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It’s not my birthday until March, but with the weather turning all wintery on us again this weekend and therefore preventing my planned work in the garden, we ended up at one of our favourite local garden centres. After the disappointment of them not stocking peach habanero seeds this year (it’s ok, we’ve found them online now) we wandered out to the plant sale area. A week or two back, we picked up a couple of bargain-tastic fruit bushes from there, and this week we found a whole section of rose bushes for fairly-cheap.
Now, roses are a plant I’ve fell in and out of love with as I’ve got older – I’m currently very much in love with them for their colour, scent, and structure. There are three roses in our garden already which were planted by the previous owners. They’re lovely, but unfortunately, being minature varieties, are rather lost amongst all the other plants. I plan to (carefully) dig these up and re-plant them in pots so they can become more of a feature. The new roses we’ve bought to replace them are Whisky Mac, Thinking of You, and Rhapsody In Blue. We also bought two climbers – High Hopes and Compassion – the first of these will probably be planted to grow around the front door, the second we’ve not quite decided yet where it should go.
So, to end the tale where I started – Tom has bought me a bunch of roses as an early birthday present, but due to the return of winter our gardening is currently restricted to sowing seeds and re-potting indoor plants.
Planting broad beans for next year’s crop
We’re right in the middle of the very-wet season in Wales at the moment and we’ve had on average an inch of rain every day for the past month or so. We had a decent gap in the rain at lunchtime today so I spent half-an hour in the garden planting broad beans for next year’s crop. Broad beans taste fantastic straight from the garden, and hopefully by planting them now we’ll have a nice early crop next year.
The chutney I made a couple of months ago is disappearing fairly swiftly, so on being offered another marrow (one of the last before the frosts really hit), I decided to make another batch.
Starting off with this:
a few hours later gave this result:
Again, it smelled rather delicious (if a little vinegary) while cooking. The result looks quite different to last time: due to time constraints (I’m currently lacking entire days to devote to cooking) I had to cook it quicker than last time – the pot needed much more cleaning than last time! – and I think that’s the main reason for the darker colour. I also used dried chillis, whereas before I used fresh ones.
I think it’ll still be tasty though 
We’ve recently inherited a greenhouse heater from a relative who no longer needs it, and I’ve spent most of my outdoor time today running pipes to connect it all up. It’s quite old and very over-specified for the small greenhouse we currently have, but if we run it on the lowest setting it should provide just enough heat to keep the temperature inside the greenhouse above freezing without emitting too many CO2s. Hopefully next year this will allow us to start our season slightly earlier for some of our crops, and maybe once we’ve built a larger greenhouse we’ll be able to grow some lemons and limes too.
When we moved in last year we made a deliberate decision to concentrate on planting fruit during our first season. This was because although the bushes, plants and trees take longer to establish than vegetables which mostly come and go within the season, once they begin to reach maturity they more than pay for themselves through the value of the fruit they produce.
We started the season with a row of different varieties of raspberries, a pair of apple trees, and a pair each of blackcurrants and blueberries. To this during the year we’ve added a large number of strawberry plants, a triplet of redcurrant bushes and an apricot tree. All the new additions we’ve made won’t produce any form of crop until next year, although the Albion strawberries continue to produce flowers and fruits despite us having already had our first touches of frost.
The raspberries all seem to be fairly happy here, although the star of the show is undoubtedly our single autumn fruiting cane. The variety we have is Autumn Bliss and it has been flowering and fruiting continuously since August and doesn’t seem to be done yet. We’re planning to plant more of these once we’ve found a suitable spot.
Our blackcurrants haven’t done particularly well. They did produce a few currants but they’ve put on very little new growth. They were planted in a hollow towards the bottom of the garden and I suspect that their roots have been a little too damp throughout the year. We’ll be moving them to a less wet spot at the front of the house once they loose their leaves and go into their winter dormancy.
The blueberry bushes have done extremely well, and they seem to like the acidic soil and slightly colder and wetter climate we have here. Our first crop was only about ¼ of a kilo between the two plants, but each bush should be producing about 4 kilos within a few years. At the moment the very cheapest “basics” blueberries are £16 per kilo, so the crop they produce once they mature is likely to be both valuable and tasty. Because of the success of this year’s crop, we’ve just added a third blueberry bush to the garden, and plan to add another shortly.
The apple trees are both growing well, but we don’t expect to have a sizeable crop for another couple of years yet. The James Greive has grown about 18 inches and the Howgate Wonder has both grown well and carried a few apples. We plan to add more apples in the future to improve pollination and increase our crop, but as yet we’ve not decided what varieties we’ll add or where they’ll go in the garden.
For anyone who doesn’t know, the blogger’s conundrum is that when you have interesting stuff going on to post about it, you’re too busy doing the stuff to post; when you have time to post, there is nothing interesting happening to post about.
Things which have been keeping us busy:
- took out the broad beans and harvested onions, garlic and carrots (12th September)
- cut back some bushes in the top part of the garden, dug a new bed and planted a pair of chrysanthemums (which Tom had picked up cheap in an end-of-season sale) and some bulbs (crocus, daffodil, tulip); dug over the compost heap and disposed of the tomato plants and sunflowers which had been killed off by the first touches of frost (20th September)
- took the netting off the raspberries; planted some indoor bulbs (white & yellow daffs + hyacinths); potted on the two surviving cape gooseberry plants (27th September)
- cut another new bed in the ‘top’ garden, around the apricot tree, and planted it with a host of crocus and daffodill bulbs; also cut and turned turfs to accomodate the first of our new raised veg beds (3rd/4th October)
- set up the second new veg bed; sorted out greenhouse pepper plants – bringing the few strongest indoors to overwinter, and disposing of the rest on the compost heap (many of them suffered in the last couple of weeks from being too close together, as well as an invasion of baby slugs) (11th/12th October)
Of course, as Tom has already posted, we’ve planted the first garlics in the first of our new veg beds. There are also other exciting things happening, like the larger of the cape goosberry plants fruiting, and the habanero peppers finally showing signs of fruit (most of the plants being brought inside are habaneros), as well as the indoor bulbs breaking through the surface in their containers. Oh, and I’ve now got five different varieties of mint in containers outside: chocolate, apple, pineapple, grapefruit, and normal garden mint! Most of those were bought for ridiculously-cheap, and seem to be flourishing even in the colder weather.
It doesn’t seem long ago that we were planting this year’s crop of garlic, but today we started planting for next year. Our garlic crop did particularly well this year, so we’re planting more varieties and we’re planting them earlier to give them the longest possible growing season. Those we’ve planted so far are:
- Cristo – a softneck variety with a really strong flavour. The cloves we’ve planted have been recycled from this year’s crop.
- Early Purple Wight – another softneck, with a reputation for being amongst the earliest-maturing of varieties.
- Aquila Wight – a hardneck variety so hopefully we should get some scapes to eat before they mature. This variety reputedly originates in the mountains of central Italy, so it’ll be interesting to see how they perform in the mountains of central Wales – not that the climate’s much different…
The two varieties that are new to us this year were supplied to us by The Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight. They’re not the cheapest supplier around, but they have an excellent range and the bulbs they supply are a very good size.
…bulb-buying time, that is! Daffodils, crocuses, and tulips: they’re all available on offer somewhere now, and these next few weeks are the time to plant them. If the rain holds off long enough for the ground to dry out, that is! It’s like walking on a wet sponge at the moment. It seems like we get a thorough downpour every day, and I’m almost in agreement with Tom about the seasons in Wales: he says we have a wet season and a very wet season!
Anyway, back to bulbs. I can’t remember what different vareties we’ve got, but the main thing is we’re aiming to get a bit more early colour in the garden this year – we inherited some snowdrops from the previous owners of the house, but all the daffodils which are currently planted are late-flowering varieties. Of course, given our altitude and latitude we won’t be expecting the flowers to be appearing quite as early as the packets say is possible, but we’ll wait and see what works & what doesn’t.
Well, ok, it has yet to be proved that what I created yesterday is, indeed, yummy. It smelled good though 
I was given a marrow by a friend (needless to say, she has had much more success with squash-type plants than we have: most of ours have been munched) and, having quite a lot of tomatoes needing to be harvested from our own garden but not feeling particularly inclined to eat them in salad due to how miserable the weather’s been, I decided to have my first go at making chutney!
I used one of Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipes, from The River Cottage Year (he calls it “Glutney” and gives a good idea of how to adjust the recipe to use up gluts of different fruits and vegetables) and it was fairly easy to follow… but incredibly time-consuming. Took me about 2 hours to prepare all the ingredients! Then, having got everything in the pan, and managed to get it to the boil, the recipe said to leave it to simmer with the lid off for “2-3 hours”. I don’t know if I have a different definition of “simmer” to Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall, but it took 5 hours for my mixture to reduce to the consistency described in the recipe! I was very glad I’d started the process in the morning, not half way through the afternoon!
Anyway, it’ll be a few weeks before I’ll know how good the result is – whatever the outcome, I’ll update here. In the meantime, I’ll be trying Bob Flowerdew’s recipe for green tomato chutney from his book Grow Your Own, Eat Your Own.
Of all the invertebrates one finds in the garden, the two make me shudder are slugs and earwigs. I’m sure that, somewhere along the food chain they have a place in our garden’s ecosystem and help keep everything running smoothly… I just wish they’d stay out of sight while they do it!
As for the progress of our plants, we’re continuing to harvest small quantities of fruit every 2-3 days, we ought to be able to start harvesting broad beans again soon after giving the plants a break to catch up with the speed at which we were eating them, some of the cayenne and sweet pepper plants in the greenhouse have fruit visibly growing, and the carrot seeds Tom sowed in some tall pots in the poly-tent have germinated.
In less happy news, so far only one of the three cape gooseberry seedlings to have germinated has survived – I did see, earlier today, sign of life in the pot which has so far not germinated, but only time will tell us what has germinated.
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