Midwinter flowers

It was Solstice on Friday - Woohoo! Nearly Spring!

Ok, so I might be getting a bit ahead of myself, but believe it or not there are actually some blooms out there at the mo. What hardy souls they are, bringing us some cheer on these cold short days. Heroes!

Honeysuckle - possibly the longest flowering plant we have

Heather - still blooming through the winter months

 

More winter interest

A few years ago, we bought a contorted hazel. It sits slap bang in the middle of the garden & is starting on its show run right now. When the leaves drop in late Autumn, not only do we get to see all the twisty stems, but the catkin buds that have already formed too.

Catkins on the twisty hazel

Over the next few months, the catkins will lengthen as they mature and then blossom in the Spring. Lovely.

& while I was out there on this big blue blustery day (a welcome respite from the 3 days of rain we've just sat through), I noticed the rhubarb has started already. What a beast...

& we're off! The Rhubarb steals a march

A new toy in the virtual toolshed

Part of my reason for blogging about gardening was to use it as a tech playground. & this week, I'm trying something new.

This is my 1st post using Snapseed rather than Instagram. I was prompted to look elsewhere for frames & filters after the Terms & Conditions debacle. & so far, so funky I reckon (I hope you like the results above too).

Snapseed is a free app from Google. I particularly like that it doesn't require a sign in & it doesn't make publishing my photos to the web an integral part of the photo fettling process.

Admittedly, the range of functions is bewildering, even daunting. But a quick mess around with it yielded some interesting results, so it'll be fun to play with it over the next few posts.

& the next of those will be in the New Year I reckon, so thanks for reading so far, have a great time whatever you're up to during the holidays, & I'll see you in 2013 :)

Hubby's a fungi

Yeah, I still can't resist the terrible puns. I'll get it out of system soon, I'm sure...
(I'm not sure)

This Autumn we've been catching the occasional edition of The Great British Food Revival on Beeb2, picking up loads of foodie tips. During the mushroom edition, there was a story about a guy who sold mushroom kits. Nowt new here: grow your own 'schroom packs have been kicking around for ages, & my Mum had a kit in the 70s. Mind, all it managed to cultivate was a cupboard full of tiny little flies - bit of an anti-climax.

But these kits from Fungi Futures are slightly different - they use recycled old coffee grounds as the growing medium for the mushies. So we already have a reduced fly risk. Yay! And these are a different variety too. Mum's kit was for the button/closed cap/portobello variety - yep, those 3 supermarket stalwarts are really the same type of mushroom at different stages of 'fruit' maturity. The Fungi Futures kits grow Pearl Oyster mushrooms. Yummy!

Lemme out of the box!

£11.95 of your hard-earned gets you one of these:

Ooh... it's a big box of potential

The pack is about the size of a wine box. When you get your kit, the fungus is already growing: when you take the bag out of the box to give it a soaking, as instructed, you can see the spidery white fibres of the the mycelium (the 'roots' of the mushroom) running through the coffee grounds. If you've ever made leafmould, it looks a bit like the end of year 1.

So, you soak the mushroom bag. Then you pop it back in the box & open that tear flap on the front. Then you cut through the bit of the plastic bag the tear flap has just exposed - this encourages the mushroom to 'fruit' in that location - the mushroom's 'fruiting bodies' are the bits we eat. You then pop the box somewhere gloomy & not too warm, mist the exposed bit daily with water, & wait...

Are we nearly there yet?

Hubby put the mushrooms in the garage - it's certainly gloomy in there, & not too warm. The box says to expect a harvest in 14 days. After a week, there wasn't much sign of progress. Is it too cold in there? We've had snow recently... Is this going to work at all?

But after 2 weeks, there's action:

Peek-a-boo! It looks like it's actually going to work!

Yeah I admit that photo looks like a poor soul with a particularly bad attack of psoriasis, but trust me this was really exciting. When those little brown knobbly ugly ducklings grow up, they're going to be splendid swan-like oyster mushrooms...

Even though we can see things are moving along, we take the strategic decision to move the mushies onto the hall window cill (alongside the recovering chicks). We're hoping that a bit more heat & a bit more light will speed things along a bit...

Success!

Ta da! Looking tasty...

Wow! Doesn't that picture just speak for itself?! Don't they look magnificent?! I'm so impressed. It's like magic! They took about a week to develop into the fully gilled brackets you see here & the progress was so rapid that Hubby was convinced you could just stand there and watch them growing. Coming home from work every day, we'd close the front door & just be blown away with how much they'd developed.

So, is anyone feeling peckish?

Dinner time!

The mushrooms are getting big now - some up to 10cm across, which is much bigger than the ones we've previously bought from the supermarket. So it's time to get busy with the garlic.... *dribble*

Hubby's the cook of our household &, like Mark from Peep Show, thinks nothing of doing a midweek roast dinner. Which is great, cos it means scrummy scran all through the week, & lots of lovely leftovers fit for snaffling.

& just in case I wasn't already sounding like a monumental arse, I now have to tell you that this week's mid-week roast was... erm... guinea fowl. What kind of fucking Princess eats guinea fowl? Mid week!? Yeah, that'd be me. Are you being blinded by the glint from my tiara yet?

But hear me out, as I pathetically feel the need to justify such pretention... *cough*sputter*... I mean, compare guinea fowl to a free range chicken:

• Cheaper: cos it's...
• Smaller: There's only 2 of us to feed, after all.
• Tastier: A bit more gamey than chicken, not as strong as pheasant.
• Different: Chicken's nice & all that, but it's fun to change it up a bit.

So we had roasted legs earlier in the week, leaving the breast meat & wings for another day. Roast poultry makes a great risotto. Mushrooms love risotto too. Risotto it is then.

Using a small sharp knife, Hubby carefully cut through the fleshy stems of the largest mushrooms:

First mushroom harvest with mid-week roast leftovers

He then sautéed the mushrooms in garlic butter, waved his magic stirring spoon, et voilà!

Guinea fowl & mushroom risotto

That bit of green sticking out from under the mushroom? It's spinach. Not home grown I'm afraid, but maybe one for next year's seed list. But there is another homegrown element in there - lovely tasty Lemon Thyme. I'll take you on a tour through our herb bed another day.

Our fungi futures?

Apparently we can expect at least another flush of mushrooms from this box. Plus, Hubby bought 2 boxes, just in case the 1st didn't work. Plus plus, a fungal friend reckons if you rehouse a chunk of the mycelium in fresh growing medium, you can repeat the cycle indefinitely. Woo hoo!

I wonder what other mushrooms we could grow...? I hear you can get Shiitake logs... & on River Cottage they once went foraging for Morels in the wood-chipped borders of a housing estate... Cool...

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.

Sufferin' succulents

Earlier this Summer, I had a splurge down the garden centre...
(Insert your own Frankie Howerd/Kenneth Williams utterance here)

On succulents, madam. Titter ye not.

They looked amazing: each had a large rosette of fleshy leaves; one green & spiky, the other grey & rounded.

Sempervivum Calcareum

Echeveria Glacuca

Having not long created the eye-shaped bed in the middle of the garden, I'd already been pondering if I should theme it.
Low lying stuff? Certainly.
Alpines? Maybe...
Gravel garden? Could do...
These'll fit right in :)

Fend for yourselves

I have no experience with succulents, but I figured they'd be OK in our garden. Why such optimism? Well...:

• Some random interlopers have self-seeded into bits of the greenhouse frame, & seem very happy there,
  Plus
• The eye-bed is slap bang in the middle of the garden so it gets the most of whatever sun deigns to shine on us,
  Plus plus
• Our soil is ridiculously free draining - All that rain we've had these last few years? No flooding... well not in the garden anyway. The doors on the other hand...

The soil is not at all sandy. It's very dark. But the colour isn't from lovely composty loaminess, oh no... It's coal dust. They're still mining round here & I pull out a chunk of the black stuff every time I go weeding.

Will they cope? Who knows! Best bung 'em in & see how they do.

Some time later...

I checked on the succulents from time to time, & they seemed to be doing fine. Then about 2 months after planting, I was having a little weed of the eye bed, so gave them a bit of a closer inspection.

The green spiky one seemed happy as Larry. But the grey one.... the grey one was a different story...

Oh... now that's not right...

Oops. Now this pic doesn't do me justice - if it had looked like this I've spotted something was up immediately. No, what happened was: weed, weed, weed, fettle, hoe, hoe, knock, oop a leaf's fallen off... & another... oh dear... the whole top's off...

Clearing away all the loose leaves, the extent of the carnage became clear:

Food for worms... sadly

Yep, when the clean-up squad have moved in, such as those stripey grubs right & bottom of the main stem there, it's time to cut your losses.

I believe that children are our future

You might've noticed from the pictures at the top of the post that these plants both had a large central plant, with lots of little plants around the edge. The common name for these plants is Hen & Chicks - a bit of a leap of the imagination, but this is no time for semantic quibbling - Mum has died, I've got to think of the children. The children! Oh the humanity...

So, how does this work? Well the chicks sit on an umbilical cord of a stem from the mummy plant. But I've seen this sort of thing before, with the strawberries. They send out long runner stems, & then where the stems hit the ground, roots spring out & a new baby plant starts to grow.

Gingerly turning one of the babes over, I see this:

Lots of leaves, teeny roots

Woohoo! Roots! They might be teeny, but they're there alright. Which means I've got a fighting change of saving the babies. Right then, best get them rehoused.

Moving on up, moving on out

So what's gone wrong? Well I suspect that even though the eye-bed is so well drained, the plant was still just too soggy. & yes, this is pure guess work on my part, but I figure if I don't act now, all is lost.

The plan:

Move the kids into a pot

I can put it by the yard door so I can keep an eye on them. Plus pots dry out ridiculously quickly. Normally that would be a problem, but not with these fellas.

Make sure there's plenty of drainage

I took a pot & filled half of it with stones, crocks & pebbles. Not just the bottom inch or so; half the depth of the pot. The theory here is to provide the water to no excuse to stick around.

Then mixed some compost 1:1 with sand; yep, half compost, half sand. To be honest I think it should've been more sand, & may be the poor border soil rather than the compost, but I really couldn't send the babies to their new home on an empty stomach.

Sand & compost mix, plus lots of drainage

With a sharp knife, I careful cut the umbilical stem on each of the babies. Well, all but 1 as it had already broken free of its own accord - it clearly knew it was time to leave home.

I levelled the soil in the pot & then created a little depression for the base of each of the chicks, gently pressed each plant home. The fleshy leaves are deceptively fragile so I was extra careful so as not to damage them.

For the final bit of drainage, I surrounded the chicks with gravel. I figure that if they're up to their necks in pebbles, they'll be less likely to end up sitting in a puddle.

Rehoused, & happier..?

Hopefully they'll be fine. They've got a cold wet winter ahead. Fingers crossed they make it out the other side intact.

Salads all year round?

At any given moment, I've usually got several stray thoughts floating around the back of my head. Half-formed sentences waft around, searching for something to hang on to, waiting to coalesce into fully fledged, proper ideas... A bit like this post...

What does it all mean?

Here are some of the itinerant ponders that were bubbling up over the Summer:

• You can grow seedlings in lengths of guttering.
• Seedlings grown in gutters can be easily planted out, in chunks, reducing root disturbance.
• At River Cottage, they grow tasty micro salads in gutters, all year round.
• Hubby really enjoyed cooking with the lovely fresh parsley that survived all winter in the greenhouse.
• We could really do with some shelving for seedlings, but there's no space in the greenhouse.

The mists are clearing...

& slowly... an image formed... & I said to hubby: "Do you think we could attach a couple of rows of guttering to the back wall of the greenhouse, & grow salads & parsley & coriander in them?"

He was so keen on the idea, he did it that very weekend - wot a star!

3 rows should do it

So we've got:

• Some timber planks screwed to the window frame; then
• Guttering brackets mounted onto the planks; then
• A standard length of guttering per plank;
• Capped at the ends with standard guttering ends.

How neat & tidy is that? Lovely.

1st sowing

The next step is to bung some compost in & sow some seeds. Rather than going mental & filling all 3 rows, we plump for just doing the bottom row for starters, with the 2 leaves we're most likely to use: Parsley & Coriander.

They're ALIVE! The coriander get going

After a couple of weeks - success! The seeds are starting to germinate - woo hoo!

Fancy a dip?

It's been a wet summer; you may've noticed. However, what we've never realised before, is that we have a very leaky greenhouse:

Hmm... are we creating a water feature?

It seems the rain just runs all the way down the garage wall, with scant regard for the greenhouse frame. But no matter, less watering for us :) It does mean tho' that if we don't want the seedlings to drown, it's time to get busy with the drill.

There's a hole in my gutter, dear Liza, dear Liza...

We'll keep an eye on them to see whether we need to add any more.

2nd sowing

When hubby put the 1st set of seeds in, he deliberately left some gaps. As well as trying to grow more things over Winter, we're also playing with sequential sowing. This is partly to try & give us a more regular delivery of leaves, but also cos when I've tried to grow corinader in the past, it's bolted quicker than Usain.

A second sprouting

So now all we have to do is wait & see how the little seedlings cope with reduced heat & light over the next few months. If these quite tender fellas should struggle, we can also try out some winter salads.

Up here in North East at midwinter, it starts getting dark about 3:30pm, I kid you not. On the upside, it's now less than a month til the days start getting longer... which means Spring is on the way - you heard it here 1st, folks!

Spring bulbs in... at the 11th hour

Big frost today. A bright & sunny morning, but definitely white & crisp out there. But the bulbs I bought nearly 2 months ago are still not planted. Pants. Gardeners' World had it as jobs to do for the weekend, but to me the look on Monty's face really saying "This should already be done, numbnuts". I might be projecting...

But as luck would have it I've got a free Sunday, & the sun is shining so it's Go! Go! Go!

Pots of pots

I'm planning on doing some more structural work this winter, so the plan is to put the new bulbs into pots. That way I can get them in soil right now & then position them out in the garden once all the heavy shifting is done. I've got some other bulbs that live in pots all the time, so fingers crossed these guys will be ok for now.

New bulbs on the block

So, who are the new recruits? Ladies & gentleman, may I present...

Dwarf Narcissus

I've never been 100% sure about dwarf daffs but I saw some at Alnwick Garden in early Spring this year & they looked very jolly.



So during my recent bulb binge, I picked up 3 x Silver Chimes, 5 x Tête À Tête & 5 x Minnow.

I'm afraid I forgot to take a picture of the Minnow card when I was in the garden centre, plus the Minnow & Tête bulbs were mixed up in the same bag to snaffle more variety for the bulk discount, so I've no idea what i've really got. I'll just have to wait until they flower & play spot the difference.

For mini flowers, these bulbs are huge! I'm surprised cos we've got lots of snowdrops & croci & they've got titchy bulbs. But no, these are all just as big as the tulip bulbs. I wonder if this means loads of flowers? Again, only time will tell...

Dwarf daffs from huge bulbs...

Tulips

We already have some tulips, but let's face it they're great so there's always room for some more.



So we have 3 x Queen Of The Night, 3 x Synaeda Orange & 10 x Shakespeare.

I thought I'd bought some white ones... I certainly spent a lot of time umming & ahhing over some, but if I remember correctly we already have 2 varieties in the garden - some traditional shaped ones, like white versions of the Queen Of The Night, plus some long thin ones, like the Synaeda.

Looking at this now though, I have no idea what possessed me to buy all those Shakespeares. What on earth was I planning to do with so many early, orange tulips? Tra la, I'm sure they'll be pretty enough.

Alliums

3 x Purple Sensation & 3 x Christophii. Again, they're in the same bag so I now don't know which is which.

I've had a Christophii before & it was amazing, but it only lasted 1 year. Bit of a shame. Is that cos they're bred to be sterile? Or did I plant it too shallow, as I've heard bulbs have to be planted really deep to last several Springs. I'll have to do some more research.

Let's pot them up

Gathering kit

Compost - check
Pots - check
Bulbs - check, check, check!

I bought some new pots earlier year. They were meant for other things, but I'm commandeering them for this now. I'll buy some more later. I've also got a few other large pots kicking about so out they come too.

I noticed the other week that the local farmshop does bags of peat-free compost - ace! The last time I went looking for peat-free multi-purpose at the local garden centre, it took ages. There were loads of different compost types & manufacturers, but I had to check each bag carefully to ensure peat-freeness. Even the Jamie Oliver brand growbags (Jamie Oliver?!) had peat in their mix. As gardening still accounts for the vast majority of peat use, & peat bog degredation is still an issue, I like to use peat-free if possible. Besides, my methods are so random that peatiness is unlikely to make much of a difference to my success rate.

Drainage

The pots all have drainage holes in the bottom, but if you just bang compost straight in the plant can end up waterlogged - the mass of roots & soil just won't drain efficiently. So to improve the drainage, first into the pot is some masonry.

Crocks for drainage

Crocks is a general term for any bit of broken pot or stone you have kicking about. Any stones I find when I'm digging the beds go into my crock pot. Broken vases, roof tile shards & bits of brick end up in there too.

Covering the crocks with gravel

The handful of crocks is covered with some pea gravel from the area in front of the house. This drives hubby mental as the gravel level slowly drops over time. But it's no biggie as we can always top it up if need be with another dumpy bag of shingle. Plus it means that I don't have to have a special store of gravel cluttering up the place just for this kind of job. This is multitasking gravel.

Again, the gravel improves the drainage by stopping the compost & roots getting all the way to the bottom of the pot.

You might think I'm labouring the drainage point here, but bulbs are prone to rotting if they get too wet. I've even seen advice about planting them on a layer of sand just to ensure they don't get soggy bottoms. I'll save the sand for when they go out into the beds, but for now the crocks & gravel combo should be fine.

Planting & positioning

Firm down a shallow layer of compost over the gravel & it's time to pop the bulbs in.

Cover the drainage with a layer of compost

Thankfully with most bulbs it's really easy to tell which is the right way up. Todays are nicely teardropped shaped, so it's pointy bit up to the sky, & sit them on their rooty flat bottoms, pressing down a little into the compost.

I've kept the bulbs away from the edge of the pot as I think I've heard they can be prone to frost damage, so they need to be kept snug in a compost blanket.

6 tulips with an allium in the middle

Now, when I planted these I was still labouring under the misapprehension that the Shakespeares flowered white, so in this pot we've got them alternating around the outside with the 3 Synaeda, & then a mystery Allium in the middle. So orange with orange & a bit of purple. But no worries - it just means I'll have an extended orange tulip season. Yay!

Other pot combos today include:

• 3 Queens, 3 Shakespeare & an Allium, which will be a heady orange & purple mix.
• 4 Shakespeare & an Allium, again, rocking opposite ends of the colour wheel.
• 3 Alliums, in the tallest, thinnest pot.... might be a bit prone to blowing over in the wind when in bloom that one...
• 3 Tête/Minnow.
• 2 Tête/Minnow but these were actually single bulbs at that Siamese twin stage, just ready to separate, so 4 bulbs for the price of 2 really. Bonus!
• 3 Silver Chimes. These guys were in their own bag so this should be a single colour pot.
• I put the remaining Chimes out at the end of the Alpine bed.

I'm actually quite excited about those orange & purple combos now. Admittedly I was expecting white in there, which would've been a bit classier, but this mix-up should yield striking results :)

Topping off

Once the bulbs were all in position, I carefully added the rest of the compost, gently around the bulbs first to keep them in position, & then on top. I press the compost down & top it up again a few times until there's about an inch left to the top of the pot.

Finally I topped them off with some more of the gravel.

Topping off with gravel & labelling up

The gravel is great at suppressing weeds & retaining moisture. Plus it gives a nice colour contrast against the plants, showing them off they nicely.

Finally the labels. I've been crap with labels in the past, but I'm trying to be more diligent cos I keep losing things. This time, some of the labels will need modifying later when I unravel the Tête/Minnow & Allium mix-ups.

A little bit of water over the top & we're done. I've put some pots the yard & some in the garden by the bench under the window. If they don't get clobbered when the snow falls off the roof this Winter, it should be a very bonny Spring.

Hedge scalping 2: Send for reinforcements!

Back in September, I wrote about tackling the annual hedge trimathon. In part 1, I was steeling myself for the job ahead. Now in part 2, I'll take you though this year's change of strategy.

Every year I gripe about trimming the hedge cos it's such a chew on. But this year I decided it was time to garden smarter: I wheeled out the big guns.

Toys!

There are a lot of hedge trimmers on the market, but I have some key needs that quickly narrow the field:

1. Must be electric

Yeah, I've read it all about you get more oomph from petrol & electric trimmers are wimps. But we already have a petrol power tool in our arsenal, a strimmer, & I just can't start the fucker. All that priming, choke tickling, chord ripping nonsense, in this day & age?! Motorbikes have had starter motors for over 50 years ffs. No excuse for it. Get your act together, 2 stroke engineers!!!!

& relax...

moving on...

2. Must chop large sticks

The laurel is such a beast that strong green new growth can already be over 10mm diameter by mid summer. What a monster.

So I needed something with big sharp teeth AND the power to use them.

Final decision hung on power delivery...

3. Batteries v cable?

I was very tempted by batteries - Monty Don has extolled the virtues of the rechargeable batteries route, & I can see that having no trailing cable is handy when your garden covers half of Hampshire.

But on the flipside, I had read a number of reviews saying that whilst the batteries do fine in year 1, performance seriously drops of in years 2 & 3. New batteries every year or so? Doesn't sound very eco to me.

So, as our garden is small enough for every extremity to be in easy reach of a cable, cable it is. I'm pretty sure I can manage not to chop through it or trip over it. Pretty sure...

And the winner is...

Ladies & Gentleman, may I present to you, the Bosch AHS 7000 Pro-T.

Nope, no idea what AHS nor T stand for. Probably nowt...

Awww yeah. Check out that bad boy :)

5 stars on Amazon, plus loads of reviews confirming it's ability to mangle even the toughest customers. Some concerns about weight, but some others saying it's not really a bother...

A swift visit to B&Q & it's mine, all MINE!

Just imagine... I could be this happy when trimming the hedge...

Is that a light breeze or did the hedge just tremble? Mwhahahaha!