Swallows

We've not really seen swallows at the nest in our porch this year, despite the early reappearance of a male. For a night or two, there was some evidence of someone nesting (that is, there were droppings under the nest in the morning), but nothing else. It's now coming to the end of the swallow's summer season, and they're starting to flock ready for a return south for the winter.

They've been doing this quite noisily (but pleasantly), and there was a group of over fifty on the telegraph wires outside the house this evening. They flew off a few minutes after I took these photos.

Swallows flocking before migration south ( Ian 2012)

Colour Wheel

As mentioned, while we were at RHS Tatton Park, we rather like the show garden 'A Taste of Ness', which was designed with a long bed encircling decking and pond. The long bed worked from whites, into yellows and on through the spectrum, ending in blues at the other end.

'A Taste of Ness' at RHS Tatton Park (© Ian 2012)

The decking, pond and beanbags weren't particularly what caught our eyes, but the colour scheme. We'd been wondering how to arrange the colours of the garden, and decided this would work with the wheel beds we'd planned:

The seating corner, with putative beds marked out (© Ian 2012)

I had a spare few minutes, and have come up with the following. The idea is that each bed will be white at the arbour end, and then move through pastel colours with deepening colour, before being intense colours at the opposite ends to the arbour.

Colour wheel plan for the seating area (© Ian 2012).

Running through, we'll use a few key plants to tie things together. The grasses from Tatton Park will feature: deschampsias, molinia, panicum and stipa. They can go in almost all the beds (mostly the yellow, orange, and red sections): we've got seeds for a glaucous, blue grass (Leymus arenarius), and we've two variegated grasses for the green bed (the reed grass from Tatton, and the one we pinched from Molly. Heucheras will go everywhere but the blue beds, I reckon; the eryngium obviously belongs near the top of the blue bed. We've bought a number of sweet peas, which will give us wigwams of colour in many of the spots. Once that backbone is there, we'll go to work filling the gaps, safe in the knowledge that any colour has a pre-defined spot!

Elephantine

Last September, I planted a dozen elephant garlic cloves, which I've not grown before. They're big, so they go in with more space (9–12") between them than normal garlic, and 2–3" deep. They grew on quite well, and I've been looking forward to harvesting them. They seemed to have stopped growing, and the foliage was starting to yellow and fall (the sign that alliums are done for the season), so up they came at the weekend. They are pleasingly huge. Each one is about the size of a decent cooking apple, and each clove is about as big as a normal head of garlic.

Clove of elephant garlic, and head of normal garlic for comparison. (© Ian 2012)

They need trimming, and then to cure for a while, like normal garlic. The biggest cloves, I'll replant in a month or so, and I shall imminently replant the small, round, yellowish bulbils that have formed around the base. They may, or may not, make it into fully formed heads next year: if they don't, but instead form a round bulb, the head the next year should be massive.

I now need to start thinking about ordering the overwinter onions and garlic, along with a new bag of green manure seed.

Keg

Shockingly, I appear to have failed to record this: about a fortnight ago, I started a kit of beer. Nothing fancy, nothing sophisticated, just a kit-in-a-can of lager. The beer kits eliminate a lot of the intricacies of beer brewing (steeping, boiling, cooling, and a balancing of malts, wheats, hops, and so on), which adds to the effort and expense. I'm not a great beer connoisseur, though I enjoy the occasional glass, so the kit approach is one I prefer. It lets me brew it myself, but scaled-down complexity from the complete experience.

So: on (I think) Tuesday 31st, I poured the contents of the can, and 1.5kg of sugar, into my fermenting bin, added some boiling water, and topped it up to 5 gallons. Once it cooled to 30ºC, I added the yeast, and sat it on the landing (which has been nice and warm for the last fortnight).

Yesterday, I drew off a pint, and checked the specific gravity, which had fallen to 1.002. The beer is ready for bottling when the SG falls to 1.006, and so this morning I added 2oz of sugar to my barrel (newly cleaned of (rather cloudy) cider remnants), and syphoned in the beer. The added sugar will secondarily ferment, carbonating the beer, which should clear over the next couple of weeks and be ready to drink. The pint I drew off for testing was (although flat) tasty, and I'm looking forward to a proper pint in a fortnight or so.

The yeasty dregs, meanwhile, have gone as bait in the slug traps.

Anniversary Weekend

This weekend (well, Friday evening) is the third anniversary of moving to the cottage. I don't feel that we've accomplished as much in the last year, in house and garden, but here's a round-up, nonetheless.

Our first successful crop of cauliflowers started last August.

It was a good year for cut flowers (in contrast to this year: the gladioli are nowhere near flowering).

We had an inspirational visit to Witley Court, and bought the 'seed' plants for the box edging to the herb garden. 

We made our first sausages!

The autumn preserving was productive, with jams, chutneys, and jellies.

We bought and planted a quince, and other fruit trees, making the garden, technically, an orchard.

I installed FreeSat, meaning we've had working TV for the last nine months.

We had a 4kWp solar PV installation, meaning we're now a net generator of electricity.

We've had two big house parties, at Christmas and summer.

We eventually got started on our leafy quilt.

Several poplars came down.

We put a stove in the sitting room.

Our biomass heating system has been a disappointment, and has diverted a lot of time and energy towards making it workable since March. It's still unmanageable at the moment: the last few weekends have been spent constructing a proper wood shelter for seasoning, and it'll still take several more weeks. With that built, we're still looking at a lot of wood, far more than planned, but hopefully a split-able amount when spread properly over the year.

We laid out a plan for the seating corner of the garden, which was later fleshed out with a top-level planting scheme following RHS Tatton Park.

We were very pleased with how the front garden looked this spring, and it's continued looking good all summer.

The top bank of cotoneaster was finally cleared, and we uncovered the pond outline by clearing the chippings sat upon it.

The shed came down, making the space for the rose garden.

It's been a good year for brewing, new plants, and visits to other gardens. It's been a difficult growing year, with poor weather and too many slugs. Yields are down on last year, and some things (peas, beans, courgettes) have almost entirely failed. On the other hand the soft fruit (especially the currants) have done well, and the new rhubarb has settled in and grown strongly.

Perhaps not that bad a year. In the next twelve months, we'd like to dig and drain the seating corner, start the herb and rose garden, and maybe (start to) dig the pond. It'd be nice to also start the beds in the copse, but that might be too much. Less significant, but really useful would be getting the weed suppressant membrane down in the vegetable garden's paths. And maybe, just maybe, we can get the heating sorted.