Slow progress in the garden

The days are starting to get a little longer. It's coming lighter in the mornings and staying light for a little longer in the evening. The garden can look a bit drab and dreary at this time of year, but as time goes on plants are starting to emerge. Snowdrops are flowering, and other bulbs are pushing their way through the soil. 

The witch hazel has been in flower for a few weeks now. Next to it is a yellow stemmed dogwood and behind the witch hazel clustered around the base of the silver birch are a group of cyclamen. 

I planted these the first winter after we moved here and were making a new garden.  They seem to increase in number every year. Also in this area of the garden, the hellebores are starting to flower. This corner of the garden is definitely a winter garden, which was planned so we could see it from the house windows during the winter. Spring is not far off.

I'm trying to get back into doing some gardening work whenever the weather is good enough to go outside.  But with the awful cold,windy and rainy days we are having at the moment, that's not very often. I also have to divide my time between the garden and the allotment. To get my body back into doing the physical work of gardening I have just been doing half an hour or an hour at a time. I've been cutting back the dead flower stems and grasses in the borders. I removed the leaves from the hellebores to expose the flowers. On the little woodland/wildlife garden after clearing the debris I have put a layer of bark chips down. It looks quite good and it shows up the snowdrops and cyclamen nicely.

 

The crab apple tree produced lots of fruit in the autumn and made a beautiful display. In the last few  weeks the fruit has attracted interest from the birds, especially the blackbirds.  We have seen as many as four at a time pecking at the fruit. A lot of the fruit fell off onto the ground over the last few months and has made the patio a bit messy so I'm hoping that when the birds have taken all the fruit from the tree itself they will start on the fallen fruit.

I feel I'm making slow progress in the garden, but Spring is not far off and seeing all the new growth appearing makes me think of the better days yet to come.

Sunny days

The days are getting more spring like now, it's lovely to be outside in the sunshine. It's only a few weeks since I was enjoying the snowdrops in the garden and now they have gone over making way for the daffodils.  The tulips are starting to flower in their pots on the patio, in fact only last week the first ones burst into flower, an amazing orange which made me stop in my tracks to admire them. 

And this week these tulips started flowering. I planted them last autumn,  I don't know the name of them but they are amazing.

The garden is looking lovely at the moment. The borders have been cleared of all the debris from the dead flowers and most of them have now been mulched. I have been putting ornamental bark down on the stumpery area in the back garden and the hosta bed in the front. All the hostas are grown in pots which seems to help keep the slugs away although not completely.

I love to see the garden looking like this at the start of spring, like it's ready and waiting for the explosion of flowers in the next few weeks.

As I walk around I can see how clumps of flowers are getting bigger. At this stage I have to be careful not to plant anything where I think there is a space, because that space is likely to get filled up soon with plants as they start to grow bigger

Some cold gardening days

It's been so cold recently I haven't wanted to go outside for too long. So garden and allotment work has been limited to short spells with lots of layers of clothing. But so much needs to be done as we move further into February.  

On the allotment we have been sorting out the storage shed. Last year, late summer the roof caved in and as the whole structure has been needing some attention for a while, it was now time to do something about it. So over the autumn and winter Richard has been working on the roof, the sides and the floor. It's almost a new shed now. It was a good opportunity to sort out all the stuff we had been storing in there. All the things we'd saved because they might be useful, but they never were. So along with lengths of rotting wood, metal and plastic items have been disposed of, leaving much more room in this storage area. We will not be hoarding things again, I hope.

The weather although very cold has been quite dry recently and the allotment is looking much better now it's not as wet and muddy. I've nearly finished getting the beds ready. This week I pulled up  the few remaining cabbages, which are not very big but might make a meal. I left the kale in as it sometimes starts growing again in the spring. Richard raked up the compost and manure in the bins and there should be enough rotted manure to finish the beds.

 I went to the garden centre last week and bought seed potatoes and onion sets. A nice indoor garden job was to start chitting the potatoes. I bought Rocket, a first early which I've grown before and always had good crops. Also I bought Charlotte which is a good popular salad potato.

The onion sets I planted in trays in modules, varieties are Sturon, Centurion and Banana. These are now in the allotment greenhouse. I grew Banana onions for the first time last year and they did really well. Chitting potatoes and planting the onion sets are usually the first jobs I do so I feel I've now made a start to the new season.

I  had a tidy up in the garden shed, sorted out my seed box and ordered what I need for this year in vegetable and flower seeds. The pots and propagators are all ready now for me to start sowing. I'll be sowing broad beans and sweet peas in the next day or two, which I will do in pots then move them to the greenhouse. I don't usually start any other seed sowing until the beginning of March. Then things will get really busy. 

The garden is looking quite messy with grass bits all over the place. So I have started clearing debris from the beds and cutting back the grasses. I quite enjoy cutting back and gathering up bundles of plant rubbish and seeing the flower beds starting to look better. I can see plants emerging and then I try to remember what they are. There are more bulbs coming through and some unexpected ones, I remember that I planted more last spring. It's nice to get surprises like that as I work round the garden.

Getting back into the garden

We've had a few sunny days this week, it has been cold, but not too cold to go out in the garden to do a bit of work. There's been such awful weather the last few weeks where it hasn't been fit to go outside, so I've been keen to get out, if only for a bit of pottering round and a breath of fresh air.

There's always something to do in the garden, if it's only sweeping paths or tidying the shed. I have started clearing the leaves off the borders. They have got quite soggy and were hiding bulbs underneath. 

They were probably providing homes for slugs too. Some of the dead plant stalks which I leave standing over winter for the wildlife are ready for clearing away. I'll gradually clear those in the next few weeks. Last week's storm didn't do much damage in this area, but the grasses in the garden took quite a battering resulting in grass debris all over the place.

Looking round the garden I could see signs of new growth. The snowdrops are flowering now. I love seeing them, the first flowers of the year in the garden. 

Also flowering now are cyclamen, showing patches of pink in shady areas beneath the birch tree in the back garden and under shrubs in the front.

 Daffodils and crocuses are emerging to flower in a few weeks time. The Hamamelis (witch hazel) has copper coloured flowers which I have to walk down the garden to see. It doesn't show up well from a distance. 

January is such a long dreary month and to see signs of life in the garden gives me so much to look forward to.

Through the Garden Gate--April 2024

It's been a busy month in the garden, catching up with Spring jobs, mulching, planting, sowing, tidying up. The weather has continued to be very mixed with plenty of rain. This month we have had wind and hail too as well as some sunny days. I finished mulching the borders, a job which I started last month. At the weekend I put a bark mulch down on the woodland bed which made it look much better. It smells really woody and the plants show up well against the bark. 

The borders are filling out now as the plants start to grow.  There's not much yet in the way of colour from flowers, but everything is starting to look really green and fresh.

 The star of the garden at the moment is the crab apple tree which is full of white blossom. It started to get quite windy yesterday so I was hoping the blossom wouldn't get blown away. We are hoping for plenty of fruit in the autumn. Last year there was hardly any when in previous years there has been loads of crab apples which give a lot of colour through the autumn and winter. The birds like the fruit too.

I've been filling in a few gaps in the front garden borders with plants which I lifted and divided from the back garden last year. So I planted some Solidago (Golden Rod) and pink Cow Parsley. I bought a perennial wallflower (Erysimum) which someone told me will flower from now until October. That sounds the ideal plant, so I will wait and see. I planted it in the raised bed border in the back garden, where I want more colour.  Also in that bed I wanted to fill a gap at the back to hide the fence, so I bought a clematis --Clematis Montana Alba.

Last month I told you about a pot of tulips I'd planted which I thought were orange but as they were opening looked like they were going to be white. Well they've opened up and this is what they turned out to be. They are called 'Copper Image'. They don't look very much like copper to me, but I do like the colour and they are lasting well. 

It was my daughter's birthday in April and she didn't want a gift but a day out with lunch. She's been working hard on her Masters degree and has finally finished. I'm all for a day out, so it was a treat for me too. We went to Lytham Hall, there's lots to see there. Click on the link to find out more. It was a lovely day and we were able to sit outside for our lunch. The birds were hopping around us obviously used to being fed by visitors. The Hall is really interesting. 

We had a walk in the grounds which has a lot of woodland and was easy walking. There is also a walled kitchen garden which was immaculate.

The volunteers were working at the time and it was nice to chat to one of them who was so enthusiastic about her work. Also outside in the courtyard area was an antiques and salvage hub and a plant hub. We couldn't leave without buying a plant or two. I bought foxgloves for my daughter and myself. It was a good day out.

I am linking this blog post to Sarah's blog at Down By the Sea for her monthly Through the Garden Gate post.

Through the Garden Gate--January 2024

The garden in January can be a dull place.  We have had our share of storms in the last few weeks and also snow. So the garden is looking a bit battered. The grasses have been blown about and straw coloured stalks are all over the place. Tall stems of flowers with seed heads have fallen over. Leaves blown onto the beds have gone soggy. So generally the garden is not just dull but messy too. 

I have done some tidying up on the few fine days we've had.  We are encouraged now not to be too tidy in the garden and not to cut back in the autumn but leave dead plants over the winter for the wildlife. This is what I do. But come January I am always longing to get out and do something. So my work is to have a light tidy up, clearing soggy leaves and plants. Any stalks and seed heads I gather into piles and leave at the back of the border so the wildlife can still get at it. I can easily clear it away in a couple of months time.

Clearing the beds of the leaves helps to reveal any spring flowering bulbs which are coming through. I always forget where they are planted so it's always a nice surprise to find them. I now have a good show of snowdrops which are the first signs of spring in our garden and are so welcome at this dull time of year. I can also see signs of crocuses and dwarf daffodils. Other new shoots are there in the beds giving me much to look forward to especially when I can't remember what plants they are. The tulips I planted in pots for the patio in the autumn are coming through as are smaller pots of daffodils and crocuses.

The witch hazel in the woodland/wildlife bed seems to be getting better established and this year there has been more colour from it. This bed is a colourful little winter corner with the witch hazel, yellow stems of dogwood, the white bark of the birch and creamy catkins on the twisted hazel. Snowdrops and cyclamen are planted under the trees and shrubs. Underneath the witch hazel when I'd cleared away some leaves I found that  the Hellebores have pink buds soon to open.

So it's encouraging to go round the garden even on the bad days, to get signs of what's to come in only a few weeks. 

I am linking this post to Sarah's blog at 'Down by the Sea' for her monthly 'Through the Garden Gate' post.

 

Through the Garden Gate--June 2023

 

The lovely weather we were having in May continued into June, but after such a long dry spell the garden started to suffer. The damp border dried up and some of the plants started to look a bit shriveled. At last the rain came, and very heavy it was too. So I was able to put the hose pipe and watering cans away for a while. The garden looks much fresher now.

I love seeing the garden change with the seasons and seeing the early plants die back and others coming in to flower to take their place.  The early hardy Geraniums, Aquilegias, Camassias, Primulas have all gone over and one of my jobs now is to cut them back. 

Now filling the borders are, Veronicastrum, Campanula, giant Scabious, white Valerian, Alchemilla mollis, lavender. Another of my jobs is to put some supports in place as some of these are now flopping over after the battering they got from the rain.

Early in June we visited RHS Harlow Carr at Harrogate. June is a good time to visit, there was so much colour. The streamside was particularly colourful with the candelabra Primulas and Himalayan blue poppies (Mecanopsis). 

Elsewhere there were clumps of Irises and foxgloves looking lovely. 

It is a good few months since we last visited Harlow Carr and since then there have been quite a few changes. There were some big rocky areas made from huge boulders and paths meandering through. It seemed like there were more water areas too. We always like to see the kitchen garden to get ideas for the allotment. 

I am linking this blog post to Sarah's blog at 'Down By the Sea' for her monthly 'Through the Garden Gate' post.