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It’s fairly easy to garden normally, you wander outside & see what needs doing then you either do it or else find a reason why you don’t have to do it right now. You plant stuff, you water it, get rid of the weeds & then it either grows or it doesn’t, it’s not rocket science & is a pleasant way to pass a nice afternoon, however when faced with a blank sheet so to speak things are different. It’s okay at first, or at least it is if you live on my estate since whilst the house is empty all the neighbouring houses seize the chance to dump all their awkward rubbish into the garden so that by the time a new tenant shows up it resembles a landfill site. Once the clearing of mattresses, abandoned wheelie bins & assorted household appliances has been completed though you’re left with a kind of crappy gap between a fence & a hedge & not a clue as to what to do with it. You immediately cut the grass but whilst in a tended garden this immediately lifts the scene positively in a neglected scrap of waste ground all you really achieve is flatter, although it’s something to be able to strim away in the certain knowledge that no damage will be done to any plant worth keeping. (continue reading…)

It may be that the snow  brought out the shyer inhabitants of the woodlands or maybe it just makes them easier to spot & they were there all the time, whichever it is there does seem to be a lot more life around here these days, the trend is continuing as Spring takes hold but sadly the evidence, whilst plentiful is reliant on deceased individuals. Squirrels are a happy exception to this rule & there seems to be more of them about than ever, rabbits seem to be in good numbers also although unlike the squirrels they don’t appear to have grasped road sense with any degree of success as yet. It is perhaps inevitable that as humanity spreads out & takes up almost all the available room that our choice is to either get used to living in close proximity to nature or else that there will be much less nature. We should possibly be slightly grateful that there’s any nature left to live close to but this is another story, living in an urban setting means that the balance between us & the wildlife is generally tipped generously in our favour but with perks to be had for those animals that have learnt to adapt. This system is undergoing some adjustments at present oddly due to our becoming more environmentally friendly, the generations of foxes that have grown used to the bounty of our bins may have to learn new tricks as we throw less away & do it more securely, they may yet have to resort to KFC leavings. (continue reading…)

It may mean little to those of us who are simply waiting for Winter to go away but when you’ve got a garden to rebuild & planting to arrange it’s a thorny problem, especially since the harsher the Winter the later the Spring. As for an arbitrary date defining the beginning of Spring it’s not much use, I may be able to see a couple of crocus spikes braving the snow but I need a lot more than that before I’m convinced. The fleeting sunshine is very welcome but with the place looking unkempt & dilapidated I need to be able to get out & about, the few green shoots that haven’t been late up Daffodils are being remorselessly destroyed by the harsh frosts that don’t seem to be giving up. Guessing when Spring has sprung in the UK is never that easy & the further north you are then the later it is, they may be moaning down south but until they’re up & running we might as well all stay in bed up here. (continue reading…)

The outside of my house look like a bomb site, the weather has been wet for so long that I can only hope it all freezes up soon so that I can at least get the grass cut, the winds have fatally damaged my arch but the clematis is still alive which is something. After the depredations of the kids & various animals it’s all looking a bit tired & in need of attention, there’s a lot of cutting back & tidying up to be done before any major alterations can be thought of let alone started. It’s all a bit dull & uncomfortable at this time of year, doing anything outside when it’s raining is a bind & it’s all too easy to find something to do in the warm, having kids that break their stuff effortlessly also helps a lot but it remains a lot of work that needs doing & I’m beginning to tire of waiting for the dry to arrive. (continue reading…)

I’ve heard both sides of the argument & I’m more for the bin men than I am the council, I think this is a stupid dispute & that in the end we’re going to be stuck with a rubbish rubbish collection once a fortnight & that it’ll still cost just as much as it will be private contractors doing the work, that said I’m sick of bin bags & I need to get rid of my rubbish somehow. For all my sympathy for their actions I live too close to the rats to want a huge pile of lovely trash for them to visit & besides, with our cat population I’m just going to end up with a bin bag full of dead rats, I can’t do anything in the garden & as the rubbish piles up around the estate it’s quickly becoming mobile. At the moment I’m spending more time picking up rubbish from the front garden than I am weeding it & trust me, it needs weeding, I’ve got big plans for the back as well but the mountain of bags is a bridge too far for what I need to do. I may just put the trash out this week & leave it like most others seem to be doing, this goes against the council guidelines which want us to only put it out on our collection dates & then take it back in if it’s not collected but since they then send the private contractors round on any day except our actual collection day I may not care by then. (continue reading…)

It’s been 11 days since the cute harbingers of doom arrived again & it has not gone well, this is an understatement but articulating a scream is never easy in type, still, I suppose it was expected that the canine vandals wouldn’t have changed much in a couple of months & this at least proved true. I knew that I was going to lose plants, I fully expected them to dig stuff up & I was prepared to see some fairly upsetting sights while they were here, they have however excelled & it turns out that I have underestimated them. At first they amused themselves by removing any plant that happened to be in a tub, then they removed the soil from the tub, then they ate the tub, after this they’d wait until I found another tub & rescued whatever lump of plant remained along with some soil & attempt to place it out of their reach, then they’d eat it again. When this proved boring as after a week most of the plastic tubs had gone they managed to cleverly dig holes in the garden & throw the resulting soil down the drain which they then watched me unblock, I have to say though that they did all this in fifteen minute episodes as that’s as long as we dare leave them outside, after I unblocked the drain they ate my pepper plants.Currently they’re making their way through my tomatoes although they do break off now & then to try & dig out the raspberry bushes, anything that resists the digging is chewed down to stumps, the place looks like a bomb hit & it seems a long way to Saturday, I’m glad I’ve got a few plants out front though. (continue reading…)

As the black-eyed susan prepares to flower signaling the end of Summer the time has officially come to see what’s ready out in the garden, time to rue the failures & celebrate the successes as well as keeping my fingers crossed that those fruits not quite ripe as yet get a little touch of luck & weather to make them worthwhile. We’ve got courgettes & mange-tout, beetroot, onions, leeks, tomatoes, artichokes, apples, rhubarb, carrots, spinach & various herbs ready at the moment & given a little sun we may even get grapes this year. The last of the fennel is a bit scruffy but you can’t have everything, we had an apple & blackberry crumble over the weekend & it was delicious, I still can’t get over the fact that people buy blackberries in the supermarkets, strawberries I understand even if you can grow your own but blackberries? They grow everywhere for nothing, you can’t escape the bloody things yet people go & pay good money for them, (continue reading…)

There are a lot less snails & slugs about my garden at the moment, living ones at least,the sad crunch in certain patches of the garden says it all but hey, if they weren’t so greedy we might have worked something out, as it is I’d like to eat too & against the recent rains I had no chance to compete. I’d like to think that if they were able now to see the rafts of tomatoes growing & the beetroot, courgettes etc they’d be okay with it but possibly not, with them out of the way everything’s had a chance to really get going & even the grape vine has cheered up. It’s not all roses though, the spinach has bolted ever so slightly & the asparagus is getting even more swamped by the courgette plant but such is life, these things can be handled, the wasps on the other hand can’t be. (continue reading…)

It’s not enough to be knee deep in slugs, awash with snails & weighed down with bugs beyond number, nope, to make things really interesting let’s have wasps as well, that’s all I need, a nuisance that can fight back! The damn things have built a nest in the front of our house, there’s an air brick there which is now flight control for hundreds of the little horrors & watering the squash is now a risky business, okay so they were fairly docile before I sprayed a full tin of fly & wasp killer into the nest but what did they expect, cookies? Anyway, they’ve got to go, if they were bees then I’d let it go, I like bees but wasps are just nasty & definitely on the list of things that can be killed without guilt, I’d make a lousy buddhist, still, as wasps go they’re fairly tough since I don’t appear to have killed one of them yet. (continue reading…)

A weed is just a plant growing out of place, I read that a long time ago & I was reminded again as I got on with the weeding & discovered a rose that has risen from the base of a delphinium, it’s slightly irritating since the rose plant I was trying to grow not eight feet away produced a single leaf & then proceeded to turn into a stick. I left the rose to grow anyway, it’s doing no harm & nature has clearly got the edge on me in this instance, it’s got me with the chinese leaf as well, or that eyesore as I now refer to it, it’s time for me & the slugs to fall out once more as even healthy plants can hardly be expected to stand up to a plague of them. The chinese leaf has surprised me though, I’ve never seen lettuce flower before & it’s quite a nice flower, I should have expected it as the onion flowers are a great bonus for not getting around to them in time. At least I can stop worrying about my tomato plant, bumpy stem or not it’s got tomatoes on it & that’s all I ask of it. (continue reading…)