Archive for the ‘Photobloggery’ 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 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 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 Photobloggery, Practicalities, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, December 11th 2011 (3.10 PM).
We missed harvesting the last green beans and runner beans this year, because we had a holiday planned. By the time we got home, they had gone past eating. Still, no point letting them go to waste, so we left the beans on the plant to develop and dry. That was the intention, at least: as the weather became wetter, it didn’t look like there was much chance of them drying successfully on the plant, so we picked them and popped them into a tub in the fridge – unsealed, but covered with kitchen roll. I gathered it would be a good drying-out spot for beans: cold, dark, and naturally drying. Now, a few weeks later, they are dry, hard, and ready to be popped into a storage tin. And they are beautiful: creamy-white green beans and rich, midnight blue and pink runner beans.
It is, really, the whole point of sustainable gardening. We are never going to be self-sufficient, with our little city plot, but equally we don’t want to be restocking our containers with freshly-grown garden centre seedlings each spring when we can raise our own instead. I don’t expect all of these seeds to be viable, but we don’t need many to be viable: this pot could fill our entire garden with beans if we wanted. This isn’t sophisticated breeding: the runner beans are from some spare plants a friend gave us, and the green beans are from some free seeds the BBC was giving out the other year, part of their Dig In project. Being beans, they might not even breed true, but hopefully next year’s bean supply is now in place.
bean, green bean, runner bean, saving seed, seed
Posted in Garden Diary, Photobloggery, Practicalities, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, November 27th 2011 (8.22 PM).
Today, we cut down the remaining wizened bean plants, having made sure we had saved all the potentially viable beans for sowing next spring. With the beans and their canes missing, the garden has lost all its height, and looks very empty all of a sudden. Very bare, compared to June or July.
However, the cycle goes around. In the post, the other day, a garlic bulb arrived.
Carefully peeling off the papery skin revealed a tight-packed spiral of fat cloves.
This is a softneck variety, Solent Wight, chosen because it’s meant to be a particularly easy variety to grow in southern England, as you might expect from the name. The cloves were planted up in a couple of our largest containers, moved to the sunniest side of the garden along the wall of the house; in spring a thin sprinkling of annual flower seeds might go in between the garlic stems if there looks to be enough space for them. In 8 or 9 months, if all goes well, this bulb will have turned into ten or more ready for drying and eating.
bean, garlic, green bean, planting, runner bean, solent wight, sowing
Posted in Inspiration, Photobloggery on Friday, November 25th 2011 (6.32 PM).
The last time I wrote an “Inspiration” post, I said: not to cause confusion with the blog title, but even though our little patch of earth decking is not a forest garden, I do find forest gardens inspirations, in terms of their atmosphere. The dappled light, the growth everywhere, the mixture of different foliage at different heights, it is all an atmosphere I would ideally want to evoke; but it clashes with our situation and our other aims.
Just to increase the confusion, this second “Inspiration” post is also rather foresty. This time, though, it’s not even a garden. It is: the Weißensee Jewish Cemetery, in the Berlin suburbs, and the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe.
The paths are kept scrupulously free of leaves by the cemetery’s staff, but in line with Jewish traditions the individual graves are covered in undergrowth.
The cemetery opened in 1880, and somehow survived both the Nazi period and Communist neglect. Despite being declared a “cultural monument” in the 1970s, at the same time it was threatened by a road scheme. Nowadays, its future is more secure.
berlin, cemetery, decay, fern, forest, friedhof, germany, jewish, public garden, undergrowth, weißensee, wood
