Archive for the ‘Garden Diary’ category
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, The Old Garden In Bristol on Thursday, March 22nd 2012 (10.09 PM).
Back in January, I mentioned that all the rosemary in Southville seemed to be blooming. I said at the time that our own rosemary bush seemed to be slowly coming into bud: two months later, it is starting to flower. On Sunday, I noticed one solitary bloom:
Today, there are rather more: I will have to try to get a less lonely-looking shot.
Yesterday, I spotted that the peas sown last Saturday, and the radish seeds sown back on the 11th, are both starting to poke themselves above the ground now. Looking back, I apparently didn’t mention the radishes when I planted them. Last year we grew several batches from a variety packet called “Rainbow Mixed”: they were good for science experiments but not much else, as almost all the plants we grew produced lots of foliage but hardly any root. From a box of radishes, we would get maybe one or two which had roots worth eating. This year, then, I’ve picked a different variety, a German type called “Ostergruß Rosa”, sold in this country under the Eden Project’s brand name. Supposedly they should turn out with long, French Breakfast-style roots. We shall have to wait and see.
blossom, flowering, pea, radish, rosemary
Posted in Experimentation, Garden Diary, Retrospective, The Old Garden In Bristol on Saturday, March 17th 2012 (3.59 PM).
A bit nippy out in the garden today: most certainly not as springlike as other days, with dark clouds massing overhead. Not at all like the warm, insect-filled garden of last weekend. Still, I did the things I meant to do: replanted the pea seedlings in their final location, sowed more peas to germinate on the windowsill, scattered a few “surprise” annual flower seeds in spare corners, and retreated to the sofa before the rain broke.
The pea seedlings have, like last year, gone in a box to stand on the garden wall. I should have transplanted them earlier: they were getting rather stuck in their tiny modules. The next batch of peas will start their hardening-up rather earlier, so they can be transplanted outside rather earlier too. The fennel I repotted last week is looking nicely at home, plenty of feathery new growth coming from the heart of both plants. The sweet peas are not so happy, still looking rather listless and floppy, so I have given them a bit more scaffolding to climb up: horizontal strings wrapped around their cane pyramid.
I said last time that I would explain a bit more about the fennel, and why we decided to get some. It is, essentially, to make up for last year. We tried to grow dill last year, and it was a bit of a failure.
If you look at a packet of dill seeds, you see a rather idealised picture: a big pot with a big dill plant inside it, leaves pouring down like a waterfall. Of course, if you’re growing dill for food, that’s what you need, because you need a good bunch of the individual fronds to put in your gravadlax. However, trying to grow dill from seed, that wasn’t what we got at all. The first plants we sowed in modules and tried to pot on: that failed entirely. The second plants we sowed in their final location; they put out a few leaves, then immediately bolted to a few feet high and flowered. Hardly any leaves at all, not even enough to make a single meal out of. The flower heads are pretty: finely-divided cadmium-yellow umbels; but, to be honest, I like eating dill too much to be satisfied with that. Why did it happen? I suspect the pot we put them in was rather too shallow, and the plants’ roots felt rather too cramped for comfort.
Now, in all the books I’ve read, it says: “don’t grow dill and fennel together”. They might give a reason, too, but if they have I haven’t absorbed it, come away only with the idea that they don’t work well together for some reason. I picture the real explanation being like primary school parents’ evening: “honestly, we love little Fennel, and he’s fine on his own, but when him and Dill get together they do tend to egg each other on. Mrs Anderson still can’t bear the sight of pencil shavings, and it was four months ago now…” Anyway, whatever the reason is, as we were trying to grow dill last year, we thought that fennel must be avoided at all costs. As I’m now completely exasperated with trying to get dill to grow, this year it is the fennel’s turn. We don’t have room for more than a couple of bulbs, so we won’t get more than a single side dish from it at the end of the season – fennel gratin is delicious, by the way. I’m more interested to see if its leaves can be used like dill, or if they will end up as purely structural plants for the summer – hopefully they will give the garden a more delicate sense of height than things-up-canes can provide.
dill, fennel, pea, sweet pea
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, The Old Garden In Bristol on Monday, March 5th 2012 (7.23 PM).
The peas planted last weekend were showing the first signs of poking up above the soil five days later, on Friday. By yesterday, the seedlings appeared to be coming on well.
Those peas are the ones we sowed for planting out in the garden later; there is no sign of the variety we sowed for pea shoots yet. There is also no sign, apart from a little ground disturbance, of the seeds I sowed outdoors. Of course, the peas, inside on the kitchen windowsill, have something of an advantage. Other things are doing well, though. I said just over a week ago that the first shoots of chives had started to appear. They have been coming on fast: getting on for a couple of inches, they are now big enough to photograph.
chives, pea, seedling, spring, sprouting
Posted in Experimentation, Garden Diary, The Old Garden In Bristol on Wednesday, February 29th 2012 (5.51 PM).
In the last post, I mentioned that although the rocket is in bloom already, there weren’t any hoverflies about yet. The very next day, I saw the first I’ve seen this year. Orange and black, it had gone before I had chance to grab the camera. It was warm in Sunday’s sunshine, and I could occasionally also hear bumblebees nearby – presumably queens looking for a nesting spot. The only one I saw was a good twenty feet away, not quite close enough to attempt an identification.
I was in the garden, because I’d decided that, with the weather being so warm, it was about time I started getting some seeds in the ground. Don’t want to leave it too late, after all: last year, because of when we started, we didn’t exactly grow the mixture of things we wanted. So Sunday was spent clearing compost out of all the pots which had had last year’s annuals in, and sowing a very few new seeds. In one pot: a mixture of calendulas and lettuce. A bit of an experimental mixture, and I’m not at all sure I have given them enough space to get along. Indoors, on the kitchen window sill: peas, germinating inside to avoid tempting the local wildlife. Peas are damn tasty, after all.
calendula, hoverfly, lettuce, little gem, marigold, pea, sowing, spring, wildlife
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, The Old Garden In Bristol on Saturday, February 25th 2012 (7.46 PM).
As you might have noticed from the date of the last post, not much gardening has been done recently. Even though I went out to swap seeds, nothing yet has been sown. It has still felt cold and frosty, damp and grey, at least until a warm bright morning this morning. I went outside and noticed that the chives have started to wake up. Grown from seed last year, they did not come to much in their first year. However, they seem to be coming back again, because each plant now has a cluster of new shoots poking upward.
Moreover, the three boxes of rocket, which I had been intending to pull up, are bursting back into life too. The wild rocket had been laying low but hanging on, a carpet of foliage which managed to survive the frost and snow we had earlier in the month. This morning, I noticed that in the past week it has bolted and burst into flower.
The two boxes of garden rocket had even managed to keep their flowers all winter. These too, though, have started growing fresh flower shoots and buds recently.
Pulling them up is on hold for now: at this time of year, anything in flower deserves to be kept for the sake of the local insect wildlife. I do love letting the garden rocket go to seed: last summer each rocket flower stem was surrounded by a cloud of hoverflies for most of the day. The neighbourhood hoverflies are still waiting to emerge, but no doubt there are other hungry insects looking for nectar right now.
chives, flowering, garden rocket, rocket, spring, wild rocket
Posted in Experimentation, Garden Diary, Photobloggery, Planning, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, January 15th 2012 (11.21 AM).
Given the crisp winter weather yesterday, we went out for a walk: down to Spike Island, along the New Cut, then back round in a circle through the back streets of Southville. I noticed, all of the rosemary bushes in the front gardens of Southville are in flower at the moment. Even in January.
The rosemary bush in our garden on the other side of the city is not in flower. I say “bush”: possibly “sprig” is a slightly better word. There are signs, though, that it might be starting to bud, pale green growing tips at the base of each leaf. Something is developing, at least; I don’t know much about rosemary yet.
In other news, we’ve been trying to do a bit more planning on what to grow this year. We had a good harvest last year from the peas we planted, but before the season was over the plants were suffering rather badly from mildew, possibly because we planted slightly too many in each box – after all, when you only have so much space it is tempting.
I have no idea what pea variety we grew last year. Towards the end of the planting season, we popped down to the garden centre, bought whatever type of pea seedlings they had available, and that was that. “Pea” was all it said on the label. For this season, therefore, we have deliberately gone out and bought seed of a disease-resistant variety: P. sativum “Boogie”. Whether they are as tasty or fruitful as last year’s anonymous ones, we will have to wait and see, but the packet of seed peas is ready and waiting in the seed tin.
boogie, bristol, disease, flowering, mildew, pea, rosemary, southville, unseasonal, winter
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, The Old Garden In Bristol on Tuesday, January 10th 2012 (6.23 PM).
Not very much happened the first week in January. Too cold, too damp, still too dark in the morning and evening. But the garlic has kept on coming: now with shoots up everywhere, even the cloves planted three weeks after the others. This one was, when I took the photo on Sunday, one of the furthest on:
They remind me of Jason And The Argonauts: the spears of King Aeëtes’ army as his soldiers start to grow out of the earth.
garlic, germination, sprouting, winter
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, Practicalities, The Old Garden In Bristol on Monday, January 2nd 2012 (11.09 PM).
The intention, over the long Yuletide break, was to finish off tidying up the garden, clean out those remaining pots which had last year’s perennials in, and get straight on with finishing the digging of the back bed. The reality, however, was that the sofa and fireside proved too attractive.
Despite that, I have started to use one of the garden-related presents I received. From K’s sister: a garden-themed notebook.
It came from Papermash, ultimately from a Korean stationery company, and inside is a normal ruled notebook; but I do love the watercolour cover. I’m going to use it as a garden diary notebook, so that I can write down what I’ve noticed when I notice it, and what I’ve done when I’ve done it, without having to come online and come here to make a note. So far it has but one entry, from last Wednesday, when I noticed the first garlic plant poking its shoot up above the surface of the soil. So far there is still only one shoot visible: I must have planted that clove rather shallower than the rest.
diary, garlic, notebook, record, recording, winter, yuletide
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery on Sunday, December 25th 2011 (7.13 AM).
This isn’t our garden. But it is a Christmas garden. K’s parents’ house, three years ago today, in deep snow.
Merry Christmas, and a happy garden Yuletide!
snow, weather, winter, yuletide
Posted in Garden Diary, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, December 18th 2011 (8.28 PM).
The frost has really started to come in in the past week. I’m learning which parts of the garden are hit by it the hardest: the sheltered area between shed and house stays frost-free the longest, and the other side of the shed, where the bee house is, also seems to stay fairly sheltered. The middle of the garden, and the prime planting area, get hit the hardest, although so far this winter the perennial plants seem to be largely bearing up. Fingers crossed.
After I planted the garlic, three weeks ago, there were a few small cloves left over from the bulb. Today, I planted those up in the containers that, this year, we grew carrots in. The carrots – more of that free BBC seed – did not really grow very well, possibly because the containers are a little small. We will see how the garlic does: we’re starting, in these containers, with the least-viable-looking cloves already, so there won’t really be any scientific conclusions we can draw from it.
The three-weeks-planted garlic hasn’t appeared above the surface yet. K says I’m being silly, looking regularly, because at this time of year it won’t break the surface for months. But, still, I keep looking to see if sprouts have appeared.
carrot, frost, garlic, planting, weather, winter
