The last few months

Seems like a lifetime away that we moved in here. Cold winters always make the last summer more distant and the next summer impossibly slow to arrive... but it always does eventually.

Just awaiting another snow fall. Snow started this year on the 18th December, most of it had melted by new year's eve, when we had the biggest brightest moon I'd ever seen, bright enough to give the conifers a well defined shadow. Apparently it was a blue moon too, the unusual occurrence of a second full moon in the same month and on top of that, there was a lunar eclipse too. So while the rest of the world was partying or watching Jools on the telly, a once in a hundred year event was happening outside. Anyway, it was very cold, so I don't blame them. The snow, by the way, was back a few days later.

September, when I finally got back into the garden psyche after all the personal stuff in Ireland going on, found me raking, seeding and rolling the lawn at the front of the oil tanks, the piece of land that the previous owner used as another veg patch but had more recently just been extra work. All but a small patch near the fruit tree at the far end has been lawned... although it has been covered with snow for the last month.


Started to lay more paving slabs in front of the wood shed/oil tanks and did my back in. This was in October and my back still hasn't recovered. May have to see an osteopath. The rest of the slabs we had lying around the garden (including the ones in the chicken run), were then laid by my cousin when we were waiting for the digger to arrive (see next paragraph). Still require about 3-4 and a half more slabs to complete the job (the half for around the wood shed) but I'll probably use a roller truck to shift them next time!

The digger work we had done in August was a great job, and it's fantastic that we moved the old muck/compost heaps away from the dyke side, however, the other side of the garden really wasnt levelled enough for a lawn and we had the huge heap of gravel/brick/weed membrane at the far end to be shifted. I had thought about getting a skip in and getting the whole lot carted away, but then I had a better idea. My cousin needed work and I needed a job done, so I went out and bought a second wheelbarrow for the job. Five days into it, we decided that it was futile sliding around on wet clay with wheelbarrows to shift about 100+ tonnes of muck even if I had been introduced to the random joy that is BBC6 Music on my cousin's newly bought (a bargain at £30) second hand Sony DAB radio - of which I am still sorely jealous). It was, therefore, decided unanimously, that hiring a minidigger was the best option. £60+vat for the day got us a digger and it didn't take cuz long to figure out how to use it. It was extremely cold (even for me who was nothing more than tea/sandwich/roley maker and pointer outer of potential landing sites for the half tonne mud aliens) and I could tell by the end of the hire period that cuz was getting fed up with it. Not surprising since he'd been shifting the brown goopy porridge around the garden for half of one day and half of the next, however there has never been a more satisfying sound than dropping half a tonne of wet clay with a digger bucket from a height of 30 feet. If you can imagine a "SPLWOP" but with groundshaking sub-bass, you'll be half way there. About an hour before they were due to collect the said earthmover, we decided to have a bit of fun with it. Video available to Facebook friends only - and contrary to urban legend, I did not pull my cousin's arms out of their sockets. I spent a the whole time doing the mother-hen bit, telling cuz not to damage anyone's fences or the greenhouse with the digger.. only to put a hole in the pot shed myself when alighting from the vehicle with my coat wrapped round the lever. Karma. Result: Levelled land for lawn & two great big raised areas for use either as rockery or to provide a base for the Spalding Mountain Climbers Association.

The greenhouse: Harvested 4 carrots (one deformed and two tiny), 2 heads of broccoli (about 2" long) and several spring onions. Apart from the beans which I didn't plant, the mange tout that my wife planted, and the spuds/plums that the previous owner planted, it wasn't the best of harvests. I think I need to do a bit more reading. All the bean poles have been pulled up and the rest of it totally rotavated, ready for the early spring crops (due early March). I'm drawing up a 4 year plan at the moment to help me with crop rotation. I'll talk about this in another post. A decision has been made to move the beans to the bit where the stawberry patch currently resides and grow strawberries in a tub (or one of those strawberry buckets made from sliding panels) as they don't freeze that well and nice though they are, there's not much point having a huge harvest of them when I could use the land for something else. I may change my mind later on. The bit between the greenhouse and the pot shed, I'm still undecided what to do with - only that it needs weeding and rotavating and with the large amount of fire ash I've been poring on it all winter, it should be nice to till soon. It still has the raspberry and gooseberry canes on a tiny bit next to the greenhouse, but I'm not sure if they've survived the winter (or indeed the manure I planted them in). Speaking of manure, I really need to speak to some horsey people to get some fertiliser pretty soon, for both the mushrooms and for use as mulch.


Bought two plastic compost bins at the garden centre about a month ago. Cheaper than Focus (and online if you consider deliver charges of such bulky items)at £20 each. I gave in to the fact that my compost heap building skills leave a lot to be desired and knocked down my handy work with the digger. I really need to start preparing the ground down the end for the permanent resting place of these bins, but the snow has hindered everything. But hopefully will have my own mulch for the 2011 growing season. Oh I can't wait.

Have a plan to make paper briquettes for next winter as a substitute for maybe at least one delivery of logs. Heating oil and wood bills have been horendous this year but then again it has been the coldest snap in nearly 30 years (so far).

Watch this space

I must apologise to all my readers for the lack of posting lately.

The fact that it is Winter should be no excuse as there are a lot of things to do in the garden during Winter and Winter varieties of crop to tend to. OK so it's our first year here and I may be being a little harsh on myself when I say that I must be really lazy not to be out in all weathers, but I recon I could have done a little bit more than I have done over the last 6 months. In my next post, I will try to summarize everything I've done so I can give myself a clean slate on which to work on... whenever we get a good day... (steve - no excuses!)

Snow!

First Snow of the winter!

AT LAST!

The Drainage Board has been! Came back from town today to find the little bit of the dyke that I hadn't done had been completely cut and the bottom of the whole dyke had been scooped out. Nice - a clean slate to keep completely free now. However, they have left a lot of the scoopings along the top of the dyke on the road side. I may have to use this for my compost heap!

In other news, I got an early Christmas present the other day. A garden shredder/chipper. Having done all the pruning last week I needed some way of reducing it down to mulch for the borders. 10-15 barrowloads of prunant became just enough to mulch 3-4 metres of border, but saved quite a bit in ornamental bark for the purpose.

Built a redimentary compost system out of the chicken coup's dividing fence. Will need to gradually build up the sides over the next year or two as I landscape the back part of the garden. Drawn out some sketches of ideas of how I'd like the back of the garden to look. After some thought I decided that I wanted more than just an extension of flat lawn. After all, Lincolnshire is flat enough.

Autumn

Definitely starting to see the effects of Autumn now. The reddened leaves of the little ash by the veranda have nearly all fallen, the back lawn is peppered with the minute sheddings of the wysteria, lawn growth has reduced to a near standstill and it's getting colder. The leaves on all the silver birches have just turned a light yellow colour and my wife's car was iced up yesterday for the first time... the latter being a little early I think. The few rabbits that I do see now are donning their winter coats and therefore appear much larger and there is a lot more scuffling under the veranda as little mammals bed down for the winter... and as a result, one of our dogs is showing a lot more interest. I guess I really have to harvest the turnips and radishes, the latter have grown to the size of large American apples and are probably too tough to eat - but the proof as they say is in the eating.

I'm going to wait until most of the leaves have fallen before I do pruning. I'm going to keep all the trimmings in a pile separate to the compost heap until such time as I can rent/buy a garden shredder.

Bought a cordless cylinder mower a few weeks ago, blades ran backwards originally but with a little help from my Dad, we got it working properly. It was a DC motor so all we had to do was reverse the polarity (i.e. swap the wires over) on the motor. It does a great job. It's amazing what a better finish a cylinder mower produces, however the ground needs to be prepared for it's use though as stones knock out the cutting alignment and any tough clump of grass will prevent the blades from turning. Anyway, I'm done the back lawn, the bit by the greenhouse, the edges to the main lawn, the bit beside the boat and the dyke edge under the trees with is so far and it's worked a dream. Needed a few charges, but this was because I'd left it a while to mow these areas so they needed the extra juice.

Need fuel for the ride-on now so I can do the chicken coop - then hopefully that will be the last mow for a while. I'll probably only do the lawns two or three times between now and spring - but anything may happen as the air temperature seems to be all over the place.

I'll sign off now as I need to go grocery shopping.

Legumes etc

Runner beans still producing vast quantities. Need to be constantly picking them though to obtain good crop. Going straight in the freezer. Mange tout are coming into their own now. Although we only planted 3 as a test run and only 2 plants seem to be thriving, I got a good handful of crop today. Thinking about it, the main crops next year are going to be Spuds (goes without saying), broccoli, beans and mangetout. To be perfectly honest, the greenhouse is a mess at the moment. I sowed the right sort of seeds for the season in rows and waited to see what happened. What I found happened was, not all seeds would germinate - with a few of the others succumbing to caterpillars, leaving large gaps for weeds and previously seeded potatoes to grow in their place. Now unfortunately, some of the weeds look like potato plants and I've not been able to tell the difference, so anything other than the crop in the row has been pulled and as it's a greenhouse that is watered regularly, the weeds have grown again - within a week. Next year I'll be more careful to make sure that once the seeds have germinated, to carefully transplant the strongest ones into the proper rows and anything standing out of line will be destroyed... Whoa, This gardening lark is turning me into a fascist. I also need to remember that even though legumes fix nitrogen from the air, they still require other nutrients, so I'll do what is says in the book and dig some trenches... although unlike the fruit bushes, I'll make sure that the manure has been completely rotted.

Learning curve.

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Bloody Wind!

I really need to get this lawn seed down before the weather gets too cold otherwise I'll have to wait till April to get this bit established, but it hasn't stopped being windy (apart from that day I did the spraying) since the middle of the summer. One of the drawbacks of living on The Fens I suppose. Shifted barrowloads of topsoil from the other end of the garden yesterday to the bit by the orchard which is all gravel and preparing area to be lush grass right up to the curb. There's always something to do round here so today I'm going to strim the front dyke again as well as in the bottom of it and around the road tunnels to tidy it up a bit now that there is not much water in the bottom. At least it's sheltered from the wind down there!