Good Enough Gardening

Looking back through the blog this past year, there does seem to be a bit of a theme of garden neglect (interspersed with frantic catch up efforts from time to time). Despite this neglect (or perhaps because of it?), although the garden looks pretty shaggy from most angles, it does actually seem to be producing a surprising amount of veg, which is the main point after all.

It may just be the good summer weather we’ve had but we’ve got French beans – usually a tricky crop – coming out of our ears, as well as continuing mangetout supplies and all the chard we’d care to eat, and then some. And the fennel, which has always been a bit marginal and tend to bolt, clearly enjoys being planted at the last minute and left to get on with things. I even threw a few random carrots into their midst, also at the last minute, which appear to be doing well. Perhaps it’s actually true that planting them amidst a strong smelling crop like fennel protects them from the carrot fly.

Even the gardeny bit which has been even more neglected looks almost, well, like a garden from the right angle. Crucially, this is the angle from which you view it from the kitchen window, which is often the only angle I get to see it at on many days. That, and when dashing out to the veg plot to desperately try and keep on top of the bean output…

Indeed, it was while glancing out of the kitchen window that I noticed a new flower blooming. My hibiscus, which was a moving in gift when we bought the house, and which has spend the subsequent five years either being eaten by hares or sulking, has produced its first bloom. I can’t take any credit for it, other than not actually giving up on it and grubbing it out. Maybe a bit of benign neglect does have its gardening merits after all.

Meanwhile any good bean recipes you might have would be gratefully received …

Gardens with Benefits

If you ignore the fact that the magnificent towering pink flower spikes to the left of this picture are, in fact, willowherb and hence, technically (but who decides these things anyway?), weeds, the garden is looking almost … gardenish from certain angles.

Much of my gardening activity in recent weeks has been in the form of making piles, moving piles and occasionally removing things from piles and putting them in their final home. It’s hard to tell whether any of this is ultimately going to be productive or not, but it gets me outside and keeps me happy and that’s the main thing. Today was the turn of the large pile of weed roots outside the fruit cage, some of which have rotted down sufficiently to be put in the compost (or would be, if all three compost daleks weren’t full) and some of which have sprouted and had to be pulled up anew.

In doing so, I noted that we actually have more fruit outside the fruit cage than within it, as the top half of our garden is rampant with wild raspberries, while I’ve just excavated the wild strawberries out from under some more rampant plants in the flowerbed beside it and they have been producing a steady trickle of delicious little berries. None of these have troubled the kitchen at all, as they tend to go straight into the gardener. There have got to be some perks to the job, after all.

In other news, our neighbours report that they have had rabbits in their veg plot. This is bad news for the neighbours and turned out to be quite bad news for the rabbits, once they’d been caught. It will ultimately be bad news for us once the rabbits work out that there is another garden down the hill a bit with some southern townie softies who are unlikely to be as free with the shotgun but for now it is good news as it turns out that the rabbits ate their pea plants. The neighbours have been generously leaving surplus eggs on our doorstep at regular intervals, which is extremely welcome but has created an imbalance in the rural favours calculus. However, as we have a massive surplus of both peas and mangetout, I’ve finally been able to tip the scales back a little in our favour (as well as keep on top of the picking which has been getting away from me somewhat in recent weeks).

In other news, the Hare’s Toothbrush, given up for dead for the second winter in three years, is … not.

This would be better news if I hadn’t just planted what will be a massive cardoon right next to it.

Behold, there has been Gardening Done

Not much, admittedly, but some.

Mangetouts, beans and half the chard has been planted out, with the salad, peas and beetroot still to come. That will leave me filling a few gaps to replace the things that have totally failed so far this year. It does seem to have been a tricky spring for lots of gardeners, not just me (although I can’t really blame the weather, having simply failed to do any meaningful gardening for the past couple of months).

Now that the weather and the soil is warming up a bit I’m actually trying something I haven’t attempted for ages: planting stuff direct into the soil, rather than raising everything in modules first. Back in the days when I first started gardening up here, I quickly gave that up as a waste of time as very little ever came up and what did was promptly eaten by the slugs. But that was when I was young and keen and trying to get everything going in March. Now that I’ve reached the ‘help, how is it May already?’ stage of my gardening career I might just have left it late enough that the seeds will germinate on their own, although that still leaves those bastards the slugs

Of course, leaving it to May to get started does give things less time to grow, so there’s a danger I’ll end up with puny undersized vegetables like, say, leeks the size of spring onions.

Behold my mighty leek harvest. Baby leeks are a thing, right? pic.twitter.com/cpjvRzh36q

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) May 15, 2021

Not that I’m a stranger to that at all.

That’s just the veg side of things, which is actually the easy bit (raised beds are amazing at keeping the weeding effort down). I draw a veil over the rest of the garden which is going hard down the ‘dandelions are an excellent food source for pollinators’ route.

Meanwhile, in other news there has also been recycling done:

Be still, my beating heart, be still.

Forward Planning

The garden may still be under a frosty lockdown but – whatever else happens in 2021 – spring at least will be coming soon (usually sooner than I’m ever prepared for).

So today I got my seed supplies out and did a quick audit of what’s still viable and what I might like to grow this year.

It’s fair to say that I’ve got into a bit of a veg growing rut recently – it’s easier to stick to what you know especially when spring can be a busy time for me. But For a couple of years now I’ve had problems with my potatoes with a good third of last year’s crop starting to rot in the ground before I could even harvest them. The ones that remained did keep better than I’d feared but it’s a sign that I should probably give potatoes a rest and see if I can put the space to better use.

Time to get the catalogues out and allow myself to be seduced by the wonderful descriptions into believing that a world of amazing flavours and trouble-free bounty lies ahead of me in those seductive little paper packets. It’s the hope that keeps you going, isn’t it? Otherwise the current situation might just sink us all. And who knows, given our neighbours’ success last year, I might even manage to grow carrots. Stranger things have happened in these unprecedented times.

I just have to wait for things to thaw out a little first …

What will you grow?

Stockpiling

Waking to news of developing political chaos, somehow today seemed like a good day to sort out the stored potatoes (some of which have already developed ambitions to start growing), and do a bit of tidying up of the rainbow chard bed.

I have to say, the chard has been a bit of a revelation this year – while it isn’t exactly my favourite vegetable, it’s proved more versatile than I thought and more to the point, it’s just gone on and on and on, providing at least one meal a week and proving a useful source of extra greens (and yellows and pinks and reds and oranges) for throwing into stir fries and other dishes.

Clearing out some of the bolted plants and the dead leaves I discovered that the mice have apparently discovered it too, so some of the roots at the base have been nibbled away, so it’s possible its days are numbered. Fortunately the kale has recovered from the caterpillar onslaught and is ready to take over the green leafy vegetable heavy lifting.

Realistically, of course, none of this will help come March 29th, if we do end up with a chaotic Brexit. As any gardener could have told the government, it’s the worst possible time of year to be inadvertently blockading your own country of imports of perishable food. Our potatoes will have long started sprouting and any remaining leeks, chard and beetroot bolted, although we may well still have some kale if the winter isn’t too harsh and the hares too hungry. No, the real purpose was to stockpile a little sanity and perspective, something that I suspect will be in even shorter supply than fresh vegetables in the coming months. Sometimes you just need to let the politicians get on with it, and go outside and get your hands dirty with a bit of honest gardening toil.

That, presumably, will still be an option on March 30th next year. Whatever the politicians decide.

So you Think you Can Garden?

Regular readers may have detected a certain self-satisfaction, not to say smugness, creeping into recent gardening posts of mine. Not only do I have hot and cold running hares in the garden, but we also have been having loads of tasty veg to eat (if slightly limited in variety) and the other half’s greenhouse is looking pretty spiffy too…

 

And then I go and visit a friend whose parents have been gardening at scale in the same spot for almost 30 years and realise that when it comes to growing veg I know nothing …

For instance, do we have an ancestral grapevine in the greenhouse?

Or a marvellously organised polytunnel?

Or enough strawberries to supply Wimbledon?

And I don’t even like celery, but seeing this, I almost want to grow it…

This is definitely not how my fennel is looking

And why do I not have TWO compost turners (not to mention two pink wheelbarrows)?

And while I might have rescued one bee …

There was more (sheep, chickens, flowerbeds, beautiful wood piles, precisely placed decorative broken pots, an actual box of useful hose parts) but I think I may have to go and have a little lie down…

Having put myself firmly back in the beginners’ class, I shall return home with renewed ambition and hope that by 2048 I too will be beginning to get the hand of this gardening lark.

Eating a Rainbow

Never mind all that gadding about in the sunshine in France, I hear you cry: what of the garden? How is your veg plot growing?

Well, funny you should ask that – thanks to the fine weather and a helpful neighbour it’s all looking rather good, at least for now, although the hares have done their best to remove any danger we might have a glut of french beans by nibbling the seedlings as they emerge from the ground. They don’t seem to have quite the same taste for kale and rainbow chard though…

Unfortunately, as we were on our way back from France we had news of a family bereavement which means that rather than spending the next few weeks as we’d planned, going absolutely nowhere, the other half has already had to hot foot it back to the US and I will be following him for the weekend.

This has left me home alone with no company but the hares, and the feeling that I ought to be at least trying to keep up with the garden’s production before it all starts to get out of hand. As someone who is not one of nature’s vegetable eaters, this is proving a bit of an effort. On the other hand, after a trip during which I struggled to eat even one serving of veg and one of fruit a day, let alone five of them, it will probably be good for me. Even if I’m still yet to find a completely convincing recipe for rainbow chard.

Perhaps I should invite the hares around for dinner?

Pottering On

Obeying the iron law that seeds only germinate *after* the gardener has given up on them, my Himalayan poppies have finally popped up having been planted in March and largely given up for dead in April.

There’s no end to the disasters that may befall these tiny little scraps of green before they get a chance to turn into any sort of display of flowers but it feels like an achievement anyway. And besides, tending seedlings is really my favourite part of gardening – as I said in my last post, my gardening tends to be of the kill or cure variety but there’s something about these hopeful little green shoots emerging from the soil that makes me spend far too much time watering them, turning them, blowing gently on them to encourage stronger growth, and just generally hanging over them hoping they’ll be okay out there in the big bad world.

But all good things must come to an end, and my pea plants were beginning to tangle their tendrils with each other so out they went today in the first real test of our new raised beds (the potatoes got there first, but potatoes will effectively grow in anything so they don’t really count).

For now they’re still getting a little cossetting with bottle cloches and a precautionary slug trap, but soon they’ll have to fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, if anyone’s got any tips for germinating lemon seeds, I’d be grateful. Assuming that the iron law doesn’t apply in this case, and the batch I planted weeks ago doesn’t surprise me tomorrow …

I’ll See your Veg and Raise you …

Master plan. Version 1 …

As I mentioned earlier, plans are afoot for raised beds in the veg plot, which is currently home to some overwintering and just-about-to-bolt leeks and some hare-nibbled kale. Indeed, I had gone so far as to measure out the space available, work out the size of raised beds I wanted and draw up an actual plan. I was quite pleased with myself at having done this by myself, no mean feat with a tape measure that’s not actually as long as the longest stretch of the vegetable plot.

Having sourced some locally made recycled plastic raised beds, and realised how expensive the whole thing was going to be, I then effectively parked the project to think about it for a while, until I either made a decision or some raised beds miraculously fell out of the sky, but with spring approaching and no alternatives magically presenting themselves, I ordered a single raised bed unit to see whether they looked okay in real life.

This arrived yesterday, about 3 hours after the email telling me it would be coming in 3-7 working days (always good to manage your customers’ expectations), so today I went out to do one last check of my measurements and set the bed up where it was likely to end up. Hmm. Top tip for gardeners: always best to ensure you have included the widths of the paths between the raised beds in your masterplan…

After recruiting the other half, a bit of re-measuring, the removal of one buddleia bush (don’t worry about the butterflies, the garden is currently about 30% buddleia by volume), the demolition of the hare defences, and the remeasuring of the space, we worked out that we did have space for everything, got the trial raised bed up and had a look.

It is quite shiny, although I suspect that won’t last. Much as I like the aesthetic of wooden beds, I like the thought of adding to the market for recycled plastic products even more, so we’ve decided to go for it and buy 10 more to complete my master plan.

The master plan also includes better hare defences, and I’m thinking we can move our bay trees into the plot as well, as they seem to get fairly heavily nibbled by the hares, especially in the snow. But then again, there wasn’t much else in the garden they could eat during the snow apart from the kale. Obviously it would be ridiculous to have extra bay trees elsewhere in the garden, just for the hares. So we definitely won’t be doing that. Definitely. Ridiculous idea.

Anyone know what other plants hares particularly like to eat?

Reaping What I Sow

One of the great pleasures of growing your own veg is being able to magic up a meal out of the garden when you suddenly remember that you were supposed to have gone shopping for a vital ingredient of the meal you had actually planned.

Of course the meal in question is usually some variation on the theme of ‘random veg frittata’, but this is usually pretty delicious, so I’m not complaining.

In fact, though I’ll undoubtedly come to regret saying this, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the veg plot so far. Despite radical neglect from me, and the attention of the hares, it does seem as if the whole no-dig and plenty of organic matter approach has worked remarkably well. It’s all a bit unruly and I can barely get to my peas to harvest them but they are growing better than they did in the old plot.

As long as I can find them while they’re still sweet enough to eat straight from the pod, then that counts as a win. Peas rarely make it to the kitchen in this household.

And my neglect of some of the wilder corners of the rest of the garden has also reaped an unexpected reward. I decided to leave some of the wild raspberry canes when I noticed they were producing fruit, and as a bonus, one of them is producing yellow raspberries, which are absolutely delicious.

Also got 'blond' raspberries growing wild in our garden pic.twitter.com/jPsxChIto9

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) July 16, 2017

Now I just have to work out how to incorporate them into the rest of the garden…