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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: spring

This month in the garden…

19 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by sallynex in kitchen garden, my garden, this month in the garden

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Tags

dahlias, hazel, Jerusalem artichokes, mulch, propagator, shallots, spring, tomatoes, Vitopod

snowdrops

Signs of hope are everywhere

Well. Hasn’t it got busy around here lately.

There I was, listening morosely to the tumbleweed (well, gales and splattering rain) and wondering if the winter would ever end. And then all of a sudden spring sprung. The frosts retreated, the snowdrops came out, and everyone emerged blinking in the watery February sunlight.

And all that sulking indoors has left a ton of stuff to do in the garden, so I’m already behind before I’ve even begun. And now that we can all agree it’s spring, there are garden articles to write and book proposals to hone and student assignments to mark and garden holidays to plan… Welcome to a new year!

Here’s what’s on my to-do list right now – all to cram into the remaining fortnight before it gets even more crazy in March. Wish me luck…

Hitching up the propagator: I think I actually love my Vitopod. It’s not often I say this about a bit of kit, but this has really transformed the way I can garden. It’s eye-wateringly expensive, but believe me: it’s worth it. The moment it comes out of storage each spring is the moment my year begins. 

Sowing tomatoes: See above. This wouldn’t be possible, this early, without a heated propagator – and a good one at that. I set mine to 20°C, and then once the seedlings are up switch the thermostat down to about 12°C to grow them on. Frost? What frost?

Sowing the earliest root crops: I like to get an early crop of the hardy stuff going as soon as I can (cue: heated propagator again. Sorry). It’s too cold to sow yet, even in an unheated greenhouse; my rule of thumb is 7-10°C day and night before I’ll risk it. But once the toms are finished, turnips, beetroot and kohlrabi go in at 12°C and germinate like a dream.

Planting Jerusalem artichokes: There’s planting to be done outside, too; this year I picked up some of the not-quite-as-knobbly Jerusalem artichoke, ‘Fuseau’, along with the seed potatoes. They’re tall, and have flashy golden sunflowers in summer, so they’re going straight into the ground in the exotic edibles garden. Just hope I can keep them in bounds, that’s all – I have tried (and failed) to curb their enthusiasm before…

shallots

Lovely fat Jermor shallots waiting to go in the ground

Planting shallots: Shallots go in earlier than onions, so mine are in the ground this month. As always, I’ve gone for a French variety, ‘Jermor’ – though I’d have preferred ‘Hative de Niort’, fiendishly expensive but the largest, most reliable and – most importantly – tastiest shallot you’ll ever grow.

Experimenting with new stuff: This year it’s Welsh onions – I never have any luck with spring onions, so I thought these perennial bunching onions might prove a useful substitute. Also Carlin peas, aka parched peas, thanks to a kind gift from skilled kitchen gardener and Charles Dowding‘s other half, Steph Hafferty. And tiger nuts, if I can keep them warm enough. All of which more at a later date.

Cutting hazel stems: You’ll find me swinging monkey-like among the thickets of hazel that line the back of our garden this month: they’re perched precariously on the side of the bank but produce some lovely long, straight stems. Cut at around 2″ diameter, just before the buds break, they supply all my beanpole and peastick needs.

Potting up dahlia tubers: What’s a dyed-in-the-wool veggie type like me doing growing something as fancy as dahlias, you ask? Well, dahlias are edible too, so they earn their place in my kitchen garden. Plus they’re dead pretty. I pot mine up in 2ltr pots this month to save them from the slugging they’d otherwise get in the open garden.

chitting

Ripe with promise: the potato crop chitting on my windowsill. Not strictly necessary, but I do like to get them out of their bags while they’re waiting to be planted.

Forcing new potatoes: The one time I bother with growing potatoes in sacks – otherwise an exercise in retrieving the minimum harvest possible from the maximum outlay – is in early spring, when I force a couple of sacks’ worth of new potatoes just for the smug value of eating them weeks before anyone else can.

Mulching & feeding fruit: The fruit garden gets a lot of attention this month: I’ve just about finished all the pruning, but right behind the secateurs are the spade and wheelbarrow. A good scattering of slow-release fertiliser – I’m a fan of pelleted poultry manure or Vitax Q4, but this year I have Carbon Gold to try too – topped off with a thick layer of mulch sets the whole fruit garden up for the rest of the year.

Image

Wordless Wednesday: Promise

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Tags

buds, rhubarb, spring, wordless wednesday

img_4241

Posted by sallynex | Filed under wordless wednesday

≈ 2 Comments

Planting witchetty grubs

10 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by sallynex in exotic edibles, unusual plants

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Chinese artichokes, crosnes, exotic vegetables, planting, sowing, spring, Stachys affinis

IMG_3396

Not much gardening going on yesterday: it was blowing a hooley again and though it wasn’t exactly raining hard, what there was flew at you horizontally on the wind like needles. I am an unashamedly fair weather gardener: I don’t see the point of turning your garden into a muddy slurry pit under your feet and mashing your soil into a sodden pulp just so you can say you’ve been gardening in the rain. Good job I don’t work in a Proper Garden where they can make me go outside even if I don’t want to. Anyway: on days like yesterday, I beat a dignified retreat and spend the day at my desk.

Today though was a different story: lovely sunshine, a balmy breeze and everything was drying out nicely. Time to do a bit more sowing: the first peas and broad beans are already in the cold frame hardening off, and the next batch of mangetouts are now cooking nicely in my 15°C propagator.

I’m not quite venturing outside yet: the soil is still chilly to the touch and we’re regularly slumping to zero at night so direct sowing is still a few weeks off yet. That’s not to say you can’t plant, though.

The above curious little witchetty grub lookalikes are a new venture for me this year. These are Chinese artichokes, crosnes, or Stachys affinis: take your pick. Whatever you call them, they’re hardy so you can plant them direct outside whenever you want – unlike my other exotic veg (mashua, oca, yacon) which are still confined to the frost-free greenhouse. So I’m going to give them a go.

I’ve planted them in a patch by the pond in the exotic edibles garden. It’s a little triangle that’s quite nicely confined, having a stone wall on two sides and the pond across the third. The reason for the fencing is that these are veg with ambitions: they will multiply and spread, even if you eat lots of them, and while it’s never a bad thing to have a lot of anything edible it can be a pain if they’re anywhere near other plants (see Jerusalem artichokes and mint, to which Chinese artichokes are related).

They were easy enough to plant: bury on their sides about 5cm deep, and around 15cm apart (not that it matters too much as they’ll soon form a dense mat). They look like deadnettle once they’re up, so I may have to liven them up with a few flowers or this is going to be a dull little corner indeed.

You harvest them from about October. Cleaning is a bit of a faff: it’s easier if you grow them in lighter soils, but in heavy soils you’ll need a bit of elbow grease and a nailbrush. There’s no need to peel. They have a crunch like water chestnuts and a delicate artichoke flavour. Sounds great. I shall report back.

Wordless Wednesday: Spring flowers

02 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by sallynex in shows, wordless wednesday

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

iris reticulata, rhs spring flower show, spring, spring bulbs

springflowers.jpg

As seen at the RHS Early Spring Plant Fair

Tulipomania

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in design, garden design

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Tags

christopher lloyd, Great Dixter, planting combinations, spring, tulips

tulips4I have tulips dancing before my eyes.

I must have planted a thousand in the last few weeks. Not in my own garden, unfortunately: though I have bought in some more species tulips (my particular passion) and some ‘Abu Hassan’, ‘White Triumphator’ and ‘Ballerina’ to bulk out the main borders, my garden is at the bottom of the pecking order so these will have to wait till I can tear myself away from all the other tulip planting I have to do.

All the gardens I look after have owners who adore tulips, so I am planting them en masse wherever we can fit them in.

tulips2

The chicken garden has huge handsome terracotta pots packed with the things out the front and a cutting garden full of ‘Graceland’, ‘Apricot Beauty’, ‘Belle Epoque’ and ‘Sapporo’; yet still they come. I am in the middle of planting a rainbow of tulip colour through the big rose garden border at the moment: it will look fabulous.

In the Dorset garden I look after there are a couple of borders by the house which I planted up with a mix of tulips as an experiment last year.

tulips1

I had, until I did this, favoured the Christopher Lloyd school of planting tulips: great blocks and swathes of the same variety, fifty at a time about 10cm apart for maximum impact. Visit Great Dixter any time in May to see exactly the effect I’m talking about: it looks stunning.

I’ve done this in my own garden for ages and it does mean you get the full impact of each type of tulip to the max. The only problem is that you get one block of early tulips coming up in late April, then a bit of a green flower-less gap before the next block flowers in early May. Or they overlap and you have a slightly jangly contrast before the next block takes over.

Of course this is probably my own cack-handedness in applying the Christo theory and I’m sure Fergus Garrett would get it right.

But just for fun, last year I tried a combination of tulips of different flowering times in the same place.

tulips3

All were a similar colour palette, but I had groups of mixed early- mid season and late-flowering types to provide a succession of colour from April to June.

Amazingly, that’s exactly what happened. They flowered for ages and were joyous and lovely and full of delight: they reminded me of a packet of Jelly Tots. Which also made me realise just how pretty Jelly Tots are.

We loved them so much we took lots of photos (including those above) and I’ve replanted them almost exactly the same this year (with a couple of necessary close substitutes as the original varieties weren’t available). I’m now seeing if I can come up with similarly lovely combinations to use in my own garden.

I thought I’d share the mix with you: here’s what I planted. It’s not all that complicated: just pairs of early, mid-season and late varieties, all toned in so that when they overlap they look good together. Simples.

Apricot Beauty (Single Early)
Purple Prince (Single Early)
Negrita (Triumph – mid-season)
Spring Green (Viridiflora – mid-season)
Pink Diamond (Single Late)

End of month view: January

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

end of month view, extreme weather, snow, spring, winter

Always the last one to the party, that’s me. But I didn’t want to wave January goodbye without documenting what has been an extraordinary month – even for this most extreme time of year.

Of course we spent most of the month under deep snow, so for the first couple of weeks there wasn’t much gardening going on. I had a close encounter with a proper bona fide blizzard, in which I discovered that our Toyota Rav 4, previously considered embarrassingly poncy, outperforms a Landrover in a snowdrift, and I lost my precious loquat tree to a heavy snowfall of 8″ in a single night. Note to self: loquat trees have brittle branches and need tying up in snowy weather.

There's a viburnum in full flower under here somewhere

There’s a viburnum in full flower under here somewhere

Once the snow had melted, it was time to assess the damage. The most serious was caused not so much by the snow but by months of wet weather followed by howling gales during that blizzard I was talking about.

An ex-tree, and possibly an ex-ladder too

An ex-tree, and possibly an ex-ladder too

This was previously an unassuming ash tree, some 40ft tall and minding its own business in a corner of our garden. It went largely unnoticed until it crashed down our back slope, its roots terminally loosened in the muddy soil. Thankfully there was nobody around at the time: our ladder copped it though.

Otherwise things have been mostly soldiering on through. I am eternally thankful I managed to remember to cover at least one of my ginger lilies (Hedychium gardnerianum) with a Heath Robinson affair involving cardboard, lots of fleece and some bricks: the other one I didn’t get around to so this is going to turn into an Interesting Experiment. We haven’t had it very cold here, minus 4-5°C at most, but it has been very wet, so if the one survives and the other doesn’t we’ll know what’s to blame.

My little ginger all snug in its fleece jacket

My little ginger all snug in its fleece jacket

And as the snow melted, it revealed all those lovely heart-lifting little jewels from their hiding places under the blanket of white, lifting the cloud just long enough to remind me that spring will arrive again, one day, as inevitable as the turning of the world.

Battered but not beaten: the first daffodils appeared on the slope this month

Battered but not beaten: the first daffodils appeared on the slope this month

It's been a wonderful year for snowdrops: perhaps it's just me but they seem bigger and fatter somehow

It’s been a wonderful year for snowdrops: perhaps it’s just me but they seem bigger and fatter somehow

..and the bulbs are poking through the ground everywhere: a new one appears every day. These are the early tulips, only a couple of months away now.

..and the bulbs are poking through the ground everywhere: a new one appears every day. These are the early tulips, only a couple of months away now.

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