Happy birthday to me-blog thing

26th August was the 1st Anniversary of my 1st post. Coinciding with Summer starting to head for the door, it seems a perfect time to reflect, tho maybe not in South Park style, on what I've learnt.

1. Do structural work in Winter

There were 3 structural jobs I wanted to do this year:

• Stairs & terracing in Stinky Dog Corner.
  Achievement unlocked! (as the kids say)
• Seating semi-circle around the gravel.
  Well I bought the sleepers... That counts as progress, right...?
• Wall consolation & seating in The White Corner.
  Yeah well given how much the wall has moved this year, it'll have demolished itself by the time I get around to it.

The only reason Stinky Dog Stairs got done was cos I did it in Winter (it was snowing ffs, but once I got going I was fine).

Working in Winter has a bunch of advantages:

• I don't overheatKey factor for me as I'm a bit prone to heat stroke.
  Heavy work = Tired.
  Tired + Overcooked brain = Losing a limb.
• No plants to knack
  All the annuals have gone, all the bulbs & most perennials are underground, leaving only me, the shrubs & trees. There's a lot more room to manoeuvre, & a lot less to get precious about, so I can get stuck in.
  
  Later in the year, when everything's up & leafy & growing, it seems like the height of bad manners to turf 'em up & mess 'em about.
  Plus they sulk:

You moved me!

Right in the middle of my big dance number!

How DARE you!

Well tough titty, big boots,

I'm going to cry for the rest of the season

& every time you look at me

you'll know it was

All.

Your.

Fault.

• I have the time
  I like to be a busy bee but things quieten down during the shortest days.

All this said, it would be nice to do the heavy work in more clement weather, but I now know this is delusional thinking. Even if all the above weren't true, big Summer work just won't happen as...

2. Summer is for having a life

I like to do stuff. Lots of stuff. In the Summer there's generally more stuff on. Can't do it all. Weekends get packed out with exciting new opportunities, leaving only the occasional day here & there, maybe the odd evening, to get out into the garden & tidy up a bit.

But that's OK cos...
 

3. Mowing the lawn = instant makeover

Such a quick job, such a transformation.
Dead easy to pop out on a sunny evening & give the grass a quick hoove.
The sharp contrast with the wild & unruly the beds works beautifully.
Full of win!

Unfortunately the mower doesn't quite get
the grass in the path gaps

4. Power tools rock!

As well as the mower, there's my new best friend: the hedge trimmer. Truly, it is a sword of power worthy of Hattori Hanzo himself. Even removing the cover feels like unsheathing a katana of legend.

The hedge trimmer has transformed the biggest job of the year - the annual hedge hack.

In the dark days of yore, attacking the hedge was a gruelling marathon. At least 3 sessions of hacking with shears & loppers, and then several more stuffing the trimmings into bag after bag, garden waste bin load after garden waste bin load.

But not this year - 2 sessions, all done. Woohoo!

Admittedly not all this is down to the awesome power of Excalibur. The odd Spring confused the crap out the laurel. Its initial growth was badly burnt by the late cold snap & only now has it started to recover. But I'll take any assistance on this mammoth task. The laurel is tougher than old boots; it'll be back to fight another year. But this year, it did not claim the lion's share of my Summer garden time, & there are no words for how grateful I am.

Not to say I am completely unscathed tho'...:

A bit of a poor effort by Emo standards

This? Yeah, well I sort of fell through the hedge.
Backwards.
yeah, yeah, laugh it up fuzzball...

I was stood on top of the wall, both hands on Excalibur. I needed to turn around.

When using the shears I'm happy to walk backwards, but when I have the trimmer out I prefer to see exactly where the cable is. 

As I was halfway through my pirouette, I started a slow fall backward... into a gap in the hedge.

Fortunately both hands were off the triggers so the blade wasn't spinning. Plus the hedge gap wasn't quite as wide as me, so I came to rest at a jaunty 45° recline. The ground level is much higher on the hedgeward side so I was able to stand.
In the hedge.
I felt like a pillock.
But it could've been sooooo much worse...

5. The hedge yields weird harvest

No hedge treasure during this year's annual haircut, apart from me, obvs.

The mug I once found in the hedge is a bit tatty so sits at the back of the cupboard & will do for decorating.

The lovely spotty pint glass was perfect & is now my regular garden refreshments glass. It makes me smirk every time I use it.

But it's not all treasure.

There's usually quite a lot of litter. To be expected really on an end of terrace.

The unripe apples were a disappointment - lobbed over the hedge & landing in the gravel with tell tale titchy teeth marks in them. Fortunately, & after a bit of a word, the kids didn't strip the tree completely bare, & 5 apples made it to full size... if not quite full maturity - scrumpers left us with 1, so we snaffled it ourselves.

A bit tart, & hopefully enough next year for a tart

But without doubt the weirdest thing to arrive over the hedge was the rat in a bag. Still no clue what the hell that was all about.

6. You tend vegetables

The flowers, fruit, herbs, trees & shrubs in our garden do a grand job of looking after themselves. Whether I'm out there or not, they carry on regardless.

I was keen to give more veg a go this year, & with hindsight I can see that I expected them to do just what the other plants do & get on with it.

But no. It was a endless round of sewing & potting on & watering & feeding... & I just could not be arsed. By mid-Summer I was proclaiming, loudly, to anyone who would listen & those who couldn't run away, that vegetables were needy. They wilted, they bolted, they got infested, they got nibbled, they got mangled. Jeez, what a bunch of lightweights!

Then I visited my Dad's garden & the truth slapped me in the face:
You get out what you put in.

I'd been expecting a free lunch, but we all know there's no such thing.

It's not been a total disaster though. A couple of tough buggers have soldiered on.

Courgettes

Still going strong, still flowering, still fruiting. The one veg plant that suits my inability to micro-manage.

Courgette flower in full pomp 

Radishes

They worked! First attempt with these this year & they're bright, fresh, crunchy & peppery. I'm chuffed to bits.

All shapes & colours from my mixed seed pack

Their location in the greenhouse might be unconventional but at least I could keep an eye on them, & the snails tend to stay out of there.

Borlotti beans

The snails definitely found the beans, but I'm surprised the damage wasn't more extensive.

Bit of a snail mauling in the middle there...

The snails first attacked while the pods were tender, so we harvested some beans then & Hubby steamed them whole, runner bean style.

At this end of the Summer the remainder have really taken on that trademark red colour, so hopefully we'll get beans too.

Onions

Yeah, not a great result here. In a variety of locations they've been universally terrible. These survivors are barely larger than the sets they started out as (20p off the right edge there for scale). But they've done better than their brethren, who are M.I.A....

Call them shallots?

The veg experiment has been interesting, but I think next year I'll look to expand hardy herb selection instead.

7. Seedlings compost is only for seedlings

The Greenhouse Guttering experiment has worked much better in Spring & Summer than it did over Winter. We had lots of salad leaves and tender herbs and things germinated very well in there... but they didn't last.

Hmm... row 2 looking a little dry there...

I finally twigged with the little gem lettuce: they were going well but after a little while they started to fade - literally. The colour started to leech from the leaves. Hubby was baffled. After a few days something pinged in my head: food. So he gave them some liquid feed & they perked right up again.

And then I remembered hearing that seed compost isn't like normal compost. It's finer plus it doesn't have as much nutritional content. So potting on isn't only about giving the roots more legroom, it's also about getting more scran into the soil.

8. Post it!

Not all the year's lessons are from out there. Some are from in here, in blogland.

Some posts have had a long gestation. I've still got Japan posts from Christmas sat in drafts. I have a phone memory card stacked with photos waiting to be processed. I have emails marked as unread so I don't forget to write about them.

All these posts sit in the back of my mind like gravel, grating away. They force "should" statements into my subconscious.

If I have a year 2 resolution, it'll be Post it!

It doesn't have to be perfect, but it needs to be out, or let go...

9. A diary, for me

When I started the blog, part of my motivation was to show the world that gardening is far more hit & miss than the experts would have us believe. But the way it's panned out, this blog is more like my gardening diary. It definitely feels like it's of more use to me than you. Does that sound rude?

Half way through the year I realised that to be useful to others, I'd have to be posting like clockwork & running around social medialand driving traffic to the site. Advertising to only my Facebook mates doesn't really get the message out there.

But frankly, what a chew on. It's got "time swamp" plastered all over it, & I already spend much longer writing about gardening than gardening.

Having said all that though...

10. Folk are actually interested

I've had some really nice comments about things I've written over the last year, & that's been unexpected. I'm frankly astonished that anyone takes the time to read these witterings.

& I love the stories it brings out of you. You tell me what you're up to & we all get to learn from each other. & that's great.

So thank you for taking the time. I'm really touched.

No Lilac flowers this year, then...

As the whole of Spring packs itself into just a couple of weeks, I'll stick my neck out & say the Lilac is not going to bother flowering this year:

Lots of green, but no lilac

Its compatriot 3 gardens over is in full pomp right now, but there's no flower buds on ours at all.

I suspect this is the result of another dodgy pruning incident :/

I know that Lilac is pretty robust - I've hacked it back pretty hard in the past with no real bother, but I don't ever recall having a no show like this.

But last year I did my usual thing of pruning it when I could be arsed, rather than when it should be done, & I guess sometimes there's a price to pay.

A bit of online digging indeed suggests that Lilac is best pruned immediately after flowering, so I'll keep an eye on the neighbours' blooms & give ours its annual haircut when theirs goes over. Won't be long now, which is handy as all that green is making a bid to dominate Stinky Dog Corner.

Ah well, fingers crossed for next year.

New Lilac on the block

And talking of the future, the white Lilac root cuttings from my mate have made it through the Winter:

Go little cuttings!

Yay! More residents for The White Corner. However, now I've learn about Lilac's bullying ways, the plan is to plant it on the other side of the wall, on the Council land. Not only will this complete the hedge, but it'll return that area to similar form of a few years ago:

When we moved in, The White Corner had 2 Conifers & a Lilac running along the bottom wall. But as they grew bigger & bigger, they started pushing the wall over. So a few years ago, we had a tree surgeon take them down & grind out the stumps. Our mate rebuilt the wall, & I've been slowly replanting the area since.

It was all quite a change for that bed as it's gone from deep shade to full sun, so some long term residents haven't survived all the drama. And we do miss the huge Lilac that was on the end - not only did it screen us from the street, but it always put on such a great Spring show.

Hopefully the new white Lilacs will grow up big & strong, just like the old one, and will have a bit more room to do it in too.

Aquilegias guard our snailbait Strawberries

You can't see them, but there are Strawberries under this sea of blue:

The Strawbs are under there somewhere...

In normal gardens by normal gardeners, Strawberries are planted out in the open, so they can convert maximum sunshine into sugar & yumminess.

Following conventional soft-fruits-together logic, ours are with the Rasps, planted just in front of them. But some Aquilegia were living there first which means the Strawbs are frequently dwarfed.

So the other year, I had a fit of trying to do right by the low lying soft fruits; do things efficiently & by the book, rather than let things slide & forcing the plants fend for themselves as usual.

Let the sunshine in

Once the Aquilegia had finished flowering, I cut them right back to the ground so the Strawbs could have their moment in the sun.

& the result? Were we forced to eat Strawberry ice cream every meal just to get through the mammoth surplus?

Of course not. Total disaster. A snail-wrought devastation of that year's harvest.

So what the smeg went wrong? I'd done the right thing - how could it possibly have gone so badly?

On reflection I think a clue lies in one of my over-used phrases of the moment: "Your mileage may vary". It seems this is the pinch of salt I should take with standard gardening guidance.

How my mileage varies

Part of the reason for this blog is to document the weirdness I've experienced with gardening. I am after all the woman who has failed many attempts to successfully grow Nasturtiums - the plant so allegedly fool proof they're in the kiddies seeds section, next to My First Watering Can & the Ladybird Sand Pit. My gardening success is on par with chance.

But these days I'm beginning to look beyond the glossy photos, gorgeous cinematography & my "shiny! shiny!" plant-lust. I am starting to hear a little more clearly the caveats with which the journos pepper their stories:

...likes acid soil...

yeah, it might help to know where our soil is on the pH scale. I've read that self-testing kits are useless, but do folk really pay to get their soil tested?

The alternative to testing is the "what already grows well?" rule of thumb. We have a happy Rhododendron, we have heathers too, & a history of conifers, so I'm guessing we're on the acid side.

...tolerates partial shade...

so would actually prefer full sun...?

...is fully hardy...

I'm here to tell you that fully hardy for Northumberland is not the same as fully hardy for Kent.

...Bay is not fully hardy in the UK...

Well the one we have, & the one my Aunt has in the Midlands, & the one in the grounds of Moorbank Botanic Garden clearly missed that memo.

The appliance of science

So how does this rambling ranty diversion relate to the beleaguered Strawbs? Good question! Let's apply some science:

How were previous harvests?

Fine.
A bit of snail damage,
but plenty of fruit for us all.

What was different that year?

Pruned the Aquilegias.

Any other changes?

Nope.

Hypothesis?

The leafy bases of the Aquilegias
in some way hid the Strawbs
from the snails.

Is this sounding a bit crazy?

Yep, but what else is there?

Have snails got great vision?

Or is it a scent thing?

Do we need a "Why?" yet/at all?

Spose not. Yet.

Shall we test the hypothesis?

Let's!

Do you talk to yourself like this all the time.

Yes.

What of it?

Weirdo...

Plan becomes action

So last year, I largely left the Aquilegias alone.


Peek-a-boo, I see you...

They flowered, they set seed. I trimmed back the seed stems before their heads burst cos, as pretty as they are, we have plenty. But I left the leaves alone, allowing them to die back at their own pace.

The result?

Good harvest! The pollinators had no problem finding the Strawberry flowers but the snails barely found the fruit, & the fruit didn't seem to need direct sunlight to ripen.

Yay science!

Will the same method work 2 years in a row? Well the 1st fruits are starting to set right now, so we'll know really soon...

The Alliums popped!

Aren't they just gorrrrrrrgeous?

Baby, you're a star

I just love the über geometric nature of Allium flowers - big pom poms on sticks. Every time I look out into the garden or the yard, I see one of these purple starburst globes. Just beautiful.

Reality check

Allium bulbs are always quite pricey so with 3 flowers up I assumed I'd only bought 3, & was well chuffed with what looked like a 100% outcome. However, part of the point of this blog was to keep a record of what I'd actually done rather than rely on my flaky memory. A quick skip back to the post about planting up the Spring bulbs shows I actually bought 6 bulbs... That seems about right - a 50% success rate is much more normal for me ;)

I wonder what happened to the others? I wasn't going to go to the faff of emptying out the pots, drying the bulbs, potting them back up again in Autumn - it's what's usually recommended but frankly it sounds like work creation to me. However, once everything has died back I might get my CSI on & try to solve the Mystery of the Non-Exploding Alliums.

 

And what of next year? All the Allium bulbs I've had in the past have flowered for 1 year only, unlike the Daffs & Tulips which (mostly) come back & back & back. As much as I love the result, I'm too tight to contemplate splurging a wad of cash on loads of Allium bulbs every Autumn. 

I wonder how hard it is to grow them from seed? Hmm... a little bit of online digging unearths Monty's Gardening From Berryfields book, & page 101 suggests dividing bulb nodes in Autumn. Cool. I can do than. The RHS Allium page backs this up, & goes further to suggest that seed propagation is a bit trixy, & should be done the same year, if at all. Food for thought.

New tech toy

To change the mood a little: Regular readers might spot that the split screen photo at the top of the post is a new development. 

I've wanted to do some composite pictures for a while, after my mate over at the Oakwood Soaperie had posted some lovely examples as part of her Christmas promotional run.

So I had a look for a photo collage app (which is made trickier as I always always read collage as college) but all the examples seemed as tacky as hell. I really should've paid attention when she told me which app she used...

But yesterday's Allium photos were just begging for split screen treatment so I thought I'd have another look - 6 months is an Ice Age in App-land.

After a bit of rootling around the AppStore, I plumped for the well rated Framatic Pro (which I keep reading as Fragmatic - what is wrong with my eyeballs atm?!!). It was on offer... for free.

The app is a bit pop-up-happy at the mo, plugging its many many in-app purchases, & the tasteless framing options are all still there, but if I keep it simple I can avoid their worst excesses. 

The downside is that if I want to do photo tweaks, such as centre focus, I have to do them in Snapseed first. So there's a real danger I'll spend far too much time photo editing & not enough writing. Need to keep an eye on myself there or I'll end up in the no-post hole again.

Maybe 49%

But enough of the tech, let's get back to the stars of the moment - the Alliums.

 

50% success is not entirely accurate as there has been one small glitch. For some reason, one of the flowers broke its neck:

Oopsie...

I've no idea what happened here. The stem looks withered, so I suspect lack of water rather than external damage - outside force would've snapped it, surely...? But then the reading I've just done about propagation says they hate to be waterlogged, & there's a distinct risk I've over-watered - I always struggle to get that right.

Gotta say though, I'm impressed with how this flower is hanging on in there. The head went over at the start of the week, but the little flowers that make up the bigger globe are still maturing. Good effort that man! Still doing the business when critically injured. What a trooper.

A glamourpuss that keeps on delivering in a crisis? My kind of plant.

Death of a bumblebee

Beautifully bright & sunny today, so I nipped out & mowed the lawn. When finished, I lifted the lid to remove the cuttings collector box thingy & spotted this little fella.

Not going for a little walk.

Not having a little nap...

Oh dear. No idea how he got in there. I certainly didn't mow over his head. I wonder if he got sucked in through the air intake on the back of the mower...?

 

The bees are having a tough enough time without this sort of accidental insecticide.

Sad times :(

Snow damage

Oh look, it's the obligatory snow post.

A tale of Winters past

When we had big snow the other year, several things in our garden got a bit of a battering. Worst hit were the blueberries in the yard. When the snow slid off the house roof, it landed all over the pots under the kitchen window, & a number of the long, thin, woody blueberry stems snapped under the weight of the onslaught. Bugger.

The blueberries survived their ordeal though. They were long overdue a prune anyway, so I snipped off the damaged stems. No real harm was done, to my relief.

New Year, new snow

This year, the blueberries have been spared, but the big hebe in middle of the garden is looking a bit overloaded.

As with the blueberries, the hebe could've had a bit of a haircut in the Autumn, but I figured I'd do it all in Spring instead. The hebe is a bit of a beast, & when you prune it hard you're left with a lot of tough thin grey stems - not a very pretty sight all though the Wintertime. My reasoning was:

Prune it in the New Year, then it will put on new growth almost immediately & so be ugly for much less time.

See, not just my usual procrastination & crapness - there's some genuine thought & logic going on here for a change.

But, the hebe has now caught an awful lot of snow. It was quite windy after the biggest blizzard of the week, & that was enough to knock the settled snow off most things... but like the rest of us, the hebe has hung on to its hat.

The hebe's snowy toupee

S'pose I'd best leave the warm snug comfort of the sofa & leap to the rescue, then...

What's the damage?

Once out there I can see that the base of the hebe's snow cap is now ice - not good. Extra weighty, & extra pointy too. Fortunately the ice hasn't trapped any of the stems - everything's sitting on top, which is great as it comes off the plant quickly in fairly big chunks. & that's fab cos like a muppet I've come out without my gloves on & my hands are now FREEZING!

Bit of a hole top right, but nothing broken

 

With the snow off, I can inspect for damage. The hebe's quite a bendy soul, & whilst it's now a little out of shape up on the top, there don't appear to be any breakages. & if that hole up in the top right of the picture doesn't close up as the plant rebounds, the Spring haircut will sort it right out.

Now bugger this for a game of soldiers, I'm off back indoors!

Reeeeeeeally sufferin' succulents :(

So when I plugged yesterday's sufferin' succulents post on Facebook last night, one of my friends said:

Careful with the succulents in really cold weather - all that water freezes and just kills them. Wish I'd wrapped some of ours last year :-((

I'm guessing you knew that anyway.

Erm... nope. But I should have.

When I was in the garden centre, I was using the modern marvel that is mobile Internet to check out the plants on the RHS website before I bought them. "Finally!" I thought, "No more shall I be seduced by fabulous but flaky floral floozies!"

When I get my new recruits back to base, I've been trying to use Evernote to track what I plant & where I plant it:

Keeping it all together in Evernote

As you can see, I've got a combo of notes, links & photos all on the same page, which is great for keeping all my plant research together. This is a vast improvement on my normal method of hmm... What's that growing there again...? I'm sure I've read something about something that looked like that... now where did I put it...?

But the thing is, you do have to actually do the reading bit. & the bit I was supposed to be reading (but didn't) was the bit about frost hardiness. & it was right there in front of me on the RHS Echeveria secunda var. glauca page I "read" in the garden centre:

Right there, in black & green

So what happened? The whole point of getting the phone out in the garden centre in the first place was to catch this kind of mistake before splashing the cash. The same italicised before we saw earlier, that's how much planning there was meant to be.

My conclusion is: retail madness - the old, old problem of seeing only what you want to see, when you really really want the shiny thing. The same madness that has me giving heels "one last go" despite: not needing them (I'm 5'10"); not being able to walk in them (lack of practice) &; not wanting to practice (waaaay too painful... truly mystifying to me that anyone overcomes that one).

Enough moping though. When my comfy shoes get me home I'll pop the chicks into the greenhouse for the Winter, that should see them right...

Oh hang on...

What's that white fully stuff outside the window...?

Oh snows!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Right, that's it, I've had enough. You lot, inside, NOW!

So, as I type, the chicks are on the hallway window, thawing out. That window is not too hot, not too cold, not too bright, not too dark, so I hope... I hope... they'll live.

In the meantime, I'm off for a little lie down.