ruminate vb. to chew (the cud)
If there was a people’s choice plant from our garden openings this summer then this would win it by a landslide. No one had seen it before, everyone wanted to know what it was and a few declared their intention to get one if they could. It comes from China where it was discovered by…
A couple of years ago I posted a piece about my water harvesting setup. I just read it through and realise that for most people it is much more complicated than necessary. I want to describe a relatively simple way to increase water storage, based on part of my system. Sue’s glasshouse has a footprint…
Continue reading ➞ Harvest time – 2, (water harvesting, that is)
This week saw some significant rain, which was very welcome except that most of the paths are now almost impassable. The curtain is beginning to go up on the last act for this year, with Asters opening, Nerine pushing up and Hedychiums flowering. With our NGS openings I've acquired a dead-heading habit that has stood…
I’ve had my allotment since April 2013 and have been a committed no-digger since about two years in. I could see what was happening to my soil, the good structure (aggregation into granules) that it had when I started very quickly started to break down. I stopped digging and divided the plot into beds about…
Continue reading ➞ Soil, getting it good and keeping it that way.
With every week that passes there is a sense of the spring slowly winding down. It's a chilly 12°C here this morning but the weather has been benign and most things are holding up quite well but a day or two of wind and rain will quickly change that. I'm not talking Ida wind and…
It's the end of month 8, which seems a particularly appropriate to pause momentarily and take stock of how the garden has performed this year. The growing season has all but run its course for the year, there’s now a slow run into winter, eking out the flowers by dead heading and enjoying a few…
I took a few pictures yesterday but didn't write this on Friday evening as I usually do, so I went out again this morning with the sun just high enough to catch a few things in the garden. There's a whiff of winding down, flowers going over, foliage starting to look tatty. Most of the…
Our first season of opening under the NGS finishes tomorrow, not a moment too soon both from the angle that the garden is slowly starting to collapse under its own weight and that we have had enough now and want our garden back. If we do it again next year we will open less often.It…
While there are still lots of plants to choose from for inclusion in a saturday six, the garden as a whole is beginning to look a bit ragged around the edges. When things have finished for the season, they either sit there looking finished or get cut down leaving a gap. It's getting late for…
Eight months ago I spread the compost from my heaps onto my allotment and resolved not to make any more. I would simply shred everything that came my way and spread it back on the ground. I wrote a blog about it at the time. It seemed a slightly radical course to take and I…
