Category: Garden / Allotment
Allotment Video Update 6th July 2013
The allotment so far this year has been about a very wet winter (which saw the demise of my early onion sets), and then very cold nights and late frosts. I think we’ve had cold nights well into June, which has made it really difficult to get plants established, and there hasn’t really been much to show, until now at least.
Allotment January 5th 2013
Harvested parsnips and sprouts, not bad about two meals worth.
Weeded and rough dug ground they were in, still too wet to dig properly.
Doesn’t look like over-wintering onion sets have survived the wet weather.
Retied raspberry canes were string had broken.
Rose Garden
Spent this morning clearing a wall in our garden to make way for some climbing roses.
Looks pretty uninteresting at the moment, but hopefully it will soon become a bit more colourful.
Roses (bareroot) have been ordered – Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Red) & The Generous Gardener (White).
Need to do a bit to the border in terms of some compost and also something along the wall for the roses to be able to climb up and be tied off to. This will be a bit of an ongoing project for a few weeks, but will hopefully result in colour and fragrance on that side of the garden in due course.
Planting A Bulb Pot: A Quick & Easy Job For The Weekend
This is a quick and easy way to bring spring colour to any garden, but time’s running out and you really need to do this now.
You’ll Need:
Large Flower Pots (bulbs need to be planted about 3-4 times as deep as the bulb is tall, so you’ll need a pot large enough for your largest bulbs) – I used troughs, but that’s just personal choice.
Crock (for drainage)
Compost or soil
Bulbs of your choice (in my case daffodils, tulips and crocus).
First place the crocks and a layer of compost in the bottom of the pots.
Now place the first of your bulbs, in this case my daffodils were the largest of the bulbs I had so they went in first.
Cover these with soil. You can leave the tips of the bulbs showing in order to help with placing the next layer of bulbs. In this case, tulips for me.
Again cover with soil, and repeat with the final layer of bulbs, in my case crocus.
Cover with soil, and gently firm the top. I leave a gap between the top of the pot and the soil to make watering easier.
Now place in the garden where you want them for the spring. Job done.
I used a mixture of daffodils (about 15), tulips (again about 15) and crocus (about 40). I bought mine from the local farm shop, because it allows me to support a small local business, plus they are cheaper than the garden centre and I can buy them loose or already bag. They were 60p/lb (450g) for daffodils, £1.75 for 20 crocus, and £2.50 for 15 Tulips.
They should bring some colour from late January right the way through to May. When they finished flowering the pots can be moved from the garden, but they need to be stored in sunlight in order to allow for the bulbs to recoup the energy expended in flowering. Leave the greenery on, as without this recharge the bulbs will not flower next year.
Marwood Hill Gardens and Tapeley Park
We’ve just come back from a week in Devon. The weather was showery but that didn’t stop us visiting a couple of the gardens in the area that are still open to the public. Most are seasonal and close at the end of September, but a few remain open until the end of October. Two of these are Marwood Hill and Tapeley Park. Both are quite small, and you can easily get round them in a day.
Marwood Hill.
This small garden is focussed around a large pond, with a variety of areas, and a number of national collections (see their website for details).
Tapeley Park
Broken into a number of different areas, including a kitchen garden and a permaculture garden has its main focus around an Italian themed garden.
Finally is anyone able to help me identify this plant? I assume looking at the flower type and leaves that it is a member of the Lily family, but that’s about as far as my skills are able to take me.
Splitting Time Between Allotment and Writing
If you follow me on twitter or know me in real life, you’ll know that next weekend I’m heading off to Bristol for CrimeFest. Consequently this means that I’ve been trying to get all the work on the allotment and in the garden that I would normally do in two weekends, squeezed into one.
Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as to be honest leaving things for a week doesn’t normally cause too many problems. Having said that, when I went down to the allotment yesterday I noticed that my gooseberry plants have quite a bit of fruit on them already, and there’s a chance that if I didn’t cover them up I could loose the crop to the birds.
Birds have an uncanny sense of knowing exactly when the fruit is at it’s perfect moment of ripeness, and then manage to strip a plant clean without so much as a second look.
So I decided that I would net the fruit bushes before next weekend, otherwise I might be too late, and miss out on this years crop. I suspect I won’t, but am not taking any chances!
Electronic Scrapbook 