If John Betjeman were a gardener...

Come friendly frosts and freeze those slugs!

Don’t cryogenically save mollusc thugs.

They’re top of the list of pestilent bugs.

Freeze over, kill!

Come, frost, and freeze to gristly blobs

Those devouring, trail-sliming, porkfattish yobs.

Wrecked leaves, wrecked stems, wrecked flowers, wrecked plants,

Wrecked harvest, wrecked plans.

Wordless Wednesday - Minus 3

A year-round crop

All gardening curtailed by snow (now melted) today, so instead I went in search of crocks.  Not to put in my plant pots for drainage, but to arrange my flowers in when picking season finally arrives.

A fine harvest today from local establishments of a charitable nature.

Couldn't buy new containers with this much character as cheaply and am delighted by my haul.  Can't wait to fill them later in the season.

At least they offer an alternative dream fuel to seed catalogues...

Looks like being microgreens this week....

Having just seen the forecast for below zero temperatures and snow in the coming week, I think this week will have to see me doing a planting of microgreens for the salad challenge.  I can do these indoors in a container, they won't take up too much space, and I should be able to crop them within two to three weeks. Will check in my seed box and see what leafy/beety crops I have the most seeds for, and use some of those.

Allotment reality: the good, the bad and the ugly

Waiting lists for allotments are overflowing throughout the UK - it seems everyone wants a bit of land to grow things on these days, or at least they like the idea of doing so. But having an allotment is a big commitment and requires a fair bit of input if you want to come anywhere near reaping the rewards of self sufficiency.

I'm a gardening obsessive with a large (urban) garden at home, I do the garden at a local infant school and have a full plot at a nearby allotment.  Sounds perfect... but... the reality is, I also have family commitments, want to go away for the odd weekend and generally have competing demands on my available labouring time.  Which means, in inevitable reality, that I don't get down to the allotment as often as I should, or would like to.

Which means this:

Top section of the plot

It will not remain this way!  Having given up the day job, I now have more time available to  attack such scenes of criminal couch grass and will allocate a minimum of a day a week to tackle my plot.

But it is important to know that this is what happens if you can't get to the allotment regularly - this was all cleared this time last year and is not the result of complete and utter neglect.  But neither is it a shining example of how to manage your allotment...

When you apply for a plot, be realistic about the time you have to work it - would a half or full plot be the best size? How much help will you get from friends, family to work it or will you be doing it alone?  What condition is the plot in when you get it?

I took on a neglected plot in 2006.  If you can clear the ground and keep it in cultivation, things get steadily better:

Regular work will take it from this to....

...this. Not perfect, but getting there.

The work needed to keep the ground usable gets less as each time you remove a crop, you also dig over the soil and take the weeds out, thus reducing the amount of work you need to do for planting the next crop.  If you inherit a neglected plot as I did, adopt a strategy of clear and plant, clear and plant - don't try to clear the whole plot in one go as it will become an exercise in futility - when you eventually finish clearing the whole thing, the first bit you did will be overgrown again!  Mentally divide the plot into sections and target specific areas to bring into cultivation each year.  You may even manage to get further than you expect!

If like me, you get a whole plot and need some helping hands, keep an ear to the ground for word of people you know on waiting lists - choose likeminded suspects and encourage them to get involved on your plot whilst they are waiting.  You could decide to allocate them a bit of plot which needs bringing into cultivation which you haven't yet tackled, or treat it as a shared enterprise and all just muck in together.  The latter approach has worked for me, but even with another family of plot-sloggers in tow, the shared issue of limited time, and the prolonged spell of wet weather has resulted in the sad scene in the first photo.

I aspire to this level of tidiness and organisation in 2013! 

Don't get me wrong,  I LOVE my plot and the site is a a fantastic place to escape and for the children to poke around, build dens, snaffle blackberries from the hedgerows and to pick fruit straight from the trees (only on my plot of course). The idyll which makes allotments so alluring is not without foundation - they are indeed magical places full of great character (and characters).  But they also require regular hours and effort so make sure you're in it for the long haul, or have a very understanding committee!

Wordless Wednesday - today at the allotment

The kindest cut

Inspired by getting my own straggly locks chopped off this morning, wielding my sharp secateurs and a disinfectant rag, I ventured into the thorny midsts of my roses today and took out all the lanky, dead and twiggy bits:  I want them to work hard for me in the cutting garden come early summer.

Most of my choices in the garden were made for glorious scent - the thing that turned me on to roses about 15 years ago. I was visiting a friend who suddenly exclaimed "Sniff that".  No, it wasn't anything more intoxicating than a beautiful white rose - and that was the start of my perfumed rose addiction.

I started off with 'Gertrude Jekyll'  (even though I thought I was buying Constance Spry).

Rosa 'Gertrude Jekyll'

She's beautifully perfumed and flowers well but does get a bit leggy and straggly so I had to reduce her height by about a third this afternoon. Sorry Gertrude, but you'll thank me for it later, I hope.  Growing at the back of the border, climbing up an obelisk,  the lower growing peonies and hardy geraniums hide her naked legs, and it's good to have her pink blossoms giving height to the overall scheme.

A later purchase delivered a  'Constance Spry' to keep Gertrude company in the same stretch of border. I cut this one back quite a lot last year without any loss of flower power, and as a result have slightly less work to do on the pruning front this year.

Rosa 'Constance Spry"

I'm always slightly tentative about cutting back Old English type David Austin roses as I don't want them to lose their relaxed, arching habit.  This same habit, however, does mean that for arranging they are best cut on a shorter stems as they tend to droop with their thinner stems and large, heavy flowers.  Or you can support them in denser arrangements with your filler flowers as below:

Here, they're arranged with my yellow floribunda rose 'Absolutely Fabulous' which lived up to its name from June to November with amazing repeat flowering despite the pouring rain. The deep pink rose pictured is a small shrub 'John Betjeman' which has fantastic colour but, like Ab Fab, little scent.  The jury is still out on this one as his stems are rather weak and spindly - the glorious colour, however, buys him another year of grace to see if he can merit his space with sturdier stalks after a prune.

My other loves are the petite Felicite Parmentier;  the most perfect shell pink cluster flowered rose with amazing scent, and Falstaff; another leggy scrambler of the deepest magenta hue and nostril-thrilling whiffage.

Felicite Parmentier

Falstaff and foxgloves

The harshest cut was today reserved for my newly planted hybrid teas.  I've cut the ones which weren't already shortened by the nursery to about half their previous size - want them to grow into nice sturdy plants with strong flower-bearing stems.  My new additions are Black Baccara and Peace roses - the former seems to be reliably dark and dusky. The latter, however, in the images I've seen, seems to vary wildly between pastel hued lemon/cream delicately fading to pink edges,  and horribly canary combined with  lipstick pink - so I'm waiting with bated breath to see how that one pans out.  Will keep you posted!

Can't wait for them all to put on a show for me come June and to breath those smells again.  (But before that will come their manure top dressing in spring - not quite so pretty...).

So what are you waiting for?  You can't do a lot else at this time of year.  Take up your secateurs, sturdy gloves and your tweezers for spike removal surgery afterwards.  Some time between now and the end of February, nip out between the showers and give your roses a prune.

For advice on rose pruning, check out the Royal Horticultural Society website

First salad leaves are in!

Twitter is a marvellous thing.  Having spent the morning weeding and clearing, my head was full of plans for newly cleared spaces and the salad challenge had slipped several rungs down my to-do list.  A quick break for lunch and a check of my email whilst downing a cup of tea, revealed a tweet from JP @gardengazelle saying that he/she was going to take up the challenge as well.  This reminded me that I'm going to be organised this year!  So I duly fished out some seeds and dug out a container from the depths of the shed.

(Actually, having paced around the garden for a while this morning, I spotted that the central bed is already sprouting lots of Lambs Lettuce 'Elan' - not that I planned or planted it.  It has self seeded happily since I first sowed it about three years ago, and now is always one of the first things to appear in an early mild spell.  So, maybe I should count this as my first salad crop and ban supermarket purchases from here on in?)

I chose a tin trough for this  batch of salads, purely because it is a decent size and has a base narrow enough to fit on my porch windowsill.  I don't like sowing salads in small pots because they can't produce enough to feed my bunch of gaping-mouthed cuckoos - whatever I sow in has to be large enough sprout a decent serving-size.  Children's voracious munching of plant material is surely a testament to the taste of homegrown salad.

For this batch I used peat-reduced multipurpose compost and mixed it with some perlite and sharp sand to improve the drainage so that seedlings aren't stuck in damp, cold, clag.

Filled the bottom of the trough (which has drainage holes in it already) with bits of polystyrene packaging from our bountiful Christmas supply. 

Mixed a few pinches of seed together for my salad mix - 'Red Salad Bowl' lettuce is a fantastic cut and come again variety,  lamb's lettuce 'Elan' as it seems very happy in current conditions judging by my outdoor crop, and mustard 'Red Frills' just because I have envelopes full of seed waiting to be used up!

Sowed it on top of the compost quite thickly as I find that sowing generously for cut and come again salads doesn't seem to affect them greatly - you can thin them out by pulling some out entirely and eating them if they are too dense and germinate too well!  Covered the seeds lightly with fine compost and gently firmed it down before watering.

I even remembered to add a label so that I know when my deadline is for my next sowing.

I've put the trough on a tray in my porch, but have put a layer of grit sand in the tray so that the base of the trough doesn't sit in the cold and wet too much (have run out of coarse grit, so must add that to my next garden shopping trip).  Have covered it with a couple of propagator lids - not because I think it needs it, but just to keep the cats from sitting on my seedlings (again).

HAZARD

The 52 week salad challenge

I've just taken up Veg Plotting's 52 week salad challenge, and for me, this will mean trying to sow a salad crop each week.  It will also mean trying to NOT buy salad leaves from the supermarket from the date of harvesting my first crop.  This may mean venturing into foraged leaves at certain points - will have to dip into "The Forager's Handbook" by Miles Irving, or my new Christmas book "The Hedgerow Handbook" by Adele Nozedar.  Both of these have some great ideas which I haven't yet sampled - for example pineapple weed and sow thistle leaves added to salads...

And salads can look so pretty too - on the plate, and growing:

I've long since discovered that they taste so much better when picked and eaten fresh, but have never before tried to be systematic about keeping the supply going.  An interesting experiment which I plan to attack tomorrow.

Will sow some mixed leaves in a container which I'll put in my porch - warmer than my unheated greenhouse so should be able to get the seeds germinating quite quickly if the weather stays as mild as it is at present.

Red frills mustard is really easy, pretty AND tasty. Also seeds prolifically so I have oodles of seed to sow!

New blooms for New Year

They didn't quite make it in for Christmas, but my forced hyacinths decided to join the party for New Year. (Note to self - must make a note of when I start them off next year, so I can guesstimate how to adjust the timing to get them to flower for the start of the festive season).

Not bad for pound shop bulbs - a cheap present for myself.   Trying to forecast the colour was a bit like guessing delightful plastic content of a Christmas cracker. Their hyacinthy scent has replaced defunct piney wafts from my crispy tree in the living room, breathing a bit of floral life into 2013.  It's the first time I've forced hyacinths in water and have to confess that I have become quite taken with the aesthetic qualities of  their fleshy, slightly creepy, white roots in the glass vases.

 Look at that blue! What a great colour to bring in the year.

On which note, thought I'd better show you something amazing which I spotted outside my window this morning.

Happy New Year and a fruitful and floriferous 2013 to all!