last of the year

2018 in the garden. What a difficult time. Brutal cold snaps, wide expanses of drought. Dead plants, neglected seedlings that dried to dust in the hot hot heat. It's nine years now since I started to tansform my back garden from a mess of rubbish and concrete into a soft green box, and it's much lovelier than it was; but now undeniably entering its difficult, tweenage years.

January started with trend prediction for 2018 in the show gardens; sadly, my regular garden show partner and I were both overworked, exhausted and unavailable to see if may of my predictions came through this year. Although, waterfall plants and flaming mutants have both had their time in the sun this year, and it's fair to say that there have been a lot of dead hedges too, although sadly most have been unintentional. In other news, the pale green checkerboard slipper orchid lives on, I never did make myself a lawn jacket, and nor did I bring back stumps and bark for moss to grow on - it was too cold, then too dry.



February saw me starting to get excited about ways of greening the urban environment, planting sweet peas, giving the garden a good spring clean and planting up masses of tomatoes and chillis - and feeding and watering up and taking out half my plants to get them started for spring, just in time for the beast from the East to kill them in a cold snap.



March continued cold. I got the fancy tree surgeons in to take out the overhang of my posh back neighbour's back hedge but their quote for the neighbour's willow tree was out of our range, so that's still a big and increasing problem. I took fleece off plants, I put it back on again. I pulled plants under cover, and then discovered that the plants under cover had also died. Everything browned in the frost.



April was mostly about teeth and green roofs. The moss on my verandah roof drew blackbirds who coould find food in it through the snow (there's still snow). Coltsfoot did well. Oh, and I caught the rumour of an allotment....



May I took on the allotment, and had an awesome time, when I wasn't being bored, lonely and knackered. I wouldn't say I really have this allotment thing nailed. Back at home, my tulips came up, my cane orchid reflowered, and I finally got the tomatoes out. All from seed this year - go me! I also found a plague of ladybird larvae down on Donnington Bridge and kidnapped a jar of them to eat the aphids on my apple tree. I can report that this worked much better than ordering them by post and I hope to do the same next year.



June I got the first fruits of the allotment - radishes and strawbs! But I've been waiting for good weather to move plants around for three months now, and none has come. It went straight from too cold to too dry with hardly a beat. My plants that have been waiting in staging are starting to die. I take some steps, but this year is already looking like a rearguard action in my garden, so I decide to indulge in some urban utopian speculation in my urban greenvasion series instead.



July things began to die in earnest. I yanked the strawberry pots after I failed once again to beat the slugs to the thin, mean harvest of a few sullen fruits. The blueberry bushes gave up the ghost. Most of the plants that had been in staging waiting for good weather to plant out were dead or being strangled by native weeds after I hastily shoved them into a border on a rare mild day. Even the tomatoes were reluctant to flower. But every year has something that likes it, and this year's success stories were starting to show; Kashmiri chillies. The grapes. Tweedia.



August the bindweed came. The Rhododendron tried to flower again. The apples set in absurd quantities. Tomatoes began to show here and there in the mess of the greenhouse, but keeping them watered was a constant struggle. Gardening was mostly a round of watering, wincing as the cold water from the rising main hit the fragile plants. Pretty much everything was showing drought damage by this stage. In retaliation I yanked a bunch more pots, including the blueberry container. I found a bench on sale and put it into the space where it had been. This was an instant hit with me and the cats, especially in the quiet of early morning.



September the first of the chillies came through - a pot of windowsill habaneros. They were wicked hot and delicious. Otherwise the month was spent watering, wondering if it would ever rain again and singing the praises of my new super-light hose which cut time spent watering to lovely waterfall ribbons. Drought continues, of course.



October was a full month of  finding another thing that had died in the garden. After a bit it obviously became too big a job to sort out, though Tim helped me by encouraging me to replace the Tree Fern. Inbetween tutting at dead plants I stared at the grape vine, thinking, I really should harvest that. In the final week the temperature began to plummet and I realised we would have frost by Halloween and filled the shed with tender plants.



November I spent irritably looking for orchid pots after the situation in the bathroom just got silly. Later, in a sudden frenzy of activity, I harvested tomatoes, grapes, made chutney, made wine. It finally started to rain, to get cold, to get properly miserable outside. And it was in this bullshit horrible weather my cat was taken ill, in my garden, early one morning, in late November. And that was her gone.



December was little more than lurching into the shed to keep the overwintering plants moist. I planted some sweet pea seeds I found in an old pot, but they weren't viable any more, and didn't sprout. I bought more seeds, but didn't plant them. Just before Christmas I was bringing in the last of the chilli harvest - Kashmiris, green and fresh.



And that was 2018, in the garden.

happy boxing day

It's the true meaning of Christmas, a cat in a box. Oh, the paws.

taking the jetty upriver for some TLC

Now there's something you don't see every day.



The jetty (ut's come up from Folly Bridge) has been chained off and inaccessible this year; geese have colonised it and now a garden is growing in the rotting wood soaked with droppings.


A couple of Salters on the jetty, managing the tow, one put a foot through a rotten board. They were in good spirits, amused by the absurdity. We had a few words after they spotted me with my camera. There may have been some mugging for the camera.



It's going for repairs. There are big plans for it next year. Oh, I hope so. There used to be a jetty full of tiny row boats at Folly Bridge you could mess around with; and nowadays, it's a short push downstream to the tiny wharf by the iron bridge, and that'sthe back way up to the Westgate.

survivor on the stalled building site

There's a new microslum going up where the corner house once had a beautiful garden, in the cottage style, with cherry trees, chickens, a pond and bees on the honeywort.

But the building work has stalled.



And you can't keep a good pansy down.

Wall gardens of Oswestry

All towns have their vernacular of municipality, styles which are adhered too, ideas that spread. In Oswestry, things live on fronts of building in the historical town centre:



Giraffes are big in Oswestry. The influence of The British Ironworks Centre may be at work here; just down the road, they have a Safari Trail of animals in varying states of realism and quirkiness. The giraffe in a nest lives above an estate agents, surrounded by Petunias.



There is a castle and all the usual history of market towns on the borders. The archers above the hanging baskets may be commemorating the history of the town?



Quality hanging baskets on the front of this pub; and this time the sculptures are celebrating the present day.



Walls work better with something on and in them. This vacant unit is transformed by murallistic fancy. I especially like the cats. But where has all this frontage whimsy come from?



Among the contemporary pieces there's the odd bit like the one above, clearly much, much older, suggesting that decorating your shopfront with small sculptures has been part of Oswestry culture for a good long time.

Let's hope that the boarded shop keeps its horse, and maybe add a few more bits, for good measure.

Farewell to my gardening shoes

These can't be worn any more. My feet just say ugh every time I put them on, even through the thickest socks. It's a sad moment; I shall not see their like again.



It's not just the punched skulls in the suede or the bright pink skully lining (and all this years before Damian Hurst svarowskied a brainbox and made it the most fashionable thing ever). To see the true beauty you must turn the shoe over:



The brand is momentum, one of those ephemeral brands that drift by in a season, leaving nothing but a trail of bewildering footprints.

in praise of tattered prairie daisies and dahlias

These beauties were planted into wheel-in containers outside the multi-cafe, The Westgate Social, in our new shopping-centre this summer. Here's the overview shot:



Over the weeks more outside seating steadily arrived and filled up; people sat by the flower borders, optimistic and tattered as they were. 

queen of all she surveys

This summer, the bindweed took the back garden. You can see it in the shot behind Harlequin there. You may also be able to see, if you look with care, the pale paws of Dion, the white cat who lives next door, wrapped around the fence on disputed corner.

Dion and Harley were not keen on each other. She'd turned up as a thin, scared kitten blinking her blue eyes through the windows of houses on our street, and our neighbours adopted her. Dion followed Harley around, like kittens do, then took to pouncing on her, which didn't go so well, then she grew up and it escalated into full-blown cold war, interrupted with occasional bouts of screech-offs. At first Dion's screech was a thing of glory and Harley's needed some improvement; then Harley developed a spectacular voice herself. Our patrolling Toms did not linger in either garden, not with these two brawling girls in residence. 

In the past few years, the disputes had settled into the normal cat time-slice arrangement, helped by how Harley and Dion had calmed down in their middle ages. But there was still the occasional clash on disputed corner.

unplanned wall gardens

I was impressed by this sudden explosion of sedum on a closed shop. The colours echoed both the fading vintage paint on the closed shop, and the cheerful utilitarian colour-pop of the safety equipment on the next door building site. Good look for Chelsea. Experimental. Strong. On point.



This tree is doing pretty well, with ferns growing in its shelter. The vertical brush stroke of the drainpipe, the rhythmic flutter of the air conditioner vents, the sharp lines of those first floor rooflets. Walls and their gardens. This is my tip for 2018; and the wild plants are leading the way.




No time for planned gardens this week; too busy mourning. This is her in full-on garden motivator mode, or alternatively asking for her dinner.

a cat in the garden

This morning my cat wasn't, as she normally is, sitting on the audio interface in the studio. The other cat seemed agitated; he was yapping, a trick that's normally hers. As opened the verandah door to go look for her, I heard her; she was outside the back door, more or less where she is in this picture, but collapsed, ill and in pain, and oh, to cut a long story short it wasn't one of those things cats recover from.

The garden was her domain. Her first taste of outdoors was here, she chased the rats from the shed, stepped fearlessly along the shed roofs and fences, and scaled the dizzy heights of the trees. She drove off all comers, even the biggest of toms.

 From kitten....

To Queen:

She lived here, played here, died here.

bringing in the tomatoes

Another job I should have done weeks ago beckoned today. The greenhouse is still full of tomato plants, and I can see from my bedroom window that there are fruit on them and some of the fruit is ripe. I planted a lot of different varieties this year, but they all did badly. This is down to three things:

• I didn't plant them out into their grow-bags until quite late, because we kept having terrifying plunging frosts
• Keeping up with the watering was very challenging this year 
• The neighbour's colossal willow tree and our passion vine had a competition to see which of them could shade the greenhouse most effectively (spoiler: the tomatoes lost)

For interest, my varieties were Pink Oxheart (which are actually pink and heart shaped!), Golden Pear (yes, pear shaped and yellow), Purple Apache and Green Opal (oval shaped and green), and one of the fancy big italian beefsteaks, I forget which. 

You can take it as read that they all tasted good - garden tomatoes do - but nothing tasted amazing this year. The need to go heavy on watering in the morning diluted the juice and the plants drying out at three hours before I was due back from work tightened the skin and sacrificed the fruit bottom to blossom end rot. There were some additional issues too, which means bar the apaches, I probably won't revisit any of these varieties:

• The Green Opals are a pain in the arse, as you really can't tell when they're ripe at all - it's harder even than the green zebras. 
• The Pink Oxhearts are slow to ripen and few on the vine. I planted them very early, and it still wasn't early enough.
• The Golden Pears are insanely prolific flowerers but a lot of the buds don't set fruit and a lot of these fruits stay very small - they're really a tomato berry. They're also really sprawly.
• The Purple Apaches are one of the best tasting tomatoes there is, but they can struggle in crowded and overshadowed conditions, and they did.
• The Costolutos (I think it was they) were picky about their watering so I got mostly three-quarters of a fruit with the blossom end rot going into the compost 

But there were still a lot of fruit! Even after I'd picked out the bad and the burst and the rotty, there were still a few kilos of tomatoes, mostly green, to stack up on the kitchen windowsill.

putting the wine onto the gross lees

In the cold light of the day after harvest, the grapes are not as good as I thought. I line up my tools; a plastic rice paddle and pyrex bowl for the crushing, a colander and some baby muslins for draining the juice, and my bucket, which is a basic item bought off the internet, still with its "Bigger Jugs" label in place.

Everything gets a good sterilising rinse, then it's time to give everything a good pounding. I didn't do badly on the harvest this year; the reject bucket only has a scattering of grapes along with the usual run of vine snails, spiders and stalks. I pull all the stalks, but leave the pits.

It's sticky, stenchy stuff, grape pulp. As usual, halfway through I feel I am wasting my time utterly; that nothing good can ever come of this muck. This coincides with my arms getting proper tired from the crushing. But nothing a quick votive to Bacchus won't get me through.

My bowl of the best of the best grapes with the cleanest darkest skin, with the sweetest and most even yeast bloom on them, go into a muslin doughnut, and into the bucket. This is enough to make alcohol, but it'll run too slowly and the alcohol concentration won't ramp up fast enough to avoid undesirable flavours, so I'll only let that run for overnight and tomorrow morning I will inoculate the bucket with a sachet of brewer's yeast I found in the bottom of the brew box.

The brix isn't bad -- at the top of "start wine" but I'd already decided to raise the sweetness while crushing, to improve the balance of acid/sweet on the nose. Plus I have some honey from a friend with a hive in her back garden, and how better to intensify the terroir?

The colour looks poor. Greyish peach with an undertone of green, like one of those sexy zombies that the internet loves so much. Never mind. Slam on the lid, wait for the magic. 

picking the grapes

Now that the sun has plummeted below the horizon for the winter, the garden is getting pretty much no sun at all. But the last weak rays of this astonishing long hot summer ripened my grapes. So I went out into it this evening to pick them.

It is far too late, in the year, in the day. I listen to Radio 6, Amy Lamé, cold fingers stumbling over the grapes. Occasionally, uncertain about a bunch, I sample one. The skins are very hard, and inside the juice is already on the turn, a light prickle of alcohol like a soft promise. I cut them down to small bunches, scissors and snips, trying to avoid my fingers, mostly succeeding, shaking them to dislodge pests as I go, leaving the small seedless sub-grapes I should have trimmed off months ago to plump the large grapes where they are good. I call them pearls - they have an exquisite, light taste. The bad ones into a discard bucket, the frost-splintered, the fly-punctures, the pears with problems.

Whenever they get to ripe, I make wine. I call it after the most numerous pest I find on my wine. This year's vintage, 2018, will be "Wandering Woodlouse". I don't know how well it will do. It's late.

It gets too dark to continue before I run out of vine, but only the far end is left, where the bunches always go first and anyway the foxes and blackbirds and hedgehogs can tidy up the last bunches for me (one is half-stripped already) hopefully without getting so drunk they get into trouble. I leave it, I have two carrier bags and two carrier bags of  grapes is enough to make wine of.

My arms ache from the cold of autumn. But the juice seeping out of the bottom of the bags has a hint of promise.

once there was a vine

Now there will be a development of four luxury townhouses.

concrete, skater boys and kombucha fabric

So, I was just chucking out my latest copy of i-D magazine (I read it on the train, usually) and found yet more inspiration for my difficult back bed. Angled chunk of concrete, actor to perch on it, boom, done. The actor might be difficult to source long-term but I do have a cat that can sit on a surface of almost any angle, so that shouldn't be a problem.

In the same issue, there's some class advertainment from Palace Skate in the form of a photoshoot set in the Parco dei Mostri. There were only two photos in the magazine but I tracked down the rest on Palace's instagram (FOLLOW) which give a nice idea of its heady charms:

Their online shop leaves no doubt that Palace a good brand for the gardener:

Finally there was a piece on experimental low-waste sustainable green fashion that featured some big trees and a dress by Aurélie Fontan who has been making zero waste fabric out of recycled cork, cable ties and biogrown fabric derived from kombucha. Through a process of Design for Disassembly, Design for Slower Consumption and Design for Waste Minimization, she has been carefully laser-cutting, tesselating and trimming and getting fabric grown in labs to create zero-waste clothes that look as much grown as designed. They may not be as practical for the gardening, but they'll work brilliantly for the garden party: