Better late than never

The title is supposed to refer to gardening, but it could just as well refer to the blog post itself. I've made a very slow start on gardening this year. It started with, I wish I'd cleaned out the greenhouse in the autumn, when proper gardeners do it, and progressed through, Those brambles are getting out of hand, to, If the weather's going to muck around like this, what's the point?

Somehow, though, I did manage to get the greenhouse clean and ready to use, and started clearing beds ready for planting. In the second week in May - rather later than just about anyone else - I got potatoes in the ground...

I couldn't bring myself to dig up that flowering broccoli, and the comfrey is a permanent fixture.

... shortly followed by peas.

The raspberry cane in the middle of this bed was also left, obviously. The comfrey in the far corner is a recent development, but is becoming a permanent fixture.

Both of these are just starting to show their first leaves, which lifts the spirits greatly. My friend Maggs gave me some plants - brassicas and curcubits - which also lifted the spirits. She offered them before asking whether I had any evening primrose going spare. I probably shouldn't have confessed to composting them - they grow like weeds in my garden - but I was glad to have a bucketful to give her in exchange. Today I finished clearing the bed for brassicas and other, so I should be getting those in tomorrow. Maybe I will have a veg garden this year.

Seed audit and planning

The first step in planning what seeds to buy was to find my seed pot. It was on the floor just there for ages, but then I tidied up... I found it eventually, and there are quite a lot of seeds in it.

Seeds, various. Very various.

A lot of these are old, but I think I'll take a chance on them and only buy what I haven't already got. I have:-

• Field beans, some old, some saved, possibly mouldy
• Dutch brown beans, saved
• Borlotto beans, old
• Peas, old-ish, Exzellenz, not enough
• Brocolli, some old, some masses of saved
• Red cabbage, old but masses of them
• Spring onions, two varieties, at least one of which is fresh
• Hokkaido squash, just four seeds
• Carrots, old
• Root parsley
• Parsnips, saved
• Leeks, saved (hopefully)
• Chard, two varieties
• Fennel, old but lots
• Purslane
• Basil
• Beetroot
• Borage
• Nasturtiums
• Sweet peas

To add to these, I now have anise hyssop and primroses - thank you Sara! This is a pretty good selection, before I've even bought anything. I've decided against growing tomatoes this year, as they need a lot of attention and I've yet to get a decent crop. Carrots would be off the list if I didn't already have seeds - I'm not sure whether to bother sowing them or not. Peas do well, so I'll get more of those. Similarly potatoes - I tried one of the blight resistant Sarpo varieties last year, and I'd like to grow those again. I'll also add courgettes and sweetcorn to the list.

The only other veg I'm wondering about is asparagus. My seed-grown plants have mostly failed, and I do like asparagus a lot. I wonder whether plants grown from crowns might be strong enough to withstand some slug-chewing? Or if not, whether I might be able to defend a few plants successfully? Given the otherwise short shopping list, it might be worth a go.

Fork handle (just the one)

I have a hand fork for gardening that has just two prongs, both somewhat pointed. I've no idea where I got it from because it never would have occurred to me to buy such a thing, but it turns out to be incredibly useful for weeding in stony ground. Recently, I have mostly been using it for transforming the garden path.

About eighteen months ago, years of neglect took their toll on the handle and it fell apart. I then lost the metal part, before rediscovering it some time later, still stuck in the ground. Onwards a few months to the new terrace I made last January, and I had quite a few offcuts of oak left over. I wondered... maybe I could use one of those to make a new handle?

I chose the thickest piece and cut it to length. Most of the work I did with a small, sharp craft knife, starting with taking off the bark. Before I started on shaping the handle, I took a chisel to the end, and trimmed it down so it would fit into the small collar on the fork.

Trimming the handle to fit into the collar

Once I had that trimmed down to size, I set to work whittling the main part of the handle into a comfortable shape to hold. I enjoyed this bit. The next bit was not quite so much fun; I had to make a hole for the metal part to fit into. Not fancying my chances of controlling an electric drill, I used a gimlet, which was effective but slow. I may have run out of patience and tried to fit the two parts together before the hole was quite finished. Of course, once I'd smacked the metal bit in as far as it would go (not quite far enough), I couldn't get it out again

The two parts fitted together

As you can see, the metal section sticks out some way before opening out into the two tines. This means the collar is free to move up and down a bit. As I slammed the metal into place, a couple of small cracks opened up in the wood, but they didn't split the handle open.

There's a small crack visible here.

To finish, I coated the wood liberally in a wax polish - I think it was beeswax melted into linseed oil, which sets surprisingly hard. I paid particular attention to the cracks, filling them so that dirt wouldn't get in and maybe enlarge them.

As well as being very satisfying to make something like this, even if I didn't do it quite as well as I'd have liked, the result is a tool that's a real pleasure to use. Because I held it in my hand to check it as I went along, I have something made exactly to fit my hand. Also, the wax polish has a lovely feel to it. After a good deal of work on the garden path, the fork handle now looks well used.

Perhaps the muddy finish doesn't feel quite so nice to hold as the wax.

I should probably clean it up and give it another coat of polish.

Seed saving

Saving seeds from one crop to plant next year seems like an obvious thing to do if you're inclined towards self-sufficiency. It's not always straightforward, though. I usually save peas and beans, even though it means sacrificing a part of the crop, but this year it was so wet at the time the beans were ripening that they never dried out, and then they got eaten by something that no doubt appreciated the soft, soaked beans. I'm not sure it would have helped bringing them into the conservatory to dry, as the damp is everywhere.

I did bring leek seed heads into the conservatory, though. These have the added complication of being biennial, like parsnips (which I also saved this year), so a few need leaving in the ground for a second year if you want seeds.

Parsnip seed heads, drying. I haven't dared look to see what state they're in, yet.

My approach to flower gardening is mostly to try and move wild flowers into the flower bed. This year, in amongst the brambles by the fence, one honesty plant appeared. I'm fond of honesty for both the purple flowers in summer and the silvery seed disks at this time of year, as well as for the name (I demand honesty in my garden!).

Honesty, slugging it out with the brambles

I collected a few of the disks the other day and was surprised to find I had as many as 25 seeds in there.

I'm sure I only picked a few disks. So many seeds!

I was going to just throw them on the ground, but when I looked at the place I planned to throw them, it was already occupied.

There's far more grass in other parts of the flower bed, but even so, this is a little crowded

I went out today and dug up a few of the weeds, then scatted my honesty seeds and a bit of leaf mould on top, for good measure. Given that they're wild flowers, I'm reasonably optimistic that something will come up next year. I'll let you know!

Rediscovering the garden path

Thanks to months of neglect, the path from our front door towards the road has become very overgrown. This is only a problem because that makes it slippery. Other paths, the ones I made myself, have completely disappeared, but I'm ignoring those for the time being because walking on them isn't essential. The main path needs attention.

The attention I'm giving it involves digging up the top layer of path and separating the plants from the stones, the first going in a bucket and then the compost heap and the second going back on the path. Ideally, soil, worms and other living things also go in the bucket, but that isn't so easy to achieve. It's slow, fiddly work and I won't even try to do any when it's actually raining, so it's done in short bursts, a bucketful or two at a time, in the gaps between the rain.

The trick, I find, is not to think about how much is still left to do, but to focus on the improvement I've made. To start with that was, When I put my foot just there I won't slip. I didn't take a picture at that time, it would have been too disheartening. I did take a picture a couple of days ago:

Even though I'm trying not to think about the size of the job as a whole, it does feel better to have got over halfway along (ignoring the other areas of path and driveway that could do with the same treatment).

I'll just keep at it until either I finish the path or some other task is a more pressing use of not-raining daylight hours.

Foraging vs. gardening, and our place in nature

A discussion on a facebook foraging group the other day has prompted me to write about something that I've been thinking about for some time, now. The discussion started with,

Not to open a can of worms as it were, but I thought this site was to help promote the sustainable collecting of wild produce, as well as edible plant identification. By sustainable I mean taking enough for us humans to enjoy as a treat but leaving enough for wildlife to eat as an essential to survive winter. Some of the posts though show such large quantities being collected which will quite possibly impact on wildlife survival, including birds, squirrels, mice, voles etc. Do we humans always have to be greedy at the expense of other creatures?

and towards the end included suggestions about heating up the can of worms on a bonfire, but being sure to leave some worms in the can for the blackbirds, and whether it's best for a blackbird to learn to use a can opener, or simply train a human to do it as and when required.

Chestnuts. Should I leave these for the woodland animals?

While I'm all for respecting and supporting wildlife, I have several problems with this position (the original post, not teaching blackbirds to use can openers). Firstly, while this point of view is common amongst foragers, it's very rare amongst gardeners. It may just be that there are two groups of people with very different standards, but I suspect that the concept of ownership has a lot to do with it. In my garden, where I have toiled and nurtured, the plants are mine and I'm entitled to harvest all of them, with no regard to what the wildlife might want. Indeed, gardeners go to great lengths to protect their crops from being eaten by other animals, and it's very rare to hear any disapproval of this behaviour.

Squash. How about these? Should I have left these too?

It's not just the inconsistency that bothers me; this highlights what the alternative to foraging is. Gardening is akin to farming: Deliberate cultivation of crops on land designated as being for that purpose. One viewpoint expressed in the facebook debate was that we don't need to forage if we can afford to buy our food from shops, implying that this is the default, neutral position.

Let's think about that, shall we? Food bought from shops is farmed, almost universally. There's a spectrum of farming practices, but they all involve identifying pieces of land as farmland and making efforts to keep wildlife from eating the crops on that land. People may debate the methods used, but does anyone say to a farmer, You must leave those caterpillars alone, they have as much right to the cabbages as you do!? Actually, it's possible that some people might say this, but I think you'll agree that this is an extreme point of view. It's generally accepted that farming involves keeping as much of the crop as possible for humans, not caterpillars.

If the default, neutral position involves, at the very least, displacing wildlife, what then of foraging? Taking wild food certainly deprives other animals of it, but otherwise doesn't disturb them much, unlike farming. Foraging, then, surely has a lower impact on wildlife than farming.

The next question has to be whether foraged food supplements or replaces farmed food. In other words, do we eat just the same amount of farmed food when we forage, or do we eat less? The answer to this is not straightforward. One possibility is all the food that is necessary for survival and good nutrition comes from farmed or home-grown sources. In this scenario, any foraged food is additional to this, treats and luxuries that we simply wouldn't have if we didn't forage.

Another possibility is that when we forage, we reduce the amount of food we eat from other sources. Even if the type of food we forage ends up as luxuries, for example sloe gin, we would have bought some equivalent luxury, perhaps another liqueur, if we didn't have the foraged food. This second possibility also covers cases where foraged food replaces more essential food items, such as foraged nettles or fat hen substituting for spinach or spring greens.

If the first possibility was mainly the true situation, then foraging really would be an additional impact on wildlife. There would be a simple choice between taking wild food and not taking it. However, I think the second possibility is much more likely to be true. We do not add to our diet with foraged food, we replace some of the farmed food with wild.

The person who started the recent debate, who is far from alone in this view, considers wild food to be treats for humans, but essential for wild animals. Even for those whose foraged food is only sloe gin or blackberry and apple crumble, which are certainly treats, I think this misses the point if - as I suspect is usually the case - these treats are substitutes for alternative treats. Even with treats, foraging is an alternative to farming, not additional to it.

What really bugs me about this point of view, though, was expressed by another member of the facebook discussion. It reflects a view of human beings as separate from the natural world. The bounties nature world are not for us, they are for wild animals. We have other sources of food, other than what we might forage.

This treats the farms where our food is grown as being apart from nature; as having no impact on it. Of course, people who express this view are not thinking about the farms, but that's part of the problem. When you think about it, farmland obviously has a huge impact on wildlife. Everything we do interacts with nature, because we are part of nature. Just like all the other wild animals, we have to eat, and that food has to grow somewhere.

From the point of view of being one animal amongst many, and needing to feed myself as much as any other animal does, I feel that I have as much right to nature's bounty as the next animal, especially when the next animal happens to be a slug.

One mushroom - a cep, I believe - that I didn't get to first.

Thoughts on gardening

Today marks the fifth anniversary of us buying our house here. I was going to write a post about what I've learnt over the last five years, but failed to get my thoughts in any kind of order, so here's a more focused post on gardening, that I started a little while ago.

I have gradually come to the conclusion that I'm not much of a gardener. Or, to put it in a more positive light, I'm more of a forager than a gardener. My foraging challenge was a huge success, overshooting the target of 52 wild foods by some margin, whereas my gardening challenge fizzled out after a few weeks (I just mistyped that as a a few weeds. I was tempted to leave it.) If we go back to the beginning, it was elderflower champagne that inspired me to try this lifestyle. The tree may have been growing in my garden, but those were foraged flowers, not cultivated. The part of gardening that I really like is harvesting.

Elder trees also produce berries, if you don't pick all of the flowers

I've tried to embrace the idea that I should garden for the sake of the activity, not the end result, but without much success. If I'm honest, I only really enjoy gardening when I see results. Digging over a patch of ground is very satisfying because it completely transforms it (the workout is good, too). Planting out seedlings can be good, if the bed looks tidy and full of promise at the end of the job. Weeding too, to some extent, but only if the bed was very untidy to start with, and really, that's just housework outdoors, and housework is not my forte. Ultimately, though, it's all about the harvest. Try as I might, I can't see the point of sowing carrots if I don't get to eat carrots. I did sow carrots this year, but saw no sign of them. I can only assume that the slugs got them all as soon as they appeared. I find this very demoralizing.

After writing the previous paragraph, I went back and re-read Eco Cat Lady's The Mythical Land of Done (part of an earlier conversation on the subject of my garden anxiety), which puts the Do things for their own sake argument very clearly. She uses the example of doing the dishes, which is a task you can never get done because there are always more, so it's futile to think in terms of getting the job out of the way. I think I get it. The other day I chose to do a bit of gardening before going out, and reflected that I'd be enjoying it a lot more if I hadn't given myself a deadline for getting the task finished. Indeed, I have learned to stop hating the dishes, and accept the task as part of my day. Still, though, I don't do the dishes for the sake of doing the activity; I do them for the sake of having clean dishes, in the same way that I plant vegetables for the sake of eating vegetables.

OK, trying to make sense of this... There are very few things we do for their own sake; eating and drinking, singing and dancing, you can probably think of one or two others. Most things we do for the sake of the end result, be if we focus too much on the result, we risk rushing through trying to tick things off without appreciating that all that doing is what life is made of. Yes, the point of doing the dishes is to get clean dishes, but try to accept that the task is part of life and engage with it, rather than wishing is was done. How does this relate to gardening? Well, it leaves harvestable veg as the main point of growing veg. If I'm not getting a harvest I'm happy with, it's a waste of time trying to grow the plants, even if the activity is fairly enjoyable. At the same time, it shouldn't feel like a terrible chore going out into the garden. If I'm having to really push myself to do it, I should either change my attitude, or stop.

There's another thing: Slugs. They eat tiny seedlings with no regard for letting plants get bigger. If only they'd leave them to grow a bit, there'd be enough to share, but they won't. Four years after my first asparagus seedlings, there's just one plant left. The slugs ate all the spears as soon as they emerged and didn't give the plants a chance to build up their strength, so they all died. I had forty; I now have one. This upset me a lot. Even so, I will not use slug pellets. It's not a nice way to die and, whatever the manufacturers say, I can't believe they won't end up poisoning animals that prey on slugs, which I'd much rather encourage. Instead, I stamp on the slugs, which I hate doing. I really, really hate it. This does not make it pleasant to be out in the garden.

Looking back at blog posts from previous years, I see that gardening has caused me considerable anxiety from the start. Maybe I should just give it up.

No!

No, I really don't like that idea at all. Why not?

Yesterday, I picked a few green beans and some peas, and that made me happy in the same way that foraging makes me happy. I really do like the harvesting part, and I'd be sorry to lose it. In that case, I need to find a more positive attitude to gardening so I can carry on doing it. Firstly, I have to deal with those slugs. I've tried copper wire, I've tried beer traps, I've tried ash and egg shells, and none of these have much impact. I can't bear stamping on them and the current approach of staring at them in resignation isn't doing any good at all. I went out to pick a couple of leeks this evening and found a dozen baby slugs on one leaf. One leaf! In the absence of better alternatives, I shall return to Plan A and relocate them. This time, though, I won't be assuming that a railway is sufficient barrier to stop them coming back. No, I'll relocate them just a little further away, into the stream. Just upstream of the waterfall. It may be less humane than stamping on them, but better than many of the alternatives. They may even survive (slugs don't drown. Putting them in a bucket of water has to be the worst way of getting rid of them. Zombie slugs!) but surely won't come back up a waterfall? Surely not?

OK, that's my plan for dealing with slugs, now how about the demoralizing lack of results? I think I can divide veg into three categories: A few, namely potatoes, peas and green beans, seem to grow reasonably well in my garden. I might not get a huge crop, but I'll almost certainly get something from them. Leeks, broccoli and parsnips can be nudged into this category with a bit of TLC (mostly slug defenses). These are the veg I should focus on, those that will almost certainly reward my efforts with some sort of a crop. There are others that I haven't yet managed to get a decent crop from: Carrots and onions fail consistently (I had some success with shallots, but the price of sets made that far too expensive as an alternative to onions) which are so cheap to buy that I don't mind too much if I can't grow them. More disappointingly, I've yet to get a decent tomato crop - I just can't give them the consistency of care that they need. Occasionally forgetting to close the greenhouse skylight on a chilly night does tomatoes no good at all. I've decided to stop trying to grow these crops, as it's just setting myself up for disappointment. Finally, there are those that are less predictable: Cabbages, courgettes, pumpkins, sweetcorn, broad beans. These might produce large amounts of delicious food, or might fail completely. If I'm going to grow these, I need to accept that it's a gamble. I'm not a gambler by nature, so this isn't easy for me, but I'll give it a go. These will be the ones to go by the wayside if I'm finding it all a bit much, and if I do get them in the ground, it'll be a bonus if I get anything from them.

This, then, is my plan for re-engaging with the garden. Focus my efforts on things that are fairly reliable, don't bother with things that never do well, try to accept the unpredictable nature of those in between, and throw slugs over the waterfall.

A few updates

I'm not doing very well with regular blog posts this year, so here's a bit of a catch up on some things I've left hanging.

Solar panels
The big project. When I last wrote about these, I was waiting for sunshine to see how they'd do.

Well, they work, but they don't put a huge amount of heat into the tank. I found this very demoralising at first, but Ian pointed out that it takes quite a few hours to put a significant amount of heat into that tank with fire, so I should feel too bad about modest performance from a couple of old radiators. There are one or two more things I could do that might improve performance. In the meantime, we've had warm-ish water out of the taps this summer, instead of cold, in spite of weather that barely qualifies for the name, summer.

Shower
It turned out that we really do want a different temperature in the kitchen than the shower, so we were forever turning the valve up or down, and trying to remember where we'd left it. Also, the temperature at the shower head wasn't entirely determined by the valve in the cupboard across the hallway; whether or not the underfloor heating was on made quite a big difference to how much heat was lost between the two. Added to that, the valve started to get sticky. I think maybe these valves shouldn't be treated this way. We needed an upgrade. One new thermostatic mixer valve was purchased, plus a connector or two, and plumbed in.

We now have one temperature for the shower and a slightly higher temperature for the hot taps. Perfect.

Wine yeast
At about three months old, the blackberry wine made with bread yeast was still pretty sweet, but pleasant and quite drinkable. That made with wine yeast, in contrast, was horrible. It was really rough, exactly like every home-brewed gutrot you've ever tipped into a potted plant when your enthusiastic home-brewing friend isn't looking.

Well, they look pretty similar

Now, at one year old, the bread yeast wine is no longer sweet at all, though still quite fizzy (correctable with a vacuum pump), and has quite a decent flavour. The wine yeast wine is surprisingly a little sweeter. It has mellowed and completely lost the rough edge, and has a more complex flavour than the bread yeast wine. In conclusion, then, both are fine for older wines, though wine yeast is better, but bread yeast is far superior for a very young wine, if you're happy to drink it fairly sweet. Before you decide that bread yeast is all you need, though, I also used it for my other wines. The dandelion wine was very good, but the oak leaf, beech leaf, and blackcurrant wines are still fermenting now, and still very sweet. It seems that bread yeast doesn't stand up well to tannin.

Vinegar
My too-sweet beech leaf wine remains resolutely sweet. I chuck in a bit of yeast or some more vinegar from time to time, but nothing doing. I think I may have discovered the solution to the antibiotic time-bomb, as this stuff kills everything I throw at it. It's a new multi-purpose sterilising solution.

Pickled mushrooms
These are very nice.

Perhaps a little stronger on the vinegar than I'd ideally like, but that has to be good for storage. It feels odd to be eating preserved mushrooms right in the middle of mushroom season, but I had to try a few, and yep, they're good.

Willow bench
Is mostly still alive. Many of the thinnest pieces died, but most of the thicker, more structural pieces have survived, and are putting out thin shoots of their own to replace the ones that died.

It's still not strong enough to sit on, but I'm sure it will be in time.

Crocosmia
In our first February here, when I was carrying out a serious assault on the garden to get it ready for my first year of planting, I moved some crocosmia from a flower bed to a steep bit of hillside. It was hard work. While not yet the dazzling display of colour that I have seen from these plants, they're getting established nicely and give a good show of orange flowers scattered across the hillside.

A smattering of crocosmia

In the background you just about be able to see the willow fence alongside the terrace. That's doing quite well, with almost no losses, and may yet provide valuable support if the terrace does start to break down.

Playing with willow

I recently started helping out at the gardening club of the local primary school. It's a lovely little rural school with a lovely garden that includes, as well as raised beds for veg and a herb garden, a living willow structure for children to play in. This is a dome tall enough for an adult to stand up in, with two tunnel entrances, one of which is certainly NOT tall enough for an adult. When I saw this structure just before Easter, it also wore a crown of shoots, about twelve feet tall. I commented on this to Charlotte, who runs the gardening club, and she said, Yes, that really needs attention. We'll probably have to get Sam in to deal with it. Noooooo! Sorry for taking your business, Sam, but I have my eye on that willow. I'll do it, I said.

I spent a pleasant couple of half-days in the school garden, weaving in and cutting willow. That is, they started pleasantly enough, but were pretty tiring after a few hours, especially the first day, when I'd forgotten to put the time on my phone forwards by an hour, so stayed an hour longer than I thought I had. It's no wonder that Ian came to see what had happened to me. He then went back for the car, as my original plan of bringing the cuttings home by sack truck didn't seem all that realistic.

Elly the 2CV, proving her worth in the last few days before she comes off the road to await funds for major surgery

I had a couple of plans for the willow, but before I got round to starting on them I had an Idea. It was one of those ideas that's just too tempting to ignore, so everything else gets pushed back to make way for it.

Idea, manifest

Can I make a bench out of willow? Yes, it seems that I can. Can I sit on it? Um, no, not as such... The idea is that all those willow twigs will take root, and as they grow they'll get stronger, and then we'll have a really cool living willow bench that we can actually sit on. Although willow takes root very easily, it really should have been planted about a month ago, before the leaves came out, so I'm not entirely confident that this will work, but I'm reasonably optimistic. In the meantime, I've moved the old bench a bit further along, so we can still use that.

Once I'd made the bench, I turned to more mundane applications. I cut lengths of the sturdiest pieces to stick in a soft bit of ground below the driveway, where the roots should help reinforce the ground and prevent the driveway sliding into the stream when it floods. I should also be able to harvest lots of shoots from these, for either firewood (poor quality, but high volume) or basketry. The medium thickness shoots were used to make a fence around the terrace, to replace the one I planted originally, that subsequently died. I'll take more care with watering, this time.

Willow fence, second attempt

I still have the top pieces that I cut off the sturdiest shoots, which is just as well, because I'd forgotten another use I thought of a while ago. When we moved here there were two wooden arches over our garden path. One of them was old and rotten, and is no more. I'd like to replace that with a living willow arch. I don't think the pieces I have left are long enough to make an arch, so that will have to be a longer term project, but none the worse for that. In the meantime, I was quite glad of the rain yesterday, otherwise I'd have a lot of watering to do.

More terracing

I've had in mind for some time that I'd like to terrace the small steep bit to the south of the garden, but it wasn't anywhere near top of the list of priorities. Then a friend offered me some topsoil, as he was digging a trench by the side of his house to deal with a damp problem. Free topsoil is not something to be sniffed at, round here, so I said yes please, and he brought several vanfuls of mud (in bags) over to our place and dumped it on a spare bit of driveway, next to the small steep bit.

Those bags of mud have sat there since the summer and we're starting to think it would be nice to have that bit of driveway back, if only to dump something else there. So it was that in the middle of January, as the lengthening days made getting outside quite an attractive proposition, I started work on another terrace.

I'd done some thinking about how to do this, and the first question was what to hold it up with. I thought a row of posts or stakes stuck in the ground might be a good start. So, where to get the stakes from? As it happens, we have a couple of coppiced oak trees on the hillside just above the new terrace.

Coppiced oak tree

That is to say, at some point someone cut down a couple of oak trees and they didn't die. Now, an unknown number of years later (at least four. Probably six, guessing when it was likely to have been done), the young shoots are fairly substantial. The first task, then, was to harvest some oak.

It wasn't too difficult to cut, if a bit fiddly where the stems were crowded. Once cut, I then removed all the leaves and small twigs and took them up to the other terrace (yes, it still needs topping up each year). This took a while, but eventually I had a nice collection of straight-ish pieces, roughly sorted by size.

Bits of oak obstructing the driveway.

I then did a bit of pacing out, plucked a few numbers out of the air, and decided that I needed twelve four-foot stakes, to be slammed halfway into the ground so that two feet would be sticking out to hold up the terrace. I selected the twelve thickest pieces and cut them to length. After I'd done this I made some more measurements on the ground, to find out where the posts would need to go so that two feet came up to level with the driveway. Over six feet from the edge, as it turned out. That's too wide - I couldn't reach into the middle from each side. I brought it back to a bit less than four feet wide, so it won't be two feet deep, even at the steepest part of the slope.

Quite a few of the pieces were four feet to the point they forked

The next task was to get the stakes into the ground, pausing only to peel back some of the grass to reveal the kerb marking the edge of the driveway. The first few stakes went in quite easily, but then I hit stony ground - as most of it is round here - and the going got tougher. For the last few, where the slope is shallowest, I didn't make the holes so deep. They won't have to hold up so much mud, anyway.

Yes, my hole-making steel bar has a hook on the top. What of it?

I then cut eleven shorter pieces and stuck those a little bit into the ground, or at least into the grass, in between the structural ones. This enabled me to weave the thinner pieces between the verticals to make a rough fence.

A fence, of sorts

Having got the space defined, it was then a matter of filling it. I have quite a lot of dead leylandii, so I got rid of some of that in the bottom of the bed at the steep end, but there was a limit to how much of that I could get in and still expect to grow things on top of it. Next, I tackled the grass. I left half of it in place, and flipped the other half over on top of it. That makes it sound so easy. It wasn't.

I picked out some of the bigger stones as I went.
I quickly ran out of buckets to put them in.

It's a fairly risky strategy leaving the grass in the new bed like this. If it was buried deeper, it would almost certainly all die, and rot down into a nice loam. As it is, the soil side of the turf isn't more than a few inches deep at most. I foresee weeding.

We've had beautiful weather while I was doing this; for the record, Imbolc was bright and clear, as was the rest of the first week of February. This did mean that I had to wait until the sun was high enough to melt the frost before I could start work in the mornings. This kind of work is hard enough without everything being frozen solid.

A beautiful frosty morning

Finally, I got to using up the topsoil. I have to say, topsoil wasn't an accurate description of very much of it. You could make pots with this stuff. It was also full of stones, which I decided to remove by riddling. Some of the soil went through easily enough but some of the stickier clay just stuck to everything. Some days I only managed a couple of barrowloads.

Riddling

I've been adding wood ash to the soil as I go. I'm not sure whether this will help to break up the clay or not, but it feels like it ought to. We got a delivery of firewood on Tuesday, which came with a bonus load of moss, so I added that too, then when I ran out of moss, I used some sawdust, which isn't ideal because it absorbs nitrogen as it rots. I'll worry about that later.

As the end came in view, I was determined to get the job finished before the forecast rain on Friday. On Thursday I got eight barrowloads of soil riddled and dumped in the new bed. This meant working on after dark, but luckily we have an outside light just there. I was exhausted by the time I finished, though.

The last thing I did, on Friday morning, was to trim the stakes down to just a little taller than the bed. Here is the finished bed.

Now I have to decide what to grow in it. I'm currently thinking about sweetcorn and sunflowers, but that may change as I work out what's going where in the rest of the garden. In the meantime, I still have quite a lot of topsoil to find a home for.

July garden

It's been a couple of months since I last posted a garden update. Would you like a look around... see how things are doing?

Starting in the greenhouse (well it's right outside the back door - it's the easiest place to start), the tomatoes are looking good.

I do wonder why I grow tomatoes on the short side of the greenhouse

That is to say, the tomato plants are looking healthy. There's not a huge amount of fruit yet, and what's there is still very green.

The cucumber plant that Barbara gave me is threatening to take over the greenhouse, if not the world. It has a number of little cucumbers that are looking very promising.

It's two days after I took that photo and that cucumber's at least twice the size

On the other side of the greenhouse, the basil's doing very well. I'll have enough to make a decent batch of pesto, if I can figure out how best to store it.

In sharp contrast, the purslane and Welsh onions that I planted by the patio seem to have hardly grown at all.

Unimpressive purslane

It's very hard to water that bed, as the water tends to run straight off the surface. It doesn't help that the cat sits on it, either.

Moving swiftly on, the sweetcorn appears to be developing nicely.

Is that a tassel in there?

I've never grown sweetcorn before so I don't know what to expect, but that looks quite promising to me.

The squash are also doing their thing, and producing little fruits. I hope those remain uneaten long enough to turn into bigger fruits.

Tiny little squash

The next bed is other and I'm loving this bed at the moment because it's looking like a proper veg patch.

Veg, various

In the foreground/right of the picture is chard. This is the first time I've grown it and I'm pleased with how it's doing. It tastes OK, too, though as leafy greens go, I prefer both spinach and pak choi. Speaking of which...

Flowering pak choi. Also nasturtiums.

... most of the pak choi I planted is now bolting, but that's OK because...

Not-flowering pak choi

... there are volunteers popping up all over the place, so I have plenty to keep me going.

Next along from the chard is fennel, the ferny leaves of which are quite hard to see in the picture. The bases are fattening up encouragingly. Beyond those are celery, which are not fattening up much at all. The cabbages just behind are looking healthy, though. I'm not sure whether I'm seeing the first signs of heads forming in them, or whether that's just wishful thinking. The next section of plants has the bolted pak choi interspersed with leeks, which are doing quite well, and three courgette plants, which are a little behind the squash, but showing promise.

There've been a couple of flowers so far, but no fruit yet.

There are more leeks along the edge of the final section, far left of the photo, but they're not doing so well because Pebble keeps lying on them. I don't think she's particularly attracted to leeks, but she likes to lie in the shade of the parsnips, and that's where the leeks are.

The parsnips are those tall, bright green plants at the left/back of the other bed. They're magnificent! They already have large roots, but I'll hold off until after the first frost before harvesting any. Probably.

Top of parsnip. I hope I'm not attracting every carrot fly in the village by poking these.

Before leaving this bed, I have to show you the sugar beet that I planted early, for seed.

There's sugar beet in there somewhere

I know I'm not giving it the best chance by allowing all those weeds to grow, but I do so love forget-me-nots! In contrast, the sugar beet that I planted next door is racing away. I took one photo on the 6th July...

Sugar beet in early July

... and another three weeks later, on 21st July.

Sugar beet in late July

Hasn't it grown! I've nibbled the odd leaf and they're really nice. Not exactly sweet, but less bitter than some, and tender. If I do manage to get any seeds, I might grow some of this for salad leaves. As to the main crop, I'm not sure when to harvest it. Perhaps I'll wait for the first frost, as for parsnips.

Are you bored yet? You can skip to the end if you like - there are flowers. If you're still interested, we'll head for the downstairs garden now.

The first bed we come to is the potato patch.

Potatoes. Yes, all of it.

I know a large section of that bed looks like it's just weeds (shepherd's purse - they were very pretty when they were in flower) but there are potatoes in there too. At least, I hope there are. I've been harvesting the first earlies for some time, but haven't touched the main crop yet.

In the next bed are field beans (like broad beans but smaller). Those from the first sowing that survived the frost are just about ready to harvest now.

Lots of small-ish bean pods

I picked the first few of these yesterday. Though the pods are small, they're well filled with beans, which is a huge improvement on the broad beans I've grown in the last two years. I'll see how the rest of the harvest goes, but I think I'll be sticking with these.

I've been harvesting peas for some time now - some have even gone in the freezer - and decided that it's time to leave the rest of the early varieties, Oskar and Charmette, for seed...

I think these are Oskar, ripening nicely

... as the Kelvedon Wonder are now ready to pick.

Kelvedon Wonder peas. These are nothing special, but they do grow well.

I'm still trying to persuade the Lord Leicester peas to climb, but they're turning their noses up at my chain link fence. The nasturtiums are looking good, though.

The nasturtiums looked a little lost after I pulled out all the weeds that were propping them up.

Just across from these are the wigwams of climbing beans, with squash underneath.

Three squash, two wigwams of beans

Both the circles of french beans - District Nurse - are doing well, but the runner beans in the middle are doing nothing. I think they may have been eaten. Never mind, for green beans the french ones are just as good.

Do have a closer look at that leek flower! (If you do want a closer look, there are bigger copies of most of the flower pictures, if you click on them.)

Leek flower looking much pinker than I expected

Isn't it pretty? I think the celery flowers are rather charming, too. I may put some in the flower border next year.

Celery: Not much cop as a vegetable, but pretty when flowering.

The flower border itself is scruffy, but rather pretty...

... and it has roses.

The sweet peas over by the fence are just starting to flower.

My favourite, though, is a wild flower growing amongst the peas and beans.

Viola tricolor, also known as wild pansy or heartsease.