By far the best helebores I have seen this year, and that even includes NT gardens, are A's mother's in Somerset. They don't get any special treatment, they've just been in the same bed for years, admittedly a bed which is, at its highest, half a foot higher than the path beside it, from years of mulching with compost.
This is our first weekend at home since the beginning of January and the forecast is mild = a chance to get stuck into the garden that has been sprouting and changing in front of my eyes for weeks. At last! Hope your weekends are shaping up too. I'll post what I managed to get up to over the coming weeks.
We spent the weekend with my family, stripping out my brother's new house. It's a red brick terrace, previously occupied by a now elderly lady who bought it and lived in it from new. In the back yard is a lean-to shed, and inside we found a dusty but carefully laid out workshop, left as last used, with still-shiny nails carefully sorted into coffee jars, spare floorboards and off-cuts stored across the roof joists, old tobacco tins full of things that might come in useful one day and a Morris Minor hubcap.
Further in, propped or hanging up on the wall, were a selection of careworn gardening tools including a lovely pair of shears, one handle threaded with a length of string for hanging up. Rusted, they still opened and closed with a lovely movement to reveal silvery, nearly-sharp blades. Although I received a very generous gift of hand-me-down gardening tools last December, hand shears were still on my wish list, particularly now that the shaped hedges in the back garden are beginning to sprout. My brother kindly allowed me to take this pair home, now I'm just waiting for the frosts to finish.
This weekend I achieved one of my three gardening resolutions for 2012: buying and planting up a gooseberry bush.
I'm a bit of a sweet tooth but a short second place behind comes the sour tang of gooseberry and blackcurrant. When your local greengrocers is Sainsbury, getting hold of these tangy beauties is next to impossible (or extortionate). In the end I went for the scarcest of the two - gooseberries.
I knew that, when our tenancy ends, I couldn't bear to move or leave behind a flourishing goosberry bush so container growing was the only option. This site was an excellent primer on varieties and care, although now I look back on it I've disregarded about five of the recommendations they make.
I'd stumbled across Wilkinson's amazing range of grow your own fruit bushes during a solo trip into town a few weekends ago and had hoped to pop back there, but a trip to the garden centre with A's family cropped up first and I came home the proud owner of one Invicta gooseberry plant and the deepest container I could find (happily, I'd wanted this container for the birthday bay but it was hugely overpriced, now reduced with a further 50% off).
It planted up very nicely and A came out for some ceremonial mulching with manure. Roll on harvest time. I've already page marked this yummy recipe.
We've been in the South West alot at the moment, spending time with family. At first glance there's not much to see, but Spring is definitely on its way. Better get my skates on.
Ordinarily I'm not one for making New Year's resolutions, but with a new garden, and a new garden blog, to keep going I thought I'd break with my usual stance and jot down some goals for the coming year here.
Written down they seem pretty unambitious, but with the weeks already flying towards February it won't be long before I'm looking back on the year and wondering where it all went. There'll be plenty more to do in the garden but as a minimum I'd like to be able to say that I've achieved everything I've set out here. There's a mixture of new experiences to expand my knowledge and skills combined with some improvements specific to this garden, all of them are going to be fun!
1. Grow something from seed and eat it
Confession: I did try this for the first time last year, but had to abandon my crop of spindly rocket and mizuno to the slugs when we moved. In any case, the only growing space I had to hand was the spent compost of a window box which dried out, causing the rocket to bolt. This time the crop has got to feed us, at least for one meal.
2. Grow some soft fruit
Because, yum! A soft fruit bush to me represents one step closer to a settled home. It's an investment plant, one that you feed and nurture and crop year after year. There's a big psychological kick to be had from growing some soft fruit.
3. Move the hydrangea
There is a hydrangea bush in our garden. You wouldn't know it though because it is planted under a very successful hibiscus and didn't get a look-in last year. The hibiscus stands sentinel at our gate, very beautifully, and on the other side of the gate is a bare space. This imbalance is even more striking in the bareness of Winter so my plan is to even up the symmetry of the garden and give the hydrangea a chance to flourish by moving it to the other side of the gate. One of the first things I did last year was to even up the sedge grasses in the garden path, and that single job has had the most impact on the garden so far; I'm hoping that moving the hydrangea will be equally successful.
4. Convince the landlord to invest in some border plants
Winter has killed off the soapwort and other ground cover plants in the bounday border and it's all looking a bit bare. I'm building up the courage to ask our landlord whether he would invest in some grasses to create a soft boundary line which still allows the garden to borrow space and planting from next door.
5. Blog more
Surely every bloggers resolution, but on the days when I do get it together and post I'm finding that the blog feeds my gardening interest as much as my gardening feeds the blog. Already it's been great for me to look back on the last part of the gardening year and remind myself of what I started with and where it has got.
I saw this brassy Janus on our New Year walk in the Cotswolds and snapped him to post here. I hope to share some of my 2012 gardening resolutions here over the next few weeks, until then ... Happy New Year everybody!
