing each other in the lee of a hedge across the coldframe I made for my old garden (it’s falling to pieces now – a combination of age and a blackthorn tree just above which keeps dropping branches at inconvenient moments).

In one greenhouse I plant cucumbers, melons, peppers and anything else I fancy growing that year: in the other are my tomatoes.

I always start the year so optimistically with my toms: I love to try new varieties or revisit old ones. This year it’s been Gardeners’ Delight, Costoluto Fiorentino (quite the best beefsteak for flavour bar, perhaps, Brandywine) and the plum tomatoes Rio Grande.

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Not so successful. The other greenhouse has been sick with blight for months: nothing will grow in there but the marigolds. Pretty as they are, you can’t eat them.

But despite the dry weather, despite the perfect growing conditions of this blissfully warm summer, the blight got in.

I mulched with compost from the bins outside: mistake no. 1, as it no doubt carried blight spores. Then a pane of glass in the roof lost a corner, so the rain – laden, too, with spores – could spatter the Costolutos with fatally infected water. And the bush tomatoes I had in the corner – ‘The Amateur’ – turned out to be the most blight-prone tomatoes I’ve ever grown, finishing off my other plants by incubating and then spreading the plague.

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This was meant to be a ‘Black Beauty’ aubergine: but it’s turned out more like a ‘Pinstripe’. Duff seeds – veg which haven’t grown into what they said on the packet – have been a bit of a feature this year.

Well: it’s a lesson learned. This winter’s to-do list includes changing the soil in this greenhouse; replacing the broken panes; and fumigating with a sulphur candle. Then next year I shall use nothing but the cleanest compost and water with tap water. I’m considering growing only blight-resistant varieties, too: ‘Losetto’, ‘Ferline’ and ‘Fantasio’, perhaps.

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My fruit garden: the only ‘finished’ bit of the garden (and even then it needs a netting cage, quite a few more plants and a bit of extra path put in). My little still small place of calm.

On the plus side, my fruit garden is looking wonderful. I planted it just last winter with two maiden cherries, a redcurrant, a couple of blackcurrants raised from cuttings taken from plants I had on my allotment, and a slew of raspberries. Oh, and a bed of strawberries, of course.

You’re not supposed to grow fruit on chalk, and my soil is grey with the stuff. But as a gardener to the core, I’m going to try anyway. So far I’m encouraged: the raspberries have not turned yellow as I expected them to (though three canes have turned up their toes for reasons unknown); the cherries are thriving; and the blackcurrants have had their first fruits already.

Here’s how it looked in 2010:

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Have you seen this gooseberry?

13 Friday Jan 2012

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I love a good urban myth. A good rural myth is even better.

There is a gooseberry known as the Flintshire gooseberry. It is, rumour has it, a prolific cropper: it was born and bred in north-east Wales, around the Wrexham area, and if you ask anyone around there who knows fruit, they’ll mention it with pride as their local gooseberry.

The trouble is, it may not even exist.

One man has been looking for this gooseberry, quite hard, since 2003, and still hasn’t found it. He’s Simon Farr, who runs the North East Wales Orchards Initiative, currently surveying and reviving ancient orchards in north-east Wales and neighbouring counties in England. Now even he admits he’s beginning to wonder if it’s a myth.

‘We’ve gone through the old catalogues and looked in all sorts of places to find it,’ he told me,’ and there’s not even a description.’

His orchards survey already has one high-profile success story when it comes to finding obscure fruit: the Denbigh Plum, first mentioned in 1785 and believed to be the only surviving native Welsh plum, was almost extinct a few years ago. Then its plight was highlighted by the project, and caught the attention of a chap called Ian Sturrock.

Ian has a good pedigree on saving rare fruit: he’s responsible for rescuing the Bardsey Apple, the last tree of which was found growing on an island off the north coast of Wales. Much grafting later and you can even buy one to grow in your garden; and so it is with the Denbigh Plum. In fact so complete is this fruit’s return from obscurity that it now has its own festival.

Not so the Flintshire gooseberry, though. Simon says almost everyone in the area can tell you about it: if it is a myth, it’s certainly a persistent one. Some even remember having a Flintshire gooseberry in their gardens, or their parents’ gardens. What’s worse, all they can tell you is that it was a prolific cropper: no word about what it looked like, or even if it was a green or a purple variety.

Simon thinks it might just be a chance seedling from a wild gooseberry, found commonly in the hedgerows here: they’re also reported growing further afield, too, in the Lake District and Northumberland.

Wild gooseberries are small, the size of marbles (the Plants for a Future database has them at 1cm diameter), and also rather hairy and can be sharp to the taste (though if you can find the plum red ones, they’re much sweeter – if you beat the wasps to it).

There’s a fair bit of debate over whether these hedgerow gooseberries are truly wild, or just garden escapees. There’s no particular reason why Ribes uva-crispa shouldn’t be a wilding: it grows perfectly well in most temperate woodland settings, and there’s a long and honourable tradition of wild gooseberries in America, though they’re different species: there’s Ribes oxyacanthoides, the bristly wild gooseberry; R. cynosbati, the prickly gooseberry; and with no small relief R. hirtellum, which is merely a bit hairy.

And there is a wealth of common names for gooseberries – 26 of them, grossetts, feaberries, goosegogs… – which hints at a long history. They’ve been eaten since the 13th century and grown in gardens since the 16th century, although it was (isn’t it always) the Victorians who really shook things up in the gooseberry world by breeding many of the best-loved varieties we grow today.

But those who argue that the hedgerow plants are from the garden point out that they weren’t recorded in the wild till 1763 – long after it was grown in cultivation. And there’s an argument that they aren’t British native plants after all: the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) certainly takes this view, pointing out that the spread of the wild gooseberry has happened since they became popular in gardens. But you can always argue the toss on native status, especially in this case.

Anyway, back to the Flintshire gooseberry: poor Simon is still on the hunt for it, and regularly follows up leads such as the old market gardens in Rhyll said to have a healthy population of Flintshire gooseberries which turned out to be a fine but nonetheless inescapably English collection of old varieties.

So have you seen this gooseberry? If you think you might have it growing in your garden – the North East Wales Orchard Initiative would like to hear from you.

Inspiration from West Dean #3

19 Monday Oct 2009

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If you thought training fruit was a simple matter of arranging the branches in a sort of fan-shape against a wall, think again.

You can trim them into single stems – cordons – trimming off all the side shoots to encourage fruiting spurs from the main stem only. If you’ve heard of espaliers and fan-training, you’ve probably heard of cordons. The advantage to this is you get to pack about five varieties into a ten-foot space. You can grow cordons upright (though you get less fruit I believe) – like this:

And it doesn’t have to be apples: this is a redcurrant (‘Redstart’) trained as a double-cordon.

And if you want to know what a double cordon is – here you go. You just allow that single stem to branch, once: doesn’t take up much more space and doubles your yield.

You can train them along a fence into a hedge…


…or over an arch to make a tunnel.

Or if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can build a sort of free-standing cage and train your fruit up that. Here’s one they made earlier…

… and here’s another one with a pointy top.

I’m a bit sceptical about cage training – can’t see how you’d keep the air circulating around the centre of the fruit tree, and if you can’t do that it’s a recipe for fungal disease – but I’m willing to be convinced, and it sure does look pretty.

Thank you once again to Jim Buckland, Sarah Wain and the team at West Dean Gardens, near Chichester, for playing around experimenting and showing us all we don’t necessarily have to do it like that.

Bigamous blogging

12 Wednesday Aug 2009

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OK I admit it – I’ve been two-timing my blog.

Those nice people at online retailer Crocus are branching out from their Chelsea medal winning range of herbaceous perennials and such like, and have started selling fruit and veg plants (and seeds). They kindly but perhaps a little foolhardily asked me about my allotment. So I told them. At length. Again and again.

So all my witterings have now become their kitchen garden blog. Actually I’ve been secretly wanting to do this for ages – I’m a compulsive grower of fruit and veg and have been for years, but only occasionally allow them onto these pages. They will still turn up here from time to time, but now I can also go on about them at great length and in more detail than you could ever have thought possible.

You, too, can live through the harvest of every pea pod by my side: all you have to do is click here….

A lovely pair of melons!

17 Wednesday Sep 2008

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Now boys, that’s enough sniggering. I mean the horticultural kind, of course 😀

I’m a melon virgin (oh stop it) – so I didn’t really expect any results at all. So I was skipping all the way home when I found these in my allotment greenhouse:

One’s a lot bigger than the other, and they’re both on the small side at the moment, but hopefully they’ll both reach a good enough size eventually (oh dear… what is it with double entendre and veg growing?). In the meantime, I’ve given them a bit of extra support (oh pleeeeease…) with a pair of old tights:

Being a bit of a babe, I only had black tights in the drawer so now I’m worrying they won’t allow enough sunlight to get through for ripening. But we’ll see.

Now, that’s quite enough of that – I’m off to find something more sensible to talk about.