Post Thunderstorm Potter

Really cool this morning and a bit of a breeze so decided not to oil the two benches.  Both are in serious need of some tlc and have been much neglected but its a small job that can wait for another day.  Instead decided to clean out the mini greenhouse.  Sowed some hosta seed and Michaelmass Daisies (for autumn colour and late bee food next year).  The garden is looking lovely and I think that keeping the to-do list small makes my largish space that more manageable and enjoyable.

Yup - Barleywood Blue.  Very
Alan Titchmarsh 1990s! 

So I had time for the silliest project!  Have a small birdtable that was looking the worst for wear so got a small test-pot of woodstain from Homebase to see how far it would go.  £1.50 did this! Looks pretty full on in close up by actually draws the eye nicely here:
 

Last job was sorting out the bird feeders.  Attracting as much wildlife as possible to the garden has been a central aim - one of the excuses for having lots of flowers!  I looked askance at the prices of some birdfeeders and was trawling the internet last week when I came across this kit for a £2.99.Basically it converts any plastic pop bottle into a fully functional bird feeder.  It arrived a few days ago, popped two holes in a plastic bottle and inserted the plastic hanger, poured in the seed and screwed it into the feeder-base.  You can see how it works here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bshxyaHX9k4 , and the final result...

TaDah....!

Am proper chuffed with this and will be getting some more. If you can't find a stockist, I got mine off eBay.  If you just search Bottle Top Feeder Kit, you'll find one. Must remember to start collecting as much seed as possible to add to much diminished stock.  Have a finch flocker in the back garden - have to fill it up too regularly!

Next job will be the oiling of the benches.  Using unboiled linseed oil.  Will see if it does the trick!

Tales from the Wormery.

I bought (not made) my wormery from a firm called Wiggly Wigglers.  As the name suggests they specialise in wormeries (mine is their Worm Cafe) can make your own but worried I'd get it wrong.  The cafe was great in that it has a number boxes you can layer it up with + a tray at the bottom for the compost liquid that can be diluted and used for plant food.

.

The Worm Cafe can have a total of four
 layersin nested boxes.

and they stock everything you need to either start up or maintain.  Of course you

Well to cut a long story short it arrived, it worked, it was great and then it filled with rats.

I'd run another compost bin on bare ground about 10 yards away and early last year detected the tell tale signs of an infestation. Kitchen compost disappeared really quickly, lots of droppings and then sight of a tail wagging fiercely at the bottom of a run its owner had made as it scurried from the feastly top on my arrival.  I wasn't too bothered, to be honest.  I just stamped a little harder on the ground as I approached it so I wouldn't actually get to see one, but that's all I did.  It became more problematic in the (late) spring when I wanted to empty the content to use it.  I pondered what to do and how to approach what was obviously going to be a nest, preparing myself for an explosive migration when I knocked the bin over.  Having worked myself up to it for a few weeks, however, the issue went away on the arrival of my daughter from uni who innocently asked if there was anything she could help me with.  Job done.

As it happened the rats had already gorn.  I'd stopped feeding the bin knowing I was going to empty it so they'd left for pastures new.  The pasture they chose was the wormery.  I found this out on an attempt to dispose of some teabags.  I took off Gollum, the stone gargoyle that weighed the top down, and there

The Worm Cafe, featuring
Gollum the Gargoyle

beneath were THREE FAT REALLY REALLY REALLY FAT rats.  Lid down, scream, run - the whole thing.  Couldn't work out how they'd got there.  Gollum was certainly ugly enough to discourage even the most determined rat, but his main feature was his weight!  We thought they must have chewed their way in from underneath.

I usually manage to fill two of these
trugs from one emptying of the
wormery.

Well a few days ago it was time to empty it.  Worm compost is gold. Black gold, Texas Tea (Ok this is lifted straight from the old American sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies.  If you aren't familiar here's the theme tune).  I use it to bed in or mulch plants I can't afford to leave without a bit of TLC.  I lifted Gollum away and with the help of a 300ft pole (spot the hyperbole)  nudged the top off.  Nothing there.  Oh the drama!

So... emptied the compost as usual, drained off the liquid food

Liquid compost on
bottom tray. All free!

 and stored nicely in old plastic milk cartons.  This is really great stuff.  Smells like nothing alive on earth but great for liquid feeding both veg and flowers. Not a sign of any chewed plastic of any kind!  All we can surmise is that the rats nudged the top off a few inches with Gollum still in residence and did the deed under him whilst still on duty.

All is restored now.  I may need to dig up some more worms but other than that sorted for the next cycle.

Liquid feed ready for
action.

So late this year!

I'm sure I'm not the only one to be deterred from getting to grips with the garden - we're all behind!  Hard to do much with frozen soil and soul-curling easterlies.

However, this Sunday glimpsed a break in the cold!  Lovely day so got on with some much needed tidying up.

So much to do but keeping it focused and simple helps to control what would otherwise be an overwhelming amount of space.  This weekend was about secateurs.  Simply walking the garden, cutting out last year's stems, thinning out ramblers and pruning fruit bushes was a pleasant hour's work.  Quick finish with the yardbrush made paths look clearer and the garden immediately fresher.

Managing time is a theme running throughout all these posts.  To be both tasty - and hasty - this garden demands the strict organisation of  time.  The way I do it is to make sure that tasks are planned in advance, focusing on a specific area of the garden. 

Next weekend will see me tackling two casualties of the winter:  some wooden troughs rotted completely through require dismantling, geranium cuttings need to be taken from larger specimens overwintered on the kitchen sill and seeds started.  These latter will all be initially set inside lest we become further plagued by the weirding our global weather is currently undergoing.

...and six months later...

 

One of the key elements to a Permaculture garden is that it can actually save lots of time.  That I've had no time at all to write about the progress of the HastyTastyGarden is evidence enough that this was a much needed strategy.  I have managed to take some shots of the garden as it progressed so rather than bore you with long descriptions of the odd half-hours I've managed to grab during the last six months, I've posted them below with some captions.



Beans surrounded by calendula and nasturtiums were late to 'run' this year! 
Carrots were sown insitu and to be honest didn't take as well as I'd like. 
What I did get have been big, fat and sweet.

 Only planted half doz cabbages.  Snails a terrible problem
here but as you'll see later they developed well.  More
brassicas next year.  We love brussels sprouts.

Disappointed with the resolution of this picture as it doesn't show the
it off to the best effect.  Love the way nasturtiums leave room for growing veg
but then take over at the end of the season so garden still looks OK. Hardly any
weeds, by the way, despite the terrible summer weather. This is
because of the newspaper mulching.  Perennials had no chance.

A view of the front garden.  No veg but plenty for the birds and bees
to get stuck into.

...and even my little cactus, alone on the toilet window shelf found something in the
summer to celebrate!

Dig Not! Use newspaper mulches instead!

The Eyesore...

I have this small patch in the kitchen garden.  It used to have a pear tree in the middle of it.  All the pears were stripped just before they ripened by hoardes of squirrels - one day they were there, the next, gone!  In order to deter the squiggles, I ran up the thorniest rose I could find but alas to no avail.  I decided that the pear tree had to go as it took up such a lot of room for no crop.  This meant I also had to lose the rose, which had by now developed its own trunk and sinewy root system.  Not ever really wanting to tackle the ground it became uneven and unloved and sorting it all out seemed such a long job (given that soil levels varied by as much as a foot in some places) it has long remained a guiltmaking eyesore.

So this year, having decided that the garden had to be both hasty and tasty (with the emphasis on hasty) I decided on drastic measures which came in the form of a newspaper mulch.

The Permaculture Association in conjunction with the likes of Sepp Holzer have pioneered this method as a no-dig alternative to cultivation.  Digging often disturbs the soil structure (I'm so glad), and mulching has so many advantages as you'll see.

First of all I used a huge pile of newspapers for the first layer.  I opened each newspaper out and spread it at 4-sheet thickness, weighted down by a few stones.  Then I emptied the contents of my compost heap over the newspaper.  Now some of this wasn't fully rotted down but any organic matter will generally do, particularly if going for deep trench mulching.  I then covered all this in some bagged farmyard manure.  OK so the latter was bought - unavoidable - but fully organic and, better still, delivered to my door!  Job done.  Imagine!  I could have spent an hour digging, then raking, then composting and instead after half and hour:

Job Done!

• soil structure undisturbed
• newspapers recycled and able to rot down to give the soil extra carbon
• layer of domestic compost down together with a good thousand worms to nourish what was a very neglected patch of soil
• layer of organic farmyard manure to further add nourishment and fibre

This left me time to plan the layout of this new bit of kitchen garden.  Next blog post!

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For more information why not try:

The Permaculture Garden by Graham Bell

There's something in this Permaculture lark...

Part of the garden is terraced and the lower half has been for too long part of Gledhow Woods.  Last year I got some help in clearing some brambles and a blown-down laburnum but it has been so full of debris, I didn't have the wherewithal to get my head round what to do with the space.  The thought of burning the rubbish skittered menacingly across the frontal lobes.

Then I reminded myself of my Permaculture pretensions and realised that actually the laburnum, skeletons of old Christmas trees and sundry cast-offs would make good semi-longterm habitats for wildlife.  So almost on a whim I began packing the undersides of the vastly overgrown privets with said debris and what I thought was going to be a long job was done in less than 15 minutes! 

The spirit with me now, I contacted my apple expert to ask if she had any Bramley seedling whips.  I'd been trolling eBay to see if there were any cheap trees I could bid for but with postage anything decent was gone for over £30 and well out of my budget.  She suggested looking in our local Aldi.  Though they had some obscure climbing roses on offer for £2.50 (but mental note, nevertheless) and some equally unknown apple varieties - outside of Denmark -  (is Aldi Danish?) there were no Bramleys.   A free-food coupon trip to Tesco was fortuitous, however, as they had just the job for seven quid.  Duly planted.

I'm going for a Stella cherry tree next.  Have been researching rootstocks and have been persuaded out of the dwarf varieties - they wouldn't stand a chance against being hastytasty.  Far too much high maintenance.  Some dwarf rootstocks require weeding, for goodness sake!  So have decided to go for the full monty and keep it within manageable limits by judicious pruning.  If anyone knows of anyone with a Stella in Leeds they want rid of - let me know!

All of the above was just over half-an-hour's work and at the end of it began to plan the next job.  I do not know why there was a pile of soil on the path down to the garden shed.  Having realised that I won't be interrupted by the formal demands of waged work, and having come to a proper understanding of how important it is to create in one's mind specific job for the next time I'm out, three days later saw me digging (yes, there was a lot) it out.  What a difference a brushed path can make.  Even if you haven't done much, it does make it look as if someone knows what they're doing!

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Try these books to tempt you into Permaculture:

The Permaculture Garden by Graham Bell
The Permaculture List on the Radishwebstore

Cleaning up amidst Midwinter Fire

Took out my gardening journal started some yonks ago.  Its just a cloth-bound large notebook - the sort you don't want to write in, don't want to mark it (in which case, ALWAYS make a mark to get over the hump), but it has the remnants of a few rose pictures I stuck on the front and is definately a bit tatty and 'gardenish' now.   For those who lapse in their intentions, I share your pain.  I resurrected it from the back of a shelf a few years ago and it still serves as a record of hastytasty endeavour despite its gaps.

Last September I did a walk-around and made notes of all the things I should do in October.  I can't tell you why I'm going to do those things in February - can't blame a cold spell as there weren't many.  The list told me of all the perennials I need to move, all the spaces I need to clear.  Yesterday I started.  I find that ticking off a list gives enormous satisfaction so... the spirea I moved from a dark spot was properly pruned back hard.  Enough roots now to establish some really strong growth this year. Roses had their second pruning - not to an outward facing bud.  I found rose pruning to be a bit mythic and enjoyed reading about the trials on roses that were just sheared down.  Apparently the small twiglet growth at the top spawns many great blooms missed by the mighty secateur.  Never looked back.

Picture doesn't do justice to the
magnificent Midwinter Fire dogwood

Today was just a bit too frosty to move those perennials.  Sometime this week will do.  Instead attacked old twiggy growth in the small herb bed and took a great picture of my wonderful specimen dogwood.  You'll have seen it in a previous scribble, now it is glorious in the sun.  Just one plant.  Modestly magnificent.

I want to plant a Bramley Apple Seedling and have been wondering where to plumb it in.  I've read about dwarf root stocks for 'patio' plants but know the latter are really vulnerable.  You even had to watch for competition from weeds for goodness sake - and I'm not one for weeding.  So no, if I'm being host to this venerable cooker it will have to have room to spread.  Oh dear.  I'm minded of what Alan Titchmarsh once quoted from an old gardening book:  "No matter how small your garden, always make space for at least two acres of woodland".  There's never enough room is there?  Well, I think I've spotted the place.  It will take a bit of veg growing space away but it will give me even more incentive to develop the ornamental kitchen garden.

That's one of the wonders of this time of year.  Spring is 'in the post' and still time to walk round and make plans.  Even if they don't come into intended fruition, who cares!

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For more recommended gardening titles, visit www.radishweb.co.uk and browse the links.