Quick Jobs

Just a brief potter outside after getting home tonight. I can't remember where they came from, but we had a pack of fifteen anemones sitting around, waiting to plant. I put them in a tub to soak for a day, and we've now planted these in the wall of the front garden, as a previous planting appears to have at least partly worked. We put a hundred in, in autumn 2010, and although they didn't show in 2011, they then appeared (to my great surprise) in spring 2012, and are back, flowering prettily, now.

I'm not sure all 100 have come up, I have to confess.

Anyway, another bunch are now in the lower bit of wall (towards the garage), in the hopes that one day they'll come up and add some spring colour.

I forgot to note that, on Sunday, we planted fifteen crocosmia ('Lucifer') in the pond garden, where the Christmas trees were heeled in until moving to the hillside two months ago.

Having left them until we could consider them together, we also decided what to do with the 'Stella' cherry and Victoria plum in the pond garden. The Stella had a number of branches from near the base, and so I've removed these. We'll train the leader to a 4-6 foot standard, which it's getting towards.

The Victoria's a bit trickier. It was pruned as a bush, I think, with the header cut at about a foot. It has a number of large-ish branches from this level, but none looks especially promising as a new standard trunk. One or two are nearly tall enough, but have a lot of dead-looking spurs at about the height I'd hope for new laterals, which isn't encouraging. By contrast, there are some lively looking stems, but they're fairly thin, and not very tall.

As plum pruning is safely accomplished until late in the year, we've decided to procrastinate. That is, to wait and see which of the stems shows good growth, and select a new leader based on that in the summer. Then we'll remove (or reduce) the rest, and train that stem in as a new trunk, aiming, again, for a 4-6 foot height.

Plum and Cherry Pruning

Most of the fruit trees were pruned near the end of February. That was while the trees were still dormant (just as well, given the snowy Easter we had), but we left the plums and cherries alone. These (Prunus genus) are particularly susceptible to Silverleaf infection (a fungal disease, Chondrostereum purpureum), which typically gets into the plant through wounds. Routine pruning of these trees should be left, therefore, until they're in leaf. As this was a formative pruning of a young sapling, we've waited only until the trees are starting to break bud.

I worked round the relevant trees this evening: Victoria Plum, Oullin's Golden Gage, Merryweather Damson,  ornamental plums 'Spring Glow' and Pissardii, 'Royalty' crab-apple and cherry 'Royal Burgandy', as well as 'Summer Sun' cherry in the garden. There's another Victoria in the garden, but I need to decide how to treat that, as it had its leader cut out at about 50cm when we bought it (a garden ago): ideally we'd have a 1-1.4m clear stem on it, but that might be tricky.

They've all had all feathers on the bottom third cut right back, those in the middle third halved, and the top third left. A couple of the fruit trees have a leader that's about at the right height, so we can train main laterals this year.

I also had a play with a plan for the herb garden today.

Possible Herb Garden Plan (© Ian 2013)

It could still change, of course. We're currently thinking of having three interwoven boundaries: one of box, one of euonymus, and one of lavender. The 55 sections then have different things in them. Some of them (the 'step-ins') will be rather more sparsely planted, to allow us to walk through them to get access across the garden. The ornamentals are likely to be plants like gladioli; the obelisks are probably going to wind up being  edible legumes, but attractive varieties. What the herbs are is still subject of discussion: the advantage of this sort of design is that each square can have different soil (enriched, impoverished, gritty, damp) to suit the planting, so Mediterranean herbs (sharp drainage, poor soil) can grow next to roses (deep rich soil).

And as for the roses: we'll probably get four varieties, possibly using the Sister Elizabeth and Eglantine roses we have as one group, with three others: I'd like at least one white rose, and one deep red.

Time to turn some more turf!

Herbs and Mulching

Yesterday we finished making the new wildflower/cutting flower bed in front of the quince. We'd lifted the turves last weekend: the ground then needed digging over to removes stones, the damaged land-drain needed repairing, and then it was ready to sow.

We've put four bamboo obelisks in the bed, which we'll plant sweet peas up. As the bed's roughly triangular, that's demarcated three beds, into each of which we've sown a different pack of seeds. One is a pastel meadow mix (gypsophila, Bishop's flower, poppies and cosmos); one is an 'Amethyst and Sapphire' mix (anchusa, salvia, cornflower, verbena); and the last is a combination of several wildflower annual mixes.

Once that was done, we spent the rest of the afternoon starting to mark out the beds for the herb garden. We lifted enough turf to clear a space about 6m by 6m last week, which we've now marked. The garden will be a series of beds about a metre square, set at 45°. Some will have herbs, some will have roses, and we might also include some with spring and summer bulbs in, and some more obelisks with climbers, to add some height.

The edging, we haven't quite decided on. We long intended to use box, mixed with lavender, but this isn't totally fixed. We might use euonymus (probably a variegated form) as an alternative. Partly this is because of the difficulty in propagating more box from the Witley clones, or the cost of purchasing the 500-odd plants we'll need.

Nonetheless, the pattern's more or less decided, subject to tweaks as we uncover more soil, and can lay out the grid, and work out where and how the boundaries fall.

Herb garden outline ( Ian 2013)

Then, today, we've weeded all the fruit beds, and put down a triple mulch: a layer of compost, covered by a layer of cardboard (degradable weed barrier), covered with a layer of conifer chippings. The last of these should mean that the ericaceous nature of the soil is maintained (particularly important with the blueberries), although it'll take a while to break down completely. I shall try to add grass clippings during the summer, to increase the nitrogen content, and off-set the nitrogen lock-up that the carbon-rich chippings will cause.

Hopefully, that should now mean that the weeding of the fruit beds is very easy this year, as well as ensuring that the bushes are well fed and productive.

Flower Bed

Yesterday we worked on removing the grass and thatch from the tops of the turves we cut in the herb garden, and breaking up the turned earth. It took all day, really, to get the square we're working on sorted, which is slow going.

Today's been a bit more interesting: first, I sowed the wildflower seed on the green roof of the wood shelter. It's a mix of thirty-odd perennials and annuals, which should, in the main, cope with the thin, well drained soil of the green roof. I'm hoping that, in time, it'll be awash with colour and insects.

To sow it, I first watered the roof with the hose, before we divided the seed into approximate fractions, based on the size of each section of roof, mixed the seed with sharp sand, broadcast it over, and raked over. It should take 4 to 14 days to germinate.

That done, we lifted the turves on a flower bed that's planned for in front of the bed with the quince in. This year, we'll be directly sowing annuals: a mix of wildflowers and cutting flowers. We had a surprise when lifting turves: an earthenware pipe running from the spectral beds corner, down towards the kitchen garden. A few possibilities exist: it could be a land drain from that corner, which isn't working very well (it might be blocked). It could be a drain from the track or hillside. It isn't a sewage pipe (fortunately).

If it's a broken land drain from the corner, that could be beneficial: if we can repair the pipe, it might solve the drainage issues in that corner without further work. If it's from the hillside, repairing it might lead to flooding in the garden as the hill drains. We need to track the pipe up into the corner, to work out what it is, and where it comes from, as we certainly can't start digging in earnest before we know what lies beneath the soil.

However, the bed we were working on is now clear, and we've made a start on breaking up the soil.

New flower bed (© Ian 2013)

Oriental hellebores

Ordered a few weeks ago, five new oriental hellebores (Helleborus orientalis) arrived today, and have been potted up. It's howling a gale outside (winds up to 35mph, in the shelter of the vegetable garden), so we didn't loiter. Well, we loitered long enough to sow two more pots of beetroot ('Cylindra') while in the porch.

The Christmas rose hellebores (H. niger), including those we recently bought in Ludlow, are looking good at the moment, although the small ones we bought two years ago are still growing. They're slow, though, and therefore expensive, which is why increasing our own from seed and divisions is so attractive.

I saw something for the wishlist while reading a magazine over breakfast: Dierama, or Angel's Fishing Rod.

Dierama pulcherrimum (image by Ghislain118 (AD), hosted on Wikimedia Commons)

First Cut

This evening, in the last of the light, I managed to cut the lawn. Just the games lawn, and round the pond, that is. On the horizon, now, is the time when that will be almost all the grass there is that needs regular cutting: the top lawn has already started its transition to herb and rose garden; the spectrum garden, once the beds and patio are taken out, has only paths to mow; the copse has started to take shape, and that only leaves a small bit at the bottom of the access ramp, and the aforementioned games lawn and pond garden.

Last year was not a good one for lawn mowing. The last cut of the year, at the start of September, was long over due, but there hadn't been any chance to mow for nearly two months. That's 224 days ago, for those of us keeping track, which does, admittedly mean that I've had three fifths of a year off from this far-from-favourite job.

The lawn wasn't actually in bad shape. It's marginally earlier (a week) than I managed the first cut last year, 24th April, and a bit later than 2011 (20th March). Meticulous record keeping belies the fact that I'm an awful groundsman, but having that much less to mow might mean I get better at fitting it in. Tonight's work only took about 85 minutes, which is entirely manageable in an evening. Before we started reducing the lawns, it was a three hour job—and not a pleasant one. The cold winter has meant that the grass hasn't grown particularly, so this trim only yielded a (pretty full, I concede) barrow of clippings—the first trim of 2012 left me with a compost bay full.

Inevitably, the lawn will look a little yellow tomorrow, and we've had a number of mole-hills in the last month, so it won't look fantastic. I've long promised myself that when I only have a 'small' lawn to maintain, I'll do things like rolling, levelling, feeding, and striping. I might not be far off, which means I might need to start thinking about renovating that petrol cylinder mower that's languishing in the garage.

The spring bulbs are doing really nicely. There's a very eye-catching crocus that's come up in the copse, called 'Ard Schenk': white, and multi-headed. There are also some unexpectedly attractive chionodoxa: they came as part of a pack, and we'd kind of forgotten we'd planted them. The other blue chionodoxa under the berberis at the far end of the top bank (near the oil tank) are also looking pretty. They only emerged when we removed the overgrown shrubs from the top bank, and have been a delight for the last couple of springs.

Chionodoxa (© Ian 2013)

Seedlings

The last of the six cubic metres of topsoil is now cleared from our driveway. Most of the load went on the green roof: we then put a fair bit onto the vegetable beds, which all needed topping up. Two barrow loads went to one side, ready for today's potting-up, and the rest is heaped on the old shed base.

Liz had a fantastic idea, while we did this: re-purposing the old coal bunker as a soil bunker. We typically need quite a bit of soil over the course of a year, for potting things up. There's nowhere neat and tidy to store that much (after all, we're talking about the equivalent of at least a dozen garden centre bags of compost), but it's cheaper (and easier) to buy in bulk. At the same time, we've been eyeing up the coal bunker outside the back door, and thinking 'What use are you?'.

Liz put these two trains of thoughts together, and so (as ever) when we get round to it, we'll empty the coal bunker of the rubbish that's in it (some coal, some kindling, some real rubbish, I expect); I'll construct some sort of better-suited hatch, and we'll start using it to store potting-type compost. Garden compost, of course, will stay in the composting bays until it's needed, but potting compost, which gets brought on-site, can live here.

Having moved the soil, we decided that it's warm enough to plant out the potatoes and onions. For the last two years, we've done this earlier (potatoes on 2nd April 2011, and 1st April 2012: onions on 27th March 2011 and 1st April 2012), but the weather's been so perishingly cold that we've waited. It's now warming up, and looking like it'll stay warmer: it's been averaging about 4°C for the last month, and we haven't wanted to put these into cold soil.

As before, we've done the potatoes in trenches, which we'll fill up. I'm not sure it has any practical impact on their success, but it's nice to be able to keep an eye on how they're growing, so we persist. The trenches are, as before, 18" apart, but we put four tubers in per row, as they haven't felt like the extra space (three per row) was needed in previous years. For now, it's just the earlies: Swift, Lady Christl, and Kestrel. The first and last are new to us; Lady Christl has long been a favourite. In a week or two, we'll put in the maincrop Druid tubers, which get more space: 30" between rows, and three per row. Our experiment in 2011 suggested that this spacing increased the yield (in kg/m²), which is what we're after.

The onions have previously been planted straight into the ground, which has worked fine in many ways, but leads to a very time consuming and tedious job of weeding. Spaced just 6" apart, there's not space to hoe, but onions suffer badly if they're swamped by grass and chickweed and buttercups. Which they get, unweeded. To try to combat this, instead we have planted them through the weed-suppressing membrane with which we've been warming the soil for the last couple of weeks. I worked down the sheet, cutting a cross every 6" by 6", and planted through these. Weighed down along the edges with stones, the membrane seems to be holding in position (necessary, if the shoot of the onion is to find the hole!). We'll now have to see whether (a) it cuts down on weeding, (b) the foliage escapes and grows well, and (c) the membrane interferes in the bulb swelling. Anyway: a hundred of each of Fen Early, Red Fen, and Rumba. The over-wintered onions (Radar) and Germidour garlic, along with the Elephant Garlic, are all doing reasonably. They've been in since September, and although they took a while (the Elephant especially) to get going, they all appear to be doing well. Inevitably, we've lost some Radar to the cold weather, but the garlics appear (at last count) to have all survived.

Today was a mammoth pricking out and potting up exercise. The petunia seedlings are the worst, so we started with them: probably a hundred seedlings, and I only sowed three 3" pots. They're tiny and irritating, because they have almost no root, which also means they almost unfailingly wilt, and I worry about whether they'll survive. Better were the achilleas: A. millefolium, and 'Summer Pastels', which were pleasing plantlets. The tomatoes (also very wilt-y) are now in individual pots, as are the chillis and peppers. We didn't get to the cineraria, but managed the brassicas (couple of dozen sprouts, and about 50 kale, not all of which will be planted out, or will be eaten as greens when small). The celeriac have finally germinated (I think they were too cold to start with), and we're going to have loads of seedlings. We weren't sure the seed would be viable next year, so I sowed the lot, and there are probably about 200 seedlings. I don't like celeriac quite that much, so we'll thin them gradually to the strongest seedling in each module, for around 35-40 to plant out. The sweet peas are now all potted on, and outside with twigs to clamber, except a few that aren't quite as hardy.

We've then sown some more seeds: leeks (Prizetaker, again), peas (Delicata mange-tout), salad leaves (a spicy mix, a more mellow mix for me, Lollo Rosso, and wild rocket), courgettes (a pack of five, of three varieties, which look fun), purple sprouting, 'Mystique' cauliflowers, carrots (Early Nantes, Amsterdam Forcing, and Autumn King), and Festuca blue grass. (No, that's not a vegetable.)

The window-sills are pretty packed, already: that greenhouse is looking more necessary every spring.

Lastly: today is Daffodil Day -- that is, the first daffodils are open in the garden.

Spring bulbs in the arbour corner (© Ian 2013)

Filled

It's been several days of hard work, filling trugs with sandy topsoil, barrowing them to the kitchen garden, lifting them onto the green roof, and spreading it out on top of the vermiculite and weed-proof membrane. A couple of hundred of trugs, in fact. The trugs are invaluable tools in the garden, as they make jobs like this possible. Bucketing the soil up onto the roof would have been technically possible, but it would have been more like five hundred trips up and down the ladder, which would have been wearisome.

I mean, more wearisome, as we're pretty weary as it is.

Green roof, filled with soil and ready to sow (© Ian 2013).

However, the green roof is now ready for sowing, which will happen in a few weeks, once it's warmed up properly. For now, there's about 9–10cm of soil, which should settle and compact to 5–6cm, waiting. Getting the wood shelter's wild-flower roof finished has taken a large chunk of this week, but it's good to have it done, and it looks good.

Readying the Green Roof

We left the wood shelter almost finished last autumn: watertight, and complete as a wood shelter, but the intended green roof wasn't done. We've spent the last couple of days working on that, though: adding the fascia boards that will edge the soil, and adding some more struts, braces, and supports. It's now ready to have the vermiculite, weed membrane, and soil adding.

To take a break from this, we've spent today digging turves on the top lawn, outside the sitting room window. We've now cut and turned turf covering about a 7m square: it needs breaking up, though, before we can plant anything. The soil for the green roof arrives tomorrow, though, and I expect it'll take the rest of our holiday to shift the couple of tons we need onto the roof.

The top lawn (© Ian 2013)

Cutting and turning turves for the future herb garden beds  (© Ian 2013)

Easter Weekend

We've had a difficult week, with lots of snow remaining: that's made for long journeys to and from work, for one thing. There's still a lot left, and there's no way we could have been working in the garden, so we've had Easter weekend off. Well, inside. We've done a lot of baking, and entertained children a bit.

As we're on leave this coming week, though, I'm hoping we'll get some things done over the coming days. Until then, you'll find me in front of the stove, eating walnut and Stilton bread, and hot cross buns. They're very tasty, and if I finish marzipanning the Simnel cake, that'll be next.