Category Archives: Gardening

Strange Tales from the Garden

My idea of irony

After a day spent hammering away at the keyboard yesterday – ebay parcels and banknotes to be written up for sale – I decided to devote most of my evening to my beloved, as she has had another harrowing day at work. After much moaning and eating fish and chips we both fell asleep around 10.30 in front of the TV and didn’t wake up until midnight. And That is why there is another untidy gap in my history of blog posts.

Julia has been under considerable stress at work over recent months because, as with all successful garden projects, everybody wants a piece of it. It’s a lovely, relaxing place to spend a day according to her manager, who spent a lazy, sunny day there in late summer, eating fruit and chilling out.

It’s not quite so lovely in November, with no heat or light or running water and a group that needs supervising, chemical toilets that need scrubbing and all the routine tasks to attend to (so that people can come down in summer and steal all your crops).

In the Polytunnel – now converted for general use with Social Distancing

People always want to ‘work’ on garden projects when they are running well, but they never want to do the actual work, and they often disrupt things due to ignorance and stupidity. Here are three examples of what she is up against. I will offer them here as slightly humorous stories, rather than serious complaints, as the full list of problems is long and boring and makes me think murderous thoughts. These are just three edited highlights.

One, Julia went down one day after her regular Wednesday day off to find a large hole in the garden. The Wednesday staff had decided the garden needed a new pond as the three it already has are clearly not enough. Julia shrugged it off as she is becoming immune to the random stupidity. When she went to the compost bins she found that the bin she had just spent two days emptying (ready to move compost) had been filled with rubble by the pond diggers. It took two days to clear it. (They have, by the way, dug the hole the wrong size for the liner and the garden is let with a hole and a discarded liner, because they have now lost interest.)

Apples – the garden is always popular at harvest time

Two, she went to the main base on the edge of town and found a display of succulents on show. Apparently they were too good to leave in the polytunnel and everyone should be able to enjoy them. One of the visiting staff had decided this and without discussion, had removed them. When Julia complained and pointed out that they were part of an ongoing project she was told they were Mencap property and they would do what they liked. However, they aren’t Mencap property, they are our property. We sourced them and loaned them to the garden because, until recently, there was never any money for the garden. They are part of a project where the group propagates them and sells the extras at Open Days to raise money for the garden.

She was then told that she should not take her own things to the garden and that she should remove them. So, no succulent project, no enrichment experience for the clients, no fund-raising and only about half the succulents we used to have as quite a lot have disappeared. Most managers would have apologised and thanked Julia for the resources she provides.

Finally, she inspected the wormery yesterday. She found that somebody has filled it with sand. We are mystified why anybody would do this, as worms don’t live in sand and don’t eat sand.

Why, why, why, why, why?

Moles like the garden too

There is a meeting on Monday to discuss the garden. I don’t think it will help. I think homicide would help, as some of the staff will clearly be more use as soil improver than they are as human beings.

Photographs

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I’ve just written 289 words about what is happening to Julia at work. A lot of it comes under the heading of “least said, soonest mended” as I mentioned yesterday but she’s just given up over half her day off to a staff meeting and telephone calls with clients, so I wrote my thoughts on the matter.

Then I decided I’d better not publish them. So I won’t. I’ll just show you some photos from yesterday.

Sugar Skulls and Succulents

I don’t know why we seem to have so many sugar skulls around these days, they just seem to be fashionable, despite having nothing to do with the UK. THey don’t even seem to have anything to do with the USA or Australia, which is where we seem to draw a lot of our cultural references from these days. It’s a mystery. Julia doesn’t even know who brought them to the gardens and left them.

Three LIttle Birds and Origami

What with the Three Little Birdsreference and the origami, we seem to have added Reggae and Japanese Paper Folding to or international themes.

Inside the Polytunnel

Virtually everything you see here has been scrounged from skips. Only the polytunnel was purchased brand new, as the chance of finding a discarded polytunnel in a skip is small.

It is now set up to allow twelve people to eat and work in here (I use ‘work’ loosely) and still maintain a semblance of social distancing.

Everything in these pictures is edible. Yes, everything. I’m quite fond of apples and grapes, but have to admit the fat hen and sedum aren’t too bad either.

Apples

Grapes

Sedum

Fat Hen

In fact, with fat hen being used as spinach in Mediaeval times and sedum tasting a little like avocado they can be quite pleasant.

I did have a picture of what I think is ground ivy but it may be purple dead nettle or henbit – they are all edible but as it’s important to be accurate when you are foraging.

I’m going to start doing more foraging again as my interest has been rekindled by a few things I’ve seen recently.

Moles like the garden too

Sumac blooming, or whatever it does

Fly on a Fuchsia

SEnsory Garden

Some flowers from the garden. I have now caught up with yesterday…

Another Twenty Minutes in the Car Park

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I returned to a familiar car park today. It wasn’t planned but I had time to kill. I see from a quick glance at the post that I haven’t really duplicated any shots, apart from one of the gym car park. so there won’t be a lot to compare. I’ve even looked through the old shots and can’t match anything else up.

Gym car park in lockdown

Gym Car Park today

As you can see, there are more people there, and more leaves on the trees. There has been an outbreak of community gardening in the areas of bare soil around the trees lining the boundary of the car park, complete with solar lights and some arty details in the corners.

Community Gardening – Sherwood – Nottingham

It could do with a bit of maintenance, and I’m not sure the Christmas tree is a great idea, but apart from that it’s good to see. If I was having a go at a community space I’m pretty sure I would find it difficult to keep it maintained, so all credit to them for having a go. I’ve been saying for years that I was going to sow some seed bombs but I’ve never got round to it. I actually reviewed a book on Guerrilla Gardening years ago, but I’ve never done any and I can’t find the link.

Rubbish in the Car Park

There’s a smattering of rubbish in the car park, though not so much as when they still had the recycling bins in the corner. However, one man’s rubbish is another man’s haiku prompt…

If you see me writing about lost luggage and broken coffee cups you will know where I got the idea from. Discarded Guinness cans, however, might be a step too far. Most things, I take in my stride, but I really would like to know how the coffee cup ended up broken by the kerbside.

The sign, even with its disapproving eye, does not seem to be working.

Rubbish Sign in the Car Park

A frilly poppy

For details of my Sunday morning, please see here.

Julia has worms!

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It’s 30 minutes to midnight and Julia has worms. That, I think, is enough to provide me with my required 250 words.

I would have more time but by the time I’d read a few comments and checked in on a few blogs I realised I had 32 minutes to post. The missing two minutes were spent explaining to Julia that the title was going to bring her loyal fans flocking to the post. I have no illusions. After thirty years of marriage I realise that the majority of people who speak to me, or read the blog, are more interested in her than they are in me. It’s probably because she likes people, speaks to them and positively encourages them to talk about themselves. I don’t. lockdown for me has been one of the best times of my life – I’ve been paid to stay at home and eat bacon sandwiches and I haven’t had to be nice to anyone. The only way I’m ever going to become a “people person” is if cannibalism becomes socially acceptable.

Wormery in a wheelie bin

The worms in question are all safely contained in a wormery made from a wheelie bin and donated to her by a local group who make wormeries to give away. I’m not sure why, but it’s a useful thing to have, both for gardening and for teaching about ecology. The woman who delivered them has some experience of the farm where we used to run our group, and the two of them spent a happy half hour comparing views.

She also told Julia that the worms like avocado skins as they curl up inside them. The mind of a worm is a mystery to me.

That’s 280 words. I have hit target and will now add a link, and post. The photos will be loaded later. I may get them on before midnight but I have to download them from email, which can take time when an idiot is doing the downloading.

Worms at Mencap Garden, Wilford, Nottingham

Sorry, it turned into a rant

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It’s that time of the day again.

The sun is draping itself gently on the rooftops of Nottingham as I stare out of the window at the back of the house and try to look like a writer. There’s still a while before sunset and the sky has not yet taken on any colour, but I am a patient man and I live in hope. It’s low enough to light up the trees in the garden and it is doing a particularly fine job of lighting up the variegated holly which are looking quite spectacular tonight.

The view, rather like the Amazon, has been deforested over the years.

On our left the neighbour removed an ornamental plum and a crab apple tree, as well as ripping up their lawn and spreading the garden with gravel. They also pushed over our laburnum tree when they had a new fence put up. It didn’t need moving, but they had never liked it and used to hack at it whenever they got a chance. I can’t, of course, prove that it was done with malice, but I’m pretty sure that this was the case.

Small Tortoiseshell on Red Valerian

That same corner was the site of a strange case of forsythia die-back, a disease that only seems to have existed in one corner in one particular garden in the country. A man give to muttering dark things about his neighbours might justifiably think that they had poured something through the gap in the fence to poison his plants.

When I win the lottery I am going to fit this house with a high-powered sound system and it out to students. This will be my revenge. I’m also going to fit water feature and wind chimes – let’s see how they like it.

To be fair, they do still have two Leylandii, which are the only trees, apart from ours, in a six garden area.

Over the years a couple of birches have disappeared from a garden at the back of us, supposedly removed because they were rotten. They looked good when they were cut, and they haven’t been replaced.

The worst loss was the hawthorn. It looked to me to be shared between four gardens because it had grown at the junction of the fences but one of the neighbours took it on himself to remove it one day and that was that.

Arnot Hill

That was a really bad day for biodiversity. We frequently used to have nesting birds in that tree – mainly blackbirds.

The neighbours on the other side, the ones who used to complain regularly, took several trees out too, though apart from a few Leylandii I can’t remember what they had. They were the ones that reported me to the the local Community Support Officer because of the brambles, the overhanging plums and the leaves which blew into her garden. She actually wanted me to cut the trees down to stop the leaves and the plums dropping in her garden.

As I pointed out, you can’t stop leaves (and there couldn’t have been many of them) and I thought of the plums as giving them free fruit, rather than being a nuisance. You can’t help some people.

The brambles, you say? Yes, I admit they are a nuisance, but several of them were actually coming from their garden into ours under the fence. A previous gardener seems to have had cultivated blackberries in the garden and they have always been rampant. And juicy. I suppose some people just don’t like fresh fruit.

We’re not savages, by the way, and not even particularly bad neighbours, despite the way things may sound, so we did cut the brambles and the plum branches. Couldn’t stop the leaves though.

That leaves our garden as the only one making an effort for nature. We have a privet, which I confess was a mistake, the holly, a plum, the one we don’t know the name of, and a Leylandii. This needs topping as it is really too big for the garden now, but most years we have pigeons nesting in it and I never get round to it. We also have a couple of apple trees in pots but I always feel guilty about them as they look so dispirited. I really must give them some compost.

I didn’t really mean to run on about the deforestation of back gardens and the drive to force out wildlife, but I did. Sorry about the crusading, but I just don’t know why people don’t just live in flats, or even dungeons, if they hate trees and wildlife so much.

It’s an outdoor space full of birds and insects and even animals and kids. It’s not an extension of the living room. You can tell the difference because of the absence of carpets, though I’ve recently seen astroturf on sale in a garden centre so even that distinction is being blurred. I’ve been thinking that I really must get on top of the garden next year. And plant more trees.

Apple at Mencap Gardens

Time to Stand and Stare

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I’m going to post about the garden to start with. It’s a nice calm place to start.

We bought sausage baguettes from the Co-op on Wilford Lane and ate them as we watched the geese fly over on their daily trip to the river. It’s an extravagance but it’s nice to eat out once in a while, and it’s hardly Babylonian in its excess.

There was a robin, a crow, a few pigeons, some magpies and a flight of about a dozen long-tailed tits. You’s think I’d manage some decent photos but I had the small camera and it was set for close-ups. By the time I’d adjusted it I normally found I was zooming in on an empty branch.

The flowers were less flighty and I even got a couple of wildlife shots, though bees and caterpillars aren’t the hardest of subjects.

Caterpillar and flower. My flimsy knowledge of plants and wildlife is revealed for all to see.

Safer ground here – it’s a bee and a nasturtium

Imagine my mind like an over-full bookcase. As you force a volume of coin knowledge in at one end a book of insect knowledge falls off the other end.

Eventually the Council House clock struck nine and I had to leave for work. I may cover the events of the day later – breaking a grandmother’s heart, talking to a lunatic and cynically laying a trap for a potential young collector.

Those, of course, are just the highlights.

Runner Beans – guess what’s for tea

In Victorian times they were grown for their decorative flowers rather than the beans. You have to wonder who first decided to taste them.

Hoverflies and Broken Dreams

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Subtitle: Poppies, Pollinators and Parcels.

I was torn between the two titles, but went for the bleaker one because I’m a shameless attention seeker.

I walked in to work this morning and found we had sixteen parcels to pack, It doesn’t seem much to do in three hours, though it’s probably fair to say that after seeing a couple of customers and queuing at the Post Office we had two and a half hours of packing. Or five hours, seeing as there were two of us.

That’s about twenty minutes per parcel, which seems OK, though when you have 100 loose coins to pack into a non-rattling parcel it can take a bit of time.

Part of the problem is that we have over two thousand items of stock on eBay and not enough storage space. We can locate 95% of the stock with ease, but we have to pack and repack the cupboards each time, which is time consuming, and the system is starting to creak.

To be fair, the cupboards are starting to creak too and I’m beginning to worry about being crushed to death in a cascade of coins and shattered woodwork. And shattered dreams. It was never meant to end like this…

Despite the somewhat gloomy thoughts, I am cheered by the poppy photos – they were absolutely packed with pollinators this morning, which validates our garden choices. They often have pollinators on them but the light and wind often work against me, and the numbers aren’t normally as impressive.

Poppy with Pollinators

Open Gardens

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Julia visited some local Open Gardens on Saturday. If you are interested in others there is a website here which details all the national ones.

One was clearly the result of spending thousands on hard landscaping and plants straight from the garden centre. I don’t know why you would do that on our street as the house prices don’t justify the cost of expensive garden work, and on our side of the street (as this one was) the gardens slope away from the house and face North.

Poppies growing from cracks in concrete

If I’d been a gardener when I moved to Nottingham I wouldn’t have bought this house. Nor would I have slabbed the front garden to save work. However, plants still manage to grow in the front garden, as you can see from the poppies.

The plants were all planted in buckets because the soil, it seems, is so poor. That is strange because our soil, just a few hundred yards away is quite good. It wasn’t bad when we moved in and with compost and hoed weeds, falling leaves and leafmold it has improved over the years. It could be a lot better, but we are best described as sporadic gardeners. Having worked as a self-employed jobbing gardener for 10 years I have to confess to neglecting my own garden dreadfully.

The plots were built up using sand when they built the houses eighty years ago, and the underlying geology is sandstone, so the soil tend to be a bit light. However, it is well drained and easy to work, and does respond well to feeding. There were allotments here before they built houses so it was hardly a barren desert.

I did, however, bring back a lot of compostable debris from my work as a gardener, so it all worked out well in the end.

That, I think is where many gardeners go wrong. Spend money on hard landscaping and plants and you will get a garden you can show off. Spend time on the soil and you will get a garden where you can grow things.

Next year I suspect this gardener will have to buy more plants from the Garden Centre to fill her garden again. One thing she won’t have to do is mow the lawn (or compost the cuttings) because the “lawn” is astroturf.

We will, once again, be cutting things back in a desperate attempt to keep ours looking vaguely like a garden. We will also return to planting calabrese and kale in the flower beds. It seems to do well and the pigeons don’t spot it like they do when you plant it in a vegetable bed.

In contrast to the posh garden there was another, where kids were playing. The owner kept apologising for this but Julia told them that was what gardens are for.

They were just doing it to help raise funds for local charities and show what an ordinary garden looks like.

It takes all sorts, and they are both valid uses of a garden, depending on your ambitions and lifestyle.

We had Hummingbird Hawk Moths in the garden a few years ago. We also had a nesting Blackcap. This year we had Painted Ladies. You don’t get that with a tidy garden.

Painted Lady on Red Valerian

Painted Lady warming itself on a paving slab

Red Valerian, like poppies, grows vigorously from cracks in the paving. It is a great food plant for moths and butterflies, though it’s a bit of a weed and not seen in the better sort of garden.

A Few Photos

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Here are some photos from earlier in the week. The year is shaping up nicely, though I’m a little worried that the papers are predicting another Beast from the East with temperatures below freezing. My only comfort is that they’ve been reporting on it all winter and it hasn’t happened yet.

Spring in the Mencap Garden

The primulas are doing well. As is the blossom. If only the photography was up to scratch.

Spring in the Mencap Garden

Here we have some landscaping features – a newly donated chimney pot, the newly painted table and the newly painted log. There’s a lot of new stuff happening in the garden just at the moment, as you may have guessed from the unimaginative titles.

Chimney Pot at Wilford

Heart on a log

The newly painted table

Finally, I’ve thrown in a magpie. I like magpies, and they sit still long enough for me to get a shot.

Magpie – so black it’s actually blue in places

And Again!

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Sorry about last night. I didn’t have a lot of time between returning home from seeing my Dad and setting off to take Number Two Son to work. In between the two events I ate tea, shouted at TV, lost my sense of humour and realised that I only had fifteen minutes to write a post. I do have a little time after getting back from dropping him off, but it can be a bit touch and go. I will try not to let it happen again.

Unfortunately, the gardens have been attacked again. All the plants that escaped destruction last time have been tipped over, crushing seedlings and losing seeds, including seeds bought by individual members of the group. A lemon tree, which has been growing in a pot for several years has been smashed to pieces, all the drawers searched, screws, nails and tools thrown around and Feathers McGraw has been dismantled again. They also damaged the plastic in the door this time.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The group members are upset, perplexed and annoyed. The police are doing their best. Julia has been preparing a press release, hoping to get some support and possibly donations, but she’s been told not to by her boss, and even banned from putting anything about the attacks on their private Facebook group.

This has put the start of the growing season back by a couple of months. Thank goodness we hadn’t moved the new cacti and succulents down to the gardens.

On the plus side, they sighted Brimstones, Peacocks, Small Tortoiseshells and Hummingbird Hawkmoths.

We’ve entered the sighting on the Butterfly Conservation sightings page – there are 84 for the UK this year, and three in the area (Burton, Derby and Ripley), or 85 and four, after ours.

Sorry it’s a poor photo, but it’s the best I have, and I prefer to use my own when I can.

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Life after the Care Farm