Allotment catch up

 It seems quite some time since I blogged about the allotment, but we have been so busy. At the moment we are sharing our time between making a new garden at home and doing essential work at the allotment. It's usually alternate days. We are still enjoying good weather and haven't had rain in ages. That of course means we have plenty of watering to do.

 A few weeks ago, we started putting up frames on the plot. Wigwam frames went up for the climbing beans (Blue Lake). My friend gave me the bean plants, they looked amazingly healthy, so I am hoping for good results from them.

The cabbages needed protecting from cabbage white butterflies so they got covered with a frame and netting.

The sweet peas were planted and another frame went up. The biggest frame project though was for the fruit. We moved the blueberries to another bed earlier in the year because they needed more space so Richard made a big fruit frame for them. Last year I lost a lot of blueberries to the birds, I'm determined to get my share of them this year. The other fruit frame needed repairing too. The building of all these frames involves a lot of recycling of wood which is stored behind the shed. We have bits of metalwork too which gets put to good use.

So frames done, the next thing was to sow some peas. The first lot which were planted a few weeks ago had been started off in cardboard tubes. A week or two later I sowed some straight into the ground. I did one short row of  Kelvedon Wonder and a longer row of  Onward. I covered the rows with holly branches to deter the mice. 

The Onward germinated well, but the Kelvedon Wonder only produced two seedlings. I don't know why that is but this week I sowed another row in a different bed of Hurst Green Shaft, so I will wait to see how they do. As the peas start to grow I put twiggy sticks in amongst them for support.

I planted some courgettes last week, along with some flowers--Zinnias and sunflowers.  This week I planted a few more courgettes. They are a round variety with a long Italian sounding name which I have forgotten. I always plant more courgette plants than I really need in case any get eaten by slugs. If they don't then I will have absolutely loads of courgettes, but this doesn't usually happen and I have enough but not too many. 

I also planted more climbing beans this week--Fasold and a purple variety called Blauhilde.

The rhubarb is very big now and I have harvested several lots of it. I freeze a lot of it otherwise we would be eating rhubarb crumble nearly every day. We are still eating the rhubarb jam which I made last year.

Weeks ago I sowed rows of radish and salad leaves and they are now being harvested. The radish were the best I have ever grown.

We have been cutting a few spears of asparagus occasionally, but I feel it is not enough to warrant taking up the space on the plot so I am considering giving up with them.

Hopefully soon all the harvests will get bigger. I can already see broad bean pods forming there are flowers on the peas where pods will soon form, the cabbages are getting bigger and the strawberries are starting to turn pink. That reminds me I need to net them, I have seen one or two of them have been chewed at by some cheeky birds.

Through the garden gate--May

I'm a bit late with my end of month 'Through the Garden Gate' post, we have been so busy in the garden making the most of the beautiful weather. May is such a lovely month in the garden, everything is so fresh and green and plants are bursting into flower. After such a wet winter the sunshine has been wonderful, and we have had very little rain. The down side of it of course is that in our garden with new plants, there has been a lot of watering to be done. But we have been enjoying our new garden, watching it develop as we continue to make changes. The flower borders are looking good, it seems that every day another flower has opened. We have watched with anticipation the growth of the alliums which I planted in the autumn and they have not disappointed us. They put on a wonderful display. As the the purple ones now start to fade the white ones in another bed are just starting to come out.

I brought a lot of plants to our new garden from our old garden and now they are coming into flower it is like meeting up with old friends. The hardy geraniums were a bit of a surprise as I didn't label them. They got planted last autumn and I had to wait to see which colour they were, Some were pink, some purple, some blue.

The Alchemilla Mollis is now in flower.  I love its frothy yellow flowers

This dicentra is a new plant and I'm really loving its white flowers.

Last autumn we visited a garden centre which had a sale of all their perennial plants. There were some good bargains and so with thoughts of planting up new borders I bought a few. Two of these were geums, a red one and a yellow one. In the last few weeks I have watched them grow bigger and finally they are both now in flower. They seem really happy where I planted them in one of the new raised beds.

In the front garden the weigela is a mass of pink flowers on graceful branches. Earlier in the year I under planted it with lavender and heucheras.  It seemed a good idea at the time, but now the branches are heavy with blossom they are stopping the light getting to them. So a job which had to be done was to cut back these lower branches. But Holly the cat loves to curl up under the canopy of the branches, sometimes to have a sleep in the shade, sometimes to watch out for mice. She is catching a lot of them at the moment. I'm not sure if she is very happy about having her little hiding place removed.

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

Our new garden project 5--creating a woodland and stumpery

Once the seating area in our new garden was completed, the next phase in our garden project was to do something with the bottom left hand corner of the garden.  This is the bit just below the seating area. We spent quite some time thinking what to do here. The silver birch tree had been planted near to the fence and the rest of the space was just grass. Should we leave it grassed or should we have a planting area?

A bit of digging revealed that right down in the bottom corner was just stones. We had come across this problem when we had done the other side of the garden and had turned that corner into a bird feeding area. I didn't need another bird feeding area, so I decided that I would plant a few shrubs just below the seating area and the silver birch tree and put some logs and tree stumps in the stony corner where it was impossible to plant anything. This would create a little woodland stumpery and wildlife area.  I have seen stumperies when we have visited open gardens and often thought I would like to build one.

        

We had a few tree stumps down at the allotment which we brought back to the garden and arranged in the corner. I obtained another stump from our local builders merchants where we buy a lot of the materials for our garden project. I spotted the stump amongst a pile of logs and asked if it was for sale.  They very kindly said I could have it for free. So that made me very happy.

Over the winter I planted a few shrubs-- a yellow stemmed dogwood, a contorted Hazel a witch hazel and a choiysia.

In the spring I planted crocus, mini daffodils, snowdrops and hellebores. There are some ferns around the tree stumps. In the bottom corner where the stony ground is I had to leave the ferns in pots but I was able to plant others in the ground away from the stones.

In a previous blog post I wrote about bringing plants from my old garden and I had a lovely time planting up the stumpery with foxgloves, aquilegia, pulmonaria, tellima, to name a few. To finish off the soil was covered with a layer of bark chippings which gives a nice woodland look. I am going to put a few stepping stones down to avoid having to keep walking on the soil as it is quite a big bed. 

  

I'm quite pleased with this little garden area, it should look good once the plants are more established and hopefully will attract the wildlife. 

Through the Garden Gate--April

 The weather in April has been a mixture of heavy showers and sunshine. So it's been a case of making the most of those lovely sunny days and getting out into the garden or down the allotment.

We have been really busy, continuing to develop our new garden and I have been enjoying planting up new beds. It's lovely that we are starting to see more colour in the beds now. To think that when we moved into our house last June, the back garden was just grass. What a difference we can see now.

Richard is building a path around the lawn and although it is nowhere near finished yet we can see it is going to look really good and will be much easier for working on the borders.

We have been carefully watching the growth of all the shrubs and trees we planted in the autumn, hoping that they survived the cold weather. They are now all in bud which is a relief. The Amelanchier is the first to put on a show,  it is now full of blossom and is looking lovely.

Early in April I planted up the border at the side of the house, I want plants to tumble over onto the path. I have planted alchemilla mollis and lavender at the front to edge the path and lupins, sedum, campanula, monarda, salvia further back with grasses dotted about in between.

   

        

We love to sit at our garden table in the back garden having a break from our work with a cup of tea and from here we can  see how the borders are developing.

The colour at the moment in the borders is from the bergenia, cowslips, pulmonaria and Brunnera. In my containers there are violas and tulips. I can see buds on the hardy geraniums and alliums. In a week or two they will be bursting into life bringing more colour. There is so much to look forward to. 

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

Primrose memories

When I was growing up I remember  my mother often talked about  a friend she had who was called Marjorie. Marjorie had married a farmer and moved from the north of England to Devon. Devon seemed a long way away, I had never been there, we only ever went to Wales. But the idea of living on a farm in Devon sounded really good to me as a child. My Mum and her friend used to write letters to each other and twice a year my Mum would receive a parcel from Devon which we were always excited about. One parcel always arrived in time for Mum's birthday in October and it was clotted cream. It was a real luxury because you couldn't buy clotted cream in the shops up north then. We also didn't have a refrigerator so we had to eat the clotted cream up as soon as possible before it went off. I don't remember what we had with the cream but it was probably tinned peaches as we wouldn't have been able to buy strawberries in October then like we can now.

The other parcel from Devon would arrive around Mothering Sunday and it was always a box of primroses cut from the wild in the Devon lanes. You can't do that now, but this was the 1950's before the laws about not cutting flowers from the wild came about.

I really loved those primroses with their delicate, little stems and lovely pale yellow petals. But they always looked a bit squashed when we opened the box so we had to get them into water as soon as we could before they died. Mum and I  would get together all the little vases and jugs  we could find around the house and fill them with these gorgeous little flowers. They soon recovered from their travels and they brightened up our shabby little house no end. I still have a little jug of my Mum's which always got filled with primroses. It makes me think of Devon lanes and banks of primroses. Marjorie eventually had to stop sending the primroses as she said she wasn't allowed to cut them anymore.

Mum's little jug filled with little flowers but not primroses as I don't have enough to cut yet

I have been to Devon many times but never in the Spring when the primroses are out, but I see them sometimes up here along the lanes in Lancashire or the Lake District and never fail to think of my Mum and her friend Marjorie when I see them.

Primroses along the road at Whalley in Lancashire

It's only in recent years that I discovered  you can buy native primroses-- primula vulgaris. I planted some in my old garden under the trees. Now we have moved recently and I am trying to create a little woodland patch in our new garden and one of the plants on my wish list was of course primula vulgaris.  My daughter who now lives in our old house said I could dig some up from her garden, they were in need of splitting up and replanting so I didn't have to be told twice. 

They look lovely nestling around some old tree stumps and I'm hoping they will increase in numbers over the next year or two.

Spring has arrived at the allotment

We've not been down to the allotment much recently, partly due to bad weather,  but also because of my ankle injury which meant that when the lane was muddy and the allotment paths slippy it was a bit of an unsafe place for me. But at last Spring arrived and fine weather, so off we went to get some much needed work done.

I was greeted by one of my favourite flowers in bloom, the marsh marigold in the pond. As I took a closer look I noticed that there was no sign of the frog spawn which had been there for a few weeks. I wondered if the rain had washed it away as the pond was pretty full up of water. But no, on closer inspection I could see little tadpoles swimming around happily. Peeping out from under the marsh marigold was a frog, I spotted another one down at the bottom of the pond. The frog was very quiet and still and didn't seem to mind me. 

Another welcome sight was the daffodils bordering the path, the bright lime green euphorbia under the sycamore tree and the tulips flowering in the big tub.

The last time we went to the allotment a few weeks ago, we moved the blueberry bushes from the fruit area where they were a bit overcrowded to another bed where they would have more space. They were looking fine after their move. The mulch you can see in the photo is shredded pine needles. We always shred our Christmas tree branches to keep for the blueberries as they like an acid soil. I have heard that this is a good thing to do.

Looking at the rest of the fruit bed we could see that the fruit frame was falling down, so some work will have to be done on it soon before we need to start netting the fruit against the birds. Richard dismantled the frame and repaired the support for the apple tree.

The rhubarb is growing really well and we should be pulling some of the stalks soon.

I'm a bit late planting the potatoes, I would normally have them done by now. So that was an important job to get done. We started work on preparing the potato containers with compost. I planted the first earlies in six of the potato bags. The variety is Maris Bard. I put compost in the bottom of the bags to about a third of the depth and sprinkled in a bit of bone meal. The bags are quite big so I put four potatoes in each bag. Then topped with more compost. When the potatoes start to grow and the shoots show through the compost I will top up with more compost. The next lot of potatoes to plant will be the second early Charlotte a salad potato.

Another important job was to weed the asparagus bed. I also fed it with some blood, fish and bone. I was pleased to see a few little asparagus spears starting to come through.

The fine weather didn't last long, it started to rain, but at least we got a good number of jobs done.

Plants for free

Having a new garden and lots of borders to plant up can be a bit of a drain on the finances. Trips to the garden centre for a few bags of compost often result in a few plants being added to the order. It's not often that I come away from a garden centre without buying at least one new plant. But there are other ways of acquiring plants. Fellow garden friends are often only too pleased to donate cuttings.  Visits to open gardens are a good source of plants, often at a reasonable price. A packet of seeds can produce many pots of plants.

A lot of the plants for our new garden have come from our old garden which now belongs to our daughter and family. Some of them were brought with us when we moved, but I didn't bring anywhere near as many as I had wanted to. I just didn't have the time with all the other preparations for moving house. Although on moving day when we loaded up the car with plants there looked to be an awful lot of them. Now it's Spring this is a good time to dig up clumps of plants and divide them and my daughter has been happy for me to go round to her garden and do this.

So for a couple of weekends I have been round to her garden with my fork, spade and a variety of plant pots and carrier bags lifting and dividing plants. Spring is the best time of year to do this with most plants. Back home I potted up the plants as there were so many I didn't have time to get them in the ground immediately.

Some of them were big clumps like this sedum which needed splitting up with a couple of forks. I thought I would get two or three plants from it but it split into seven. Some of them were quite small, but a few weeks later had grown much bigger.

The back area of our house now looks like a plant nursery with all these plants lined up waiting to be planted. There were very few plants in our new garden so we have a lot of space to fill in the borders. I can see I will be kept busy for the next week or two planting all this lot up.