Slow progress in the garden

The days are starting to get a little longer. It's coming lighter in the mornings and staying light for a little longer in the evening. The garden can look a bit drab and dreary at this time of year, but as time goes on plants are starting to emerge. Snowdrops are flowering, and other bulbs are pushing their way through the soil. 

The witch hazel has been in flower for a few weeks now. Next to it is a yellow stemmed dogwood and behind the witch hazel clustered around the base of the silver birch are a group of cyclamen. 

I planted these the first winter after we moved here and were making a new garden.  They seem to increase in number every year. Also in this area of the garden, the hellebores are starting to flower. This corner of the garden is definitely a winter garden, which was planned so we could see it from the house windows during the winter. Spring is not far off.

I'm trying to get back into doing some gardening work whenever the weather is good enough to go outside.  But with the awful cold,windy and rainy days we are having at the moment, that's not very often. I also have to divide my time between the garden and the allotment. To get my body back into doing the physical work of gardening I have just been doing half an hour or an hour at a time. I've been cutting back the dead flower stems and grasses in the borders. I removed the leaves from the hellebores to expose the flowers. On the little woodland/wildlife garden after clearing the debris I have put a layer of bark chips down. It looks quite good and it shows up the snowdrops and cyclamen nicely.

 

The crab apple tree produced lots of fruit in the autumn and made a beautiful display. In the last few  weeks the fruit has attracted interest from the birds, especially the blackbirds.  We have seen as many as four at a time pecking at the fruit. A lot of the fruit fell off onto the ground over the last few months and has made the patio a bit messy so I'm hoping that when the birds have taken all the fruit from the tree itself they will start on the fallen fruit.

I feel I'm making slow progress in the garden, but Spring is not far off and seeing all the new growth appearing makes me think of the better days yet to come.

Back to work on the allotment

There's a pattern to the work on the allotment. The same jobs are done at the same time of the year, which makes it difficult as I write my blog to find something different to say. It can become a bit boring. But I do like that repetition. I think 'oh here we go again, we did this last year'. It does make me feel good though and that I might be doing things right.

Three sessions on the plot last week made me feel good. I am making progress, but the weather at this time of year can put a stop to all that so I feel lucky that I was able to go three times in one week. Arriving on the site we saw that some wood chippings had been delivered and the path down to our plot was quite muddy as it often is at this time of year. As it's a job we often do at this time of year that was going to be Richard's job for the afternoon.  

Spreading chippings along the path is not actually working on our allotment but it does help if we get it done, it benefits some of our plot neighbours too. Unfortunately Richard ran out of time and energy to get the whole path done that afternoon, so  planned to carry on with it next time. Imagine our delight when we arrived a few days later to find that someone else had finished the job for us.

       
                                                   

I cleaned out the greenhouse, swilled the floor and left it to dry out. I have started sweeping up the leaves and scraping up moss from the paths. They get very slippy if the leaves and moss are not cleared. I didn't get them all done and realised it was a bigger job than I thought. So next time maybe.

Another job to do at this time of year is to sort all my seed packets out and order what I need for this year. So that has been done and the postman delivered  them this morning.

I also did a new allotment growing plan for this year. You can see it in the photo. It's not to scale and I might still change some things, but it's roughly what I will be doing this year.

New year on the plot

Our first visit to the allotment since early December was on New Year's Day. Well that's a good start to the new year, but it was very cold and  too cold to do any work. Nothing much had changed since that last visit in December.

But we didn't go to do any work, we went to dig up some leeks and cut some parsley. 

It was a good chance to check around and make sure everything was ok. The rhubarb is showing signs of new growth.

The fruit bushes need pruning and weeding needs to be done in the cages.

We had cleared most of the beds in the autumn and spread compost then covered with membrane, so it was looking fine.  

There are winter jobs to be done, repairs and cleaning, but they can wait for warmer weather.  The cold frame collapsed last year and needs repairing. The greenhouse and shed both need cleaning out.

Since that visit we have had plenty of bad weather, snow, rain extreme cold, so still not gardening weather.

Time to start sowing and planting

We've spent a lot of time on the allotment over the last few weeks, with all the good weather that's been around it was best to make the most of it.

The winter jobs are now done and beds are ready for sowing and planting. The first things to plant were the onion sets and it was so good to see veg growing at last. 

The first early potatoes (Rocket) were planted in bags and soon I will be planting the second earlies (Charlotte). Broad beans which I had started off indoors in cardboard tubes were planted last week followed by a double row sowed straight into the ground.

There are a lot of weed seedlings from the sycamore tree all over the allotment and what a nuisance they are. I am constantly pulling them out. I've been taking the weed membrane off the beds which I covered in the winter and what did I find underneath? More of these weeds! So much for weed membrane. 

As I've taken off the membrane I've been gradually hoeing off these weeds. Last week after clearing what is going to be the salad bed I sowed lettuce, radish and spring onion.

The greenhouse is filling up with trays of seedlings. I cleaned out the two cold frames so they are now ready for hardening off plants. 

We bought some wood chippings a few weeks ago from a local log supplier for a very reasonable price. We often get them dumped at the allotment site for everyone to help themselves to, but there hadn't been any for a while, of course after we had bought some they started being dumped again! Never mind at least we didn't have to share ours and they were good quality. So we have managed to cover most of the areas on our plot which needed them with chippings and it looks really tidy now. 

Richard has been busy dismantling the little greenhouse which we decided to move to our garden. It's quite small and will fit in a small corner of the patio. It will make it easier for me having a greenhouse at home as well as the allotment so I can pop out to water seedlings without having to keep going down to the allotment. I will also be able to grow two or three tomato plants there.

There's a nice big space left where it was which we have covered with wood chippings. I think it will become a storage area and perhaps a place for pots of flowers and potato bags.

This rusty old wheelbarrow was on the allotment when we took over and I've been wanting to use it as a planter but never had enough room. It's been propped up under the hedge for years. I think I will be able to use it at last. I'm going to grow flowers in it.

Sunny days

The days are getting more spring like now, it's lovely to be outside in the sunshine. It's only a few weeks since I was enjoying the snowdrops in the garden and now they have gone over making way for the daffodils.  The tulips are starting to flower in their pots on the patio, in fact only last week the first ones burst into flower, an amazing orange which made me stop in my tracks to admire them. 

And this week these tulips started flowering. I planted them last autumn,  I don't know the name of them but they are amazing.

The garden is looking lovely at the moment. The borders have been cleared of all the debris from the dead flowers and most of them have now been mulched. I have been putting ornamental bark down on the stumpery area in the back garden and the hosta bed in the front. All the hostas are grown in pots which seems to help keep the slugs away although not completely.

I love to see the garden looking like this at the start of spring, like it's ready and waiting for the explosion of flowers in the next few weeks.

As I walk around I can see how clumps of flowers are getting bigger. At this stage I have to be careful not to plant anything where I think there is a space, because that space is likely to get filled up soon with plants as they start to grow bigger

Some cold gardening days

It's been so cold recently I haven't wanted to go outside for too long. So garden and allotment work has been limited to short spells with lots of layers of clothing. But so much needs to be done as we move further into February.  

On the allotment we have been sorting out the storage shed. Last year, late summer the roof caved in and as the whole structure has been needing some attention for a while, it was now time to do something about it. So over the autumn and winter Richard has been working on the roof, the sides and the floor. It's almost a new shed now. It was a good opportunity to sort out all the stuff we had been storing in there. All the things we'd saved because they might be useful, but they never were. So along with lengths of rotting wood, metal and plastic items have been disposed of, leaving much more room in this storage area. We will not be hoarding things again, I hope.

The weather although very cold has been quite dry recently and the allotment is looking much better now it's not as wet and muddy. I've nearly finished getting the beds ready. This week I pulled up  the few remaining cabbages, which are not very big but might make a meal. I left the kale in as it sometimes starts growing again in the spring. Richard raked up the compost and manure in the bins and there should be enough rotted manure to finish the beds.

 I went to the garden centre last week and bought seed potatoes and onion sets. A nice indoor garden job was to start chitting the potatoes. I bought Rocket, a first early which I've grown before and always had good crops. Also I bought Charlotte which is a good popular salad potato.

The onion sets I planted in trays in modules, varieties are Sturon, Centurion and Banana. These are now in the allotment greenhouse. I grew Banana onions for the first time last year and they did really well. Chitting potatoes and planting the onion sets are usually the first jobs I do so I feel I've now made a start to the new season.

I  had a tidy up in the garden shed, sorted out my seed box and ordered what I need for this year in vegetable and flower seeds. The pots and propagators are all ready now for me to start sowing. I'll be sowing broad beans and sweet peas in the next day or two, which I will do in pots then move them to the greenhouse. I don't usually start any other seed sowing until the beginning of March. Then things will get really busy. 

The garden is looking quite messy with grass bits all over the place. So I have started clearing debris from the beds and cutting back the grasses. I quite enjoy cutting back and gathering up bundles of plant rubbish and seeing the flower beds starting to look better. I can see plants emerging and then I try to remember what they are. There are more bulbs coming through and some unexpected ones, I remember that I planted more last spring. It's nice to get surprises like that as I work round the garden.

A muddy path and planting snowdrops.

 

A few weeks ago when we arrived at the allotment we found that the path down the lane to our plot had been churned up by someone who had tried to drive a big wheeled truck down it. We weren't very pleased about that as it made the path very muddy and walking down to our plot was quite difficult. The path is not meant for vehicles to drive along. The ground is quite soft on this small stretch of the path and can soon become muddy. We had worked on improving the path a couple of years ago by putting wood chippings down and they worked quite well at soaking up the mud. I don't have a photo of the lane when it was all churned up, but in the photo above you can see on the right some of the tyre tracks, on the left is when I had started flattening them out.

So last week I set to work flattening the tyre tracks and lucky for me someone had dumped some shredded tree chippings further along the lane. So Richard and I spent the next few days collecting the chippings and spreading them out along this muddy stretch. Each time we went to the allotment we dedicated some of the time to barrowing chippings to the lane. It was hard work and my back was suffering each time. But I have to say it looks much better and is so easy to walk along now with no fear of slipping or falling over.

A nicer moment was that Richard found a clump of snowdrops amongst some garden rubbish which had been thrown in the woods across the lane where we are allowed to throw our compostable waste. He dug them up before they got covered in more rubbish. I planted them along the fence outside the plot where I already have some bulbs growing.