Autumn glory in the garden

This gallery contains 10 photos.

The bliss of allotment taskitude

There was no one else there, just me, the sun, the moon and the stereo robins.  I like my allotment neighbours very much, but I like them best when they’re not there.

And so the combination of tasks and solitude was able to work its magic once again.  “Taskitude” is such a renewing experience. Solitude of itself is wonderful, but combining it with a task somehow seems to allow your mind to wander even more freely.

Battered beansticks and sideways sprouts

And the joy of a scruffy allotment like mine is that there’s always a task of some sort waiting to be done.   It means you can pick a job to suit your frame of mind or energy level – whether it’s full-on aggressive digging, fence-mending, fiddly weeding, trying (again) to salvage the swaying shed, or even breaking new ground in the less-cared-for corners.

This time, post-viral and weary, I had only gone to gather sprouts and leeks for tea, and took the fork just in case I had the energy to dig up more potatoes.

Well, dig the potatoes I did, and the leeks, and harvested the sprouts.  Already re-energised, I gazed at the wreckage of the beanpoles, tottering and fragile even before they were brought down by the Christmas storms.

Ah yes – the perfect task for a weary body!  The wreckage was slowly unravelled and triaged into long sticks, short sticks and bonfire fodder.   All the wire ties were salvaged for reuse next year.  The sticks are willow, grown on arches in the garden and the allotment.  They’re not ideal – a bit bendy for bean poles to start with, and a brittle within a couple of years.  But they’re free, sustainable and rustic looking.  And they do the job.  What more could you ask of a stick?

It was glorious slow-motion, time-wasting allotmenteering.  Gardening for other people is always against the clock, balancing appearance, thoroughness and time.    I’d done just the same task – deconstructing beanpoles – for customers a couple of months earlier and remember feeling stressed at the time it was taking.  “Pottering” gardening is the truly restorative kind.

And so eventually I left the sun and the moon and the stereo robins, bearing almost more than I could carry in mid-winter bounty and feeling restored.  And that’s what allotments are for.

Season of mists and mega-fruitfulness

The allotment has never looked worse and has never produced more –  a useful reminder that neatness and fruitfulness should never be mistaken for each other.

A kindly summer has meant that even with minimal attention, the crops have flourished.  While I was hospital-visiting, the plot was just quietly getting on with growing.   Well done that plot.

The King Edward potatoes, bought loose from a sack in the village store, have produced ridiculous numbers of perfect spuds.  Most of them are still languishing in the ground under a dome of weeds.  I’ll dig them as I need them over the winter, and enjoy baked potatoes and mash to warm me up on cold evenings.  Luckily I now know the butter I’ll pile over the top is just what the doctor ordered (just the one doctor, but I’ll happily take his word for it).

Courgettes are still producing in late October, butternut squash has made fantastic soup and roasts, my first-ever Brussels sprouts are delicious and plentiful.   There are more beetroot and onions than I know what to do with, parsnips galore, endless spinach and leeks I haven’t even started on yet.

The only weak link is the carrots – not so much baby carrots as foetus carrots.   In their defence, I never thinned them out, and they were lucky to get planted in the first place.  They’ve done as well as they could in their straitened circumstances.

I’ll gradually fight back the weeds over the winter, but will try to remember that even the shabbiest plot can be working away quietly on a bountiful harvest.   Appearances can definitely be deceptive.

Garden gallery: June bursts forth

This gallery contains 11 photos.

Spring rudely interrupted

A vicious nor’easter is howling through the house and snow has been blowing horizonally past the front window all day.  The green shoots and yellow flowers of spring are lost to sight.  The White Company has painted the world.

The daffodils are battered; the snowdrops are buried

But for the weather, the allotment would have been calling. Some early work has already been accomplished: the tumbledown shed has been patched up and Creosoted; the rhubarb has been freed from its tangled web of couch grass.  The potatoes are chitting on the windowsill, and leeks and sweet peas are in the propagator.

But much remains to be done, and at least a week will have been lost by the time the cold snap eases.   The ground will be cold for planting too, with night-time temperatures plunging several degrees below zero.   Finding some giant plastic sheets to warm the ground will be a good idea.

The plum blossom had just burst too, so this year’s harvest may already have been compromised.  No jam tomorrow.

But as always, weird weather brings benefits too.   A hectic weekend has given way to a day of enforced rest.  The late burst of winter has brought hungry birds back into the garden too:  a chaffinch tucking into seeds on the patio table; mob-handed starlings driving dainty bluetits from the fatballs; a robin trying to balance on the feeders;  blackbirds hanging out gloomily near the house, forced to think about food when their minds had been on other matters.

Camellia nobilissima is braving the snow

And not just the blackbirds: we’d all allowed our thoughts to turn to spring, led astray by last week’s burst of warmth.

The Met Office is now musing about a possible colder-than-average run right into April.  As my mum has been pointing out for years, in the face of snow-strewn Christmas cards and popular psychology, Easter is often colder than Christmas.  This year, she may well be right again.

First tastes of spring

After a season of sad farewells, spring is marching inexorably onwards, reminding us that in the midst of death we are in life.

Hellebores are thriving under the twisted hazel

Snowdrops are standing brilliant white against the brown earth, crocus flames are lighting up the ragged grass, hellebores are modestly hiding their beauty beneath their downcast purple heads.  Winter-flowering shrub honeysuckle is spreading its exquisite scent beside the shed and even lungwort is flowering in its pinky-bluey tones.

The first daffodils are just about to burst their buds, but primroses and primulas have beaten them to it.  The first camellias are out too, and the twisted stems of the corkscrew hazel are alive with catkins.  The furry buds of magnolia stellata are full of promise against the brown wood of the shed.

False spring this may be, with another blast of winter set to hit, but it’s a joy to see such signs of life after a long winter.

The birds are falling for it too: blackbirds, blue tits and jackdaws have all been spotted preparing their family quarters.  Great tits and finches are calling from nearby trees.  In the woods the birdsong has reached orchestral  levels.

Camellias are putting on a dazzling early display

And there’s nothing like a bit of spring sunshine to get the season’s gardening under way.   On Tuesday I worked til dusk chopping back the huge willow branches sprouting from the arch (recklessly planted at the end of the garden when I imagined a romantic green arbour rather than a lifetime of lopping).   The sun went down in a rose-streaked sky and a fox came sniffing into the field.

Rose-pruning has been equally satisfying – Félicité Perpétué (another reckless planting choice) has been brought back to some sort of order, and Albéric Barbier, sharing its quarters on the aforementioned willow arch, has been tamed for another season. This is the most precious rose I own, a cutting from my mother’s garden, where its pinkish buds and creamy white ruffled flowers enchanted me long before I had my own garden to plant one in.

General tidying has begun – seedheads are best left until spring so the birds can take their pick, but I must confess to restoring a bit of order.   It’s also fascinating to see what plants have survived the onslaught of winter, and just wandering  round is a delight, reminding oneself of lost friends and things that you’d forgotten even planting.

Spring proper may not be here yet, but the promise of life is written across the frosted ground.

Earthy Paradise Lost

It’s a shame Time Team is being abolished.  I could have asked the lovely Tony Robinson and his crew to come and have a look for my allotment. It’s disappeared under a Sleeping Beauty-esque landscape of weeds and brambles, but I’m sure a professional excavation team could find it again.    I left it there somewhere just a few weeks ago.

Anyway, in the absence of Tony and his team, I’ve had to resort to my own diggity-digging.  Two hours of hard labour has found the first traces of where the beds might have been.  Two long-forgotten slug planks were unearthed, relics from earlier in the summer.  I’m not going to tell you what happened next, but let’s just say the slugs didn’t get rehomed in the lane this time…

The strawberry bed is a rampant river of green that has burst its banks and spilled over into all neighbouring land.    The maincrop potatoes are still in the ground under layers of willowherb, grass and dandelions.  Leeks are being strangled by more of the same.  The swedes and beetroots are nestling in another weedstrewn patch, but are at least looking nice and fat.  And yes, I’m still factory-farming slugs. Industrial quantities of the blighters, and I haven’t spotted my toady friends for a while.

Anyone who is not familiar with the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum” should come and take a look.  It’s amazing how quickly nature will take back land it spots as vacant, like some sort of cosmic squatter.

It’s hard to claim I’ve enjoyed the allotment over the past couple of months.  One single night of frost has killed the courgettes and butternut squashes.  The green beans, decimated by slugs early in the season, finally got going, only to be afflicted by some sort of brown spotty disease.  Even the rhubarb appears to have been stripped almost bare by other allotmenteers who were granted picking rights.

It’s been a lot of work for not much return, hardly surprising given the year’s historically appalling weather.  But even if there’s not much to harvest, it’s always a great place to be still, to think, to dig and to be grateful.   And for bountiful crops, there’s always next year.

Robins sing in a new season

The robins have appeared out of nowhere, singing their wistful, melancholy songs of autumn from hidden corners of the garden.  Summer’s only just got going but the signs of change are all around.

The bright pink balloons of phlox are beginning to fade, and the lavender is turning brown.   The evening primrose is nothing but straggly seedheads and even the heleniums are past their prime.

Helenium Moorheim Beauty catches the August sun

The buddleia is on its way out, after a summer entertaining butterflies – peacocks, tortoiseshells, red admirals and gatekeepers.   The beautiful bee-friendly allium sphaerocephalon has packed away its purple flowerheads for another year and only brown pollen-free shells are left.    The vibrant red splash that was crocosmia Lucifer has come and gone too.

Here be dragons: Crocosmia Lucifer provides a tropical splash

Now it’s the turn of rudbeckias and hibiscus to shine.  Japanese anemones are going strong too, flowering at head height in a corner with almost no light at all.  They’ve crept in under the fence and made themselves at home, thank you very much.   Gertrude Jekyll has a second flush of beautifully scented, exquisitely carved roses and the self-grown golden rod is in its prime.

Rudbeckias make a sunny splash in the autumn garden

For all its heralding of a season of harshness and decay, I love the autumn.  It’s a season of change, of the first chilly air on your face and of the grass heavy with dew in the morning.   Later the leaves will change into their autumn collection of colours too, but it’s the first subtle hints that I love.

We’re bidding farewell to one of the oddest summers ever: the wettest early part of the season since records began, a drought before that, and a stop-start August.  Who knows what kind of a winter the autumn is ushering in.  Maybe the robins’ song is partly a prayer to ward off the worst.

Summer memories: phlox, perovskia, allium, crocosmia, lavender and lots of lovely weeds

My new BFF (best froggy friend)

As I lie on the sofa typing this, I am officially a three-toad sloth.

Yes my latest slug patrol on the allotment uncovered not just Biblical levels of slugs, but three actual toads.   To be precise: the common toad, bufo bufo – so good they named it twice.

Now I never thought I’d be the sort of person to be overjoyed at the presence of toads, but then again I only recently discovered my life was incomplete without a demijohn, so things do change.    If you knew in your 20s what you’d care about in your  40s, you’d die of shame.

The bufo bufo trio – two big ‘uns and this reddish baby – were nestling under three different slug planks:

Fantastic organic slug control!  As I took away a large tub packed to the rafters with slugs and snails for rehoming in the lane, I felt rather guilty that perhaps I’d taken away their tea.

I’m sure I need not worry.  The slugs are multiplying faster than Met Office weather warnings and I’m sure a whole toad commune could set itself up on the allotment and not go hungry.

The arrival of the toad family does mean rethinking how the slug planks work – most of them double as walkways, so I’ll now have to make sure they’re wedged off the ground with something so that toads don’t get squashed.  Maybe the best way will be to fit small cross-struts on the underside of each plank.  Another job for next winter when not much else is happening…

The marvellous discovery of the toads came as I returned to the allotment after a few days’ absence caused by illness and yet more rain.  I picked the last strawberries and the first raspberries in joyful mood to the accompaniment of greenfinches and  a green woodpecker.

Opium poppies have grown themselves and are a huge hit with the bees

A red admiral has also been sighted, and the bees are going crazy round the bed of opium poppies.  Hmm, an interesting idea has just occurred for a profitable new crop to take people’s minds off the weather…

But back to the toads: I love tautological critters anyway – I’ve long been a fan of  buteo buteo (buzzard) and  troglodytes troglodytes (wren).  So a tautological slug-muncher ticks several boxes on my list of Most Desirable Allotment Inhabitants.

In my thriving wildlife community, I hope my bufo bufo friends live long and prosper. And guys, can you start with the onion patch please?

An English country garden

This gallery contains 14 photos.