£1,000 for a bag of onions

Early days - the weeds are in control

The truth of the matter is that we should never try to grow vegetables ourselves - it's much easier and cheaper to buy them from the supermarket.

I'm not anti-gardening - very much the opposite - I'm just pointing out an inconvenient truth.

During the past year (I got it in April 2014) I have had an allotment with a view to growing my own vegetables. We got it because we thought Sam and Lucy would spend some time with us when they returned from France and I didn't want Lucy digging up my lawn to plant beetroot.

As it happened, Sam moved straight to Jersey and Lucy followed him soon afterwards, so they never returned to Thorney and I had plot 12 on the Gas Lane allotments, covered in nettles, burdock, cow parsley and bindweed.

The weeds were so high that it was impossible to see the boundary fences and impossible to walk through the plot without first hacking a path.

The first job was to repair the fences, make a gate and then tackle the weeds. Hopefully, there would be time to plant something as well. Walking around the plot was quite tricky - there were several large holes hidden among the weeds and you'd suddenly step into one of them and almost go head first into the nettles. The burdock seeds were deadly and Holly would come back covered in them.

Weedkiller is starting to take effect and some
of the rubbish cleared away.

Glyphosate was the answer and on a still, sunny morning I blitzed the patch with spray and then repeated the exercise a month later. This didn't kill everything, but it did get things under control. With less vegetation, one could see the holes and also see a vast amount of rubbish left behind by the former tenants. There was lots of plastic sheet, lots of nylon netting, an old sunshade, broken chairs, bottles, cans,labels. It all had to be picked up, some of it salvaged, but most just dumped.

We also tackled the overgrown trees at the bottom, took down an elderberry, a dead eucalyptus and a barren plum tree.

The section of land next to my neighbour was less weed covered because they had sprayed it to keep the weeds from spreading into theirs, so that was the section I dug first, managing to get a narrow strip done in time to plant a few bits and pieces. I bought a secondhand rotavator for £100 but it proved to be a bit of a lightweight and also wouldn't run for more than five minutes at a time, then wouldn't start again until it was cold. In the end, I dug the plot by hand and I put in a row of peas (eaten by slugs as soon as they emerged), beetroot (not sure if the slugs or rabbits did for those, but something did), onion sets (which the rabbits nibbled as soon as the shoots appeared), leeks and runner beans (again, the jury is out as regards the guilty party). The one crop which remained uneaten were five courgette plants which went on to provide us with all the courgettes we could eat (and more besides) during the summer.

Rabbit food - my first crop of runner beans was eaten in days.

My onion sets struggled on and I got a bag of small onions; I resowed runner beans, put in some protection and managed to get a small crop from those and a bought bigger leek plants from the plant stall on Whittlesey market and we've had a few decent meals from those.

David Jones, my neighbour, gave me some flagstones which have formed a base for a shed; I've planted gooseberries, redcurrant and blackcurrants and four cider apple trees.

The shed had been a boon - it's somewhere to sit if
it's raining. Holly likes it, too.

During the summer, I made a small raised bed for saffron crocus and a larger one for asparagus. The saffron crocus have had a hard time of it, being constantly nibbled by rabbits. I've little choice but to bring them back and plant them around the garden, which I will do this spring. The saffron bed might also be brought home or i might constuct a cover and use it for seeds or salad.

During the autumn, I've dug over one half of the plot and it has broken down quite nicely during the winter. One part of this, which I had dug over first, had broken down enough for me to plant winter onions, shallots and garlic. Once more, the rabbits sensed a tasty meal and I had to fence them all pretty quickly, although the shallots suffered before I could get enough fencing arranged..

With all the various bits and pieces purchased, I have easily spent over £1,000 - the biggest item being a shed and four apple trees - and in return I've had perhaps 10kg of courgettes, 3kg of runner beans, half a carrier bag of small onions and 40 leeks.

The growing season is starting again and I've dug up, divided and replanted 12 globe artichokes and covered some ground with plastic sheet to warm up so I can sow broad beans (they went in last Saturday). I've learned that I can't leave anything uncovered or unprotected, which means I'll be buying more cloches, netting and supports this year! Last week, I was talking to one allotment holder who grows soft fruit. He said that muntjac deer ate all his gooseberries last year. The good news is that they don't like blackcurrants, the bad news is that pigeons love them! Let’s add a home-made fruit cage to this year’s expenses.

I'm looking forward to spring and all the things I plan to grow - I just hope they don't end up in the belly of a fat rabbit, or a muntjac or pigeon, rook, jackdaw ...

Globe artichokes divided and replanted. They will make a tall screen
at the back of the plot - should look quite nice.

Winter flowers in my garden

Still quite a show from the gipsy's asters

This winter has been notable for being wet and windy. The jetstream is lower than usual this year and has created some extreme weather.

For north America it has pulled down Arctic air and caused severe snowstorms and temperatures as low as minus 35 deg C when wind chill is taken into account. For the UK, it has pulled a number of Atlantic storms (which would normally have passed to the north of the British Isles) into Britain and Ireland.

Over Christmas and into January, there have been five major storms, with strong winds, heavy rain and (this week) huge waves battering the west coast. There’s a round-up of the story here. Sea arches, stacks and cliffs have been washed away and the Victorian promenade at Aberystwyth in Wales has been severely damaged. There’s lots of flooding across southern and western England – the usual suspects such as the Somerset Levels and around Tewkesbury, but also large areas in Kent and Surrey, and the Thames is now starting to flood in its upper reaches.

In the east, we have been lucky. The storms are generating strong westerly or south-westerly winds which have not been strong enough to cause damage in our part of the world, although they have resulted in unseasonal wet and warm weather. Much of the rain has arrived during the night, so we’ve tended not to feel that it’s been raining excessively, but when you walk out into the fields or on the garden, it definitely shows. The lawn is like a sponge and squelches when you walk on it.

We have had a few frosts, but nothing like the really cold weather of the past two years. This is evident by the range and types of plant that’s currently flowering in my garden on 8 January.

You’d expect the snowdrops to be out (no surprise there then) and they are just coming into flower with clear white buds; also the hellebores (Lentern rose) is out under the trees at the bottom. Wallflowers that I planted from pot-grown in early November are now starting to come into flower and I also have primulas and little blue flowers on the vinca.

What I hadn’t expected was that the aster that Margaret bought from the gipsy in the summer is still a mass of flowers, even saying it’s in a sunny spot at the front of the house, I’m surprised it has done so well. Even more surprising is that several lobelia plants have survived the frosts and are actually flowering. Not many flowers, but there are five plants with blue and white flowers on. I haven’t the heart to pull them up.

Brachysome, a plant with feathery green leaves and blue, daisy-like flowers, has survived in planters and still has a few flowers hanging on.

Finally, I have night-scented stock which self-seeded during the summer, germinated in early autumn and are flowering. I haven’t detected any scent, they’re probably too busy shivering to bother about how they smell.

I’ve also had nasturtiums self-seeding and germinating in sheltered spots and some cornflowers have also formed a large clump of self-seeded plants. If they survive the cold still to come (which they could) they’ll be a really early spring show.

Timber!

Cross sections of the tulip tree trunk

A couple of days holiday and we have spent it doing some major garden work, pruning the conifers (which is always a major task) and the corkscrew hazel, also taking down my tulip tree.

It was sad to see the tulip tree go. I had in mind that Janet and Andrew Knights had bought it for my 40th birthday, but when we cut it down I took some ring sections and could count only 14 or 15 rings which would have put me at 45 when the tree started out.

I’m not sure whether you can accurately date a tree’s age by the rings because it must have spent its first few years as a skinny shoot a centimetre across. I can remember Janet and Andrew bringing it around and putting it in our kitchen standing in its pot. It must have been no more than five feet high.

It was a very good present. Years before I’d read about the magnificent tulip tree avenue at Kew Gardens and what a wonderful sight it was when they flowered. Margaret and I had been to Kew about 35 years ago to try to see them, but had missed the flowers by a week. I must have told the story to Janet and Andrew, so they bought me the tree and I planted it in the garden - cue (or Kew) years of my own magnificent displays.

The tulip tree is so named not because its flowers look like tulips, it’s because its leaves have a distinct three-lobed shape, just like the traditional rendition of a tulip flower. It grew straight and strong and very quickly and, after a few years, I was able to discard the stake and tie. But although it was clearly thriving, there were no flowers. It became a standing joke to ask me if the tulip tree had flowered.

About 10 years ago, during the summer, the leaves on the tree started to get brown spots, turn yellow, die and drop off. They have always started off green and healthy and the tree continued to grow, but the new leaves that came out in May had all gone by late August and the tree looked decidedly shabby every summer. It must have some kind of fungal or viral infection and I might have tried to spray it, but spraying a 30-feet tree is not easy (or practical) so this year I took a look at it and decided it was best to go (there hasn’t been even a hint of a flower to compensate for the shabby leaves). To make matters worse, the Knights have bought a tulip tree of their own and despite being in their garden for just a few years, it flowered for the first time this year. Margaret went to see it, but I was at work and unable to, so I still haven’t seen a tulip tree in flower.

Well, my own tulip tree certainly won’t be flowering now. It was some 30 feet high, so we took it down in sections, lopping off as many lower branches as possible, putting a rope on the top section to pull it into our garden and then cutting the trunk halfway up. Once that was on the lawn, I took the bottom section down in the same way and then dug around the stump and cut that off as close to the ground as I could. The wood was very soft and wet compared to something like oak, so the chain saw went through it very easily. I split the bigger logs and we’ve laid them out to dry. They can go in the chiminea next summer.

Before chopping it up into chiminea-sized chunks, I noticed that the growth rings on the tree were very distinct and quite wide. I thought they might be good for Max to use in the classroom to illustrate tree growth and how the tree grows more one year than another. I cut two sections and stood them on their side on the table in the summerhouse for safe keeping. When we retired for “goutier” Margaret remarked what nice ornaments they made and they did look very nice. I should have cut a few more in hindsight, but they might split and crack as they dry out - like I said, tulip tree wood is quite soft and wet.

We got the chipper on the lawn and while I was getting through the big logs, Margaret chipped all the smaller branches and spread the chippings in the compost bin and around the garden. It was as if the tree had never been there, we’d been industrial in our destruction and processing. I’m always sorry to see a tree go, but the garden does look better without it; it was not an attractive tree and the bottom of the garden is a lot more light. I now have to think of what we’ll do with that border.

Pruned leylandii

After the tulip tree and after lunch, we turned our attention to the conifers by the patio. I’d planted three leylandii in a triangle about 25 years ago and they’d grown very quickly into substantial trees, as leylandii do. We had them topped around 10 years ago and when we made the new patio, I took off the lower branches to let more light through. It made them into quite attractive trees, but they still shaded the patio a bit too much so two years ago, I took more branches off the bottom and cleaned the trunks of ivy. They are quite nice trees, but I’m worried they’re a bit heavy at the top and, as they’re quite close to the house, I don’t want one crashing through the roof one winter night.

The problem with topping a leylandii is that you think you’ve stopped it growing any taller. What actually happens is the main shoot is stopped, but a dozen side branches grow and take up the race for the sky. My plan was to get a ladder up to the original cut-off point and then prune (cut off) all the second branches. Margaret was deeply unhappy with this plan, mainly concerned about my safety but also a bit worried that the trees would look as if they’d been given a flat-top haircut. My reassurances that they would grow again and look fine in a year or two were not helping.

I put a ladder up and climbed to the first cut. It was a lot higher than I thought and the prospect of climbing into the tree, with a chainsaw and stretching to lop branches was not inviting. Health & Safety would have had kittens. I decided on a different approach. After quite some time spent walking around the trees and staring up into the tops, we decided that removing a few more lower branches would do the trick. Margaret was not convinced and argued for every branch’s life until it was cut away and then agreed that it did look better without it. We removed about 10 branches and by then Margaret had the tree chopper’s equivalent of blood lust - I’ll call it sap-lust - and wanted more pruning. She had her eye on two odd branches sticking out at right angles, but they were quite small and difficult to reach so their lives were spared.

We had done quite a good job, but there was a pile of branches on the lawn for processing. Whenever I prune the leylandii, I’m staggered by how much foliage there is. The size and weight of some of the higher branches was really surprising, we’ve probably taken down around 250kg from the tops and there’s more light coming through without spoiling the overall shape. There was only a couple of hours left in the day, so we made a start on clearing the branches. The smaller pieces would be chipped, the bigger ones saved for firewood and the green leaves spread around the garden by the summerhouse to die down and mulch. Margaret was in charge of chipping and spreading, I was the sorter and processor. Actually by 4.30pm, we were both pretty weary and decided to clear up and get some fish and chips from Eye.

Friday was supposed to be rain in the morning but bright in the afternoon so we thought we’d get finished then. Actually, it rained all night and the following day was quite cold and grey, so that the lawn remained sodden. If we’d worked on that we’d have really chewed up the turf, so best to stay off it. We went to Whittlesey, I made a loaf of bread, some flapjack and a parkin loaf. It rained again in the evening.

Saturday was bright and clear however, although the lawn was still very wet in the morning. I took the dogs for a long walk across the fen and it was very pleasant - one of those clear, crisp autumn days. Holly had a good sweep of the fields that have been left fallow and the walk turned out to be longer than expected while Gravel and I had to wait for her to show up. She did, in the end, like she always does but when I’d walked another quarter of a mile, I realised I’d lost her again. She’d obviously scented something interesting and had doubled back for another session. I called her - nothing; waited, then called again - nothing. So Gravel and I retraced our steps for a few hundred yards then Holly could be seen in the distance heading towards us on the path. I turned round and walked towards home pretty briskly to give her a challenge to overtake. She wasn’t done then, there was still time to shoot off down another track/dyke this time with Gravel leading the way. Springers can’t resist a scent and if their nose is working their ears stop completely. Gravel is now much better at staying close, but even he disappears quite often. You just have to trust them; they always come back and they can’t get up to too much trouble surrounded by miles of arable land!

We have a pre-arranged point where their leads go back on and they always get a biscuit, so recall suddenly becomes very good. In fact, Holly is often sat waiting near the leads-on point. There wasn’t much wildlife to see today, but I did see one lone house martin skimming the fields. He was flying south and I guess he was going a bit further than Whittlesey.

My growing woodpile - got enough for next summer

By afternoon the lawn was dry and we managed to get the remaining conifer cleared within a couple of hours. We’ve got a pile of wood for the chiminea next year and it also makes a good place for various creatures to overwinter - part of my help the local wildlife efforts. My compost bins have certainly been utilised, although the hedgehog house under the decking is (to my knowledge) unused.

A wheelbarrow full of twisted logs and
sticks from the corkscrew hazel

When I cleared the last compost bin, it had been sitting for six months with a covering of old plastic sacks and when I lifted them off there was a little mouse staring at me. He hesitated for a second or two while we both contemplated each other and then dived down a hole into the compost. I’d normally dig it out in big chunks, but this time I had to rake it off carefully for fear of chopping a mouse in two. The mouse colony was actually confined to the top foot of compost and as I drew it off panicked mice ran off in all directions around the other bins and into the wood pile. They probably thought they had a nice house for the winter, but the best-laid plans of mice ... etc.

On Saturday evening, we celebrated with a couple of G&Ts on the patio while the sun went down. I lit the chiminea and we sat out until dark. It was a lovely evening, with no wind and a clear night. The bat was still hunting for insects, hopefully getting enough to hibernate successfully.

Today was another lovely day. Margaret and I walked the dogs and had breakfast when we got home. Today’s job was more pruning - this time it was the corkscrew hazel. We’ve transformed it this year - Margaret spent some time getting all the ivy off it about a month ago and today we removed all the suckers and various crossing branches so we could open up the inside of the tree. The chainsaw is a wonderful tool, it makes lopping and cutting so easy.

We took loads of wood out and it was really hard work. There was so much wood to process that we didn’t quite get it finished and the wood store will be overflowing with logs and sticks for next year. The big border is now quite open all the way down - I’m going to have to give some serious thought to what we do next year.

Well and truly pruned - the corkscrew hazel

Footnote: Margaret managed to clear the last bits of hazel during the week and this weekend, we moved the woodpile (so the oldest was at the front) and I took the chainsaw to the rest. We now have a very respectable pile of wood for next year's chiminea burning.

Gourds for Christmas Decoration

This one has grown up, over and along the hedge

For the last few years, we’ve grown gourds during the summer and Margaret has dried them, varnished them and used them for Christmas decorations and presents.

In 2008, we had an excellent crop and three people got gifts of dishes filled with varnished gourds. I’d have preferred a bottle of malt, but I didn’t get a dish of gourds, so can’t complain.

That was a good year for gourd growing (they like it hot) and I grew them on the ground like you’d grow courgettes. Those that did best were the ones that climbed up through the conifers at the bottom and hung clear. They have really strong tendrils that reach out, wrap around twigs and then coil into a spring shape so there is some flexibility and the tendril doesn’t snap in the wind (very clever, gourds). They are excellent climbers!

Next year, was wet and cold and the gourds did terribly. We hardly had enough for Margaret and none for presents.

In 2010, we had more success, but Margaret experimented with two coats of varnish and it didn’t work, they went all gooey. I’m not sure what went wrong. I suspect that not enough time was allowed between coats or that the gourds were not fully dried out.

Anyway, last year, we tried a new technique. Instead of growing them in the ground, we grew them in large old pots which had become a bit battered to hold flowers and look pretty. I grew them up against the hedge, so they were in sun, sheltered (to a degree) from the wind and I also encouraged them to climb up the hedge - not that they needed much encouragement! There’s no truth that this technique was developed to avoid cutting the hedge during the summer gourd-growing season.

It was a considerable success and Margaret also perfected the drying/varnishing process; then added some glue and glitter to really make them look Christmassy - bejazzled gourds.

They lasted until well after Christmas and would probably have still been OK this year. Anyway, we didn’t see any gourd seeds in the shops this spring so, instead of going on the Thompson and Morgan website, I decided to save the seeds from last year's. I carefully selected the best shapes and colours, scooped out the seeds and dried them. I experimented with a small selection and they germinated well, so I planted up the rest and got really good germination rate - well over 70 per cent.


The gourd plants went three to a pot and we had five pots along the hedge. The summer hasn’t been great weather-wise, but all except one pot, have done well. Oddly, the fruits from the seed is nothing like the parent fruit. I’d expected to get knobbly plants from the seed of knobbly fruit, but the plants are completely random. We’ve got some that have made massive fruits (almost like marrows) some long stripey one that I’ve never seen the like of and some familiar shapes. Nearer the house, the plants have grown up, over and along the hedge and there are some big fruits on the field side. I think we’ll find a lot of fruits when we cut the hedge that we just can’t see at present.

I don’t know why the size, colours and shapes are so different. Perhaps some pollen from my sister’s courgette plants drifted across or a bee dropped some pollen from the pumpkin patch at John’s nursery.

Anyway, I’ll update with a report on the crop and some pictures of the finished products ...












Gourd update 7/12/12

The gourds have been drying in the airing cupboard and some on the windowsill. Margaret has thrown away some of the less attractive ones and the remaining crop is now ready for varnishing and decoration.

Some of the colours have really changed and come out as the fruits have dried. It's not a bad crop and some quite unusual colours and shapes. Only disappointment was a large number of white egg-shaped fruits and also some very large fruits; almost marrow-sized.

Above and below: the gourd crop dried and ready for varnishing and decoration

Here is the finished product. After a couple of months drying in the airing cupboard, they have been varnished and Margaret added the glitter yesterday (December 15)