Something to report

At last - a real gardening thing has happened on my patch! The shallots have been planted - yipee. I know it's not much of a report, but it is another baby step towards my goal, and it is one of the January tasks ticked off. Thanks goodness, because the month is almost gone and I feared there would be nothing to show for it.
Another task on the list to the side there is to plan an asparagus bed. Well, I have done that too - in that I now know where I will put it - which is in an area that used to house several rhubarb plants. When we moved here there was enough rhubarb growing to feed the entire Central Belt every day from March to July. My cousin, who lives in Troon, however, happened to mention that he was looking for a few crowns. Was he surprised when I duly obliged? Haha - he can now supply Ayrshire with his delicious rhubarb chutney, and more to the point, I have a bit of space that I can give over to an asparagus bed. I will have to weed it out carefully and dig in some compost over the year, so I think I will have to wait until next spring to plant any crowns. Hopefully some of our campervan trips to the west coast will yield a bag or two of seaweed, which will help the fertility a bit.
Feeling a bit more confident about the tomato and pepper sowing now, so may get on with that next week, unless we get snowed in. I know the lovely Charles says to wait until March, but I do worry that it will be too short a season for me up here. I wish there were more northern gardeners writing or blogging, so I could get a better idea. I will give it a go now and sow a second batch at the beginning of March and report back - wow - a research project!

Bees!

I am going on a beekeeping course! I got a lovely email from the man from EMBA to say the course was starting up in March, just a few miles away from us and there would be 29 including me. I think that's a really high number of people in Lothian who are thinking of becoming beekeepers, so good news for bees. I am not sure if the garden would be suitable for a hive - its long and narrow, and there are a lot of houses round about now, and associated overhead phone cables which might disrupt their flightpaths. I guess I'll find out all these things on the course. If not, them I am sure I can borrow a corner of a local farmer's field. Wonder what sort of people will be in my class!
I have not given up on hens by the way - plans are afoot to give Jenny some company - and us some eggs!

It's oh so quiet.....

...Oh so still... in the garden - cold, frost and today a fairly heavy snowfall. Not a lot really going on outside, but lots of reading - books, seed catalogues, magazines and online things. Trying to work things out in my mind, but there is a lot of confusing information around. Is January too early for sowing broad beans and early leeks inside - too early for tomatoes, peppers and aubergines in the propagator - should I try and get the longest possible growing season out of this northern climate - or will I end up with loads of leggy seedlings kicking around inside like a bunch of teenage boys, as it is still too cold to go out? I will just sit by the fire and ponder.

It's going to be fine in 2009!

Well - hopefully at least the weather will be, because I have an awful lot of work to do here. Never mind, Santa left me a wonderful present in my stocking which will solve all my problems. Charles Dowding's Organic Gardening - the Natural No Dig Way. Sadly though, I will still have to dig quite a lot before I can stop digging for ever, as clearing out the perennial weeds is an essential part of the process - ho hum.

I have not yet worked out my main seed order yet, but I have selected my shallots, which will be 2 packs of Longor from the Organic Gardening Catalogue. I decided against the Eschalote Grise - mainly because if I order something from T&M, I seem to get full catalogues from them every 2 days in the mail and also because CD (my new hero - above) says they should be planted in the autumn. The new Sarah Raven seed catalogue arrived today though so I can drool over the fabulous photos there, look up the OG and Suffolk Seeds catalogues do a some complicated cross referencing and then order online from Alan Romans.

The greenhouse clearout is going really well, thanks to HG. We have a freed up inner section for the plants when they are sown, and quite a bit of bare staging in the outer section for potting and sowing.

Anyway, to fool myself into thinking I can really grow things, here is some chard still looking quite good, despite the permafrost.

People in glass houses.

Today we emerged from our Yuletide bunker (well, we finally finished the washing up anyway) and began the next phase of 'reclaim the plot'. However, the frost was too hard to dig or prune anything, so it seemed a great opportunity to start on the greenhouse - 'A Big Joab, Jimmy', as they say around here. The double greenhouse had been taken over by the hens (sob) and was also the recipient of any junk we didn't have space for in the garage - there was even a tree growing in it, threatening to push off the roof panes! Seed trays full of dusty old compost, the unknown remnants of once hopeful seedlings, harvested garlic from 3 years ago still hung up to dry, hundreds of old compost bags and millions of plastic plant pots - all littered about as if a giant wooden spoon had stirred everything around.
We were accompanied by BJ, keen to try out his new gardening set given to him for Christmas. this comprised a sturdy canvas bag, gloves, and trowel and fork. Once out became apparent we would have to take turns about working or playing with BJ, so I started off clearing the inner end of the green house. This is the area where the seedlings and growing plants are kept, and the tomatoes planted out. It has a connecting door to the outer end, which is (in theory) the working end - potting up, sowing seed etc. It was full of old seed trays and pots of what might have been potential harvest, sadly left to rot and turn to dust. Half a dozen old grow bags, which had been planted up with various salad crops were still sitting on the staging. The dusty old compost from all these receptacles was collected in an old zinc bath and carted off to be added to the compost bin. All the pots were put in a large box, old drinks bottles that I used for either growbag water reservoirs or as eye protection on the ends of canes, were similarly collected up and stored. These will be washed later, and once the front end is cleared out I can implement a storage system for them.
My turn over, I headed indoors with BJ, who, I later discovered had filled his bag with old compost and fallen apples, when he tried to take it into his bath, to make tea for HG, whose job was to cut down this mystery tree. We though it was a spur from the lilac tree which grew just across the path, but without leaves it was too hard to tell. Task accomplished, he then went on with a couple of woodworking jobs he was doing.

All in all a good start was made, and I feel a plan coming on - oh yes! - it even includes plant pots graded and stored by size. Later, I went through last years seeds, which were stored in several plastic carriers, stuffed into one big carrier bag, stuffed down behind the craft drawers in the conservatory. I now have a new system. Two wooden filing drawers from Ikea, and a set of cardboard drawer dividers. Trouble is BJ has now appropriated them to store his toy car collection - now much enlarged by his Father's inability to resist the Woolworth's closing down sale. I have a surprising amount of viable seeds too, so I can now really, seriously, finally work out what I need for next year. Promise I will.

Return of the light.

The shortest day is now past, and the sun has appeared victorious over the horizon. I sneaked out from between sleeping son and husband, slipped on my duffel coat and garden clogs, grabbed the camera and watched the events unfold from the west boundary wall. First it was dark, then a pale gleaming silver and before long rosy hues began to deepen into flame. I felt a bit like a spectator at some heavenly contest of might between the forces of dark and light - which it may very well have been. I think the good guy won, but he needed the darkness to shine through.
Photographs can never do justice to such a spectacle, but here is my paltry homage to the return of the light.

Have a good Yule y'all.

Lost...

We've lost two of our hens. They have disappeared. We now only have one - poor Jenny, the old, daft Maran. I came out around lunchtime to give them their scraps and wheat berries, and only saw Jenny - walked round to the hen hut and saw a mass of white feathers on the ground, and straw pushed out of the hut. I bottled it, and rushed in to report to the Head Gardener, who duly went down to view the grisly scene. But there were no hens to be found - a few drops of blood on some of the white feathers, and one or two brown feathers lying around, but no Fiona or surviving Broon Twin. No sign of any bodies or trail of feathers.

What we think has happened is this. (Stay with me at the back please.) There is a mad wee terrier who lives round the corner called Sash (this is Central Scotland, mind). He normally never gets out, but when he does he goes crazy and thinks he can take on all the traffic that thunders past our road - he normally does too, as huge articulated lorries have been slowed down to a crawl whilst this tiny beige scrap barks at them in the middle of the road. Anyway, a couple of times Sash has gained entry to our garden and had a go at Fiona. She is white, and she is slow, so normally she is the fall guy, while the rest run for cover. He has had her down and feathers have gone flying, before she escapes his jaws and hot foots it out of there. The first time it happened, we were away in the camper, and No 2 daughter who was at home telephoned to say one of the hens had been killed. Again. no body, just loads of feathers. About a month later, a man knocked at the door asking if I had lost a hen. It was herself, and she had been living in his garden all that time, being fed by his granddaughter. Now this was a fair distance away and across a road (Ha! Now we know!), so he was unaware of our hen keeping activities, until his granddaughter's friend's mum had mentioned us. Well, she settled back in and then last year, around Samhain, we were relaxing, enjoying the extra end of Summertime hour, and the Head Gardener went to make a cup of tea. He came rushing back in to the bedroom, pulling on joggers and fleece, shouting - there's a dog dressed as Superman teaing lumps our of the white hen! Well - what can you say? Sure enough there was a dog wearing a blue cape being chased out of the garden by a man in a navy fleece, grey joggers and a pair of brown deck shoes. Really - the sights you see when you don't have your gun! Anyway, this episode solved the mystery of Fiona's summer holiday (she was OK, just a bit spooked - the dog had attended his owner's fancy dress party the night before - they were still hungover, and obviously Sash had drunk all the leftovers) Another time he got in - same thing - went straight for the fat white one - she escaped again to another neighbour's garden, and a merry hour was spent trying to catch her. Anyway - to finally get to the point - what we think has happened is that Sash has got in again - had a go at Fiona who has scarpered - tried to get into the hen hut where surviving Broon Twin was in the nest box dragged her out and she too has escaped.

Jenny, the daft old maran, who may not be so daft after all, is now living a solitary life in the greenhouse. The hen hut obviously has painful memories for her. She reminds me of the Will Smith character in I am Legend. How weird it must be for her - her whole community wiped out in an instant. No stone has been left unturned in the search for the missing . The neighbours are all on alert for signs of hens squatting in their gazebos etc, but i fear the worst for them in this weather. It is very sad.

Pruning interrupted

Well, the next day, the other blackcurrant did not get it, and can still be seen in it's unshorn state as I type this. The gooseberries got a real going over - vindictive little minxes that they are - one managed to pierce my heavy duty gauntlet - quite sore actually. The flowering cherry was given a blast - really because it was so overgrown that we couldn't use what we term the 'back door' (it's the furthest away conservatory door, which leads out to an area of mossy tarmac that I fondly hoped would be an outdoor eating area - you know, me in a floral print tea dress serving Provencal type lunches to my sparkling happy family, drinking rose wine and admiring my wonderful dahlia displays, but it doesn't get any sun, is surrounded by buildings, and it's in a former mining village in the Scottish Central Belt). Then two of the fruit trees, 1 plum and 1 apple got a half hearted swipe, as it was freezing cold and beginning to rain. Retreat to the fire and later on pulled out the seed catalogues, but BJ decided I had had enough 'me time' and didn't go to bed until 11 o'clock.
So - still on the pruning list - blackcurrants still to finish, plums and apples need a hard prune, but may need a pair of loppers, roses to be cut back and moved to front of house. Maybe a job for January now.

Cutting through.

The ground has been frozen hard now for almost two weeks, so things have been very quiet at the back of the yellow cottage. Baby James has not been very well, so we have not ventured out much at all. In the last few days, however, he has perked up at lot, and has found his lost appetite, so, a frosty, cold but sunny morning encouraged us out of our hibernation. The Head Gardener, now recovering from his slipped disc, was keen to clear out the garage (again) with a view to getting the Camper Van inside for the Winter. This is a job much like the painting of the Forth Bridge used to be (the garage is even the same colour), as so much stuff accumulates, and the space is too handy as a dumping ground. Anyway, HG, with BJ in tow set about the garage - filling the car up with 'stuff for the dump', so I wandered down the garden, secateurs in hand, with the idea of doing 'a little light pruning'. I love pruning, it is so satisfying cutting away the dead wood and twisted branches. Have been doing pruning indoors too this week - clearing away the piles of - stuff. I know I have used that word three times already, but there is no other word to describe it. Loaded car trip up to the Debra Charity shop - chosen because I could park right outside it, leave BJ in the car, while I lugged boxes of books, clothes and...stuff into the quite small shop.
So - pruning then. I wanted to prune the blackcurrants, which have been left to grow out of control a bit. Two bushes, in particular, were in need of a severe short back and sides. Lawrence D Hills recommends cutting half the bushes right down, and putting up with a reduced crop the following year, but then being able to manage them better. Same again with the rest, so in theory a fantastic crop should be enjoyed in two years time. Trouble is, the bushes most in need of shearing were the best cropping ones. In true interrupted style, however, I was just finishing massacring - sorry- manicuring the first bush, when HG appeared with a very tearful and cold looking BJ who wanted his Mummy. The other one gets it tomorrow.

Advent

First day of Advent ( although, ecclesiastically, I suppose, it would have been yesterday) and we get to open the first door on the advent calendar. This year, ours is a scene from T'was the night before Christmas, with jolly old St. Nicholas dressed up in his best Coca Cola red. Oh well - more seasonal than a Bratz chocolate one (do they eat chocolate? And what have they got to do with Christmas?). Anyway - gardening is the point of this blog, so lets keep the focus -even if it is fairly loose. A picture of our winter display - yes can't deny it any longer - it's December- last night I had to have three blankets and the downie, plus socks, leggings, cardigan, baby and husband to keep me warm. It did work, but it was not a pretty sight.
We have on our table a pot of narcissi bought from Snapdragon at the Country Living magazine fair in Glasgow. It was the wonderful Jane herself who served me. She was so nice, and I am afraid I became very gushy - 'I just love your blog!' I splutterred. like some star struck teenager. But really, I couldn't have been more pleased if it had been Donny Osmond himself LOL. Check out her blog -see links. She also has great links to other blogs, if you want to lose half a day in blogland.

The other plant on the table is a lovely hen shaped basket of cheery faced winter pansies, a present from the lovely Vanessa and her family, who came for lunch yesterday. They wanted to see our hens, with a view to getting their own and we had a very pleasant afternoon. What a great wee team they were too.

Photos are pretty rubbish - I am not a good photographer are the best of times, but worse when I am trying to avoid showing the untidyness of the rest of the house, while taking an artful composition. But you get the idea.

Christmassy/Yule things will no doubt creep onto the table and into the house and blog over the next week or so, and then it will be full blown deck the halls etc. I like that.