The All Seasons Gardener

Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:16:00 +0000

New garden beds – the big idea!

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:12:00 +0000

Karen put a really big idea in my head, and I’m still working it out, but here’s the broad outline. I have a stepped bed in full sun, that needs to be completely replanted (it did have salads etc in it) and a trough along the side of my shed (east facing) that is also due for a revamp. I asked for suggestions and one was to grow herbs and medicinal plants… well I’ve decided to grow not culinary herbs but those used in creating cosmetics and toiletries. The ones that like full sun (verbena, woad etc) can go in the stepped bed, while the shade lovers (yarrow, woodruff, angelica can sit in the wooden trough. And then I can have the fun of trying to make some toiletries from the plants …

At present I’m simply trying to make a list of plants suitable for each location. The trough is only eighteen inches wide, and has a window three and a half feet above it, so I can’t plant anything too tall or spreading in it, as we definitely want as much light as possible to enter the shed! The step beds are easier, because they are each nearly a yard wide and nearly three yards long so there’s plenty of scope for larger and more structural plants to feature there.

If anybody’s got any suggestions, I am very keen to hear them!

Garden photo – March

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:55:00 +0000

So here’s my picture for March – as you can see we’ve done some heavy pruning of the shrubs near the house, the two beds just off the paving are empty (see previous posts for general outline of planting scheme - I'll be posting next week on the plants that I’m actually planning to grow there) and the lawn has been heavily sanded and rolled by Himself, in preparation for spring growth. Look at the shadow that monstrous palm tree throws across our grass!

Our lawn has never been particularly good and I’m wondering about investing in having it re-turfed this year – it’s only a tiny surface area but it would be nice if it was emerald green and velvet-soft, instead of a bit tufty and inclined to brown at the first sign of drought …

Our borders really need mulching too, which is going to cost a fair bit in both money and time, but the soil looks starved of nutrients and we haven’t mulched some areas of the borders for three years, so it’s definitely long past the time we enriched our growing medium.

I’m happy with the groundwork we’re doing this spring – but worried that I’m setting myself up for a very labour intensive summer of planting and so on!

Thoughts and promises

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:31:00 +0000

At last the crocus have made it into bloom! Isn’t it lovely to see the spring arriving at last - the promise of the year being fulfilled when it seemed almost too late. I seem to be spending a lot of time just standing and staring at things, until I get too chilly and have to shuffle my feet to get warm again.

And Karen at An Artist's Garden has put a thought into my head – my two empty beds could be used for growing unusual herbs and plants used traditionally to make cosmetics, couldn’t they? Wouldn’t that be fun: woad and verbena and marshmallow and calendula and … other things that I can’t think of on the spur of the moment but would probably adore being able to grow. And then I could use the plants to make cosmetics and toiletries, couldn’t I?

Okay, I’m not sure who I’m kidding here – the chances of me making cosmetics out of anything are about as remote as me going to the moon, but growing the plants is definitely within my scope (or should that be ambit, given the astronomical metaphor?) and could provide a nice focus for the area.

I shall go and do some research – as soon as I’ve finished staring at the crocus.

What would you do with this garden eyesore?

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:07:00 +0000

It’s a sort of a bed – it used to contain salad vegetables and herbs in the days before second dog arrived. Then we discovered that we would have to fence and net it just to stop him jumping in and eating everything (he’s particularly fond of chewing down my rocket plants, also carrots which he digs up with great efficiency) so we did fence and net it and grew some vegetables in it, but this year he actually jumped into the middle of the lettuces, smashing through the netting roof entirely. He is a bit of a liability, but we love him.

Now we have an allotment, we don’t need to grow much at home any more, so we have these two beds pretty well free – they have a southern aspect and are free draining. The fence could stay or go: I don’t have strong feelings about it. I also don’t have any inspiration right now, so I thought I’d throw it open for debate – anybody got a brilliant idea for me? Bear in mind that the dog is still with us, and still tends to get into the flowerbeds and romp around, particularly if birds land on the plants so anything very fragile is likely to end up being destroyed by his antics …

And this will have to count as my February garden photo, both late and not of the entire garden! It's because most of the pond plants and equipment are currently sitting on the lawn while we clean it, so a photo of the whole garden would be unsightly beyond belief.

February’s end in the garden

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:44:00 +0000

I suppose I should be grateful that it’s not snow – but there has hardly been a good working day in the garden the whole of this month and I really hope there’s not going to be a repetition of this horrible month in March.

We’ve finished clearing the front garden, but there’s been no chance to plant anything because the soil has been frozen or waterlogged. As for the back garden, I’ve been unable to do anything at all because of the weather. I have a tarpaulin covered in prunings and weeds in the middle of the lawn, a half-hearted new border design and a pond that needs a thorough clean-out.

What I need is a good kick in the pants to get me moving. Or some decent weather to inspire me to work!

Greenhouse planting in February

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:13:00 +0000

Ten beef tomato seedlings have come up in the heated propagator, five sweet peas have split their skins but not put up shoots yet, four nasturtiums are well on their way, the marigold seeds are stirring because the soil is moving and even the early Nantes carrots that I’ve sown in a large deep container in the greenhouse look as if something is happening as the soil surface is minutely disturbed this morning.

I find this time of year almost unbearably exciting. Everything seems willing to come up at once, and it’s well nigh impossible to keep track of what’s happening. My seed potatoes are sprouting nicely and everywhere except my garden the crocus and snowdrops are blossoming nicely.

I have some snowdrops, but no crocus, because of my ongoing inability to win the battle with the squirrels. Even though I have two small dogs, the squirrels are contemptuous of their barking and simply wait until dark to come and dig up the crocus bulbs – they don’t like the snowdrop bulbs nearly as much. My neighbour (she of the fake allium) has a very large black and white cat which seems to inspire much more fear in the fat-tailed rats, and as a result her garden has lovely clumps of violet and gold crocus. Yes, I’m envious. Still, I have my carrots to look forward too, and the squirrels can’t get to them!

Winter’s end garden beauty

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:27:00 +0000

Sometimes it’s not the new growth in a winter garden that creates the most loveliness but that which is fading and dying and vanishing away.

I’m really not a fan of hydrangeas – probably because I grew up on the Isle of Wight where they, along with rhododendrons – were everywhere, in massive and unmanageable profusion as a result of their enthusiastic planting by the Victorian’s, who tended to summer on the island and to like their big shrubs and fern gardens and grottoes. Familiarity seems to have bred contempt in me!

However, this one hydrangea does survive in my border, just so that it can produce this incredible display in January and February – I cut it back in March as I’m not at all fussed about getting a good early display of flowers, what I like this the fragile intricacy of its winter disintegration.

And the **** pond pump has packed in again this morning! It seems that the gurge is fine, but we need a new connector … so I’m ringing the distributor and asking them to send one – recorded delivery this time!

February garden tasks

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:18:00 +0000

Apart from wandering down the garden every morning and delighting in the sound of our pond pump merrily causing water to trickle from the cascade into the pond, thus giving our fish oxygen to breathe.

We have a couple of trees and shrubs to be planted out – two lovely roses, for example, but as there’s currently a frost and the weather forecast is talking about frost for as far ahead as can be seen, they remain sitting in the shelter of the shed until the weather breaks. I’m also waiting for a frost free few days to prune some of our fruit trees that didn’t get done at the end of last year.

None of our container plants have needed watering yet, but if the sun continues to shine on the sub-zero ground, I’m going to have a dilemma – either water sparingly and hope the water doesn’t freeze the roots, or not water and hope the plants don’t get too desiccated.

And we’ve managed not to spread salt this year – although we did think about it a couple of times in January we managed to clear our paths instead of salting them, which makes me happy because I can see some salt damage on our neighbour’s lawn already (and that’s the neighbour without the fake allium, not the neighbour with, just in case you were wondering).

My peas and sweet peas are sown in the greenhouse – nothing showing yet but I can see the soil is stirring. The first beef tomato seedlings have appeared in the indoor propagator, which is great as we didn’t get any germination from last year’s saved seed and have gone back to packet seed this year. And the first hellebores are starting to glow in the borders – one of the nicest sights of the year, for me.

How to maintain a pond

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:27:00 +0000

I should call this how not to maintain a pond, because we have failed horribly in pond maintenance in the past month. It began with the ten days of very cold weather, when our pump, like lots of pond pumps, froze solid. It did begin to work again, but at some point after the ground thawed, it stopped working again and we failed to notice.

In our defence, the pond is a long way from the house and so we don’t hear the pump unless we happen to wander down there, which we didn’t. And then the weather got rather warm, rather quickly and we did notice that the pump wasn’t working and the water wasn’t circulating, so we pulled the pump out and had a look. A thing, let’s call it a gurge, as I have no idea what its proper name is, had broken. We needed a new one.

No problem, I thought, we got the last gurge from a little pond shop down the road. But the little pond shop no longer exists, and the nearest similar shop is a huge national chain with about seventy different kinds of fish, and lots of fish-tank accessories, but no gurges. So we rang the manufacturer and they agreed to send us a gurge.

Fast forward a week. No gurge. The pond is starting to look cloudy, and no amount of nipping out and stirring it with a canoe paddle seems to help. I ring the manufacturer again and they say the gurge must have got lost in the post. So they sent another.

On Sunday we spent a couple of cold, stinking hours fitting the new gurge to the pump. But the time it took to get the thing means that the pond is now quite stagnant, which in turn means that we’ll probably have to do some remedial work to get the eco-system functioning perfectly again as the plants start to grow again in the spring.

Lesson learned – from now on I shall go and check that I can hear the pump every day!

Fooled by a neighbour’s garden

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:51:00 +0000

I was wandering around my own plot, with its mixture of rain flattened shrubs and snow blackened grasses when I saw something in my neighbour’s garden that piqued my interest.

It looked like an allium. But it couldn’t be, could it? My own mahonia was about the only thing that had any colour or form in my garden, and two snowdrops, not even properly open yet, that I was watching with hawk-eyes to make sure the dogs didn’t trample them. An allium? Were there winter alliums? My neighbour does have a particularly good alpine bed, which I envy immensely. If anybody could grow it, she could.

Well no, when I managed to get close enough to find out, it wasn’t or at least not a living one – it's made of printed fabric carefully glued to a plastic stem - but for the few minutes I thought that it really was a flower, it cheered me up no end!

Winter Flowering Shrubs

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:15:00 +0000

Our wintersweet has just come into flower.

If you don’t know the plant, proper name Chimonanthus praecox (praecox meaning winter flowering, apparently) then you’re missing a treat – it has very strange flowers – outer petals of a yellow very much like that of winter jasmine, and inner ones with a maroon flecking or streaking to them. This is not their key feature, however. That is the scent, which is amazingly sweet and spicy (hence the common name of the plant) and very attractive to winter birds, which often perch in the branches.

I was a little worried about how the plant would cope with the heavy snow and frost, but it seems to have shaken off the bad weather quite comfortably. It did take five years to flower, which is about average, apparently, with the outer limit being seven years and the best you can hope for being three or four years and that might explain why it’s not such a popular garden plant as I think it deserves to be. Perhaps quick-fix gardeners can’t contemplate waiting seven years for something to settle in?

Anyway, it’s an easy thing to grow, even if it appears to be doing nothing much for all those years – it’s frost resistant, and will thrive in any reasonable, well-drained soil, even over chalk, which can’t be said of everything! It does its best in a sunny and sheltered spot and will flower earlier and better if you can offer it a spot against a south facing wall.

Front Garden Findings

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:09:00 +0000

We have entirely filled one skip and cleared less than one half of the front garden. I cannot express how shocked I am by this – it’s like a temperate rainforest moved in while my back was turned!

So we’re going to need another skip – at least. And the process of clearing away all the rampant ivy, winter jasmine, summer jasmine, holly seedlings (they are everywhere and extremely painful if you happen to grasp one without realising it’s in the middle of a clump of ivy) and associated detritus, I have found a rather nice skimmia that I thought had died …

Yes, I’m aware how terrible a gardener that makes me appear – but the ivy has crept over a low wall and is, in places, clumped about a foot high – and the little skimmia is lurking under what was a canopy of ivy. Now it’s been cleared around and trimmed back a bit, it gives a nice little focal point.

I wonder what else is hidden from present view in the un-tackled half of the wilderness?

Gardens in winter: rain, frost, snow and fog!

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:23:00 +0000

I can’t remember the last time I had the chance to spend some comfortable hours in the garden. As soon as the snow melted we had heavy rain, and we couldn’t set foot on the lawn for fear of destroying its already fragile root structure. Walking round the paths and looking at everything drooping from its ten day snow-cover was depressing, but at least we could see plants again, even if they were dripping with rain!

And today, my first chance to get out there without it bucketing down, we had fog!

No pictures of my garden I’m afraid because (a) the fog was too thick and (b) the plants look too ragged and sad to show you, but I was pondering, as one does when one can’t work in one’s own green space, how much better designed Japanese and Chinese gardens are than British ones for fog. Perhaps they work with what they get – certainly the Chinese gardens have almost no lawn, strong plant shapes that contrast with each other, like twisted trees and vertical bamboos and lots of hard landscaping, both formal and informal in which gloriously bright tile and wood is used to provide accents. My own garden today is a thousand shades of grey, which made my memories of Beijing even more warm and happy …

Selling your house? Start with your garden!

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:18:00 +0000

I’ve been talking to a friend this week who is an estate agent (realtor in the USA) and he commented that my garden would sell my house quicker than anything else that I could do – not that I want to sell my house, but he was making the point that in this time of recession and stalling house prices, people often don’t appreciate how a garden affects the speed (and price) of a house sale.

This intrigued me, so I asked him what I was doing right (and wrong) on a purely theoretical basis.

Apparently 30% of buyers decide if they want a house based on the front garden and path leading to the front door! This means that having flowers in the front garden, or neatly trimmed hedges and shrubs, really makes an impression and because this area always features in the advertisements, ensuring that you have given the house a welcoming appearance can determine if people even choose to view it. He said that people should buy some tubs or hanging baskets and fill them with flowers to brighten up a dull area, clean the path and remove any weeds or litter and ensure that the frontage looks welcoming and cared for.

In rear gardens, grassed areas can be make or break – at a minimum grass should be cut and edges neatly trimmed, because a tatty lawn implies other more hidden problems in the house in general. Then you need to deadhead all your flowers and make sure that trees and shrubs are kept in reasonable bounds, no twelve foot rambling roses, for example.

Decking must look perfect or you’ll lose money on the purchase price for repairs – fortunately we have paving, not decking, but he hinted it could do with a good power wash if I were in a selling mood. Ponds need to be clean and tidy, and sheds also. Finally, garages are important – apparently nobody puts a car in the garage anymore, in stead they use it for storage or as a workshop, so clearing the floorspace is important and hanging some baskets or putting some trellis on the garage wall for a climbing plant really adds to the appearance of the area.

I had no idea that the garden was so important to the value of my property! It makes no difference, of course, except to the way I think, but I shall look at my garden with a new eye from now on.

Still snow – garden a no-go area

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:34:00 +0000

It’s getting really depressing now – how do people who live in snowy zones cope with weeks or months of blanket whiteness? My Resolution #3 is a non-starter still, there's nothing to enjoy except the view from the window!

I’m also getting a little concerned about what will happen when the thaw finally arrives – I know that shrubs and fruit trees are very vulnerable to dying off through sitting in waterlogged soil in cold weather. This is because they don’t put out new roots nearly as fast as other plants and so can’t cope well with what is essentially an underwater experience.

So, to be on the safe side, I’m taking a few cuttings as soon as the weather warms up because I fear that plants that may seem to make a good recovering will still die off in the summer as a result of root damage. And as soon as the plants are no longer frozen, but before the spring starts, I shall probably prune back a lot of my ornamental perennials and shrubs really hard, so they aren’t supporting a lot of new leafy growth on starved and loosened roots which can lead to root rock. That’s going to mean that the garden looks pretty dire for a while, but better that than losing established plants.

And because snow, like rain, washes away nutrients, I shall be getting out there as soon as it’s warm and dry enough, to mulch the roots of all my shrubs to try and give back some of the goodness the winter has stolen.

This is what the garden looks like today … sad or what?

January garden picture

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:38:00 +0000

Well there’s not an awful lot to see in this, is there? Snow, snow and more snow. But at least I'm keeping my garden resolution #1 and sharing it with you.

What am I learning from this picture? The enormous palm tree, which we took as a two foot sapling from my parents’ garden in Torquay really needs to be cut down and given a chance to re-shoot from a more manageable height, as it’s totally overshadowing the pond and is probably quite shallow rooted, so I’m worried that strong winds could bring it down.

The lawn, so neatly blanketed in snow, is actually quite a mess under its white covering, and I’m wondering about re-turfing it, as it’s such a small area and we could have a lovely emerald carpet if we started again with really good quality turf.

At the bottom of the garden, next to the greenhouse is the pond, believe it or not! It’s a lovely mature eco-system now, but perhaps I need to get in there and thin out some of the surrounding growth to give it a chance to reveal its watery beauties more clearly to the eye.

New Year’s Resolutions for the garden

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:42:00 +0000

It’s that time of year when we resolve to improve our lives and our selves, but this year I’m making some garden resolutions too.

Resolution One is to photograph the garden from the upper story of the house every month, like this one taken in July – far too often I tend to take only close-up photos and then when I go to buy new plants I forget what’s on either side of the spot I’m planning to fill. It will also make a good monthly reference of what’s in flower and where more work is needed to improve the overall performance of the garden.

Resolution Two is to take some kind of workshop or class in gardening. I’ve never taken a single class, everything I do comes from watching my parents and grandparents gardening, from reading books or TV programmes. I think it would be wonderful to have some real expertise under my belt!

Resolution Three is actually going to be the most difficult – it’s to enjoy my garden as much as I work in it, so that I eat outside more often, or just wander around the garden enjoying it, rather than stopping to prune plants or remove weeds and get stuck in the details of by green space rather than remembering the glorious overview – in other words, I resolve to be a garden user, rather than just a gardener!

Have you made any garden resolutions?

More snow and more garden winter plants

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:02:00 +0000

This is such a rare occurrence in my part of the world that I’m going to have to beg you to excuse me while I share another picture of snow. It was taken two days after the previous one and, astonishingly for South East England, it shows not just the same snowfall as the picture of winter jasmine, but a subsequent light snow shower that also settled!

I was a little concerned about many local trees and shrubs as a lot of people here have never ‘winterised’ their plants as we just don’t get heavy laying snow, so I can see already that some of the more tender plants in neighbouring gardens have suffered badly, and the weight of the snow with quite a lot of strong winds, tending to easterly gales, has snapped a few overly long branches on some shrubs, notably the hydrangeas that people hadn’t pruned back for winter and a neighbour has probably lost a pieris japonica that was elderly and had damage to its central stem – now the snow and ice damage appears to have split the main stem of the plant wide open.

But most trees have coped really well, possibly because any big trees that were going to fall did so over a decade ago when we had the ‘Great Storm’. And it’s been a revelation to see how some of our berrying trees actually look with snow on them – it really brings out their true beauty.

Gardens in Snow

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:32:00 +0000

It’s rare for snow to fall in Sussex, UK, and even rarer for it to settle, especially on the twinned city of Brighton and Hove, but this week has been that rarity and it’s fascinating to see how snow changes the shape and contours of a garden – no doubt Scandinavian and North American readers are wondering what all the fuss is about, as they spend several weeks or even months looking at snowy vistas every year, but me this is a quite unusual perspective.

One flower that literally stood out was the winter jasmine. I’ve raved about it before, and will do again, but this was the first year that I actually got to see the flowers against a blanket of snow: in previous years, although snow has fallen, it’s never stayed around for more than a couple of hours, so observing how the blossoms coped with sub-zero temperatures and then with the thaw, was very instructive. In fact the flowers never browned at all, which surprised me, as I’d thought that on the day the snow melted they might develop brown edges. And the plant coped well with the weight of snow, being trained up a trellis and (relatively) well-pruned. I did notice some local winter jasmine that were growing over low walls that did seem to be getting a little pressed down under the snow, but today they all look fine again.

So winter jasmine is an excellent performer in snow, and I’m glad to have finally had the chance to find this out!

December has little to offer florally

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:37:00 +0000

I’ve been looking around other people’s blogs and am miserably happy to confirm that my bloomless garden is not a singular event – everybody is struggling to find anything to smile at, plantwise, this December. The mahonia is a winter stalwart, but even it is a little rain-sloshed this year.

The virburnam is perhaps my favourite winter flower, gently fragranced and subtly coloured in snow-white with faint blushes of the lightest possible pink, it gleams from the bottom of the garden like a kind reminder that the spring will soon arrive. And alongside my holly bush, which has plenty of red berries this year, it offers a winter colour contrast that is more than welcome in these long dark days.

December projects

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:18:00 +0000

This time last year I was blithering on about this: ‘At this time of year you sometimes have to search pretty hard to find things to admire in the garden. Of course, the canny gardener will have planted for that catch-all phrase ‘year round interest’ but sometimes objects of interest can be far and few between.’

Well well well. You’d definitely have to look far to find something of interest in my front garden this December – unless skips interest you, that is. Because we are having a transformation.

Our 1930s frontage has always been a bit of a problem – part wildlife garden, part burglar deterrent, generally something of a mess. We’re taking out almost everything (keeping the crab-apple tree and the palm tree, which is evidence of the fact that we are neither ruthless enough, nor imbued with the spirit of landscape gardening) and trying to start again with a lower maintenance and more attractive, but still wild-life supporting front garden. Wish us luck!

Christmas gifts for gardeners

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:58:00 +0000

Okay, the one thing I didn’t want for Christmas was something I just got: a Hippeastrum in a pot!

To be fair, there probably are a lot of other things I didn’t want, but once I saw this arrive, on the arm of a somewhat unintelligent relative, it moved to the top of the list. Why do people buy gardeners house-plants? Not only is my house entirely free of indoor plants, so that I can spend as much time outdoors as possible, I have two three-month-old kittens on the premises: can you imagine how long this elegantly top-heavy bulb is going to last under their less than tender attentions?

But once you’ve got it, you’ve got it, so I shall have to somehow cope with it. I’m going to try and keep it kitten-safe over Christmas and then follow the Royal Horticultural Society’s advice which is basically:

When flowering is over to grow the bulb on applying a balanced liquid fertiliser weekly and putting the pot in the greenhouse during the summer months, but protecting it from strong sunshine. It needs to be watered regularly, apparently.

Then in late September, you withhold watering and let the plant gradually dry out. in a cool place, such as a greenhouse or garage (light is not necessary), for one to two months before starting them back into growth by bringing them indoors into the light and resuming watering and feeding. And then I shall give the damn thing, lovely as it is, to somebody else for Christmas!

Hippeastrum courtesy of Tatters at Flickr (mine isn't this far advanced, so not worth photographing!)

December garden tasks

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:14:00 +0000

Even though I spoke too soon in my last post, and it’s rained steadily just about ever since, I have a lot to do this month:

December is probably the optimum time to move evergreens and large shrubs that have outgrown their current position – I’ve got a hydrangea that needs relocating, and because I’m replanting it elsewhere, rather than getting rid of it, I have to find a way to get it out of the ground with as big a root-ball as possible, transplant it, and then cut it back and stake it on both sides so that it doesn’t develop root rock. The main problem is going to be digging a big enough hole in the new location without having it turn into a mini pond – there’s so much standing water in the garden that I’m sure it will all drain into the hole and rot the roots, even with grit in the base to offer drainage.

In the greenhouse there’s not so much to do, just watering plants sparingly to ensure they don’t become waterlogged and thus prone to rotting. I have half a dozen potted up bowls of bulbs to move into the cold greenhouse to encourage them to be in flower by Christmas, as I shall be giving them as gifts.

Then there’s my least favourite tasks – deciduous leaves offer shelter to slugs and snails, so they need to be lifted and bagged. As well as providing a haven for such nasty beasties, they can harbour rot and fungus and allow it to survive the winter by insulating it around the base of shrubs, trees and wooden structures.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/ / CC BY 2.0

End of month garden view

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:52:00 +0000

Much as it pains me, I have to say that November has probably been my worst gardening month for years. I’m trying to remember a day it didn’t rain, and the only one that comes to mind was the day we had a severe weather warning for gales – we knew that, because at 3am we heard a neighbour’s shed tiles hitting the ground, and it carried on until late evening, by which time all my nerines were prone on the ground, where they have remained because it hardly seemed worth staking them up when the rain just knocked them down again.

So here’s my totally dispiriting view of this month’s garden. On Saturday afternoon I brushed off this path and happened to leave the empty bucket outside. By Monday morning the path was covered in leaves again and the bucket, as you can see, has captured a healthy amount of rainwater – as if we needed to store any!

And we haven’t had a single frost so far, not even an air frost, so there are baby snails happily denuding the few leaves that remain in the garden, and woodlice (where I grew up we called them chickie pigs) apparently beginning their task of world domination by taking over every crack and crevice in the walls and paths.

But half an hour ago I saw a tiny sign of hope and while the photo isn’t very good, I hope it speaks of better things to come … where there’s a rainbow, surely there’s a little bit of sun ahead?