...when the thaw came, it became apparent that, under cover of snow, we had been joined by a new inhabitant in the garden - a mole! That first molehill has now been joined by several more. Negatives - the poor lawn has already suffered this winter - before the snow there was a layer of wet leaves. And molehills are not pretty. Positives - I am not a houseproud (gardenproud?) gardener, and anyway moleheaps consist of lovely friable soil which can go on the raised beds. And moles have to live somewhere!
The wildlife is doing well - the squirrel is an occasional visitor, but generally the bird clientele is expanding - as well as the gorgeous pair of collared doves, and the two nuthatches whose visits give me so much pleasure, we now have a pair of loved-up woodpigeons. Also, a pair of robins, ditto blackbirds, and (to my great delight) a beautiful male bullfinch, who occasionally brings his dowdy olive-coloured mate along too. There is a proliferation of tits of various sorts (blue, great and coal) and most days a marauding troupe of long-tailed tits, like miniature animated feather dusters with mohican haircuts! Lots of sparrows, too, which is good as they are getting scarce, and some dunnocks and chaffinches. Every couple of days there is a single goldfinch, but despite the supply of nyger seed he hasn't brought any friends yet. I live in hopes of lots of baby birds in the spring, although I worry about the presence of magpies and jackdaws. I need to enthuse Matthew about fixing a nest box to the eaves for the benefit of the sparrows!
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Exciting new stuff delivered!
Very exciting - yesterday a very heavy-laden courier arrived with my four raised bed kits, which are now in the garage pending Matthew helping to make them up. And today, the doorbell heralded the arrival of yet more treasures - a box of plants from J Parkers and a big parcel of seeds from Kings Seeds!
The plants were a bit of a self-indulgence - all ornamental, three dogwoods with lovely red stems for the back corner of the garden (a bit of winter colour), three ornamental grasses for pots for the patio, a honeysuckle to grow up the arbour (it flowers at a different time from the rose), and two little pieris plants (I already have a bigger one) again for pots. I spent a very therapeutic afternoon (especially as it was sunny and dry, and not too cold - a miracle!) potting up all the new arrivals - some only temporarily until I get round to digging holes for them. The pieris need ericaceous compost as it is lime intolerant, so while I had the compost bag open I also potted on the lovely camelia that Val gave me, which has doubled in size since we moved here 3 months ago, and is full of plump buds, as the poor thing has been toppling over because its pot was too small. It is now looking wonderful in a lovely blue glazed pot, which sets off its dark, glossy leaves beautifully. The crimson flowers will look good against it too, when they appear - which won't be too much longer, by the look of the buds!
This evening I have worked out a sowing calendar, from February to July - things like lettuce are pencilled in several times to ensure a continuous supply. Goodness knows what Matthew is going to make of all the pots and seed trays on the window sills - he complained enough last year with just a few! Maybe next year I might think about investing in a little grow house - can't justify a greenhouse, but that would be a compromise.
This is going to be fun!!!
The plants were a bit of a self-indulgence - all ornamental, three dogwoods with lovely red stems for the back corner of the garden (a bit of winter colour), three ornamental grasses for pots for the patio, a honeysuckle to grow up the arbour (it flowers at a different time from the rose), and two little pieris plants (I already have a bigger one) again for pots. I spent a very therapeutic afternoon (especially as it was sunny and dry, and not too cold - a miracle!) potting up all the new arrivals - some only temporarily until I get round to digging holes for them. The pieris need ericaceous compost as it is lime intolerant, so while I had the compost bag open I also potted on the lovely camelia that Val gave me, which has doubled in size since we moved here 3 months ago, and is full of plump buds, as the poor thing has been toppling over because its pot was too small. It is now looking wonderful in a lovely blue glazed pot, which sets off its dark, glossy leaves beautifully. The crimson flowers will look good against it too, when they appear - which won't be too much longer, by the look of the buds!
This evening I have worked out a sowing calendar, from February to July - things like lettuce are pencilled in several times to ensure a continuous supply. Goodness knows what Matthew is going to make of all the pots and seed trays on the window sills - he complained enough last year with just a few! Maybe next year I might think about investing in a little grow house - can't justify a greenhouse, but that would be a compromise.
This is going to be fun!!!
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Seed catalogues etc
As promised, a report of what I am actually ordering after my trawl through the catalogues. For some time now I have been buying Gardener's World magazine and Grow Your Own, and looking at the adverts and also which suppliers get mentioned in the articles. This narrowed my shopping down a bit! Together with some searching on the web, I ended up with Thornhayes Tree Nursery in Devon (they specialise in trees for the Wet West of the UK), David Austin Roses, King's Seeds (I have grown their sweet peas in the past), Dobies, and Thompson & Morgan.
Thompson & Morgan rapidly proved to be a waste of time. Although their catalogue is lovely, their customer service wasn't - I have emailed several times in the past few weeks with a specific enquiry about the dimensions of their raised bed kits, but apart from an automated reply demanding my order number (how can I provide one of those when I haven't ordered yet, as I am waiting for their reply before I decide whether their product is suitable for me?!) I have heard nothing. When the Dobies catalogue appeared, it turns out their raised bed kits (fully described, with all dimensions) are actually cheaper than T&M, so I have given up on T&M altogether.
Dobies seem to have the best in asparagus crowns - they have varieties that can be gently harvested from the first, rather than second, year, which is good as Matthew isn't the most patient gardener! So I will buy them, and the raised bed kits, from Dobies.
Pretty much everthing else in the way of veg and flowers will come from Kings Seeds, together with highly secented varieties of sweet pea in a range of colours. I love sweet peas. For many years I have grown them in pots, growing up a wigwam of canes - this year I will use part of the raised beds too, so there will be lots to cut for the house.
In terms of veg, I have gone for mixed lettuce, salad bowl (cut and come again leaves - I grew them in pots on the window sill last summer), chard (just like spinach but easier to grow), broad beans, dwarf beans, pak choi, peas, rocket, and a variety of tomato called Tiny Tim which is designed to grow in containers (will try them on the patio). I have generally gone for veg we really like, which is expensive to buy (those bags of leaves!), or which tastes so much better fresh (peas). I have tried broad beans before, with mixed success (slugs!), but other than that it's all new to me!
I got some 'pretties' too - I love alchemilla (Lady's Mantle) and although I have some in a pot (which originated in my friend Val' garden in Dorset) I would like it everwhere! So I will try that from seed and try to get it to naturalise under the hedges and on the bank. Also foxgloves and knautia for the bank at the back, and nasturtiums, nicotiana and nigella to grow in containers around the patio. And 5 varieties of sweet pea - Knee Hi (a dwarf variety in mixed colours) for the pots, and Ethel Grace (lilac), Gwendoline (pink/cream), Tara (salmon pink) and Alan Williams (blue) for the beds. Are are described as highly or very highly scented, so that is something to look forward to!
The star of the customer service awards has to be David Austin Roses - I emailed a plaintive request for advice, as their extensive catalogue is so extensive as to be bewildering for the beginner, asking for varieties which would grow happily in a container and also for general advice on compost, size of pots etc as I have always been very daunted by roses - there is so much mistique about them, especially from elderly male gardeners! Ann Hilse, their garden design and landscape coordinator, emailed me back at lenght with lots of easy to follow advice, and a selection of suitable roses in the colours I had indicated, and in the end I am going for Crocus Rose (a cream - my choice) and Munstead Wood (a deep crimson - Matthew's choice). I will also buy The Generous Gardener (palest pink) which is a climber, to plant beside my arbour. I shall have no hesitation in contacting Ann again with any future queries.
The tree nursery were also helpful, but I don't think I will be ordering from them,simply because of cost - they have a minimum order of £100 net, for orders to be delivered, and I can't very well hire a van and trog down to Devon to collect them myself - and my modest order won't get anywhere near £100. Plus there is £30 plus VAT delivery charge. I could easily be paying £150+ for £50 worth of trees. However, I now have a clearer idea of what trees I want, so I will try more local nurseries and garden centres - Usk has quite a good selection, I think. I feel some trips to garden centres coming on when the snow melts!
I shall also need some hardware - I have a set of Felco secateurs on order (much cheaper at World of Felco online than anywhere else I have found), and will also need a wheelbarrow, and a border spade (I can't manage a full size one). The other major expense will be approx 800 litres in total of topsoil and compost, plus a few bags of manure, for the raised beds - still, all these are one-off expenses, subsequent years will just require some seeds and compost and the odd plant here or there.
Meanwhile, I had better get on and fill out those order forms!
Thompson & Morgan rapidly proved to be a waste of time. Although their catalogue is lovely, their customer service wasn't - I have emailed several times in the past few weeks with a specific enquiry about the dimensions of their raised bed kits, but apart from an automated reply demanding my order number (how can I provide one of those when I haven't ordered yet, as I am waiting for their reply before I decide whether their product is suitable for me?!) I have heard nothing. When the Dobies catalogue appeared, it turns out their raised bed kits (fully described, with all dimensions) are actually cheaper than T&M, so I have given up on T&M altogether.
Dobies seem to have the best in asparagus crowns - they have varieties that can be gently harvested from the first, rather than second, year, which is good as Matthew isn't the most patient gardener! So I will buy them, and the raised bed kits, from Dobies.
Pretty much everthing else in the way of veg and flowers will come from Kings Seeds, together with highly secented varieties of sweet pea in a range of colours. I love sweet peas. For many years I have grown them in pots, growing up a wigwam of canes - this year I will use part of the raised beds too, so there will be lots to cut for the house.
In terms of veg, I have gone for mixed lettuce, salad bowl (cut and come again leaves - I grew them in pots on the window sill last summer), chard (just like spinach but easier to grow), broad beans, dwarf beans, pak choi, peas, rocket, and a variety of tomato called Tiny Tim which is designed to grow in containers (will try them on the patio). I have generally gone for veg we really like, which is expensive to buy (those bags of leaves!), or which tastes so much better fresh (peas). I have tried broad beans before, with mixed success (slugs!), but other than that it's all new to me!
I got some 'pretties' too - I love alchemilla (Lady's Mantle) and although I have some in a pot (which originated in my friend Val' garden in Dorset) I would like it everwhere! So I will try that from seed and try to get it to naturalise under the hedges and on the bank. Also foxgloves and knautia for the bank at the back, and nasturtiums, nicotiana and nigella to grow in containers around the patio. And 5 varieties of sweet pea - Knee Hi (a dwarf variety in mixed colours) for the pots, and Ethel Grace (lilac), Gwendoline (pink/cream), Tara (salmon pink) and Alan Williams (blue) for the beds. Are are described as highly or very highly scented, so that is something to look forward to!
The star of the customer service awards has to be David Austin Roses - I emailed a plaintive request for advice, as their extensive catalogue is so extensive as to be bewildering for the beginner, asking for varieties which would grow happily in a container and also for general advice on compost, size of pots etc as I have always been very daunted by roses - there is so much mistique about them, especially from elderly male gardeners! Ann Hilse, their garden design and landscape coordinator, emailed me back at lenght with lots of easy to follow advice, and a selection of suitable roses in the colours I had indicated, and in the end I am going for Crocus Rose (a cream - my choice) and Munstead Wood (a deep crimson - Matthew's choice). I will also buy The Generous Gardener (palest pink) which is a climber, to plant beside my arbour. I shall have no hesitation in contacting Ann again with any future queries.
The tree nursery were also helpful, but I don't think I will be ordering from them,simply because of cost - they have a minimum order of £100 net, for orders to be delivered, and I can't very well hire a van and trog down to Devon to collect them myself - and my modest order won't get anywhere near £100. Plus there is £30 plus VAT delivery charge. I could easily be paying £150+ for £50 worth of trees. However, I now have a clearer idea of what trees I want, so I will try more local nurseries and garden centres - Usk has quite a good selection, I think. I feel some trips to garden centres coming on when the snow melts!
I shall also need some hardware - I have a set of Felco secateurs on order (much cheaper at World of Felco online than anywhere else I have found), and will also need a wheelbarrow, and a border spade (I can't manage a full size one). The other major expense will be approx 800 litres in total of topsoil and compost, plus a few bags of manure, for the raised beds - still, all these are one-off expenses, subsequent years will just require some seeds and compost and the odd plant here or there.
Meanwhile, I had better get on and fill out those order forms!
So now I've got a blog, what do I do with it???
I really started this as an experiment to see whether I could actually work out how to do it - sad, is'nt it!? However, my friend Pixie suggested that I could record my progress on my new garden, especially as I am going to attempt my first proper veg garden; and I am doing an art foundation course with the Open College of the Arts and they are very encouraging of blogs as a means of getting your work online and to chronicle your progress - so, here goes!
This first post is mostly about the garden - it has been snowing a lot here on and off for the past 4 weeks or so, and I haven't even been able to get outside - but it has given me a chance to sit down and plan what I want to do, and then pore over the seed catalogues and work out exactly what I need to order.
At the moment the back garden is rectangular and almost all grass. The left-hand boundary is a delapidated fence which is the neighbours' responsibility, and which should get replaced at some point in the next year or so. The back boundary is an open chainlink fence, with a line of the neighbours' trees immediately behind it - mostly sycamores. The right hand side is a bank leading to a high hedge of something evergreen with large shiny leaves (as yet unidentified - you can tell I am not a gardener!) at the house end, and more open and scubby at the far end. About one third of the way across, nearer the left hand boundary, is a concrete path leading from the back door of the house to the back boundary.
The plans, roughly, are as follows:
To the left of the path will be the 'working' area of the garden. Here, there will be 4 raised beds of 1 metre square, alongside the path. There will be enough space between them to mow. The top one will be for Matthew's asparagus (he's been going on about growing asparagus for about a decade, but we have never been in the same place for long enough before - they take a couple of years to get going) and the other three will be for veg and my beloved sweet peas.
As it is possible that the neighbours will remove some of the trees if their plan to turn the area behind our garden into parking for their house comes off, I would like to plant some small trees - their height is very limited as they need to be more than 1 1/2 times their height away from the house, and the garden isn't very deep. I would love a silver birch, but even small varieties grow to 12+ metres, so that's not going to work, sadly. However, rowan (mountain ash) and spindle would work, and also I would love a quince tree (mmm, membrillo!) and as they are self-fertile you only need one, unlike apples etc.
Wildlife is a priority, and I want to turn the top left hand corner of the garden into an untidy area, with a log pile, perhaps a hedgehog house if I can persuade Matthew to build one, and some stones and leaf piles. In the top right hand corner I would like to make a small pond - my friend Val has a very successful and froggy half-barrel pond in her garden, so it really doesn't need to be big to attract wildlife.
I would like to plant the bank with sort of woodland species, and would start with foxgloves, and in a garden in Dorset last year I saw dark crimson Knautia (a kind of scabious) against lime green euphorbia (spurge) which was very effective, so we'll give that a go. Next autumn I will think about bulbs.
I have an arbour in pieces in the garage, ready to be built in the spring, and would like to grow a climbing rose and a honeysuckle up that. It is going to go at the end of the path, on the right hand side, facing diagonally back towards the house and patio. On the patio itself there is a bench and some chairs and a table, and already some pots which I brought from the last house, and I would like to have some more including two roses and some container veg.
So - that's the plans, and next time I will write about the catalogues, and what I have decided to order.
This first post is mostly about the garden - it has been snowing a lot here on and off for the past 4 weeks or so, and I haven't even been able to get outside - but it has given me a chance to sit down and plan what I want to do, and then pore over the seed catalogues and work out exactly what I need to order.
At the moment the back garden is rectangular and almost all grass. The left-hand boundary is a delapidated fence which is the neighbours' responsibility, and which should get replaced at some point in the next year or so. The back boundary is an open chainlink fence, with a line of the neighbours' trees immediately behind it - mostly sycamores. The right hand side is a bank leading to a high hedge of something evergreen with large shiny leaves (as yet unidentified - you can tell I am not a gardener!) at the house end, and more open and scubby at the far end. About one third of the way across, nearer the left hand boundary, is a concrete path leading from the back door of the house to the back boundary.
The plans, roughly, are as follows:
To the left of the path will be the 'working' area of the garden. Here, there will be 4 raised beds of 1 metre square, alongside the path. There will be enough space between them to mow. The top one will be for Matthew's asparagus (he's been going on about growing asparagus for about a decade, but we have never been in the same place for long enough before - they take a couple of years to get going) and the other three will be for veg and my beloved sweet peas.
As it is possible that the neighbours will remove some of the trees if their plan to turn the area behind our garden into parking for their house comes off, I would like to plant some small trees - their height is very limited as they need to be more than 1 1/2 times their height away from the house, and the garden isn't very deep. I would love a silver birch, but even small varieties grow to 12+ metres, so that's not going to work, sadly. However, rowan (mountain ash) and spindle would work, and also I would love a quince tree (mmm, membrillo!) and as they are self-fertile you only need one, unlike apples etc.
Wildlife is a priority, and I want to turn the top left hand corner of the garden into an untidy area, with a log pile, perhaps a hedgehog house if I can persuade Matthew to build one, and some stones and leaf piles. In the top right hand corner I would like to make a small pond - my friend Val has a very successful and froggy half-barrel pond in her garden, so it really doesn't need to be big to attract wildlife.
I would like to plant the bank with sort of woodland species, and would start with foxgloves, and in a garden in Dorset last year I saw dark crimson Knautia (a kind of scabious) against lime green euphorbia (spurge) which was very effective, so we'll give that a go. Next autumn I will think about bulbs.
I have an arbour in pieces in the garage, ready to be built in the spring, and would like to grow a climbing rose and a honeysuckle up that. It is going to go at the end of the path, on the right hand side, facing diagonally back towards the house and patio. On the patio itself there is a bench and some chairs and a table, and already some pots which I brought from the last house, and I would like to have some more including two roses and some container veg.
So - that's the plans, and next time I will write about the catalogues, and what I have decided to order.
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