It is only a few days since London received this winter’s final meteorological onslaught. I hope that will be the last time this season that we are ravaged by winds that rattle the polycarbonate panels of the growhouse, and rain so hard that I am led to wonder whether there will be any goodness left in the soil of my raised beds. But that’s the odd thing about the weather on these islands. It is so changeable. The day after the storm the sun came out, the wind dropped, the temperature soared and we all enjoyed a delightful spring day, more reminiscent of April than February.
I’m afraid I might be a bit of a fair weather gardener. I do tend to wait until it is sunny before venturing out to the rooftopvegplot for any prolonged work session. So last weekend I was out there from dawn to dusk catching up on a whole series of jobs that I’d been itching to undertake.
Compost
Apologies to those of you who don’t ‘get’ compost, but for me the large school trunk that is my compost heap is the centre of the garden. I spent a happy hour taking finished compost out of the compost bin. I’ve not been able to fill it for a week or two because there is so much that is fully composted already in there, I didn’t want to contaminate it with underdone kitchen waste. I’m filling up some large plastic terrace pots, as well as spreading it as thickly as I can onto the raised beds and around the stems of some of my pot-plants.
The compost box, for that is probably the best way to describe it, takes up almost as much space as one of the raised beds. But it has a flat timber lid that doubles as a look-out on summer evening, I use it as a base for the hibachi barbeque and as a temporary shelf for gardening equipment, trays of afternoon tea and pot-plants.
The composter is, in many ways, unconventional. It doesn’t have much ventilation, though a base layer of sticks provides a ventilated ground story. I drilled air holes all around it at low level, before I filled it. Somehow rain gets in, (I’m not sure how) so it keeps moist. I’ve added 15mm expanded polystyrene inside all around the edge. The insulation came free when my growhouse was delivered some years ago. It seems to have had a wonderful effect, keeping the temperature in the heap higher, and making the compost box the speediest downgrader I’ve ever owned.
I have noticed that the raised beds need filling up with new compost at least twice a year. For a long time I assumed that soil was being compacted, washed away, or blown away. I’m sure all of the above happens, but I’ve realised that part of the loss is due to the plants using up the nutrients in the soil to form leaves and shoots. Somehow that realisation makes me feel that all this composting effort is well placed. It’s a cycle of growing, reclaiming and then putting back the waste from last year’s crops onto this year’s beds. I didn’t even have to import worms. Lovely little red wrigglers appeared as if by magic one day. In fact I’m pretty sure their eggs would have been imported in a bag of organic compost that I must have used right at the beginning of the process, when I was filling the raised beds for the first time.
Burying the Hedge
I read somewhere that hyssop is like lavender, in that you can dig it up and re-plant it, at a greater depth, in order to reinvigorate it. My hyssop hedge was looking okay. But there were a few gaps in it. I also wanted to extend it a bit. So, even though it has only been in a year, I dug up each plant and teased it apart until I had two clumps of growth. I didn’t break them apart entirely, just sort of stretched them. I then re-planted, deeper than before. This seems to have worked quite well. The hyssop hedge now extends right across the front of the spring bed, without gaps and doesn’t look too bad for its rough treatment. I didn’t prune it. Though I think the received wisdom is that if you mess about with a plant it is a good idea to reduce its top growth a bit in order to balance out the damage you have inflicted upon the roots. I might give it a light clipping in a day or two.
Thinning Radishes
I love the first radish of summer. I’m not that successful at growing them throughout the year, I guess my beds may get a bit too dry in the height of summer, and they are not a crop that enjoys crowding. But they seem to do well for me in early spring. Some that I sowed a few weeks ago under cloches, are coming up well, so I thinned them and used the clippings in a sandwich. Their red stems and pale green leaves are very attractive at this stage. Sadly I have been forced to put a few slug pellets around them. The broad beans that are supposed to be coming up in the same spot are being crucified by the slugs. As quickly as they come up they are eaten. I have thrown financial caution to the wind and ordered a supply of anti-slug nematodes. I have never used Nemaslug before, hopefully this will do the trick. Of course none of my garden slugs have died over this cold winter, they have just grown huge. During the coldest period I noticed they were feasting on the bird food peanuts!
Preparing the Raised Beds
The highlight of the last few days has been planting up the first raised bed for spring. A few months ago I buried kitchen waste under the soil and sprinkled the mounds of earth with chicken pellets. Now when I dig I find very little of the kitchen waste still in evidence. The only thing I can still see is the egg shells which I break up a bit with the hand fork. I read somewhere that a top dressing off eggshells is better long term than lime. The lime washes through the soil rather quickly, but the egg shells, because they are more granular and thus more difficult to break down, release calcium into the soil over a longer period. The problem on a large scale is that you would need thousands of eggshells. We run a B&B, so we get through quite a few eggs in a normal week, enough for my small requirements. Since I’ve been including crushed egg shells into my compost mix I have noticed that the soil seems to stay sweeter longer. We don’t get any of that greenish, sickly smelling soil that I now realise reeks of acidity. Until recently I didn’t know that you can tell acidity by smelling the soil. This might explain why my great friend Craig Benton (Dr Compost) always smells the compost when he comes to inspect my garden. But subconsciously I think I have always known what that smell is like. Think old flower pots in shady corners and you’ve got it.
Good Friends
Sadly Craig and his talented jewellery designer wife Tina are leaving these islands and going back to the USA. Even though we lived quite a long way away from each other, they lived in Dublin and we live in London, we really enjoyed his visits and the enthusiasm that he brought with him. Our loss is America’s gain. They both think that business prospects are better over there than in Ireland at the moment.
Good friends are so difficult to come by, that it is always a shame when they move away. However there are advantages to living in central London. Sooner or later everyone we know will turn up on the doorstep. We had a friend from New Zealand drop in for coffee on Sunday morning, someone who we haven’t seen for years. After five minutes is was quite like old times. Except that we are all a little older. I notice the conversation seems to focus on illnesses rather more than it used to. I remember listening to elderly relatives and being bored by such talk. Perhaps gardening talk is old man’s talk as well?
Planting up the Raised Bed
Finally, after all that preparation and a little time off for socialising, the spring bed was ready for planting. I’ve already blogged about the planting scheme last week, so I won’t talk here too much about the design. Just click through to the other blog if you are curious. Suffice it to say that thinking about it, researching the plants and drawing up the design, was as much fun as the planting. I was able to endure the ghastly weather by dreaming about the bed and all the lovely colourful produce that I could cram into it. But I didn’t mention last week how lovely it was to have my hands in the soil, digging out holes, setting plantlets in place, watering and cosseting.
After I’d finished, I re-fixed the cloche hoops and covered them with protective fleece. I put the fleece, which is some sort or Terylene into the washing machine at the end of the season and it cleans up remarkably well. Apart from a few tears it is still in quite good condition. But I hate not being able to see through it. I’ve just bought some new stuff called, Envirotech by Agralan from the Organic Gardening Catalogue. This is supposed to let more light and water in, as well as last longer. I note that it is also washable at low temperatures.
Reading and Writing
I love to write about what I’m doing. In fact my life these days is infused with writing blogs, writing short stories and writing longer pieces. I’m just about to publish the last few chapters of an online novella that I worked away at all last year. While I garden I often try to resolve some problem or other that is sticking in my mind. I’ve been quite active in helping to set up a local neighbourhood group, FitzWest. Now we are up and running, we want to get some initiatives off the ground. My neighbour Ann and I are keen to start a reading group. But now I’m wondering whether it should not be a reading and a writing group. I belong to two writing groups already. I love submitting my work and hearing what people have to say about it, even though the comments are never wholly complimentary. I was thinking that we could combine the normal reading group with encouraging members to submit their own work, as well as reading the work of established authors. This would take the pressure of those who don’t always want to submit something, give us all a reminder of what good writing is and encourage us all to learn and improve. But could all that be crammed into an evening’s meeting?
As I plugged away at my plot, setting each plant into the correct place, making sure it wasn’t too high or low, back filling the hole and then pressing down gently but firmly, in order to make sure the roots were well connected with the soil, I was turning these thoughts over in my mind. I started thinking about some sort of green gardening course as well. Would people be interested? I could certainly share my knowledge of micro-gardening, permaculture, water conservation, recycling, encouraging pollinators and what to me is a completely engrossing subject - composting!
