A Happy New Year

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astrantia, greenhouse, New Year

Happy New Year

Much is made of the hope and optimism that the start of a new year should bring but the reality is, of course, somewhat different. Hangovers, the feeling that we ate too much over the Christmas period and the sinking feeling that January, my least favourite month, stretches out in front of us, is somewhat closer to how most of us greet the start of another year.

It’s no great surprise though that as humans we love the idea of a fresh start, a clean slate and the thought that things will be different in the new year. Companies know this which is why we’re bombarded with adverts for online dating, detoxing, losing weight and holidays at this time of year. For us growers that feeling has probably never been as strong as at the start of 2013. You have to be quite optimistic to be a gardener and lets face it after last year’s summer and autumn the fact that we’re planning to pick up our spades and fill those seed trays once again is pretty remarkable. So, although January can be an inhospitable month, we know that a new growing season is upon us and we’re buoyed with hope that this year will be better than last. It would be hard not to be though.

I’ve got quite a big project on my hands this year, I’m writing a book based on my allotment. So, whilst I’m excited, I’m also feeling a sense of trepidation, partly about delivering the actual book and partly that the weather is going to cause me no end of headaches when it comes to getting plants ready for their photographs. A normal spring can be stressful enough.

Flooding at Ross on Wye which could be renamed Ross on Sea

Plans for 2013 involve a spot of replanting in my front and back gardens. Some plants have rather taken over. Yes, you know who you are, astrantia. And other spots don’t have enough seasonal interest. There’s the constant challenge of making the allotment as productive as possible. And I can’t wait to get growing in my new greenhouse. I have plans for some tomatoes, a chilli plant and possibly a cucumber. However, I don’t want to get carried away, which I think I’m in danger of and find the greenhouse is so full I can’t get in there.

The impact of the weather in 2012 hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for growing but it has made me reflect on the plants I grow. I’m not yet completely decided but I think this might be a spud free year. My plants last year didn’t do well and for the amount of space they take up I’d prefer to grow something more reliable and that is more prolific. I think, and my plans are still in their early stages, that I’m going to try to grow the crops we eat a lot of, such as bean, peas and lettuce, really well and focus less on trying new things this time. Celeriac will definitely make a reappearance and I hope to grow more Florence fennel over a longer period this time. I’m looking forward to reading about everyone’s plans for their own gardens and allotments over the coming months.

So, for me, it’s the thoughts of seedlings galore, buds breaking and the first signs of spring that refresh me. Forget the detox and get sowing will be my mantra for the start of 2013.

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2013. Lets hope the rain stops, the ground dries up and that the weather is kinder to us this year. Best wishes WW x

The Wellywoman Awards 2012 – Part One

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Burgon and Ball, Daucus carota 'Black Knight', Derek Jarman, Dungeness Nature Reserve, felco secateurs, greenhouse, Lia and Juliet's supper club, tayberry

With winter approaching it’s a good time to look back and reflect on the year that has passed and, as the award season is starting, I thought I’d introduce the inaugural Wellywoman awards. Courtesy of Wellyman and his rediscovered model making skills I have the ‘Golden Wellies’ which I’ll award for those garden related greats of 2012 and, in homage to the Golden Raspberries that go to the year’s worst films, I bring you the ‘Golden Snail’ awards. It was going to be the ‘Golden Slugs’ but modelling a slug and making it actually distinguishable from, well, a blob of modelling clay proved a little difficult.

So it gives me great pleasure to announce, in no particular order, the recipients of the first ‘Golden Wellies’.

Daucus carota ‘Black Knight’

My flower of the year has to be Daucus carota ‘Black Knight’. In itself, it’s not the showiest of blooms and the tricky growing conditions this year meant it took a while to get going but once it did flower it just kept on going right into November. The plummy-pink coloured umbel flowers of this variety of carrot looked so good in arrangements and they lasted up to 2 weeks when cut.

This was the first proper year for my tayberry fruiting. Although I made the mistake of buying the thorn covered variety which has made it interesting and painful when training into some semblance of a structure, its fruits have more than made up for any scratches. A combined flavour of blackberry and raspberry and a long fruiting season have made this a great addition to the plot.

The humble pea gets my nod for an award. This is the first year I have grown them. I’ve always wondered what was the point when frozen peas are so good but nothing on the veg patch this year could beat the sweetness of freshly picked peas eaten raw. They are top on my list of crops to grow in 2013.

My favourite TV gardening programme of the year had to be Sarah Raven’s Bees, Butterflies and Blooms. The series followed Sarah as she tried to change perceptions about community planting schemes for the benefit of locals and wildlife. It was fascinating, informative and, at times, infuriating (it appears some would rather having plain old, boring grass than a beautiful flower studded meadow).

This was the year I discovered the delights of squashes. The plural there is really rather stretching it. I grew Uchiki kuri and the weather conspired to make this not the best of years to be trying to grow squash for the first time.  I didn’t, at one point, think I was going to get anything at all from the plants so I was delighted when I spotted two yellow fruit forming. It was a bit of a race against the lower temperatures and lack of sunshine to see whether they would actually ripen in time. In the end, one grew to a really significant size and turned a beautiful deep orange colour, the other ripened but didn’t grow very much. It was a squash version of Little and Large. Despite the low yield I’ve been bitten by the squash bug, so I’m hoping I can fit some more varieties into my planting plan for next year.

The tool of the year has to go to my Burgon and Ball flower snips. I was lucky enough to receive a pair this time last year to review on my blog but November wasn’t the best time of year to put them through their paces. I didn’t think anything could replace my Felco secateurs but I used my snips all year-long. They can cut through surprisingly thick stems and are lighter and smaller than my secateurs so I tended to favour them. The one problem is their green coloured handles. I’m not sure how much time I wasted this year hunting for them after I’d put them down somewhere. I think some coloured tape around the handles may be applied this winter.

Derek Jarman’s garden

Despite the weather I did get the chance to visit some beautiful gardens. After years of wanting to go to some of the iconic gardens of East Sussex and Kent we finally got around to visiting them. My favourite was Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness. The simplest and possibly least typical garden it had immense charm and was set in a stunningly bleak location. The plants that thrived here seemed all the more precious because they were growing in such a hostile environment. For me it showed that the need to grow is an innate response to our environment and that even when faced with such unlikely growing conditions the desire to create beauty using plants was too strong to resist.

The amazing food at Lia and Juliet’s Supper Club deserves one of my ‘Golden Wellies’. I was new to the concept of supper clubs when we went along in June but what really drew me to this one was the celebration of fruit and vegetables and seasonality. Keen allotmenteers, Lia and Juliet wanted to showcase the produce they grew and make it a real event. With tea-lights lining the path to the front door, fairy lighting in the back garden and a verandah for pre-dinner drinks the scene was set for a great night. Not only was the food great but so was the company. In fact we loved it so much we went back again in October.

Some golden wellies have to go to the newly installed greenhouse. It was a pain to build and was responsible for a fair degree of swearing and although it’s not really the time of year to start using it to its full potential, I love it. There are already several seed trays of hardy annuals in there, some salad leaves and herbs. Roll on spring.

And finally, my last ‘Golden Wellies’ of 2012 go to my fellow garden bloggers and tweeters. They are too many of you to mention individually but you’re great. You inform, inspire and amuse. I’m looking forward to reading about the highs and lows of 2013.

Read my next post to see who and what will receive a ‘Golden Snail’.

A True Test of a Relationship

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greenhouse

I have a bit of a theory when it comes to DIY projects. You can consult horoscopes, do all those relationship tests they print in women’s magazines or even go along to pre-marriage classes but if you really want to know whether you and your intended are well suited spend a weekend building a greenhouse. If you haven’t shouted at each other or blamed the other for the mislaid spanner and are still speaking by the end of it then you’re pretty well matched in my opinion. It could, actually, be any sort of DIY that requires some team work but I picked greenhouse because that’s what the Wellies spent the last weekend constructing. And yes, we are still speaking.

With the delivery of the various sections of our greenhouse last week this weekend revolved, pretty much entirely, around its construction. Excitement at finally having my own greenhouse was tempered by the sight of the instruction manual and all the parts. It all looked rather daunting. The delivery guy said it would take only a few hours to put up. A FEW HOURS?!! But he did go on to admit he’d never actually built one himself.

I know it’s quite a skill to write instruction manuals. Conveying as much information as possible, in this case just with diagrams is quite a challenge. The problem I find with them is that some of us need a little bit more information than others. Wellyman isn’t normally fazed by them but even this one left him scratching his head.

By lunchtime on Saturday with all the sides built and joined together, we were lulled into thinking we might have the whole thing built in a day. How wrong could we have been? After a quick stop for lunch reality set in. With the afternoon light fading quickly it was a race to get it to a stage that we could leave it in overnight.

Everything is held together with nuts and bolts and after 5 hours I was sick of the sight of them.  Despite my much smaller fingers I seemed to have a problem getting the nut to stay on the bolt so I could twist it onto the thread. The back of the greenhouse is up against a fence panel. There was just enough space for us to get down the back but wedged between the greenhouse and the fence trying to screw nut to bolt and then losing the nuts. Aaaaarrrggghhh! It’s fair to say the air was a little on the blue side this weekend. Then, the No. 10 spanner was put down ‘somewhere’. Of course, the instructions didn’t even mention a No.10 spanner being an essential tool for the job. Just as we thought we were getting the hang of things we would get to another section and find yet another set of instructions in a tiny plastic bag with yet more screws, blots and nuts.

We finally called it a day for food, lots of tea and, in the case, of Wellyman wine. But we weren’t finished for the day. We spent the rest of the night building the staging whilst watching Have I Got News For You on Dave. We know how to live.

I woke on Sunday and groaned at the thought of all that glass waiting outside. I groaned even more when I opened the curtains to see we’d had the hardest frost of the autumn so far. The garden and the greenhouse were covered in white, glistening frost. Handling glass with cold-numbed fingers was going to be fun. It’s always the fiddly things that take time with any DIY job, the bits you don’t think about. And then there are the bits that that should fit but don’t. Brute force, a hammer and a metal file were all employed, successfully but discovering pieces don’t fit with rapidly fading light is incredibly frustrating. Patience isn’t one of my strong points and I do think I uttered the words ‘I wish I’d never bought the damn thing’ at one point. Possibly it was when we had a section of glass that went above the door and it just wouldn’t fit because the door was in the way. Head scratching ensued, the tape measure came out, the manual was consulted. In the end, we had to unscrew the door and then force it into place and the words force and glass really shouldn’t go together.

Finally, at 4.30pm on Sunday, in the dark, we fitted the final bits of glass in the louvre vents. Fifteen hours later and too many bolts and nuts to count we had a greenhouse. I even managed to muster enough energy to do a little dance in celebration. It is pretty small, as greenhouses go but it will be perfect for the growing season ahead of me and the plans I’ve got. And every cloud has a silver lining – a bigger greenhouse equals more nuts and bolts.

Hibernation is Here

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celeriac, greenhouse, hibernation, lifting dahlias

Still flowering – geranium

I’m not sure if it’s the clocks changing or the weather but the feeling that takes over me at this time of year is here once again. The desire to stay warm, dry and cosy inside is hard to shift. You might say ‘why bother, give in to the feeling, our bodies often know what is best for them, what they crave, why fight it’? I did hear once about a village in France where the people apparently spent the winter asleep. It wasn’t true hibernation, in that they didn’t lower their body temperature as animals do. Even so there are days, particularly in January, where staying warm under the duvet and sleeping my way to spring sounds like the best way forward.

Of course, there is much to look forward to over the next couple of months and despite the gloom I feel much more positive about the winter ahead than I have in previous years but the one thing I can’t seem to motivate myself to do is get up to the plot or into the garden. We haven’t had any significant frost yet but we have had lots of rain and plenty of dark, dank days. The sort of weather where you can almost feel the damp penetrating your body. There is nothing remotely enticing about spending time outdoors in these conditions.

I really do need to get up to the plot, at the very least, and lift my dahlias, dig up a celeriac for dinner and pull out some of the hardy annual flowers to tidy things up. Fortunately, the need for celeriac will force me up there because otherwise I could find more than enough excuses as to why I should stay at home. I don’t like this feeling of procrastination which is not normally something I suffer from. I am, I’m afraid a bit of a fair-weather gardener. I decided this year to try some salad leaves for autumn and winter but to be honest they haven’t been a great success. Standing out in the cold, the rain and the dark, on a morning, picking the meagre leaves for Wellyman’s lunch is losing it’s appeal. Most were eaten by slugs and production levels have dropped so much that I would need so many pots to get any worthwhile quantities.

Still flowering – erigeron

I have got some lettuce at the plot which seems to be faring better on the slugs front, at least, but it’s just not as convenient to have salad leaves up there at this time of year. Things maybe different next year though, because last week I took the plunge and bought a greenhouse. *does a little dance* I’ve wanted one for a long time but the combination of thinking we didn’t really have the space and the cost have put me off. Oh, and the thought of it being just another thing to take with us when we move. After moving 7 times in 8 years it’s hard to shake off the feeling that you’ll be moving again soon and the rigmarole that entails. The lack of space still is a bit of an issue but I’m working on something for next year which requires more plants than my cold frames and kitchen window sill can cope with, so it felt like the time was right. It will hopefully make life a little easier next spring and the idea of being able to give tomatoes a try again and maybe even some chillies is pretty exciting.

It’s a small greenhouse, as space is tight and I haven’t even got it yet and it’s probably too small with all the plans I have. Still after years of not having one it will be a real joy to have any indoor growing space. The idea of being able to sit with a cup of tea on a chilly spring day with the sun streaming into the greenhouse and being warm and toasty inside brings a smile to my face now.

There is however, the small matter of having to put the greenhouse up. Whilst now might be a great time for buying greenhouses, as there are some great discounts, the chances of a dry weekend in mid November are slim. I can’t say I’m looking forward to spending 2 days constructing a greenhouse in the cold and damp *shivers*. Now what was I saying about hibernation.