Monday 30 May 2011

Weeding

We seem to have spent a lot of this (long) weekend weeding. It did, however, rather need doing.

On Saturday, we cleared half of the onions (which were rather congested with clover and nettles, mostly), as well as going over all of the fruit beds. The raspberries were quite bad; the gooseberries/blackcurrants were acceptable; the blueberries and currants were awful. There are, somehow, about two dozen potatoes growing—obviously missed when we lifted them last year. We had to remove some, as they were crowding the fruit bushes, but we've also left others, and will bring them up as new potatoes in a while. However, there was also a lot of other weed coverage—now all cleared. It looks a lot better!

We also popped round to help Jenny and the children construct a large octagonal sandpit. It's very good: took about 350kg of sand to fill it, but is big enough for all three children to play in.

Yesterday, we spent almost the entire day sorting the workshop out, which wasn't a particularly enjoyable task, but good to have done. It was a bit too wet and windy to venture outside! Today, though, has been drier, so we finished weeding the other half of the onions, and repotted a number of the perennials that arrived in the autumn, many of which are looking good, and starting to grow. A few, however, have not yet shown signs of life: hopefully they will soon.

The onions appear to be getting quite battered by the strong winds of the last few days: many of them needed firming in. Liz suggested a low withy hurdle along the wind-facing side, to give them some protection, which has merit.

We also planted out some more seedlings: 16 more celeriac (next to the extant 20, which needed two replacements), another dozen leeks (between the others, to be taken up as babies), and a pumpkin, three courgettes, and two ornamental gourds. We also sowed a row of spring onions between some of the celeriac, and a row of radishes between some cauliflowers. I also put 6' support cages up above the peas and runner beans: they've had 2' supports, but are outgrowing them.

This means that all the beds are now full!

Sunday 22 May 2011

Lions and tigers and...meerkats

We had a day out yesterday with Jenny, Philip and their foster children, to Yorkshire Wildlife Park. None of us had ever been, so it was an adventure. It's only been open a couple of years, but it's excellent, with a good variety of animals, and nice settings. My particular favourites were the meerkats and lemurs; they also have three lion prides, an 'African Plain' full of zebra, ankole cattle, and the like, a tiger enclosure under construction, birds of prey, and a wetlands opening later this year.

Meerkat sentry; Yorkshire Wildlife Park © Ian (2011)

The children, predicatably, were as excited by the slides and adventure playground as the exotic animals, but there you go. Today's been foul weather (strong winds, a couple of inches of rain, and—at one point—hail. Which was being blown horizontal. Accordingly, we stayed inside, instead of doing the garden tasks we had in mind (nothing exciting, but some weeding needs to happen, and I'd like to plant up the new hanging baskets). I've patched up some plastering in the kitchen, and removed some rotting window-sill in the study. The windows stand on a stone lintel, which, while exposed outside, is boxed inside. The wood has started to decay, however, so I've removed part of the case and sealed the window-frame to the lintel. When we come to redecorate, I'll need to replace the window-sill, and decide whether or not to replace the lintel casing. Possibly not; we'll see what a stone 'feature' looks like.

Monday 16 May 2011

Rain

It rained a bit, over the weekend, and that's continued today. The wind's also picked up, which—combined with the rain, I think—meant that the rectangular vegetable bed's fleece cover had half blown off the frame this morning. It was still attached on the eyes/nails on the path-side, but in being lifted off had started to tear quite badly at the corners. So, I removed it completely. This evening, the other covers were also tearing, and because it's damp, I can't really make any repairs (tape won't stick to wet fleece)—so they've all come in.

It's a couple of weeks earlier than we were planning to take the covers down—we can get frosts until the end of May. However, we probably won't put them back on this spring, as the weather's been quite warm, and is looking set to stay that way. If a frost does threaten, the runner beans will need covering, and—if it's severe—the celeriac and beetroot, but otherwise I think the soil's now warmed enough not to need the covers.

They've been a rather mixed success, the fleece cages. They've taken a lot of time to put in, and maintain. On the other hand, I think they've helped get things going, and—without a greenhouse—we would have struggled to grow enough plants on to fill the beds in May/June. The wood/wire construction will be useful, in the long run, for netting (especially brassicas and beans) and for fixing the irrigation system's water jets, so that's certainly no waste. I'm not sure, though, whether we'll continue using the fleece once we have a greenhouse.

Once I'd collected the covers, I spent a while weeding the onions, which are doing well, but were accompanied by rather too many nettles, goosegrass, and clover. It's looking much better now.

Sunday 15 May 2011

Comparing Notes

We got back this afternoon from a pleasant weekend spent with Hazel and Alex in Cambridge. As is custom, we spent the time eating, gardening/walking, and playing board games. Hazel is an excellent cook, and produced a lovely slow cooked pork belly from a National Trust book we don't—yet—have. That may need to change. We'd taken a bottle of my elderflower wine, which went down very well—apparently, it's quite like a semi-sweet Reisling.

On Saturday, we walked over to their allotment, which has come on again since we last visited: they've basically finished the raised beds (about 3m x 0.8m), and installed a 5m x 5m fruit cage with a load of bushes. Gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants; and a jostaberry, Japanese wineberry, and a kiwi. The jostaberry is, essentially, a gooseberry/blackcurrant cross; wineberry is a type of raspberry; the kiwi needs no introduction. I shall be intrigued to try the first two, and to gauge their success with a kiwi—needless to say, I doubt we could grow one up here. The vines need decent summer warmth, and are vulnerable to early frosts: we have an insufficiency of the former, and a predilection to the latter.

Their potatoes are, I might say, behind ours: conversely, their runner beans are ahead. They grew over-wintering onions (Senshyu), so they're looking bigger than ours—no surprise, as they've been in since August 2010. However, Japanese onions don't store as well, and we've sown a year's worth, so we'll be well placed once ours are harvested. The strawberries are doing better, benefiting from the higher temperatures in East Anglia. Everything, though, is a bit dry: they've had no significant rain since the end of March.

It was, as normal, a pleasure to see them; and always interesting to see how someone else's garden's getting on!

Sunday 8 May 2011

Bedding

We've been away for the weekend, visiting my parents, so there's been barely any garden activity. However, we popped in at the garden centre on the way to Thirsk, and picked up a couple of packs of mixed bedding (to augment the cineraria, et al. I sowed last week). I also grabbed thirty six-foot bamboo canes, to frame the peas/beans once the fleece cages come off, and some more of the excellent thorn- and water-proof gloves we like. Our old ones have lasted about a year, but we've each acquired one split. We'll keep using the old ones for things that the splits don't impinge on, but they were on offer, so we've stocked up.

When we got home today, we've had to spend some time adding waterproof fabric tape to the fleece cages, where the posts have damaged the fabric in the wind. It's rather tedious: hopefully soon we'll have reinforced sufficiently the vulnerable areas.

I keep meaning to create a 'weather' page, with data from the weather station. It's happily churning out statistics, but I need to export some graphs, and the like, to upload. One of these days...

Wednesday 4 May 2011

Tidying the Strawberries

It's about two months late, but we spent an hour tidying up the strawberry bed this evening. The netting that covers it is out-of-the-box: never cut down to size, and a bit of a tangled mess at the edge of the bed. We trimmed that down (much improving accessibility), and cleared some of the dead leaves, detritus, and weeds from around the plants. A big pile of straw then made its way onto the bed, to protect the nascent fruits.

I note that, when doing the same thing last June, I decried it as a job left too late. I'm about seven weeks earlier...and it still seems too late. I think the rapid growth (due to the very warm March and April) has hastened things along: it would have been a much easier job if done in February, and I could have removed a lot more dead foliage without fear of disturbing the strawberries. Never mind: I'm sure they'll cope.

Monday 2 May 2011

Vegetable Seedlings

An enormous day of planting out the vegetable seedlings.

We started in the last side of the C-shaped bed, interplanting some small 'Parmex' carrots between the Early Nantes we sowed a couple of weeks ago. We then filled the remaining space with about forty beetroot (some 'Boltardy', some others), and quickly recovered the bed, to minimize the risk from carrot root fly. We were careful to handle the carrots as little as possible, and avoid the foliage; on a breezy day and with the re-sealed beds, I think they'll evade attention.

The newly completed rectangular bed was next. At one end, we've put in lots of cauliflowers ('All The Year Round'): they're too dense, but I think many won't survive the transplantation. Then, nine Brussels Sprouts (looking healthier than the caulis), and a couple of dozen purple sprouting broccoli. These stay in until next January, so we've intercropped them and the Brussels with scarlet kale (of which the young leaves are tastiest) and some spinach. The last couple of metres of bed are empty, ready for the courgettes, pumpkins, and butternut squash—they're still inside, as they're a bit more tender.

Lastly, we planted up the Q-bed: 48 leeks ('Prizetaker') next to the onions, and another row of 'Ishikuro' spring onions between the leeks. Sixteen celeriac ('Monarch') in the corner, and then we moved the runner beans and peas to join the directly-sown plants. For while they're small, we've put a few more Early Nantes carrots between the blocks.

To round off, we moved some salad leaves into the miniature middle bed, and then sowed some more seeds: cineraria (Senecio cinerearia 'Silver Dust'—bedding foliage), petunias (a cheap F1 mix, if I recall), and lobelia ('Cambridge Blue') (for the new hanging baskets), and some poppies ('Flanders') and love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena 'Moody Blues') to eventually naturalize in the copse.

Back to work tomorrow, but a very productive Easter holiday, I think—and very exciting to have the vegetable beds planted up!

Sunday 1 May 2011

Preparing the Last Vegetable Bed

We've now emptied the last (rectangular) vegetable bed, having removed the crocosmia, an errant iris, and the stooled willow. Next, we added about fifteen barrows of topsoil (I lost count, but it was about that many), to bring the level up, having spread out the manure we'd left at one end. I then drove the wooden posts into the edges, and strung wire between these to form the support for the fleece cover; then we attached the water nozzles to the posts, and connected them to the irrigation supply line. We then put fleece over the cage, punched holes in its border, and set the reinforcing eyelets in the holes, before nailing in the respective hooks (into the outside of the bed). Finally, we put reinforcing tape on the fleece where it goes over the posts, to minimize the risk of splits.

And then we collapsed on to the sofa.