Snow, dead plants and birdies

Spring has been a long time a-coming! And I am a long time a-coming back to this, but then there wasn't much happening except cold, cold snow. The picture above shows the sun lounger!!! lol. That was a winter to be endured rather than enjoyed, I was so happy that we have a stove to chuck wood and coal on, otherwise it would have been really hard.

My poor rabbits even looked miserable for a while, that was with three hot-water bottles a day, 6 inches of bedding, my old gardening jumper to cuddle into/poo on, and lots of insulation in the hutch.


A few plants are looking very dead. The Rosemary fooled me for a while but I think the greeness was frozen in, as soon as things thawed it turned brown. The Sage is still just alive but looks sorry for itself, it almost gave up totally last year. I wonder sometimes if they get depressed at being out of their natural hot, sunny habitat.

Most things are bursting back into life, shoots and big fat buds everywhere. The soft fruit is making my mouth water at the thought of all the lovely luscious juiciness!!!!!!!!!! Last year I got a whole three Jostaberries of the one plant. I had never even tasted them before but will have to find room for another, well worth growing. They are a cross between Gooseberries and Blackcurrants and taste like Blackcurrants but are bigger and sweeter.


The continuing pleasure this winter has been the amount of, and variety of birds in the garden. My new hobby is to pick up the bird poo from under the big tree, and throw it so that it is under the soft fruit instead. My kind hubbie was up the ladder every day filling up the bird feeder, sometimes twice a day. We had loads of the usual tits and chaffinches but quite a few unusual birds that we had to get the book out for. One day there was a sparrowhawk sitting in the sycamore, looking for an easy meal.

The last few days has seen blue tits in and out of the nesting box. They nested last year but magpies came into the garden and killed them, better luck this year. It brought a smile to my face every time I could hear the babies cheep cheeping away.

The nest box only took 20 minutes to make from a bit of left over fencing, there are lots of patterns to make them on the web, try
http://www.rspb.org.uk/advice/helpingbirds/nestboxes/smallbirds/making.asp
and make sure the top is secure! I wish I had known that one without learning the hard way.

A lot of people feed the birds in their garden but without somewhere to nest they will still struggle to breed. We are rural here, so one nest box will not make much difference, but in a lot of areas it will do.

Plans for the next few weeks are
.........still not ordered in my Biodynamic planting guide, it also gives a good indication of what the weather will be like as well
..........get some seeds sown, especially after having to pay out for a lettuce at the supermarket
.........another bottle of the E.M. (effective microbes) super stuff!
.........compost the dead plants (boo hoo)
.........chuck some seeds around, the lazy way to summer colour

Cheap Shower Curtains

The snow is here! It has been thick and scrunchy underfoot for the last few days. It might be chilly but it looks so festive, and the birds are coming in from far and wide for the food that is put out for them. There must be a bird grapevine as the feeder is emptying faster every day. Lots of chaffinches, robins and bluetits plus the occasional bullying crow barging its way in.

The frost has had the unfortunate effect of making the polytunnel look like it has been made with Argos' cheapest shower curtains. It is holding up well, although I had to scrape the snow of the top in case it got too heavy. I haven't even looked inside! I am not much of a winter gardener. It is ok on the sunny, dry days, but sitting by the fire and watching the birdies with a cup of tea and a good book is a tad more pleasant.

The birds spill lots of seed underneath the feeder. We have wheat and oats popping up amongst the soft fruits. I did try to harvest some but quickly realised why there probably wasn't an obesity problem in the old old days. It takes so long that you would starve before you had enough for your brekkie. I must be lacking the technology, there must be some electronic gadget that does it for you?

Apart from the pleasure of seeing the birds, they poop out lots of droppings that are rich in nutrients, especially phosphate.

So feed your plants the easy way and get your oats at the same time.

Rich Pickings?

I haven't really done well in the garden this year, rubbish weather and a lack of time as usual but the fruit has been good. The blueberries (American style ones) are sat in pots that are a bit too small for them now and have still produced a good few handfuls of healthy fruit. This is the first we have had and they are lovely.

They have not made their way into the kitchen, not much does, and I may not tell anyone about them. My dad ate loads of my peas, every time I looked he was out in the garden with a guilty expression on his face. No sooner had he gone home and the next lot were just looking good then my other half's mum was round and munched the rest.
At least pigeons you can shoot.

Some tomatoes are ready at last, they seem terrible slow this year. Most of the outdoor toms have died from blight, third year running. Last year the greenhouse toms showed signs of it and I sprayed them with the E.M. microbes, they recovered themselves straight away.

The cucumbers have been good. Only complaint is, who wants to eat cucumbers once the weather has gone cold? I had on two jumpers and my long johns today, and that was just for inside the house.

I have been making more of an effort lately to be a bit more self sufficient. I have not used the hoover in a couple of weeks, we don't have carpet here anyway except on the stairs so brushing is easy. Our only heating at the moment is the pot belly stove (hence all the jumpers), the central heating is not on yet, and all last winter it was on almost as low as it would go. Mind you, the bill was still high but I don't fancy leaving it off totally.

I was eating some of the weeds in the polytunnel as well!! Only the tasty ones.
I found some fat beech nuts the other day, ok for a nibble but I think that I would starve if I had to manage properly. Unless I could still have a sly nosey in the supermarket skips! sshhh!

Soil improvement

Our soil here is clay, about 12 inches of very much clay soil over 5 feet of pure clay. Also the area is badly drained which doesn't improve things! We put one line of drainage throught he worst bit which had made a lot of difference but some areas are still under water in the winter. There are clumps of iron in the soil, there were lots of worms of the bad kind, none of the good kind and it was either pure mud or like concrete.

I dug over most of the soil at the start and added in a few bags of soil conditioner from B&Q which has been quite good. I'm not giving them an advert but they are 5 minutes away so got a few visutes a week from me throught the first year. It would be cheaper to buy in bulk but I didn't have the money in bulk! Anyway it improved the soil a lot.

In the spring I had some birthday money to spend (on the garden,yeah!!) which went on some nice pots and a litre bottle of E.M. - Effective Microbes. If you haven't tried these before or heard of them, read up now and buy a bottle! What make healthy soil? A good soil structure, earthworms, and a thriving population of microbes! A womans best friend?

The formula for E.M. was devised over 20 years by a Japanese scientist Dr. Teruo Higa in a bid to reduce our reliance on artificial fertilizers and pesticides. The aim is instead to promote life and help ailing ecosystems.

When the bottle arrived I mixed some up (it goes far, you use it at 1% concentration in water) and watered a few tomato plants with it. In the morning I went into the greenhouse to check and it was like a cartoon, my eyes nearly popped out of my head at the difference!! It was like the plants had been in the gym over night, hard to explain but imagine an Olympic athlete full of energy and life compared to most of us on a Monday morning, going through the motions.
(Really shouldn't have used that phrase, I have dealt with other peoples motions, bowel ones, on a Monday morning and it ain't good).

Which takes us neatly onto the subject of poo!! What else does a girl need but poo? I purchased some goats poo through my local L.E.T.S. group, West Lothian which may have improved my soil and the herbs are meant to love it BUT my car still stinks on a warm day, two years later.
No, I like my poo closer to home so I got a couple of rabbits instead and a worm bin.

I like rabbits anyway and I must like worms 'cos I used to eat them (Iwas a baby, give me a break). The rabbits eat the bits and pieces from the garden like dandelion leaves and grass that I won't eat, then their poo feeds the worms. This year I got a 3 buckets of great looking compost from the worm bin plus lots of worms in the compost heaps and there is always plenty of rabbit poop and bedding for the heaps as well. Works great all round. Also it feels good having a kind of loop in the garden of ........ Plants - us/rabbits - worms/compost heap - soil - Plants.

One good thing about rabbit poo is that it can go straight on to the soil as it is well digested (twice) by the rabbits and so doesn't do any harm. I used it last winter as a mulch for a lot of plants to keep the worst of the winter of them.

I have also dug in left over compost from the tomatoes and molehills that I collected from the football pitch. And don't tell anyone, but after the donkey rides at last years Gala day there were some "presents" left lying so I took them home for the garden too. I got spotted doing it as well, and even I thought it was taking things a bit too far.

The soil now is much, much better and the plants are healthy. I keep watering the E.M. into the soil and spraying it about, I am sure last year it stopped the tomatoes getting blight. They showed all the signs of it, I sprayed like mad and the plants went healthy again. Also, I have to say it, when it has been watered in and sprayed around the garden is like the best ever sparkly fairy kingdom!!!! I am not quite sure what happens but something does. I put some E.M. in my muesli but it didn't turn me into a fairy. I maybe went a bit nutty though.

for E.M. and worms try http://www.bubblehouseworms.com/

Some photos from this year

Compost Heaps

I dived into the older compost heap, the one in the secret garden, on Thursday. Good job I was off work that day as the weather has been rotten since.
I dug around and got a few pounds of nice looking potatoes, not tried them yet, plus a load of compost. Some of this went into the polytunnel then the rest got bagged up in old compost bags for next spring. I am hopeful that I might not have to buy any compost next year, the first year in the garden I was down to B&Q nearly everyday!

I left half of the heap as it is thick with nettles, good for the butterflies.


I copied some information from this website about nettles (one of my favourite most useful plants) http://www.nettles.org.uk/

Let's take a look at those you may see in a sunny nettle patch.

	Red Admiral - Vanessa atalanta A common sight in gardens in the autumn where it will feed on Buddleja flowers and fallen fruit. Migrates from Africa each spring.
	Small Tortoiseshell - Aglais urticae The adults are frequent visitors to garden flowers.
	Peacock - Inachis io Unmistakeable resident butterfly with large distinctive 'eye-spots' on the wings.
	Comma - Polygonia c-album The comma was struggling in the early 1900's but has made a remarkable comeback and is moving steadily northwards. I have had mostly Cabbage White butterflies and a couple of the Tortoiseshells but not much else. The numbers of bees have been down this year as well, last year the secret garden was buzzing with dozens of bees, this year it is more like a dozen over the whole garden. Most gardens can fit in a little clump of nettles in a corner and they are easy to keep under some control, just keep cutting them down for compost then leave the last lot to pop up and flower and leave over winter. Very nutritious too in the spring, it is easy peasy to add a few leaves into your soup or indeed your soap but don't eat the soap. The potatoes on the compost heap are a free gift, any potato peelings I put on near the edge of the heap then when plants appear they grow out the sides and when they are ready I am forced into digging over the heap otherwise I won't get fed. I am not sure why I have had no problems with slugs at the spuds but although there are plenty of the wee blighters on the heap they don't seem to go for them. http://www.nettles.org.uk/

Plans, Wishes and Reality

This is the plan of our garden, we added the bit on the right side or as I like to call it "The Secret Garden". It isn't very secret but it is fairly hidden and had not been used at all in decades.

The first dig around to see what the soil was like made me think it was ok. Turns out, that must have been the dump corner as the rest of the soil was terrible!! Very heavy clay full of streaks of iron and under that is pure clay for a good 5 ft.

Add to that a lack of drainage for the whole area and I had to change most of the ideas that I had.

A tropical jungle was out, so was rows and rows of perfect looking veggies. The slugs see to that one.


My first step was to sit looking at as many photos of gardens as I could find, ones on the web that I liked the look of I put together in a folder. This was actually one of the most useful things that I did as sometimes it is hard to form a concrete picture in your head of what you are aiming for (no concrete).

Most of all this helped me realise what I really didn't want, which is flat, dull and full of overbred lifeless plants. The photo above was one I found that I liked, lots of colour and height.


My wish list:

• to be eating lots fruit and veg out of the garden
• for it to look a least a bit wild and jungle-ish.....lots of climbers, lots of height
• loads of herbs and flowers for cooking, and for using in soaps and creams etc. including the weird, unusual and poisonous!
• a couple of compost heaps and a worm bin
• wildlife friendly, lots of bees and butterflies please
• looks good and fairly low maintenance

......and a hammock to enjoy it all from, still waiting for that one!