Challenge

Our new garden is a blank canvas. Except for the plants we took from our previous garden it is empty. Although, that is only the case if you ignore the knee-deep weeds that have been enjoying the undisturbed soil. Again, soil might be a bit optimistic. At the moment we’ll have to deal with rock hard clay. In a couple of weeks we’ll get some help from a professional gardener who will do the really hard landscaping and then it is up to us.
My fingers are itching to dig in, I have been designing and making plans all winter. Not long now!

Potting up and moving on

It has been a while since the last update on this blog. For a good reason, because the last months we’ve been busy preparing to move house. For the first time in our lives we’re house owners.
We weren’t sad to leave our old house. But to leave the garden behind, in which we spent so many hours transforming it into place of beauty after years of neglect, was a different story.
To keep the costs down, I mainly grew annuals from seeds, so there weren’t too many plants to dig up and bring along at the end of the winter. But still we’ve managed to pot up quite a selection. Hopefully they will form the start of a new beautiful place that we can create together.

We’ve even potted up a small apple and quince tree that we got as presents from our old neighbours a year ago. It was quite a challenge to dig them up. But we managed and found a more or less suitable container. They’ve spent the winter in an industrial plastic “pot” getting waterlogged every now and then. But it shows how resilient plants are: they are budding so fingers crossed that they will survive and bring us some fruit in the future.

War and Peace

The creatures we share the garden with bring their own wide range of different vibes.

Earlier this Summer, the bumblebees went mad about the hollyhocks. They drank nectar until they started dazedly buzzing around in circles. The two in the picture at least seem to share one flower peacefully.

Not long after that, the patrolling of the garden by big nose diving dragonflies started. They are extremely territorial and although we do not have any water in our garden, it apparently needs to be defended heavily. They are fiendish and not afraid to attack something as big as us.

And October brought on loads of spiders. The Rudbeckia forms it own little micro-environment with a bunch of spiders hanging between the flowers. One of them managed to catch a solitary bee and wrapped it up for later.

This Comma came to say goodbye as a last sign of Summer, the coming week the weather will turn. Rain and cold will come to replace the lovely warm afternoons we have had the past weeks.

In preparation the undergardener cleaned the birdfeeder and filled it up with peanuts.
Bring on the cold!

Reflections

July and August are such great months for the garden(er). The results of all the hard work back in spring are on display and it is time to sit back and take it all in.
It is also the moment to evaluate the effect of all combinations and see what is worth repeating and what could be improved on next year.
The dahlias once again are a big success and keep on producing wonderful flowers.

Unfortunately most of the sunflowers got eaten by slugs (grrr) and they did not manage to shine like they did last year. And once again I completely misjudged the amount of space certain plants need. My tomato jungle is joined by a pattison forrest which does not seem to stop growing and the undergardener is only just about tolerating them creeping over the border-grass boundary.

And I vaguely remember planting phlox, picked up at a plant swap earlier this year, somewhere in the garden this spring. I gave up on it, thinking it also fell victim to the slugs. But to my great surprise it stuck its head up through the crop canopy, right next to the tiny apple tree which is also swamped by the tomatoes.

Next year we definitely have to change something about the way we grow the runner beans. The garden fence is a handy help for them to climb onto, but perhaps it is just a little too adventurous and not very practical to get a ladder to pick the beans from the neighbour’s tree.

Cheeky

On my peanut feeder it said “jackdaw proof”. Which is true, but I don’t think they had this cheeky exotic visitor in mind during the design stage. Meet Percy our local parakeet. He is a very fussy eater, discarding the skin of the peanuts. Sometimes he brings his woman, Priscilla along and they make sweet squeaky sounds.

Pretty weeds

Last year I had mixed successes with my “live and let live” philosophy, letting plants grow that I did not recognise to see if they would produce pretty flowers. This year I have learnt from some of my mistakes (no more deadly nightshade), but luckily some new plants have sprung a surprise.

I moved a tiny fern-like plant that I found at the boundary of our garden to a more prominent place: you never know! To my surprise after our holiday bright blue spikes of flowers appeared, outperforming my expectations and definitely not belonging to a fern. Google assisted in giving this freebee a name: Jacob’s ladder. A perennial which is likely to self-seed and spread further throughout the garden.

Right next to the Jacob’s ladder I filled a gap with a little blue violet. Or so I thought, because covered in pollen by its neighbour proudly stands a little blue lobelia. I love it that the garden keeps amazing me.

Also I might have accidentally introduced a “weed” of my own to our garden. Nasturtiums love our sandy, poor soil and are popping up everywhere, even in the garden path. They are so prolific that I don’t think this garden will ever get rid of them and they will keep brightening up the garden for several years to come.

With a little help from my friends

I think the war on slugs might have just taken an unexpected turn. Out of nowhere Major toad appeared in the salad growing bag. Quite an interesting choice of abode, but he is welcome to stay if he hoovers up a slug or two on the go.

Mulch and garden design

Mulch and design are two words not likely to appear often together in one sentence, but they sum up my recent garden-related activities quite nicely. We had bucket and bucket loads of rain until even the grass was sopping wet under my wellies. It just prevented any work in the garden. So, instead I decided to pick up my pencils and work on a garden design for next year. While our garden this year showed all the colours of the rainbow, it will hopefully look a bit more sophisticated next year. Not that it will lack in colour, but it makes life a little easier now I know what colours my seedlings are going to be.

To complete the plan I ordered some seeds from a local shop and although I am still looking for stipa and astrantia seeds (they had sold out) they delivered all the other seeds and my spring bulbs just when we had a break from all the rain. I jumped in my wellies and dug up whatever was left of the dahlias and planted about 200 bulbs (ouch).

Last weekend I bought the biggest bag of mulch ever seen, I hardly got it home! But now at least my dahlia bulbs are snuggled up in their buckets covered in mulch and we applied a nice blanket to the fruit trees and the hibiscuses. Definitely needed the help of the undergardener who lugged the bag of mulch around the garden.

I think we are pretty much ready for winter now, I’ll keep the very last flowers going as long as possible and then bring on the first frost and snow!

Winter makeover

Last week it was unseasonably warm around here. While I was getting ready for my winter wardrobe, the temperature swung back round to 20 degrees. Together with some rain this proved perfect conditions for the dahlias. The plants look a but scruffy because of the wind and rain, but the colours really stand out amidst the yellow and brown leaves of the trees.

The warm spell makes me hesitant to give the garden its final winter makeover, there is still so much green and because I mainly planted annuals it will look pretty bare once I am done. But one frosty night, and it can’t be that long, will turn it all to mush. So I got out my little red trowel and went to work. Who would have thought the dwarf sunflowers grew such big root systems?

Some of the late veggies are still happily going and growing. The beetroots are the size of big marbles, not sure if they will survive the winter, so perhaps we’d better eat them soon as some novelty veg. Sadly, the parsnips were rubbish (again) and I pulled them all out of the ground. Even with protective ground covers the cabbage root flies managed to wiggle their eggs in. You could almost hear the larvae munching away. And talking about munching, by the time the cavolo nero will have ended up on our plates, I will have checked every leaf a few dozen times, they were irresistible for the Cabbage whites.

Just after writing the first draft of this post, the big storm also hit our garden and snapped all the dahlias. Now I just need a dry day to lift the tubers from the ground and store them for the winter. I guess that’s also part of wanting to be a gardener, saying goodbye to your plants for the winter to come.

Indian summer and micro carrots

After the first autumn storm that floored what was left of the sunflowers, the weather turned for the better and we’ve been enjoying fabulous sunny days for the past few weeks. This provided a great opportunity for getting all the spent annuals out of the garden, move some plants around and….guess what do some more hard landscaping! The undergardener still had some plans for more curves and better defined edging. And who am I to oppose, the more flower/veg beds the better!

Removing the sunflowers, which grew remarkably big root clumps, I also came across my experimental carrot planting scheme. When the garden was exploding with plants this summer I still desperately wanted to squeeze some carrots in. So, I planted them in the gaps between the sunflowers. I can’t recommend that method, as they have grown the size of my fingernails in all these months.

It is good to see that we’re not the only ones enjoying the last rays of sunshine. The masses of bumblebees have disappeared (I’d like to say they moved South, although I don’t think they migrate…), but the last bees are hanging on to the few remaining flowers. Preparing for the winter by soaking up as much sunshine and nectar as possible. Perhaps there is sufficient room in our garden, next to the bird box, to hang an insect apartment block where they can crawl into, protected from the weather, so we can enjoy their visits again early next spring.