gardening stretch goals - a crocodile pit

So, for our anniversary this year we went to Crocodiles of the World. As I recall it all started in the back garden of an Oxfordshire-based crocodile enthusiast. Now it's a creditable and rather enjoyable mini-zoo, with some interesting breeding programmes (Tomistoma, your favourite crocodilian you have never heard of; some spectacular Giant Tortoises) and a pleasant aesthetic, partway between traditional reptile hot-house and modern zoo. Here's some views of the cages, all attractively tormented wooden lounging spaces and pot plants gone semi-wild. That's a Green Tree Monitor, I think.

Outside, for the Tortoises great and small, open grazing paddocks punctuated with constructed boulders and miniature palms alternate with warm-houses planted up with every house plant that ever wished their home was bigger, brighter and warmer.

Like many a small zoo, it has gathered some off-topic items. Meercats, squabbling Otters, an invisible Fishing Cat, a sword-beaked Kookaburra. The aesthetic for these pens is firmly modern zoo, with human observation posts and animal display perches:

But this is actually what we're here for. The Crocodiles:

As an aspiring supervillain, the idea of having dangerous animals in my garden appeals mightily. I pick out Black Caiman as the most handsome of the Crocs and therefore the bext choice for my fantasy back garden crocodile pit (though the most dangerous are probably their small congregation of colossal Alligators, kept on their own in a very safe sunken pen with a sheltered observation platform) but Nile Crocodiles are the classic sociable croc, an easier breeder and more widely available and probably the most practical choice for your garden crocodile pit. Here's their colossal float of Nile Crocs being given an "enrichment feed" for the entertainment of both the animals and the visitors. Large feeds are more intermittent, and medium feeds are introduced periodically for crocs that seem to be eating less. That sounds like a regime that could gel with supervillain life quite tidily.

As you can see, this is an indoor pit. It's too cold outside for most reptiles in this country. So your fantasy back-garden crocodile pit does need a roof, secure walls, a feeding platform and some cheerful greenery. And once you have a Crocodile House, you also have a Tropical House, so you might as well have some insects and birds flying free in it to engage the exotic plants and humbly approach biome.

pot plant shenanigans

There's been some expansion among the pot plants this year. The light bulb gardens were probably the first hint of a problem. I was looking up air plant containers and found that these could be purchased online for a few pence:

They're faked-up lightbulbs, vases in the shape of lightbulbs. I figured they'd make good airplant holders, but the moment I got them they screamed terrarium. Glass gathers condensation, which might make an airplant rot. But the various bits and bobs I did put in them are doing fine.

Then I started feeling a bit bored with the samiliness of many, many jade plants and stinky feet plants. This jelly bean seems quite happy to re-root any lost fragment, so it probably going to be just as much of a plant-spawning menace as the others.

A friend gave me this. It was in a delightful state of glossy health. That didn't last. Many dropped leaves later, it's finally reached an accommodation with its gloomy new home. It's in a ceramic pot, which I'll have to fix before winter or its roots will get too cold and wet.

Then there's the airplant situation. I found those little neon red ray-trace baubles on sale in Debenhams. The white one was an on-trend Christmas gift, which came with an included, half-dead, airplant. Half dead being one of airplants' natural states, all plants involved have since rallied and are now pupping merrily. The large prestigious-looking airplant came from a large prestigious-looking airplant stall at a garden show, where the lady on the stall told me that Spanish moss (also pictured) will flower if it feels sufficiently at home! Stretch goals!

This little trailer dries out too fast, and probably needs a bigger pot. It's up high, becxasue the kitten can't resist anything trailing. The Flamingo plant behind is also up high because he's a bit of an orchid-nibbler, which won't do him any harm, but he's too silly not to nibble lilies too, which will.

This helicopter-leaf succulent came from a friend who'd just had an overweighted flower-stem fall off. It's never flowered for me, but has dropped off numerous pups which are now scattered all over the place. That manky-looking leaf next to it is from a beautiful Streptocarpus called Harlequin Damsel. It came in slightly odd soil that's hard to keep water balanced, and suffers, and struggles, but never stops producing beautiful flowers.

The Chinese Money plant is such an on-trend plant I accidentally asked two people for one and they both came through. The more mature one is already sprouting children, so I'm sorted for these now. This one looks a bit hairy because it came to me in a terracotta pot that the kitten knocked off the shelf and rolled around the floor for half the night. The plant didn't die. They usually don't

I honestly don't know what that thing with weird bulbs at the bottom of the stems is. I got it from Wilko's mixed succulent shelf, which sometimes comes up trumps. It looks like someone tried to reproduce an onion using palm ingredients .... oh, and just like that, I've identified that it's a Ponytail Palm. Cute. The cactus shooting down between it is a Queen of the Night, according to the people I bought the cutting from. It's.... not dead?

The Monkey tail - another cactus with potentially fabulous flowers I've never seen - also came from a friend. It roots readily and he had a lot, probably from a parent plant collapse. The "Christmas" Cactus (I have December and June flowering plants) came from a more direct collapse, where I knocked over a very heavy plant at a party. The host instantly divided it and gave me half, which is top-notch hosting in any book.

Finally to the orchid that's currently in flower. This sinister little maroon moth has been a slow grower, but recently got her own container after I realised she was top-heavy in the pot she came in. This often precedes a growth spurt, so great things may be ahead of her.

last summer's wine

So yes, we drank the wine. It needed a bit of filtering (I hadn't quite managed to banish the yeast plaques problem) but it was good. The kids were round so they wanted to play Pokémon. Sadly my back garden is a bit of a Pokédesert, so they had to have fun taking pictures instead.

 

As you can see, I have a few new exotic pests about the place, and a brand new plant in one of my planters, a hungry picnic invader and a very cute new dog.

But of course what they mostly wanted to do was photograph Pokémon on people's heads. Aolan Grimers. Everyone's wearing them this season. So chic, so now.

fantasy chalk upland garden

My Mum's husband's birthday treat this year was hammering the horse at Uffington (you also find it called chalking or scouring) which is done every year to keep it white and shiny and well defined (except during world wars when it is reverently covered with turfs to keep it safe and disguise the landmark). He's an archaeologist, so taking part in a public custom that's been running for thousands of years (they took cores to check) is his bread and butter, but I also fancied the idea, so we went to join them. Here we are, chalking up the horse:

It was a hot, hot day, and as I worked along with the other volunteers, the soft tump-tump-tump of the hammers and the skylarks singing, and the flowers and the butterflies all got me thinking. Were we not gardening?

We talked it over; was it more akin to public art, a social act like a barn raising or laying a new road? The thin chalk lines that went down through the centuries became steadily more defined. Not many people live in chalk uplands, but in the village I grew up in there were the occasional properties where you'd cut the turf with a spade and hit chalk, almost at the surface.

In a place like that, could you resist scouring and chalking your way to an green and white op-art garden of wonder?

Chalk grasslands are rich with flowers and butterflies. It's a stunning biome, though exposed and too far from water, shelter, roads, and so on to see many houses, many gardens.



Working farm trails and roads feature; spaces where trees have taken the land to create hedge spaces, clearings and copses. Wayland's Smithy is just down the road here, with its gentle lawn and extraordinary rocks, its woodland and wildflower borders.

that's just going to be trouble

It's the time of year that everything's sprouting. And sometimes you look as a thing and think, pff, that's going to be trouble. Like this lovely little Verginia Creeper here, plugged into a crack in a concrete front garden. Or this deliciously ambitious Nicotiana:

urban greenvasion: back-to-the-wild-planters

This idea came to me over the summer, as I was hauling three hazel saplings and a sucker ash out of my herb pots. Why do we plant plant pots? I mean, obviously I popped a Loropetalum Chinensis Ever Red into one of my pots (and watched it die in a terrible withering cold spell) because  I thought it was beautiful and wanted it, my precious, but if all you're after is a fringe of cheery greenery, why'd you bother planting up the pot? Why not just leave it for come-what-may?

This harks back to Hundertwasser's principle of Portions, with a third of horizontal surfaces private, held for gardens of dwellings, a third public and planted, with respect to the obligation to have trees, and a third reserved for "spontaneous vegetation".

Spontaneous vegetation is of course a dirty word. Allow me to quote Jana VanderGoot from Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic:

The phrase spontaneous vegetation tends to be used synonymously with words like weedy, invasive or unkempt when it appears in discussions of aesthetics and architectural space. Spontaneous vegetation often signals the social failure of unsafe, chaotic and isolated places. It is also associated with the economic failure of abandoned lots and run-down buildings in need of maintenance.

This conjures spectres of the dried planters outside closed bars dribbling rosebay willowherb and sow thistle (not usually a problem) and of willow and buddleia sprouting from cracked architraves and damaged drains (you need to weed your frontage as a matter of urgency), and other things like that which sooner or later get tidied up.

But what if there were deep planters which included reserved space for spontaneous seedlings? What if we didn't weed out the volunteers and write-ins, the fly-throughs and random arrivals, from the planters until they began to spread beyond their allocated third?

Well, I have a few containers of every size in my garden that I've not got around to putting anything successful in, or which have a thing which has died, or which have been invaded by cheerful weeds, and I have become accustomed to it. The mature hapsadaisical pots have started sprouting spontaneous trees, Bog Myrtle in the water pots, Dogwood in the dry pots, Ash in the stony pots and Hazel absolutely everywhere.  I've got used to them, with their cheerful flags of Red Valerian, Marguerite, Columbine, Willowherb and Bindweed. I'd miss them if they weren't there (though that is just as true of all my fancies and tenders and pretties of course). But never mind rewilding; this is reweeding.

So, what do we need to get from here to there?

1. A greater tolerance of bare soil or fluctuations of greenery levels. An indulgent tolerance of the browns and greys of winter and early spring.
2. A range of  pots with concealed water reservoirs in their bases available for every size and position, and easy availability of cheap municipal planting mix to fill them with..
3. A shift to a positive language and attitude when discussing weeds, vegetation and spontaneous growers.  I've started that a little here, with the concepts of reweeding, come-what-may and volunteer plants.
4. A higher tolerance of green spread from containers, allowing tumble and scatter of vigorous plants a little allocated space around their containers.
5. The boldness to step back and allow vegetation to happen. 

I love this idea because it has a bewitching simplicity. In some sense you could achieve quite a lot with just a few signs saying things like "Reweeding Area" or "Spontaneous Vegetation Space" or "Fallow Area - Please Leave" and whatever happens to be closed, neglected, in-between plantings, abandoned or awaiting agreement that week in your urban area.

Of course defending that space for the weeds would be rather more of a challenge.

rescuing last year's wine

I spotted a disturbing crust in the necks of the wine bottles from last year's winemaking (which was - wow - November last year, really late) so thought they might be spoiled. But other half went onto the internet (everything we know about winemaking we've cobbled together from the internet) and discovered that while it might be spoilage, it might also be a yeast crust from bottle fermentation. Now bottle fermentation is a possibility, as I didn't stop the ferment last year, just observed that it had stopped. Under these circumstances it can continue, very slowly, and create a yeast crust, especially if your bottles are a bit cold (I had to rescue mine from a cold larder).

So, rescuing wine after a bottle ferment. Step 1, order your Campden Tablets - they only cost a few quid, and if the wine is drinkable, you'll need to add them to stop any further trouble.

Step 2, strain your wine through a muslin into a sterilised bowl (I like Pyrex for the job) and taste. I used a little ceramic sake cup for the tasting. Anything going into the bowl needs to be sterilised and rinsed. Your yeast plaques look like this:

Hooray!!!! It tasted like wine. If so, Step 3 into your brewer's bucket with it, which is also sterilised. Repeat for each bottle, making sure you taste for each bottle. Even if (as with mine) "it doesn't taste very alcoholic," be aware that each bottle you taste will diminish your accuracy and capability and you need to remember without fail to strain, taste, and only then add to the rest of the wine in the bucket. It wasn't a disaster for me, but if that had been a spoiled bottle it would have been....

Then, Step 4, crush and add your Campden Tablet. That'll stop any further microbial action. Wipe out and sterilise the bottles to take the wine back. (I use boiling water with sterilising powder - nothing fancy - but again, be aware that by this stage you too have an alcohol content.). Then it's time to Step 5, refill the bottles. Remember to sterilise your funnel and put your bottle in something to catch the inevitable spillage. I'm using a handy soup bowl.

Step 6, Top up and cork the bottles. I was sufficiently wavy by this stage that the little syringe (sterilised!) for topping off the bottles was a lifesaver. You've doubtless noticed that I've lost between a half and a quarter of a bottle by now. Above, I'm seeing if a three quarters bottle is the right size. It isn't - too much spilled/drunk and I had slightly underfilled the bottles in the first place, which might have encouraged the yeast plaques.

A half bottle of malt in the cupboard contained but a sip of whisky, so I pressed it into service for the half bottle. I didn't sterilise (or rinse, now I come to think of it) the bottle, but that shouldn't cause any problems, and may actually improve the flavour, so proceed directly to Step 7, label the bottles.

And there we have it, Casita Freelands 2018 "Wandering Woodlouse," all ready to drink. And having drunk half a bottle myself, I have no shame in foisting it upon friends. I'd pair it with chocolate and coconut biscuits, cheese straws and wotsits, as it's not a subtle beast; honey, raspberry and redcurrant brawling on the nose, with an undertow of hedgerow herbs, gentle rain and autumn leaf.