International jet set plants

Japan jolly holiday pix, part 1

Oh we do like a bit of that Nihon goodness in this house. This Christmas was our 3rd trip to Japan, so over the next few posts I'm going to show you some of the gardening stuff we saw this time around. I'll look at the local vegetation & hard landscaping in the next couple of posts. Right now, let's set the scene & then take a look at some tropical regulars.

Where in the world?

As you may or may not know, Japan is made up of over 6800 islands. The archipelago stretches over a couple of thousand miles (give or take a couple of ongoing territory disputes), starting up by Russia, through Honshu where Tokyo lives, & running on down the Pacific Ring of Fire to just clip the top of the tropics.

This year we went to the Yaeyama Islands, a group at the South Western end of the chain, due East of Taiwan. We visited 4 jimas on this trip: Ishigaki-jima, Taketomi-jima, Iriomote-jima & Yubu-jima.

Climate

So, just North of the tropics means no frost & good positive temperatures all year round. But it was most definitely Winter while we were there, with the weather changeable & regularly stormy. But when the sun came out, it was glorious - shorts, sandals & sunglasses.

The international tropical jetset

We've been fortunate enough to have been on several sunny trips abroad, & I'm starting to notice that there are some plants that seem to follow us around on our holidays. Are they stalking us?

Bougainvillea

I think we've seen this plant on just about every trip we've had to a frost-free destination. 1st time was Tenerife, where its dark green leaves & its lairy magenta or orange flowers looked great against the white buildings.

For some reason I didn't expect to see it in Japan, but here it is:

Bougainvillea, pushing my camera to the limit

(Sorry about the photo quality - my camera really gets its pixels in a twist with vibrant pinks & reds)

The photo above was taken in the garden of the Guesthouse Iriwa on Ishigaki, and we saw this pink variety in gardens everywhere on the trip. Then, on Yubu-jima, there was a greenhouse packed with other colours too.

The Yubu-jima bougainvillea collection

The big blousey bits aren't petals, but pseudo-flowers made by specialist leaves called bracts. The true flower is the teeny white one, right in the middle.

Hibiscus

I tend to think of Hawaii when I see this flower. It's so pretty that it's no surprise this luau lovely has conquered the tropical world:

Hibiscus, in red, the hairclip favourite

We're all used to seeing the flower in isolation, as a motif on a sarong or shirt, or behind the ear of a beach babe, but the parent plant of this beautiful bloom is a shrub. On our trips we've seen it regularly used as the most glamorous of hedging.

The plant seems almost insanely willing to flower too - in Madeira, we saw a freshly planted hibiscus hedge that consisted of sticks barely 2 inches out of the ground, & one of these bare twigs already had a whacking great flower hanging off it.

It comes in loads of colours, some of which we saw in Japan:

Hibiscus, in a delicate pale pink

Hibiscus, in a much less delicate PIIIIIIINK!

Bamboo

The bamboo craze didn't only hit the UK, it would seem. The bigger varieties have been planted with enthusiasm across the tropics, & you can see why: statuesque, elegant, shade-giving, windbreak, plus handy construction material.

Best use I've seen was in the grounds of the hotel at Chichen Itza in Mexico - fabulous tall clumps of green stemmed giant bamboo were planted throughout the hotel's extensive gardens. Admittedly, they used a chainsaw to prune them, but at least they were never short of a fence post.

The variety below is from a little closer to bamboo's natural home, as the photo is from the grounds of another hotel, Painu Maya, where we stayed on Iriomote:

Big bamboo

Palms

Hot weather = palms: date, coconut, banana, the lot. No promo tropical beach shot is complete without a palm or too, preferably with a hammock strung between them.

Palm are so happy in warmer climes, they end up as the municipal default:

"We've got a long road with no shade... Best line it with palms, then..."

You know you're on holiday when you can see palms :)

Palm grove

So that's some of the familiar faces. In the next post or two, I'll look at some stuff that was new to me this time around.

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!

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!