# In the garden



## Olly Buckle

A dull grey day with a wind today, it was good to get into the greenhouse. I finished planting  French bean and runner bean seed in pots. I had my potting mixture fairly dry, so I left a full watering can in the greenhouse.

 There is a sunny day forecast for tomorrow, when everything has warmed up I shall go in and water them. It won’t hurt being a little damp, but overnight cold and sodden would do them no good.

I often save seed, sometimes I buy a new packet but with beans I find it is easy to have a huge surplus. From these I pick all the biggest and best looking seeds, I then always plant up far more than I need and when it comes time to plant out choose the biggest and strongest plants. That seems to work year on year.

Of course I also have a surplus of young plants, the yellowish ones, the ones with a missing leaf, the stunted and misshapen, these I cull mercilessly. The Third Reich would salute my mentality, there is a time and place for everything. I know gardeners who try to save every plant, they are fools.

I still have a fair number of plants left after this, and, although not as good as the ones I plant, others seem grateful for them.


----------



## CFFTB

Yay someone else loves gardening! Reading your post gets me antsy to get my hands dirty again. 



> I know gardeners who try to save every plant, they are fools.


Ouch that hurt! I'm one of those fools. Have to save every runt, orphan, red-headed stepchild.


Do you sell, or give away? Some of my hyacinths have already started to bloom, & I think the fluctuation in temps we've been having is confusing them, but I hope to have enough to give away. They're so fragrant. Also hope to have some left for the table.

Thanks for getting me in the mood to load up my gardening bucket again, Olly.


----------



## The Backward OX

Olly Buckle said:


> Of course I also have a surplus of young plants, the yellowish ones, the ones with a missing leaf, the stunted and misshapen, these I cull mercilessly. The Third Reich would salute my mentality


 
No doubt these would include such plants as 
אֶשְׁכּוֹלִית eshkoleet, עַגְבָנִיּוֹת agvaneeyot and שְׁעוּעִית shu׳eet.

Just kidding, Mr Bucklestein.


----------



## Olly Buckle

It is a bright, sunny day today, almost too hot to work in the sun, and I have been digging over a piece that is in partial shade from the trees along the bottom. It is intended for the celery which is still in pots in the greenhouse.

Last night I pinched the dead heads from the yellow daffodils which are in a large clump by the old apple tree in the lawn at the top of the garden. When I moved here I rotovated everything, except the apple tree, and planted grass. I was busy with the house for the first year. The daffodils I discovered growing naturalised as a tight little clump of bulbs, crammed together and growing into one another. I have separated them and replanted twice now in the last fifteen years and they have recovered enough that they make an oval of dense yellow about six foot by four in the early spring. Now they are over I have a drift of white narcissi with pale yellow trumpets at the bottom of the garden where I planted all the odd bulbs I found. 

There is a vase with a couple of dozen of these in on the kitchen table, scenting the room. On the windowsill there is a narrow brass vase with four or five heads of snake’s head fritillary. They are not usually a cut flower but I do like them in that vase and I have quite a large clump which does not suffer for losing a few. Flowers are starting to appear all over the place now.

Looking down the garden the magnolia stellata is in full bloom under the Prunus autumnalis, that stays in bloom in this garden from December  until the end of February despite its name. Very pretty with its dark twigs and boughs lined with little pink flowers, but, like the daffodils, finished now.

At the top end of the garden the chaenomeles is glorious with scarlet flowers, growing against the wall of the top shed. Next to it the thing I call Mongolian dogwood and the missus refers to as Jew’s mallow is covered in yellow pom-poms. Between the stones of the patio the Veronica has turned into a mound of vivid blue, and there is the first flower on one of the strawberries that I plant in big tomato pots to keep near the back door.

It’s all happening again out there.


----------



## Olly Buckle

CFFTB said:


> Yay someone else loves gardening! Reading your post gets me antsy to get my hands dirty again.
> 
> 
> Ouch that hurt! I'm one of those fools. Have to save every runt, orphan, red-headed stepchild.
> 
> 
> Do you sell, or give away? Some of my hyacinths have already started to bloom, & I think the fluctuation in temps we've been having is confusing them, but I hope to have enough to give away. They're so fragrant. Also hope to have some left for the table.
> 
> Thanks for getting me in the mood to load up my gardening bucket again, Olly.


 
I give them away, I put a little folding table out the front on the verge with a notice saying 'free plants', people still leave a few coins sometimes though. The missus hates it because cars keep stopping at the weekend and she keeps thinking we have visitors.

Hyacinths are pretty early, they are already there in my garden. I have never bothered to grow them 'properly' but every so often some one gives us one in a pot and when they have finished I put them in among the crocus. They take two or three years to recover, but as you say they smell great.

Have you ever considered how much seed most plants produce, a runner bean hundreds, a cabbage thousands, heaven knows how many acorns come from an oak tree in its lifetime. Only one is reqired to survive to replace the parent, why not have the best one?


----------



## Olly Buckle

The back of our house faces south and the back door originally led into a tiny kitchen. We built a new kitchen on the side and the old one has become the back hall. The new part extends a couple of feet further than the original, and across the corner, to the left of the back door, created by this is a trellis, with a jasmine growing up it that extends on over the back door, filling the upstairs with its scent in summer. Between the jasmine and the back door is a rosemary bush which started flowering during the winter and is still going, on warm days the bumble bees are on it until the very last of the light. Most of the area around the door is paved, but on the right is a small area of earth with a sage plant and mint, this stops the mint spreading all over the garden. The path runs to the right past the new extension and there is a narrow bed under the kitchen window, the jasmine and rosemary are in one end of it, but further along there are thyme parsley and oregano growing, as well as pinks and various bulbs, an ornamental sage against the wall one end and a passion flower the other. The path is fairly wide and I place the strawberries I have in pots on the path, along the edge of the border, in early summer.


----------



## Eluixa

Ah, that is sweet! Our daffodils are just now coming up. Our decorative plum bloomed and something with yellow flowers with four petals too. You make me want to get out and mess around my property too. And I love green beans.


----------



## CFFTB

^Must be forsythias. Spring has definitely sprung, although we had a cold snap & I hope it hasn't stunted anything. The hyacinths seem too have slowed to a crawl. Strawberries? I'm jealous. Have you tried tomatoes? Overripes will drop seeds that will spring up the following year, but they can get out of hand.


----------



## Eluixa

^^Yes, Forsythia! You are awesome.


----------



## Olly Buckle

> Have you tried tomatoes? Overripes will drop seeds that will spring up the following year, but they can get out of hand.


I tend to use bought seed from known varieties, but a friend saves the best tomato from the best plant until it is very ripe, then treads on it in the bed inside the greenhouse door, he pricks out his new years crop from there next spring.


----------



## Olly Buckle

Eluixa said:


> Ah, that is sweet! Our daffodils are just now coming up. Our decorative plum bloomed and something with yellow flowers with four petals too. You make me want to get out and mess around my property too. And I love green beans.



You are a fair bit behind us, my daffodils are gone and the forsythia has finished, and that is in the small bit at the front of the house that is North facing and in shadow a lot of the day.


----------



## The Backward OX

CFFTB said:


> Have you tried tomatoes? Overripes will drop seeds that will spring up the following year, but they can get out of hand.


 


Olly Buckle said:


> I tend to use bought seed from known varieties, but a friend saves the best tomato from the best plant until it is very ripe, then treads on it in the bed inside the greenhouse door, he pricks out his new years crop from there next spring.


I don't know about the Nthn Hemisphere, but here, tomatoes being easily the most promiscuous of all plants, we encourage our bees to mess with cross-pollination and as a result keep coming up with new varieties. One that we chanced upon a few years back was insect-resistant, sweet and of a good size, whereas, normally, sweet tomatoes are tiny, and big ones attract fruit fly.


----------



## The Backward OX

Old joke:

"We put cow manure on our strawberries."

"Really? Have you tried clotted cream? It's delicious."


----------



## Olly Buckle

I started a bad jokes thread elsewhere, thank you. He said primly.

I have been digging, it is something I try to avoid, and with forethought one should be able to avoid it. I am somewhat annoyed with myself, I have discussions with other gardeners about the sort of customers who call us up on the first summery, sunny days requiring our services, when we arrive the garden is overgrown with weeds and they say something like, “I was thinking of growing some vegetables this year”.

If I had known I would have come last Autumn and covered the ground with weighted down old plastic bags, then I could have turned up now and lifted them to reveal the odd twisted dock or dandelion that had enough root to survive, the ground would be soft and damp under the rotted grass and I would lift them easily with a fork.

As it is the customer and I are looking at a piece of overgrown meadow, the plants have sucked the moisture from the ground and it is rock hard. I usually suggest a sheet of builder’s plastic with grow-bags on it for the first year or “I will never get it dug over in time to plant.”. That is a bit of a white lie, take it steady and you can get through a lot of ground in a day, but what is a pleasant job on a cool, damp autumn day becomes murderous in hot sun and I can think of better ways of using my life.
Gardening is like life, the less prepared you are the more work you do in the long run.

Digging is not good general practice in my gardening book. Digging breaks up the structure of the soil, it cuts worms in half takes their homes away; it creates an artificial environment for the plants. It is a practice for occasional emergencies and to expedite some things that would take years. When ground has become infested with docks or is very compacted it can take a couple of years to recover it by other means, for example.

So why have I been digging, well, my brother in law gave me a tray of celery seedlings, and they prefer the damp, partially shaded conditions that are found at the bottom of the garden in a part I have not brought into use yet, so I have dug over a small square (They do better in a grid than a square) and have then dug in a couple of barrow loads of compost, they should do well there, but I will be weeding out seedlings all summer that would not have been there if I had been prepared and mulched.


----------



## The Backward OX

Olly Buckle said:


> Digging is not good general practice in my gardening book.


 
So how do you aerate the soil? Stretch out in a prone position and use a pea-shooter to fire oxygen-charged bb's into the ground?  :wink:


----------



## garza

Worms, that's how. That's why we have worms. I mean, that's why the soil has worms. They aerate and at the same time deposit castings that enrich the soil.


----------



## The Backward OX

Party-pooper!


----------



## garza

Well, yeah, that's one of the jobs the worms do. 

The most popular worm on the organic gardening circuit today is the California red worm. Some gardeners do not put California red worms directly into the garden, but raise them in the worms' own elevated beds and use them to digest compost. In such a case the castings are then used in the garden. N, P, and K content of the castings is usually five to seven times higher per kg than organic material not digested by the worms. See *this*.

Cuban agronomists and farmers have carried extensive research on the use of the California red worm. The US trade embargo has raised the price of commercially prepared fertilisers out of the reach of Cuban farmers, and they have become experts in organic vegetable production on a large scale, something the manufacturers of store-bought agricultural chemicals continue to insist can't be done.


----------



## Olly Buckle

I don't know if it is true but I was told worms did not exist in NZ before they were introduced in a ball of dirt around the roots of a fruit tree, they spread from  that orchard and gradually turned the country from brown to green. Can any one confirm or deny this authoritatively?


----------



## The Backward OX

Olly Buckle said:


> I don't know if it is true but I was told worms did not exist in NZ before they were introduced in a ball of dirt around the roots of a fruit tree, they spread from that orchard and gradually turned the country from brown to green. Can any one confirm or deny this authoritatively?


Probably a myth mate. Look at this Earthworms - Earthworms in New Zealand - Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand


----------



## The Backward OX

garza - that's a fascinating site. Almost enough to make a guy give up writerly pretensions and do something interesting.


----------



## garza

Olly - Perhaps the situation is the reverse of that. According to one source on the Internet, '_The New Zealand Flatworm, Arthurdendyus triangulatus, was first sighted in Northern Ireland in 1963 and probably arrived in the root-ball of a plant. It has since spread all over the British Isles, but sightings are still more concentrated in Northern Ireland and Scotland_.' 

The article goes on to say, _'New Zealand Flatworms are a great threat to soil condition and the wildlife which feed on earthworms, and every means should be employed to prevent their spread and eradicate them if possible. Some pastures in Northern Ireland have become waterlogged due to the loss of the earthworm population. Unfortunately many have been shared between friends as they swap plants'._

Your original question, though, is interesting and I'm going to dig further to see if there may be any truth in that, or whether it's another rural Downunderland legend.


----------



## The Backward OX

> [ot]I've just realised - the last three posters have between them over two hundred years experience of life. What possible match can there be for that amongst all the spotty teens that infest forums?[/ot]


----------



## The Backward OX

'_The New Zealand Kiwi, best-known because it eats roots shoots and leaves, was first sighted in Australia in 1943 and probably arrived as supercargo on a tramp steamer. It has since spread all over Australia, but sightings are still more concentrated on Queensland's Gold Coast and around South Bank in Brisbane_.'


----------



## The Backward OX

garza said:


> Your original question, though, is interesting and I'm going to dig further


Given the author, the pun was almost certainly unintended.


----------



## garza

Unintended but fitting, adding a bit of aeration to the conversation though aiding its deviation.


----------



## Olly Buckle

Near the top of the garden, on the west side, is an apple tree that is one of the few things remaining from the previous occupants. Like most fully mature specimens of fruit trees it is an old variety, this is in the nature of trees. 

They have a saying round here, ‘Plant apples for your children and pears for their heirs.’

Being an old variety it varies in its cropping year to year, some years there is barely a flower on the tree, this year it is a mound of pink and white, and wafts of scent keep drifting across the garden. If we do not have a late frost I shall have to thin the apples to get them to any size.

That late frost is a real possibility, I’ll bet all over southern England, where we are experiencing a heat wave, people are going out to garden centres and buying tender bedding and seeds that they are putting straight in the ground. There is a real chance they will die, this is England and as my Dad would say “In other countries they have climates; in England we have weather.”

Some people mock these optimists, I like that people are optimistic, and sometimes it pays off and the garden is filled with flowers. I still like to hedge my bets. I planted a tray of forty tomato plants and got about three dozen germinated. I have junked a couple of real losers and put two lots of six smallest ones out the front on a small table. I leave a note “Free plants” and a description of what they are, then stop the wind blowing it off by standing a plate on the blank end. I was left a total of £2.41p, people unload their loose change, the seed cost £1.69p I make my own compost, and the pots came from a skip. Of the two dozen plants that are left I have planted four out in the garden, if the weather favours me they will do well, otherwise there are four for the greenhouse bed, four in large pots I can have on the patio, four to replace those killed by a late frost, and a lot left over. I’ll give some more away.


----------



## The Backward OX

Olly Buckle said:


> Some people mock these optimists, I like that people are optimistic, and sometimes it pays off and the garden is filled with flowers.


Mate, you're the last person I'd expect to see conditioned by overseas trends in grammar, yet here you are saying "I like that people are optimistic," just like a true Amurrican.



> I still like to hedge my bets. I planted a tray of forty tomato plants and got about three dozen germinated.


And here was me thinking it was us Downunderlanders who did everything upside down. You planted plants _and then_ they germinated? :scratch:


----------



## Olly Buckle

, see what you mean, for clarity, forty cells were planted with two seeds each, germination took place in about thirty six, and where both seeds germinated I reduced it to the stronger looking plant.


----------



## The Backward OX

Olly Buckle said:


> I was left a total of £2.41p


You want to watch out for the spies from HM Revenue and Customs. They'll be reducing your pension if you're not careful.


----------



## Eluixa

Alrighty then...I just took a walk around my yard and woe is me. When we bought this house from gardeners there were to be flowers all over that first spring, and a couple more too, bushes that flowered, trees that flowered. I imagine they were sad as they left their garden to us but they were divorcing and going their own ways. They were trying to dig the bulbs out before they left and were even going to remove a tree in the front yard, which we put a stop to. But this is how it goes. 
I already had two boys, and became pregnant a month after we signed, with twins. And for the last eight years, I've been a little busy. 
And so, even though I have pruned here and there, cleared paths on and off, watered occasionally, this place is a MESS. Ivy creeping, things dying, half dead or shooting up uncontrollably, ground cover taking off, and it is so pretty, and I had to laugh, since I just spent too much on ground cover at the shop, before I took my hike behind my house. I say hike cause I have to lift my feet up and over all the blackberry, also taking over.
Grass is everywhere, everywhere, in every planter, strangling my blueberries, etcetera! I don't understand why people kill moss. I love moss, it stays low and is soft and does not need me to keep it alive.
Scotch broom is rampant. Not only in our field, but creeping silently into our immediate areas too. Too much, too, too much for us.
Today, I've pruned overhanging branches, to clear paths for people taller than me, that's almost everyone, moved a few bulbs, hope they don't die, better than being mowed over though. At least they have a chance. I've dug up little trees that are copies of one's I have already, and could not grow where they were. 
We had no idea how involved this property was. *Elbows on desk, head in palms* Oye!
It is so pretty here, even so, but I have an unbelievable amount of work to do and about one month to do much of it in before I become allergic to the grass. I love pruning, so that's something. I feel better having written it out in any case.


----------



## The Backward OX

I perhaps need to un-engage from this site.

First Olly, then Eluixa, posting away madly about working outside.

So I got to feeling guilty, iddle I? 

I gathered secateurs and the telescopic pruner and attacked _just_ one tree that, with all the rain and The Long Hot Summer, had begun blocking the back porch. Forty-five minutes, and you can hardly see any difference. There are from memory about sixty or seventy BIG trees, including some tropical rainforest racehorses, that will need attention. Then there’re maybe 150 shrubs, hundreds of different ground covers, weeds by the zillion coming up in gravel drives and paths... 

How do I unjoin?


----------



## Eluixa

Don't un-join, you are going to need your puter seat when you've done exhausting yourself. And I need a telescopic pruner, really bad. Olly is a good influence.


----------



## Olly Buckle

Autumn and Winter are the times to prune, not in Spring when the sap is rising and the air filled with the spores of infection.


----------



## The Backward OX

...points at Eluixa, not at upside-down Aussies. This IS Autumn.


----------



## Eluixa

Thanks Olly, I'll keep my pruning minimal and for the sake of clearing paths and the house, until fall. We have wood ants that like to get into the house, and I have to make sure our taller bushes don't actually make them a highway directly to our window sill, for instance. 
And I want to go to Australia...I want to go everywhere...


----------



## kennyc

Eluixa said:


> Alrighty then...I just took a walk around my yard and woe is me. When we bought this house from gardeners there were to be flowers all over that first spring, and a couple more too, bushes that flowered, trees that flowered. I imagine they were sad as they left their garden to us but they were divorcing and going their own ways. They were trying to dig the bulbs out before they left and were even going to remove a tree in the front yard, which we put a stop to. But this is how it goes.
> I already had two boys, and became pregnant a month after we signed, with twins. And for the last eight years, I've been a little busy.
> And so, even though I have pruned here and there, cleared paths on and off, watered occasionally, this place is a MESS....



Wow! We're Twins!    ... well not exactly (I wasn't pregnant for example :mrgreen but I've got the same mess here. This past weekend was so cold, dreary that I didn't want to tackle it, but yeah I need to do some serious work on the plants, beds, trees, shrubs, etc. that have been ignored for the past 7 years.


----------



## kennyc

The Backward OX said:


> ...
> 
> How do I unjoin?


 

You can't, this is Hotel California!


----------

