Garden starts to grow

May 20, 2010 — simonashall

The garden has undergone quite a transformation from last year, as I’ve been busy building raised beds following the clearance that we did last Autumn. Some of the vegetable beds from last year are now standing with flowers in them instead but they will be grassed over eventually. After a really enjoyable first year in 2009, I’m being a bit more ambitious this year, although it can feel like a third full-time job and the pace of the growing season doesn’t work around you – you have to work around it.

Early potatoes with frost damage visible

I particularly enjoy David Inns’s columns in the Woking News and Mail and I was hoping to link there but the News and Mail – now separated from the Surrey Ad group – doesn’t have a full website although its WordPress blog is a different and quite refreshing change from the staid old thing I used to have to cobble together on a Thursday morning. Anyway, this week David, who is chairman of Horsell Allotments Association, comments on the most obvious thing to any gardeners over the past fortnight – the frost!

Peas don't mind the cold

Once we’re into May, this kind of thing should be over but a late one like we had last week can damage things – including early potatoes, which he comments on and the leaves on mine went slimy and black but thankfully there’s new growth coming up. Unfortunately my tomatoes, even though they were covered, didn’t like the low temperatures last week and so I lost them but I’ve been to Wisley and got some new ones.

Like David, I’m also amazed at the things that didn’t get affected so much – my peas for example, which although you think of them as quite tender plants, seemed to not be the slightest bit bothered by the low temperatures and the asparagus slowed down a bit but there was no discolouration or sign of ill-health.

In his column, David mentions his Comfrey is flowering – Comfrey is a plant of the herb family that grows extremely deep roots and can access minerals in the sub-soil that most plants can’t reach. This makes the leaves full of superb fertilising agents and they are either used in water as a liquid feed or left to decompose in compost or on the ground itself. I have four plants and eight root clumps – my plants came from RHS Wisley and Squires Garden Centre. You might be fooled into thinking – as I was before I checked – that the two small ones are the Squires plants while the Wisley ones have shot up – actually it’s the other way around. So don’t assume the best quality stuff can’t be bought locally.

Give your rhubarb some water

Comfrey on the left from Squires, others from Wisley

My father is also a grower – when he came last time he marveled at my rhubarb and asked me what the secret was. I’ve two Timperley Early plants and three Champagnes with a Raspberry Red that I picked up from Squires in the spring. None have been forced this year as they need time to settle in. The secret to good rhubarb – also a member of the herb family – is the same as the secret of life; water, and plenty of it. Rhubarb will grow fine with just the natural watering from the rain but if you’ve got a few rhubarb plants in the back garden and it’s the only thing you grow, you’ll be amazed at how much different two litres of water a day will make.

Here’s to more sunny days and the occasional (weekday) shower.

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Horsell gardens wanted

March 18, 2010 — admin

Anyone fancy a stroll around this? Thought not.

 This year’s Horsell Garden Safari in aid of Horsell Village Hall will be held on 19 and 20 June, which just happens to be the week before our wedding, so that kind of rules me out of opening up our garden, as I had hoped to do.

It emerged at the meeting tonight that I’m not the only one dropping out at this stage and that several other gardens had fallen off the list for various reasons from the extremely harsh winter, the economic conditions (yes, it costs quite a bit to get a garden looking good enough to show) and competition from the National Garden Scheme. Out of the 20 gardens from last year, only around a quarter are hopeful at the moment and we desperately need some more to support this great annual event.

There are already posters up around the village that reach more people than this blog but if any Horsell residents are prepared to consider opening up their gardens – and remember that they don’t have to be classically-proportioned masterpieces, we have all sorts of idiosyncratic and themed spaces – or know of anyone who might be, please get in touch with organiser Penny Kramer whose number is in the book or leave a comment here and I’ll put you in touch.

Horsell Garden Safari is one of the highlights of the village calendar and a genuinely crucial piece of fundraising that helps us make real improvements to the hall. Having a load of people trampling through your garden and judging the height of your sunflowers doesn’t sound great I know – but really, they are so much fun and you’ll be well-supported by our fundraising team as well as helping to raise money for one of Horsell’s most used facilities.

Why not give it a go?

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Spring’s in the air

March 16, 2010 — admin

Taking a moment out from politics, the past two days have definitely heralded spring, not just because we’ve had a bit of sunshine and been spared the frost but because the smell of sap rising in the plants is all around in the garden and beyond. I spent this evening planting my strawberries out from the cold frame they’ve been in for several months while I tried to prepare the ground and my early potatoes went in on Sunday.

Nothing illegal, it's just tomatoes

I’ve also got these tomato plants on the kitchen window sill, where the other half constantly berates their presence. Understandably, the thought of growing vegetables indoors is a little Bohemian for her taste but I don’t have a greenhouse or any other warm and light part of the house so it’ll have to do. The plants themselves have actually done a little too well because they spent too long in the propagator. They really ought to be at this stage in early May ready to be put out in June. It’s a bit cold still at the moment for tomatoes, they prefer daytime temperatures in the late teens upwards and as near to 10 degrees at night as possible. I might be able to harden them in the cold frame in around four weeks.

This year I have a system of raised beds and have been carefully planning the produce that I hope to grow. It has become an increasingly popular thing to do as 1940s frugality and 1970s good life ideas come back into vogue. Horsell Allotments had vacancies only a few years ago – now there are many dozens of people on the waiting list, including me. Having an allotment would allow me to mix with other growers and free up space in my relatively small garden to keep the fixed perenial plants and move the more space-hungry crops elsewhere. In Horsell we are blessed with some of the best allotments in West Surrey and I’m determined to see it kept that way.

That’s why I’ll commit to doing whatever it takes to maintain the current Bullbeggars site as allotments – regardless of the nature of any proposed alternative – while supporting in every way the addition of the Carthouse Lane site. As well as being a healthy and intuitive recreational pursuit, allotments help engender a sense of community and are significant among the pillars that keep our village distinct and vibrant.

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Gardeners question BBC

January 12, 2010 — admin

Many of today’s papers carry the story about the BBC having to back down over the new series of Gardener’s World, due to begin in March. I had read about the controversy surrounding the changed format of the show for 2009, especially from the established viewers. But I think the corporation should have stood its ground.

I never watched the show before 2009 because I never had a garden to speak of. Last year, I designed beds, cleared turf, dug over, planted, fed, watered, fretted and harvested like millions of other gardeners across the country. I derived that same therapeutic enjoyment and experienced one of the great glories of England – working in one’s garden on a warm spring day. I can’t imagine ever giving that up now for as long as I am able.

But to me, Gardener’s World in its current form was superb. Yes, it was a bit ridiculous that the team was able to move onto a wasteland and seemed to have unlimited resources to create walls, glass and beds that most people can only dream of. But I like Toby Buckland and his team and particularly that the show was  not aimed at people who knew the Latin names of everything growing on their property.

And I take exception to the notion that the amateur kitchen gardening that I did is not the ”proper, grown-up gardening” the GW viewer wants to watch. For thousands of years, kitchen gardeners on differing scales have kept their communities alive. By comparison, flower gardening has only been a working man’s pursuit since the war.

Not that I don’t like flower gardening – I’m sure it’s something I’ll turn to in due course. But by then, I shouldn’t need a programme each week to tell me how to do it and I’ll be happy to leave GW to those just beginning to experience the pleasures of the garden. For the serious gardener surely moves on to RHS reference books and, of course, Gardener’s Question Time.

I wish the BBC had kept the current format for a second year – people need time to get used to change as with Top Gear, the programme to which the new GW was sneering compared (and another programme that I enjoy very much). What we are likely to end up with is a compromise that will neither be accessible enough to entice the “new guard-ners”, nor pure enough for the “Latinistas“.

Another great British Broadcasting Corporation compromise.

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