Winter

It sleeted the other day in Teddington, which I'm taking as a sign that the Wintersmith has stepped up for his turn at the dance.  As there's no planting or plant-activity left to do in the garden, I thought it might be an idea to just take stock of where me and my garden are at this year and what's planned for the quiet season.

First, we have a new addition to the family.  Our Sam had a baby.  I've mentioned her before, her name is Ellie, she's turning 1 in December and she's already toddling at a run.  She's got a fair vocabulary up to now:

Miaow = Bill or any cat
Doos = Juice
Doyan = Diane
Durj = George
Door = Door
Edjig = Hedgehog
Mum = Mum
Nana = Nana
Chickenchickenchicken = Chicken.

I buried my Dad this Autumn, which was as hard as you might expect.  I might write more on that in the next few months, but I'm in a weird sixth stage of grief right now.  I've gone through the five as normal, but my mind still isn't at rest so I've been making a lot of jam and I've been poopsocking heavily on the xbox.  On the plus, I can now make lemon curd.  He liked lemon curd did our Cubby, he liked the Beatles too, so when I did a job up Hampstead the other week I swung by Abbey Road on the way home, spent some time sitting by the zebra crossing with my thoughts.

It seems I've been shortlisted for a job as a lab tech.  Won't find out until tomorrow.

The garden then.  The trees out front had a fungal thing but I've treated that organically by dousing the leaves with diluted milk and by adding calcium to the soil.  The new thornless brambles are making it easier to gather the fruit, and Ellie loves doing that.  She sits on my Mum's lap out on the ramp and picks the blackberries that grow along the handrails.  There'll be more planted on the other side too, but not just yet.  I want to get two more cherries in first.

The back garden is having its annual lawn die-off.  The back garden faces North so we can only keep a lawn for a Summer.  The fruit bed is doing well though.  The loganberry plant is halfway along the trellis now, chasing the last of the Sun.  The gooseberries are looking iffy, in that I can't quite tell if they're dead or just hibernating and I shan't know until Spring.

Out front the neighbours' fence is still a bit dodgy.  It was put up by cowboys and so in the first breath of wind it collapsed and damaged their car and my pear tree.  I've made some repairs to it (because it's cheaper than cleaning up after cowboys - the last time they came out to make repairs they dug a hole round the post, filled it with dry cement powder and buried it) but I'm still not happy, so when I get some dough I'll buy a couple 8' tree stakes and drive them 4' deep.  Against that fence I've got an elderberry and three kinds of raspberries.

I'm looking at ways to make my front garden more wildlife friendly.  The bark on the ground is attracting woodlice, I've got a log with holes drilled into it which attracts ladybirds in the warmer seasons.  Plenty of dead wood for beetles.  Once my dwarf orchard grows to size it'll start attracting bats, at which point I'll consider bat boxes in the eaves.

Now birds and hedgehogs...  My front garden has two plantable areas, which I term the Island and the Outside.  Here's a map, not to scale:

The North edge of the Island is already lined with rosemary and lavender.  I think I might continue those around the Western edge and then along the South edge.  I'll site a hedgehog box in the centre and fill out the middle of the Island with gooseberries and bush roses.  There's already jasmine and brambles growing against the railings, and together it should make for a dense enough hedge to support birds and hedgehogs.  

At the Northernmost end of the Outside, up against the wall I've got climbing roses, Etoile de Hollande, but as they grow the bottom will need cover to look nice.  I'm thinking Buxus sempervirens, maybe bush roses, maybe lavender.  This'll come out by a foot or so and again I can work in a hedgehog box.  I'll put blackcurrants in front of that.  Maybe I'll separate the blackcurrants from the rest of the bush with a little hidden chickenwire so that Ellie isn't grabbing rose prickles. 

I'll put a narrow path down the middle of the Western bit of the Outside, from the blackcurrants down to just East of the Westernmost cherry.  At the end of this path I'll put a wee storage thing in the shade of the front fence (where little else grows), while either side of that path I'll sow herbs and strawberries.  I'll also put in bee pots to encourage bees.  

Next year I'll fit windowboxes for basil and sage.  I'm gradually accumulating nice pots, some of which will house a mix of flowers and herbs, others will hold mint by itself because mint is the Britain of plants: it'll colonise the entire pot! 

This year we were sufficient in three things: rosemary, bay leaves, and blackberries.  Next year we ought to be sufficient in those plus sage, raspberries, verbena, loganberries, blueberries, gooseberries and hopefully thyme.  Thyme's tricky though in my garden.  Within the next three years we should become sufficient in those plus strawberries, basil, mint, blackcurrants, elderflower, elderberry, figs, and seasonal stonefruits (apples, pears, cherries).  

And that's been my year!

Bulbs

I've been putting bulbs in for the new year.  

Behind the pear tree I've put in crocus bulbs.  They'll come up in Spring and hopefully they'll set seed.  I'd love for some pretty flowers to become naturalised in the garden.  I'll be planting bluebell bulbs in the January to the same purpose.  In both cases, crocus and bluebell, they'll grow in the wee nooks between other plants without bothering anything.  

They go up as far as the end of the fence, the full width.  Against the wall there in back I intend to grow climbing roses up and along the wall.  I'm considering growing Elder against the fence, so it's likely that not all of my crocuses will grow to flower, but with 75 bulbs in the ground you can be sure that a few will.  

In the island I've sown French garlic cloves.  Garlic is a magic thing: break a bulb down into cloves, sow the cloves 4" apart, and each clove becomes a whole bulb!  With anything from eight to sixteen cloves in a bulb, varying by cultivar, you have a greater than exponential increase if you replant every clove.  I shan't though.  I'm going to select for my five or six biggest bulbs each year and the rest will go to the kitchen, either for braiding and drying or for pickling.  They need a nice sharp frost in the Winter in order to divide out into bulbs, otherwise you just get a slightly larger clove than the one you buried, so with that in mind I'll be hoping for a good chill in the Winter.  Apples are a bit like that too, they need a cold Winter to produce a good yield.  

The garlic's in under the bark, to the left of the rosemary and this side of the sage.  The bark's a little thick just now, but that'll rot down over the Winter and put some carbon in the soil, mitigating the worst of any frost.  I'm quite tempted to close off this end of the island with a fan-trained damson, as the extra fruit will be very welcome.  

Still waiting on my qualification and transcript.  I've earned a distinction at HNC, which is all very wonderful, but it's doing me no good if I don't have the paperwork to show to universities or potential employers.  I'm feeling rather stuck right now and I don't like it, but with luck I'll have it all sorted ready to apply for the January intake.  

J

Stuff in jars for the Winter

Now bear in mind a chutney has some staple ingredients: vinegar, sugar, salt, pepper, that I shan't bother listing again for each.  I also tend to include bay leaves and chilli flakes in all my chutneys.

Rear, from left to right: 

• Pickled shallots with apples, peppercorns, beet stalks and juniper berries.  
• Pickled garlic with red peppers, basil, lemon thyme, bay leaves, peppercorns.  
• Dried, home-grown sage.  

Middle, left to right: 

• Dried, home-grown rosemary.  
• Beetroot, onion and plum chutney.  
• Tomato, red pepper, red onion and garlic chutney with home-grown oregano.  
• Mango, green pepper, carrot and onion chutney.  

Front

• "Rhubramble" jam.  There's eight jars that size rather than one big jar in order to combat Bready Knife Syndrome.  

That should be me and mine set up for the Xmas period.  Our Sophie lives down in Reading so she's got an 0.25L jar of each chutney and one of the wee jam jars as cupboard-fillers for the Winter.  

Grass, tools and evolution

I planted the lawn today.

  George now has no back garden for at least a week, maybe a fortnight.  I used aerator shoes to drive the seed in deep, like two inches deep.  Some's only an inch deep, having been raked in.  Some's at the surface, squashed in with my boots.  With any luck, a storm coming out of nowhere won't be as devastating a thing this year as it was last year.  We may end up with a half-decent lawn this Summer!  

  As thanks for putting the lawn in, I got given a lovely new edger.  I've never owned an edger before.  This one's a thing of beauty: dark hardwood handle, sturdy, quality lathework, and with a bright stainless steel blade.  I think I'm in love.  Can't wait to put in a proper border with it.  

Lastly then, the strawberries I planted last year are greening up and back on the grow.  More specifically: half of them are.  The other half are either dead or dormant.  Thankfully the surviving half are from all four cultivars planted.  This is a good thing because the weird second Winter we just had is not great for plants.  The limey London soil is definitely not great for fruiting plants (my strawbs are in compost, but there's soil beneath and the alkali is capable of creeping up).  

Those which survived are hardier to frost and more tolerant of the edaphic conditions than those which died.  

This is the basis of evolution.  Evolution depends upon life in the midst of death.  Those which survive go on to pass on those very genes which helped them survive.  This adapts the species to the prevailing conditions.  The surviving strawberries will propagate new plants - both vegetatively and sexually - until the Strawbrary is full.  Those new plants will be adapted to fit the prevailing conditions of my garden.  After a few more generations they'll have thoroughly evolved to fit the niche of "strawberry plant in Joey's Strawbrary", after which they'll need to evolve again before they'll be able to thrive half as well in any garden but mine.

Life plods on, as ever it has.

In defence of schools

Schools are too quick to close these days.  When I was a kid we trudged through a foot of snow...

But what's changed?

When I was a kid, the buses and trains were run differently than they are today.  Buses worked in the snow. Trains had a limit, but when that limit was reached the Men In Orange would be out on the line with shovels. Transport did what it said on the tin back then.  Today the trains shut down with no prior notice whatsoever once the snow gets past an inch.

Insurance was different too.  Snow cover is hard to afford these days.  Slipping on ice is now a suing matter, while back then it was one of those things. 

Staff who work with students have less autonomy today.  This is partly understandable; endless paedophile scandals and the general underfunded crapness of social services has led to overtightening of rules.  Where it gets to the point where a teacher cannot help a child put on sun cream, or hug a child who is distressed, I for one think it has gone too far.

Yesterday, the buses would run, kids could be gotten home safely.  If the worst came to the worst and a freak blizzard of biblical proportions snowed the town in at the last minute, the kids could be bedded down in the school hall and the cafeteria set to the bulk output of hot chocolate.  It never happened, but if it did then the teachers would get on with the job and be praised for it.

Today, the buses won't run, parents will need to leave work early and drive their kids home (if they can).  If the kids are kept in and our hypothetical blizzard happens, the teachers will be slammed for failing to foresee the unforeseeable, parents will become hysterical, the Sun will screech "but what if there'd been a paedo in there?!?!?!", and somebody will get sued into next Tuesday.

Headteachers today must - with no warning whatsoever - pre-empt the point at which the trains will shut down, the buses will stop running, and get the kids out with time enough to get them home.  Heads must judge if it will snow enough to shut the transport the night before, and decide if the two hours teaching they'd get done are as good as a wasted day.

You'd need a masters in geology and the wisdom of Solomon to balance all this and, inevitably, the balance will be gotten wrong.  It is natural therefore to err on the side of caution.  I don't envy them the task.

In Pictures: SNOW!

The garden

Snowy buddleia is snowy

A blade of Grazing Rye, sown as a cover crop between the rows of V. faba, pokes up from beneath the snow.  

The ramp

This is the inside of one of the bins, taken about half an hour after the binmen took the refuse.  Prior to them taking it, the bin had had a lid on it.  In the half hour since the closed bin was opened it managed to fill with snow to an inch deep at the base of the meniscus; and mark you that's a bloody deep meniscus, on the shallowest side it's 4 inches from base to height, and on the deepest side it's a foot.

So I went down to Radnor Gardens to see it in the snow:

This snowman was pursuing these ducks at a very sedate pace:

And downriver, Twickenham was shrouded in fog and snow.  It was hard enough to see that far in these mild conditions; if the wind picks up to a blizzard I would not want to be on the river, or on a bike, or doing anything whatsoever where a lack of concentration might kill me or someone else.  

Winter is in full swing!

My Botanical Adventure

Went to Kew Gardens for the first time today.  I really should've gone sooner.  The guide thingy suggests you leave yourself two to three hours to get around the place - aye, sure, if you're an anorexic on a souped-up granny scooter being piloted by the Stig!  I was there for five hours and I reckon I'm lucky if I got to experience half of it.  I'm going to include the bulk of the photos on a separate page because I took 103, but I'll post a choice few here.  I went in the Winter, so I presume you've got to see it again in the Spring, Summer and Autumn to really get a sense of the lifecycles of the specimens there.

 Me amidst an amazing collection of palms and ferns

The Coffin Tree can grow to be among the tallest trees in the world!

This fish was watching me.  

This Cycad is older than Kew Gardens.  Cycads as a bunch are older than the dinosaurs!

And for reference, here's a cycad being munched on by a Triceratops

This is a Banksia, named for a local boy...

There's a gallery of botanical art there, it has its own building, The Marianne North Gallery.  It features a load of paintings by Marianne North plus the Shirley Sherwood Collection, a collection of paintings by various artists.  There's a whole section on fungus for any myco geeks.  Sadly, no photos allowed.

I stopped for a burger halfway through.  It was a hell of a burger!  Venison.  You heard me; a venison burger!  Venison, in a burger.  I'll stop now.  

There were piranhas

The turtles were nothing like the ones you see on the telly though.  They weren't even armed!  Bit naff really.  

Now the Kew Pagoda is a bit of a local landmark.  You can see it from over the Thames in Brentford, from half of Richmond and Sheen, and of course from the top of a 65 bus.  So I decided to see where in the Gardens I could grab the best long shot of the Pagoda.  

Here's it up close

The Treetop Walkway is the highest publicly-climbable structure in the Gardens.  The Pagoda is taller but you aren't allowed up it.  Here's the walkway:

I expected the views from there to be amazing, and they are!  You need to get that high and see Brentford, see Sheen, to remind yourself that you're still in London.  

But the view of the Pagoda was obscured by tree branches.  

Still, at least in the Winter you can see it at all.  In the Summer that'll be a wall of green.  The view from the top of the Temperate Greenhouse (the biggest greenhouse) is significantly clearer, albeit with a big tree blocking part of it

Best view however was straight down the Cedar Vista from the corner of that wee lake in the North of the Gardens:

These parakeets live all over Richmond Borough.  A shitload escaped from some private collection back in like Victorian times or something and the rest is history.  Their ubiquity in Strawberry Hill has seen them nicknamed "green pigeons".  

I saw a Japanese Minka house.  These were made of wood and ridiculously versatile and durable.  

I saved the Evolution exhibition for last.  It was cool, though some prat had vandalised part of it.  It was full of fossils, ancient living species and models of ancient extinct species.  These Liverwort have been around for 400 million years - twice as long as the mighty Cycads!

A fossil

Aaand I'll put the rest on a side page, because there's bloody loads of them!  Suffice it to say that a great day was had and I'll be back there in the Spring.  

Winter Is Coming!

I won't really have much to do in the garden between Xmas and mid-January, so I might not blog much.  I tried to find a way of explaining how interesting my life is about to become, and then I found this on the internet:

ENOUGH SAID!

The first frost

Today was the first frost of the new Winter, at least in London anyhow.  Willing to bet my mate Lyndsey up in Tayside has been freezing her arse off for a month already.  Comment that it's been two months in 3... 2...

So it touched the lawn but not the beans.  It also bejewelled those bloody weeds that keep invading my lawn, so presumably this is the time to make a serious dent in their numbers.

Sparkly lawn!  Alas for the hole in the bottom corner there.  

The beans are coming along nicely.

Scarcely kissed by the frost.  

Take THAT ya bastards!

That's all good, but today I also found that I had something to be really proud of.  The roof of the arbour was covered in a thick layer of frost but not a drop touched the seat.  That must mean that a) I got the roof seals spot on, and b) that I've successfully sited it for maximum shelter from the worst of the cold.  Happy with that!

Frost

No frost!

Really chuffed with that.  Right, I've got a day off tomorrow so I'll be racking the cider.  Wish me luck!

xx