Garden

You will probably have noticed I post much less about my garden these days. As I’ve grown older and less fit my gardening time has decreased. With a painful hip if I spend an hour that is my limit.

Since having help with all the real work I did potter around the garden but I find I’m doing that much less. Our growing has reduced to soft and top fruit , runner beans and a failed effort at purple sprouting broccoli..

My gardening morale has not been helped by an awful growing season in 2017. Even an old reliable apple tree failed completely as did a formerly prolific plum. In fact pretty much all our fruit both top and soft failed. The only half way normal crop was blackberries and raspberries. This was a very big blow which I attribute to late frosts which caught all the blossom. Apart from this we have had some cultivation failure. Two plum trees I bought have proved reluctant to grow and never gave any fruit. I’m reasonably sure we had pollinators for them as we have others of the same variety in the garden.

Another cultivation problem has been rhubarb. This is reckoned to be very easy. We do have very fast draining soil so possibly they were not watered enough.. Annette doesn’t care for rhubarb so this failure leaves her unworried. I have been reconciled to losing all our sweet cherries to birds and currents haven’t been a complete disaster

One experiment which I pooh-poohed was Annette growing a few new potatoes in containers. The containers were plastic buckets with holes in the bottom. In fact this worked fairly well. I think the reason is that they were well watered whereas our ground crop was deficient in water. Certainly our potato crops have been disappointing.

One slightly poignant success has been baby conifers. I set aside some a few years ago( mainly self sets originally ) with a view to providing Christmas Trees. This was when the grandchildren were small and coming here at Christmas time. Neither of these are true anymore just when my conifers are reaching a decent size ( one is already too big ). We now convene at our youngest daughter’s house and they insist on buying a tree. I guess there is nothing for it but to cut them down.

Speaking of cutting trees the one thing I spend a lot of time on is cutting up wood. This is to feed our open fire where we burn a combination of coal and wood. I must admit to being a bit less confident on the merits of an open fire after seeing evidence that the small particles produced can be a health hazard. The merit of burning wood is that it is, in principle, carbon neutral as a renewable resource. Our open fire is more thermally efficient having a back boiler which also feeds the central heating system. I recognise that the system isn’t as efficient as a freestanding ( apart from a flue ) wood   burner. Martin has wood burners and they are very good. The main problem in his home office is a time to heat up ( he lights before breakfast ) and controllability, with a considerable lag.

Anyway I have become something of a fanatic in gathering and cutting wood. For a long time I was using cut up wooden pallets for fuel. Before retirement I had the damaged pallets from work and afterwards I was using garden centre throw outs. More recently I have had wood from trees cut down locally. This is more difficult to cut up  and I have probably invested more than is strictly worthwhile in chain saws, log splitter and saw horse. I have also become slightly fanatical about using any wood in our garden.

For next season we are hoping for a better year from soft fruit. We have expanded our raspberry area. We definitely hope to grow runner beans. Annette was saving seed but mice in the utility room have eaten a portion.