it's too early to start up the propagator

Repeat fifty times, "it's too early to start up the propagater".

Repeat fifty times, "you could plant sweet peas now, but they'll only go leggy".

Repeat fifty times, "you're not allowed to plant any marigolds until you've tidied up the shed".

Repeat fifty times, "Clean all the crap out of the greenhouse before you plant this year".

Repeat fifty times, "Now is not the time to be drunk shopping for this year's fuchsias".

But it's so difficult, especially when the whole world is doing this:



And while I know they're kind of doomed, I can't help but admire their chutzpah. The same goes for all the birds singing like maniacs, and allotment fox, whose tail is now looking bushy and lush. That slightly plushy, ready-to-rumble-and-tumble feistyness of the ducks on the river. The tiny flights and savage fights of tiny birds. Spring is coming.

Today's task up at the allotment was measuring up a space for the geodesic dome. Well, actually, I'm doing a small vertical stretch to make it a Hub-Pod instead of Hub-dome, but it should still have that proper permie vibe, albeit with a slight edge of glamping. So it was all staking out 3.2m lengths of string to see if I've left a big enough space. Looks like the bit under the nasty old landrover hood (or whatever that piece of irregularly-shaped 'proofed fabric my predecessor was using to unsuccessfully suppress weeds is) might just fit the bill perfectly, although it was past civic twilight (never mind actual twilight) by the time I got up there. I'm going to need to treat the sticks, so I can go for a coloured wood stain, which is a fun thought. Turquoise/sky blue is my home colour, but there's a certain attraction to sunflower yellow. Paint first then construct? Or construct then paint?

The couch grass is still monstrous, invasive and terrifying, but wherever I heap it, the heap is disappearing, so I might just be able to compress it to death - without having to take anything organic off the allotment, which is my challenge for this year.

spring is coming

On the 1st Jan, I got massively overexcited when I found these on our New Year's walk:

Fast forward a few weeks and they are in full bloom (this is in Iffley Village):

I have planted a few snowdrops in my back garden over the years, but only one little clump, next to my Pulmonaria, and constantly threatened by encroaching Euphorbia, seems to have persisted. It has a couple of small, slug-rasped flowers. It's not been cold enough for any pests to die this year. I've seen aphids in December, Mosquitoes in January. My Summer Savory is surviving, my Scented Geraniums are thriving (I've rashly left half of them outside this year, as the cuttings take very well, and I now have far too many geraniums). We may still get a cold snap!/Or maybe not.

I'm slightly hoping we will, as I still have an apple tree and a vine to prune and certain things don't seem to be hitting dormancy and therefore may flower at a confused time, or not at all.

On the other hand, it would be nice to have a winter without losing a treasured plant.

time to turn leaf-blowers electric

I was on one of my standard urban walks the other day which (as is often the case) has a cut-through pedestrian route through a managed housing area. In it, a workman was clearing leaves with a leaf-blower, from under the bushes where they had fallen onto soil. These were being placed into plastic bags to be taken away as waste. This was an urban area, so I don't doubt that a fair amount of wrappers and other rubbish was coming out from under the bushes too.The urban perception is that a pile of dropped leaves is waste, rubbish, messy and so people litter into it. Given the lack of public toilets in cities nowadays, I'm sure they do worse.

But high-powered air blasts do more than just remove the leaves. Top layers of soil get scoured off too, leaving (and now I looked at them, they did have this) clean, exposed upper roots. The soil becomes stonier as smaller particles are swept away. Leaf blowers are more normally used on driveways, pavements and lawns of course, where there is either protection for the topsoil, or top-soil is a non-issue. But these are also spaces which are flat enough for use of a broom to be practical.

It takes longer (of course) to sweep or litter pick, than to blast your way through the garbage using a jet of air powered by a small 2-stroke petrol engine. It's also perceived as a less-skilled job, although there are (of course) better and worse ways to sweep, just as there are to dig, rake, hoe or do any other piece of manual labour. Leaf blowers are undeniably a lot more fun than rakes and brooms, especially when combined with a teeny-tiny van to transport around huge piles of leaves. These vans, nowadays, are pretty much always electric.

So, give me a moment here. Given that sometimes (not always!) it is better to be hands-off with your leaf piles, howsabout we have roll out some electric leafblowers. They'd make less noise, (they'd also probably be lower-powered, but I think that could be argued to be a good thing) the pollution would be removed from the immediate area, (important in urban areas with high particulate loads) and the fun would be retained, but become more of a one-tool-in-the-box rather than a strapped on, fully committed full-bore one-solution-fits-all sorts of fun. The leaf blower could holster in a charge port in the vehicle next to the brooms and the pickers. Lovely!!!!

For domestic use, well. I get a lot of leaves in my garden from my neighbour's tree. I use them as mulch, or the worms eat them. There's this making leaf mould thing people get really excited about, but you can actually just leave the leaves. There's this mowing your leaves thing that people advise as being great for lawns, and I guess you can do that, it's not going to do any harm, but you can actually just leave the leaves. Your largest leaf will still fit inside an earthworm. It's what they do. Your leaves are not a problem. You can just leave them.

an hour in january

It's not especially cold this year, but I'm feeling the cold. An hour outside is about as much as I can handle at the moment, before the tips of my fingers start reddening,  my face starts falling off and my womb starts sacrificing my extremities as surplus to requirements. An hour is time for a fair amount, though. January hours:

In an hour before twilight up at the allotment I flattened one of the alarming heaps up on the allotment. I've been referring to them as "potential burial sites" but having cleared one, the only thing buried in them is massive roots of horseradish and black bin bags (yes, really) full of couch grass roots. I'm sure my allotment predecessor absolutely meant to take them to the tip, but as I discovered when I tried that myself, a bag of couch grass is punishingly heavy. One of these heaps is now flattened into this year's potato bed (look mum I'm rotating my crops!) and the black bin bags have gone into the waste, and the couch grass into the couch grass disposal tube.

Other hours up at the allotment have been less impressive (weeding the broad beans and onions, arranging last year's brown, sere weeds into wind breaks, clearing couch grass from another bed, a bit of fitful digging) but I'm getting up there most weeks, so all good.

It's not always a sustained hour, of course. I've more had an hour in ten minute snatches about my garden this weekend, but in that time I got all the remaining bulbs into the soil (while admiring all the shoots from the ones that went in 1-3-5-7 weeks ago), gave the shed a rough tidy, swept up some leaves, got hold of a teeny-tiny pine tree for the culinary shelf (the shop I bought it from promptly brought out all the rest of their leftover tiny growing Christmas trees, did I encourage them?) and sat down with a cup of tea on the bench while mentally compiling 2020 job lists, that most important of gardening jobs.

I also spent an hour reading a gardening picture book, The Wildlife Friendly Vegetable Gardener, by Tammi Harting with pretty illustrations by Holly Ward Bimba, which was fun, albeit North American (to be honst, the presence of a sugar glider and a humming bird on the cover should have tipped me off). Tips like "crab apple trees in hedgerows keep black bears out of orchards"  probably aren't going to be terribly useful until we've gone a lot further down the rewilding route, but added a pleasurable fantasy twist to the reading. I borrowed the book to inform me up at the allotment, where I'm finding the presence of resident wildlife inhibitory on getting the area clear and productive. I end up thinking "oh, no, ants!" way too much. She had a lot of suggestions to help with the this:

Allotment 2020

•  A place to sit and watch the wildlife
• A magnifying glass, so I can say "ooh ants!" instead of "oh no! ants! sorry ants!")
• An observation journal that is fine for allotment visitors to read and which gives me somewhere to record the wildlife
• A wildlife trap camera (ooh, they've come down in price) so I can get to know my fox in invasive detail
• A bit of the allotment where I'm doing no-dig - clearing an area with a thick newspaper layer/ thin layer of soil/thick layer of mulch 
• A flow pattern of perennial vegetables/tussocky things from the top to the bottom of the allotment to create a bird/insect corridor
• Some pots with why-the-heck-are-you-doing-that seeds growing in them (Tammi suggests apples)
• A combined strawberry and asparagus raised bed
• A comfrey, nettle and fennel patch for pollinators and green compost
• Cosmos around the compost bin
• A shallow water supply/permanent puddle (upturned bin lid? Something recycled.) 
• A predictable wildlife feeding spot in a sheltered bit of the allotment, where I can put spare produce, seedheads, spoiled veg, etc. to be cleared by badgers, birds and foxes
• Shelter stacks of brown waste/woody weeds for amphibians and bugs
• Sunflowers among my raspberries as bird distractions

My final January hour was spent in a very #loveyourthicket frame of mind, pulling back the boundaries of a friend's native hedge, uprooting and chopping off its suckers and using the trimmings to thicken the boundary line. It's a single-line hedge, which is polite in a backgarden context, but which does tend towards thinning and bolting. I got a reasonable amount of hedge trimmed, all threaded back into the boundary line (leaving a squeeze-through gap so next door's kids can retrieve their footballs) though it's still pretty wild. The sap was rising and the buds were bursting - it's not very cold this winter! I had a good time, rumbling along the hedge, mumbling to myself, browse down the suckers, nibble back the boundaries, trim back the shoots, channelling the large herbivores that might have sustained a scrub clearing garden like this one in days of yore. She gets occasional muntjac and a bumbling badger in the back garden, but neither of them are going to nibble back the upper branches, so it's up to us to be the temperate megafauna in the garden.

#loveyourthicket for January

I was talking at work, like you do, about the various permutations of January. Veganuary, of course. So far, I've eaten a Greggs Vegan Steak Slice when I was hungry after going up to the allotment, so I'm participating there. Dry January, but sadly I don't like Seedlip, and not just because I grew up in a rural area where "Seedlip" was a very unpleasant insult, though that doesn't help. Then someone brought up Januhairy and firstly, what a lovely word, just try saying that, and secondly, not shaving body hair sounds actually quite practical for midwinter.

It was with this in the back of my mind that I was reading Rebirding, a lushly textured love story to a wild Britain, potentially reclaimable, rewildable, and MacDonald (the author) was talking about thickets. While lots of birds like to nest in scrub (from robins to yellowhammers), Nightingales need really dense thickets. Nice big thickets of bramble and/or rough scrub trees, ideally "extremely dense, almost impenetrable,thickets of vegetation within two metres of the ground"   (That links to "Managing Scrub for Nightingales" sixteen riveting pages, with diagrams and photographs.) And I'd like there to be more Nightingales, wouldn't you?

This brought to mind the times in my life I had seen those dramatic two-metre tall clumps of bush and bramble. I'd seen them on the farm, usually in the context of cutting them down. But I'd also seen them in neglected gardens of city houses, including two I'd lived in -- large messes of bramble, elder, hazel, the usual rubbish, occasionally clear-cut by the landlord, but more often than not left all year round, and sometimes choking the whole garden. In one of the gardens I had cleared the bramble myself, partly. Suddenly I felt guilty. If only I'd let the garden stay Januhairy. If only I'd learned the ways of #loveyourthicket - my birds would surely have thanked me.



If it sounds a bit wild and dirty, that's fine. #loveyourthicket is a bit of a wild and scruffy idea. Don't just leave a bit of your garden slightly wild. Let it sprout with the bad stuff, the thistles and the brambles and the nettles. Let is go lushly brambleicious. Let it be an active menace to your guests and your roses. Your thicket should be a third of your garden (tying back to Hunderwasser's rule of thirds, which stated that a third of the garden should be for native planting, a third for human planting, and a third left entirely wild) but should constantly menace the rest, the guests, your pets. The birds and the bugs will live in this space, the hedgehogs and the foxes. It will be your own private wildlife reserve. It will brim with life. It will be the green backdrop to your outdoor life. Your wilderness.

Of course, like all wildlife reserves, it may need a little light judicious trimming. Managing Scrub for Wildlife recommends some cutting to ensure a mixture of habitats - but also that cut vegetation is reserved, to encourage the insects. So you can head in there - carefully - out of season, to keep your thicket properly thickety. But no need to burn or recycle your trimmings. Just shove them in the thicket - that's what it's for.

at the allotment, after dark

I've given up on closing the hatch on my compost bin.



Allotment fox just wriggles it off every time, so he can curl up inside.

first year at the potato fair

Pennards Potato Days are a new thing for me, though I've picked up heritage tomato seeds from them for a few years now, either online, or at shows. All of my best and most flavoursome tomatoes have come from them, from the legendary Wapsipinicon Peach to the sumptuous Cherokee Purple. 

Alas, neither of these were available so I pick up a Krim, a red Beefsteak and couple of other meaty purple/black mediums. That should do me.

Potatoes, I went for Casablanca for my 1st early, Athlete for my Salad, British Queen for my 2nd early, and Mayan Gold for my maincrop

Sweet Peas I went proper Barbie with Just Jenny and Mumsie.

Others I got some Oca, Elephant Garlic and Jerusalem Artichoke, plus some rainbow chillis and some rainbow radishes as my radishes got a bit dull last year.

The set up is a proper IKEA one-track queue, a clockwise shuffle around the community centre hall where potato tips are swapped and friendsa and colleagues suddenly outed as allotmenteers.

I hadn't decided where to put the potatoes this year, but when I went up to the allotment, it was obvious. I'd lacked earth for earthing up last year, so let's go for the corner where my predecessor stacked up black bags of couch grass and piles of turf. I dug out the rubbish and flattened the heaps. It's rough at the moment but it'll be ready when my potatoes are.  

oxford's urban forest

Oxford is a green city. But I only recently discovered that we are considered to be an "urban forest" -made up of all the city’s trees, shrubs, hedges, and woodlands. Everything is included, from garden trees, to green spaces at institutions and local authority parks. And together, we make up a forest.

On our local GIS, you can highlight the tree preservation order level, and therefore discover which trees near you have needed protection in the past. Non-inclusion on the map is no indicator that a tree is unremarkable. Only those threatened become preserved. Initially I was worried that the beautiful Lime trees that shade parts of the streets in our area weren't included, but that simply means that there is no need to include them, as they have never been threatened

We value our local trees. The Tree Policy in unequivocal. Anything cut must be replaced. No-one can have a tree removed because of aphids, bird droppings, perceived threat or simply not liking the tree. This brings a smile to my face. There are always people who take agin a tree. Sometimes there are trees that take agin a person. Sometimes we all manage to get along.

Which isn't to say that there are not flash points. Large, mature trees in urban streets are a particular risk and therefore are at particular risk. The Cowley Chestnut is the latest controversy. It's another upper storey office window visible large tree, like the ones that were taken down outside my offices. The dampening effect on mood within the office as the loss of the summer greenery, the winter tracery, was palpable. But when they were cut, we looked down and there were dark half moons of rot in raw wood of the severed trunks.

Large trees have a cultural value, they become members of the community, reliable presences in the local emotional geography of your home space. In China, the rescue, transportation, relocation and transplantation of mature trees to create geographical foci in new build areas has driven advances in technique and success. But it is still a riskier business than starting again with a set of little, unambitious trees that will grow politely, harmonise with the houses, and never menace the upper stories.

Working with the rotten parts of a tree, working with its dead and dying wood, its falling branches, its slump, the parts that are sitting down, is part of arboriculture. Letting a tree die rather than hastening its demise may be desirable in some cases. In bonsai, the art of including dead wood or working with the rot in a specimen is valued and named; Jin and Shari can even be created, for the beauty of the dead preserved in the embrace of the living.

Large tree have an economic value as well of course - they are ecosystem service delivery modules within the urban machine, and I have no doubt that the large lime trees are very supportive in stopping our upswelling and alarmingly proximate water table nudging too far upwards.

Interestingly, while researching our local trees, I found this gem hidden in a Q&A:

Can I plant a hedge or shrubs in the service strip? Usually not: a hedge or shrubs would also prevent public access and be unlawful. However, it would be reasonable for you to plant bulbs, summer or winter bedding plants as they would be classed as temporary (this does not affect your right to apply for a licence to plant on the highway if you wish).

So go ahead, and plant tulips and daffodils, pansies and primroses, or whatever you like a long as it's low and temporary in your verges.

2019 resolutions for the garden

Having failed to clear the leaves from the patio, sort out that overhanging willow tree, get the couch grass off the allotment, plant my Christmas Sweet Peas or even clear the dud grapes from my grape vine, now is the perfect time to think about what I want to achieve in my garden in 2019.

Ehhhhh, if I get the time, if I have the energy.

1. Activate the overhang moss garden.
   The edge of the patio is a rough concrete block retaining wall overhung by a paving stone surface I call the culinary shelf. It holds my herb pots along with my regular attempts to grow things (Sparaxis, Himalayan Blue Poppies) which are beautiful but will not survive my soil. Under the overhang, crumbling bricks are stacked which were previously a rough partition wall in the kitchen. I had an idea about using them for formal underplanting, but the more I think about this, the less I like it. Inspired by the work of James Wong, I want to go natural, and make it look like moss and ferns have naturally colonised the area, using wood and other natural elements. 
2.  Arbour up the seat at the back of the garden
   There's an arbour, and a seat, and they're currently at right angles to each other, as a result of some Passion Vine drama a few years back, when it died all the way off then resprouted from the middle of a flower bed. That stem's now gone (they don't last for ever) so I get things more comfortable for the bench and its various creepery surrounds.
3. Grow some mushrooms
   I got a book for this for Christmas and everything. Partly it's about my local microclimate (damp) and partly it's about extending culinary/cultivatory skills but I'm definitely going into 2020 feeling mushroom-curious.
4. Build a geodesic dome up on the allotment
   I got given the first bit of the kit for Christmas, so this will definitely happen now. I'm excited, but also trepidatious. Will it be as wind resistant as I hope? Will it overdominate my plot? My next step is to create a level, woodchipped space to put it in, then I need to buy some poles, then it's construction time. Exciting!
5. Install Asparagus or Globe Artichoke or both on the allotment
   It's a statement of intention as much as anything else. It says: I will be here for a while.
6. Use the big flower bed for temporary installations
   It's small scale compared to most garden art of course, but there's still enough room to play with. I've got some plans and ideas; nothing original, but most gardening is about working with the ideas of those that went before you.
7. Make more pickles and chutneys
   I eat a lot of pickle and chutney, pretty much every sandwich is pickled up. Sometimes I struggle to place the produce I produce (not usually, because I'm not good at making gluts happen!) But let's join those dots a bit more this year and make sure that if I'm not eating it in time, it's chutney.

That'll do for now.