Signs of life

Hardly worth saying how miserable the weather has been and how it has kept me out of the garden.  I'm sure you all feel the same.  We did grab a couple of hours at the weekend for some tidying up and weeding and generally having a sort out.  


I have planted the dwarf runner beans and dwarf French beans in the legumes square alongside the dwarf peas.  I also rigged up the cat defence which I hope will double up as support for the plants if/when the grow tall enough to grab on to the string.


I am writing this on Tuesday 15th May and we are threatened with a frost tonight!!!!  Sadly they will have to take their chances as I can't cloche them (!) and don't have fleece or anything light enough to throw over the flimsy string and cane construction.  Hey ho... wonder what will be there tomorrow.

Finally there is a glimmer of the first early potatoes.   First might be accurate but early - I think not!  My sister in the Cotswolds is earthing up her spuds.  Envy, envy.


I don't know if you can tell but I've raised the cat defender a few inches above the box to give the spuds some room to grow.  If I just remove it at this stage every cat in the neighbourhood (and that's four regulars in the immediate vicinity) will trot over to try out the newly constructed cat loos.

I've planted a few spare beans and peas in the square foot bed and put in four squares of seeds - salad leaves, radishes and beetroots.     




The back four squares are untouched as yet.  I have two thoughts - one - don't bother as they are a pain to reach when harvesting and/or leave them in case I see some bargain veggie plants - unspecified variety as yet.


We'll see what happens.

My fourth and final veggie square with the rhubarb.  The seedlings at the front are salad leaves, not weeds.  The two big tubs - far too much soil for what is growing in them - have American land cress and parsley.  Not a sign of life from the parsley - which doesn't surprise me as I've never yet managed to grow any from seed, but the good old reliable land cress is on its way.


They are planted in tubs to lift them up for some light otherwise the rhubarb drowns out everything else.


I've got the usual huge holes appearing on the rhubarb leaves which I assume is down to slugs. So much for rhubarb leaves being poisonous.  Not enough, obviously.


I wonder how many of you went to the Malvern Spring Show last week/weekend?   It is certainly one of the best in the year but I'm afraid I gave it a miss  as I probably will with most of the others.  They are lovely to look round if the weather is good but usually awful traffic jams, rotten parking, expensive entry.  I have got to the stage of thinking there's nothing much I want from them any more.  Inspiration for a bog standard back garden falls on stony ground (pun intended), I don't need exciting or particular plants and I am weak for gadgets and gizmos so could do without being tempted.  Basically I think having done the shows for years I have come to a stopping place.  Don't let me deter anyone else, for all the opposite reasons. Enjoy

Post script from the 27th

This is the lowest point in our garden and it is always pretty much a swamp throughout the winter.  We are on clay and not exactly free-draining.  We excavated channels and filled them with grit but it didn't make a scrap of difference; so now we just live with the black lagoon.  Sometimes the water backs up and lies on the surface of the lawn for a while.  This is the worst we have ever seen. This last week It filled up to the top of the edging strip of wood and overflowed down the back.  

First sunny day

Monday 30th April and this is the first sunny day we have had since coming home on 30th March. Easy for us to remember and not just be guessing at it.


The blossom on the amelanchier has finished.......


























 and given way to my little cherry tree.  The crab apple still has to do its thing..




In a month of being at home despite all our dreadful weather the changes in the garden are phenomenal.  


I've optimistically planted out my dwarf bean plants.  I was tempted to madness by the sight of the seeds I planted beginning to sprout.  


It is happening in all three places which I find surprising.  The greenhouse you would kind of expect as it manages to get to eighteen degrees or so most days in there.  Maybe, also, not too surprising that the lettuce under the cloches are doing OK.  The big surprise for me is that the salad leaves and radishes and beetroots I put in very wet and cold soil have also made it.

I am pretty sure I read somewhere that germination depends more on light than on air temperature and this seems to support that theory.


This is the blue pre-planted disc from the pound shop.

The salad leaves under the cloche.


























A bargain to point you towards this week is the May issue of Gardeners World magazine.  Every year they produce a card and booklet which lists gardens you can get into for two-for-one with this GW card.  Truly useful if you are someone who likes mooching gardens.  The link if you want to find out more is http://www.gardenersworld.com/2-for-1/


Here's hoping the weather has turned (ever the optimist) and we can all get out in our gardens for some long stretches instead of dodging the raindrops.

Rain stopped play

I intended to get out into the garden today come what may.  I thought I could at least get into the greenhouse and fiddle around with stuff in there.  I also intended to take some photos to show the progress of the seeds I planted.  Clearly I am a fair-weather gardener; I've refused to put a toe over the doorstep.  It is like mid-winter out there - very cool, grey, raining and very windy.  Fingers crossed for some change soon, the weeds are advancing up the garden like Great Birnham Wood up Dunsinane Hill, and we all know what happened next!


So having taken time to tell you about all the things I haven't done ... the point of this post is...


Bolton Hospice is trying to organise some Open gardens this summer.  Check out this link Open Garden Appeal  If you sign up quickly you might also get a free rose from Barton Grange!  You don't have to have a stupendous garden or open it to all and sundry you could just invite family and friends to tea and cakes (or a BBQ or whatever floats your boat) and ask for a donation for the hospice.  There's tons of other stuff you could do too.  Just have a look and see if you think you could manage something 'botanical' for a really good cause.

Help Wanted

I have just received an email for someone looking for help:

I am looking for a retired person to tend my garden for a couple of hours a week..

Would you know anyone? Gigg Lane area.

If you can help or know someone who would be interested please get in touch with me by email mormson@mail.com and I'll 'connect' you.

Sort of sorted...

Ten days on from my last proper post and I've just about made a start on the gardening.  In a good/bad way the weather hasn't exactly been conducive to Spring planting since we got back.

I've managed to get the four veggie beds weeded, dug over and chicken pelleted.  The potatoes are planted.  I couldn't get International Kidney without trawling round numerous places so I just bought the first early I recognised - even though I've not grown it before - Foremost.  this was the first thing I did in the garden and managed to do it wrong!  I planted them in the wrong place.  I rotate crops each year and they went in the wrong space.  Being fussy I dug them up the next day and moved them to their proper home.  For a woman who has moved the same tree four times this is small beer.  Not much to see in this picture but reading from the bottom up....  Bed 1. Rhubarb coming on nicely.  Two cloches at the front with salad leaves (seeds) under them.  Hopefully the cloches will add warmth enough to produce something soon.  The two black pots at the back need half filling with styrene as they are far too deep for the parsley and land cress which will go in there when the weather warms up a little.  Not sure if I will just sow straight into the pots or start off in the greenhouse.  Opinions welcome.  I am hoping that being raised in pots they might get a bit more light than just in the ground behind the rhubarb; it also makes it easier to pick.  Bed 2. has two 'covers' on it the square foot gardening frame and on top of that is one of my mesh covers that I use until stuff comes through to stop the local cats using the beds as a toilet.  So this one will be my square foot garden.  I liked that last year and still think it is a good idea for small spaces and high yield as you can harvest a square and plant up again immediately with something else and with 16 squares you can have a variety of stuff.  I am intending to only plant up 12 of the squares this year as they are reachable.  Four feet is too deep to get to the back of the beds without treading on them (I have the same problem with the flower borders, more on that later).  Right now there are two radish and two beetroot squares on the go... might be too cold and wet??  Bed 3. The potatoes  Bed 4. will be dwarf runner beans, dwarf French beans and dwarf peas, but there is no point in putting those out until May up here in Bury they will just rot off in the ground.  I have got them started in the greenhouse.

I had a bit of a tidy up in the greenhouse and started the seed trays off.  I have a stack of pots and spare seeds to offload on the community centre (hopefully).


I need to swap the potting table and right-hand staging shelves around as the best of the sun is on the potting bench most of the time!  My little greenhouse is in just about the worse position it could be but it still has a reasonable amount of light and more to the point heat so I am hopeful it will be useful.  This is its first year really as I got it too late last year to do much with it.

I used my potting bench for the first time too and what a joy that was; no more back-breaking bending over a trug and making a mess everywhere.  Why oh why didn't I make a space for one years ago?  The job was done in half the time.


I haven't done half of what I need to do but I've made a start.  

From top left..  a tray of dwarf French beans called Speedy.  It will be nice if they live up to their name. I think it was a mistake sowing them in small modules - they would probably have been better in individual pots.  All the empty trays on their right will have hanging basket plants in them - Bidens, Felicia etc.  This is my first attempt to start off those for myself. I spend a fortune on plants in May to make up all the pots and baskets I have and I thought this might save some money.  Even if they all work I will probably still have to buy some things to add to them but its at least worth a go although I am actually thinking it might be nice to plant a single variety in abundance in each container rather than the mixed mayhem that we've come to love. That way I won't need to buy and add the 'feature' plants such as fuchsia and geraniums. It might be worth a try for one summer any way. (what do you think? let me know)


On the second shelf down I have a tray with nine pots of dwarf runner beans called Hestia which I have grown before and they did OK.  Naturally they didn't produce anything like the quantity of beans the six-foot runners do but that's a blessing as there is a point where even I get fed up of beans.  That said we are enjoying coming home to our freezer stock of them from last summer.  


In the same tray are six pots (with three seeds in each) of tomatoes.  These are a small tumbling variety called Sweet Million.  Again this variety is new to me.  I intend to grow about three pots of them in the greenhouse in hopes of actually getting a red instead of a green harvest for once.  If I decide to try some outside I might actually load up my shepherds crook bird feeder with hanging tomato pots.  I am pretty sick of never having any birds in this garden however much food I put out for them.  It is a complete mystery to me.  It costs me an arm and a leg and, with the exception of meal worms, it sits out there rotting.  Ken suggests its because of the local cats but I have had my own cats most of my life (not now of course) and I still had birds in the garden.  I can only put it down to not being here in the winter to feed them.


The other tray has 20 individual pots of a Sugar Snap dwarf pea .  I potted these on from a strip of seedlings  I bought at Summerseat for something like £1.25  I think.  Whatever they cost it was far less than a packet of seeds and, again, more peas than I need/want. 


If they all these seeds (and others yet to be planted) take, I will have the usual problem of to much and what to do with them.  PLEASE, if you want my excess plants or leftover seeds, in about a month's time keep your eye on this blog and I'll let you know what's going begging and you can arrange to come and pick them up from me. 

These couple of pots will be interesting to watch.  I bought a packet containing two pre-sown ten-inch discs of paper to go in hanging baskets from our local Pound-stretcher.  The green plastic pot contains the blue mix of plants; this is for my chimney by the summerhouse.  The Hessian-lined hanging basket has a yellow mix in it for my front garden.  The mix of plants are very nice and well-chosen so if they work they will be brilliant.  Again, I am sorry not to have noted the price but I think this one packet only cost £1.99.  What a bargain if they work.  If they don't it will just be a case of slinging it out and planting up as normal - no great loss and I may as well have a go instead of having pots sitting there empty waiting for stuff to go in.  Watch this space.   Have any of you used these?  Were they any good? 






The experienced gardeners among you will get the irony of this photo.  My gravelled utility area is absolutely full of baby foxgloves.  This is a very small example from a very big area.  Sadly they will all have to come up.  I am hoping I can transplant a few of them successfully which is why I am waiting for some warmer weather before doing it.  The irony is the cussedness of mother nature. I have scattered packets of foxglove seeds around in the borders quite a few times over the years and maybe got a successful three or four plants from them.  I probably do weed them out to be truthful, but I really don't have a great success rate with any seed sowing in the borders since I've lived up here.  It seemed to work in the balmy Midlands quite well.  I certainly didn't scatter these here.  The only thing I can think is that I have carried a foxglove seed head to the bin and they have self-sown everywhere.  Even this is odd as I leave all my seed heads on my plants over winter if I can for the birds (!!) and I live in hopes of a few free plants in the Spring, so it is unlikely I'd be binning a ripe seed head.  It is all very odd, slightly amusing and also rather annoying.


So.... as I claimed at the beginning of this, I am on my way to Summer 2012.....  and dreams of warmer weather.

Message for the community centre

This is a photo of two chimney pots and some Mignonette strawberry plants which are currently on offer to the local playgroup.  I posted it here so they can have a look at them to help them decide if they want them or not.