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:

greengages and the orchid pot problem

As winter approaches, and the bare root season approaches, my mind naturally turns to trees. Specifically, a greengage. I'm quite fond of plums (ooer missus)  and my favourite in all the family is the understated, honeyed delight of the humble greengage. I don't really have space in my garden for a greengage (particularly as they really do do better with a pollination partner so you're planting two trees not one), which is why I got an allotment. But it is possible that I don't have space for an allotment in my life, and also, having your greengages a ten minute walk away sounds like an engraved invitation to the blackbirds of East Oxford to tidy up your crop for you. And if they make me give up the allotment for being too neglectful, then what? I lose my gage.

But, potentially, I could plant a stepover. There's also a gage/plum cross called Opal that would make a beautiful pollination partner. Would I, could I, should I try to do this in my back garden? Or should I opt for a pair of cheaper dwarfing trees, pop them up on the allotment and take the risk?

In other news, my bathroom orchids Manager's Special and Seasonal Clearance have outgrown their already fairly large pots. It's possible that they have actually outgrown the (quite small) windowsill, but a clear square tower pot would certainly help them fit better than the round pots they're in currently. Weirdly, though, this seems like a bit of an ask. Briefly I thought I'd found something useful on Amazon, but then it turned out to be ineligible for click and collect (what is that about) and it was expensive enough to give me pause, and it's now lost in my discarded browsing history, good luck finding that again (although at £8.99 per pot, I feel I can do better). Sorry orchids, hang in there. I'm sure the right pot will pop out of google, er, any time now.

I don't want to move them out of the bathroom. When they're both in flower, it's fireworks:

green roofs of London

When you're up here, and doing this, what should a person do?



Spot out the capital's amazing and expanding roster of green roofs and roof gardens of course!

I like these: functional, industrial green, green that's put in alongside the aircon and the liftshaft, to service the needs of the building. It's brown at this time of year of course and intentionally; that doesn't mean it's dead. It's drought-tolerant.



But how about this green island in the sky? There is always room at the top! Mediterranean planting, curvy benches, a human-accessible roofspace with a view across the solar-panel field. Optimised roof; there's even a dramatic light well in the middle.



The planting is très modern, too. But here's a more trad park space, with deck-chairs and borders, umbrellas and awnings and cloud cut hedges and lawns, which must be watered, perpetually.



Not many people here, though. Where are the people? They're having a meeting. They're eating their lunch. On balconies de-bleaked by hedges and troughs and planters shading in green into their peripheral visions. It's mid-week, mid-summer; time for shirt sleeves, weekend sunburn, frayed tempers.



The concept of a "garden room" is powerful. Here and there the roof greenery reflects the surrounding architecture; a green grid echoing back the squares of the towerblock windows, green pits creating a solemn echo of giant domed solars.



Green doesn't always stay on the roof, of course. Green wall one is a burgeoning creeper; green wall two is cladding designed to look like the building has a creeper. I'd be annoyed but look at the roof. It's got green walls and a green roof, albeit the functional, non-accessible kind.



But green spaces don't have to be huge projects. Look at this tiny garden crammed into rooftops, or the pair of beehives shoved in the corner of a commercial roofspace. In spaces where you can only agree to green up a tiny corner, it can still work well.



Or you can bring in the astroturf and Cordylines - the plant which could always be plastic or real.



The wharf houses sprouting rooftop gardens, back-gardens in the sky, communal and personal and shaded and sheltered in the warm Thamesside microclimate.



Wild meadows tucked onto the tops of building blocks, as if someone had introduced a grass block onto a towertop in Minecraft.



Elevated train lines creating storey-up waste ground, thick with native weeds, mice, birds.



Balconies and roof-scraps pressed into service as skygardens sheltering and softening and covering domestic life in the city.



And as to what's coming next; well, it's under construction. But there's a green roof on it.