A Visit to Bealtaine Cottage

Of course we are by no means the only 'bloggers' describing their small-holdering and gardening exploits on 'here' and as well as following Mentor Anne's fun and games with chickens, ducks and now a cute new kitten, we catch all the posts too by nearby 'one man band' lady, Colette O'N at her "Bealtaine Cottage" site not far north of Boyle. Her website and blog are at

http://bealtainecottage.com/2013/05/31/a-walk-through-the-permaculture-gardens-of-bealtaine-cottage-on-the-last-day-of-bealtaine/

Her stories always carry a host of pictures, but she also allows a controlled succession of visitors to be shown around and we signed up for one such tour this morning. I did not take a camera but I hope I can do the place justice. In 3 acres from a very unpromising start - fields like ours, all cattle-poached, over grazed and full of rushes, she has, over the course of 9 years, created a superb wooded garden which is threaded with narrow, interwoven paths and small clearings. She has planted around 900 trees over the years (a couple every weekend, she joked) from self-seeds, cuttings, gifts, purchases of bare rooted saplings or 2-3 year old 'feathers'.

They are mainly indigenous species, all be it many are 'not supposed to grow in a bog' - beech and copper beech for example. There are alder, mountain ash, birches, ash, elders and buddlieas, no end of willows including many woven and pleached into archways and living hedges. There are many fruit trees too, both in the woodland and in a clearer 'orchard' area. Most of the trees are less than the 9 years old, though there are some fine gnarly old beasts which pre-date Colette and one which may mark an old grave site from some poor unfortunate who would not have been allowed to be buried in a Christian grave-yard. The over whelming feel is as of a proper mature broad-leaved woodland with its canopy layer (the trees), it's under-storey (plenty of currant bushes, flowering currant (Ribes)) and dogwoods and then a lush herb layer full of buttercup, grasses, docks, vetches, primroses and no end of surprises, but all seemingly in balance with no one 'thug' dominating. The main driving force of plant choices is to provide year round food for the bees, from the earliest flowering Ribes, through to late autumn Sedums.

By digging out a winding channel through a low point she has managed to create a beautiful little stream which flows as clear as gin through a few small dammed silt-ponds, a bigger silt pond and then a bigger pond which was buzzing and wriggling with life - tadpoles, newts, boatmen, whirligig beetles and much more. This has also part drained the surrounding land so that it is no longer the boggy, poached mess she 'inherited'.

There is also an 'edible area' (edible for herself and for the birds) packed with fruit, currants (Colette thinks she'll get 200 lbs of blackcurrants this year) and the poly tunnel which I have admired since seeing it one of her blog-posts; it has straw paths and stone path edges, and its bronze fennel. As well as a good range of herbs, this carries plants for which she is keeping seed, including a 'perennial' purple sprouting broccoli which still gives sprouts for eating and carries viable seed although it is 3 years old. I also noticed a ruby chard being allowed to run away to seed. She sends quite a bit of seed away, especially to Americans who are always hungry for flowering plants 'from home'.

The 'permaculture' thing comes into focus on the original and on-going efforts to create and improve soil, from the thin, boggy, rush infested, cattle-abused stuff inherited to the the rich, deeper, leaf-mulched, compost enriched growing medium Colette has now. She showed us one of the new bits, an orchard. She lays cardboard down on the existing surface without digging it over, to exclude light. She has a decent shredder and actually grows fast growing plants like laurel and dogwood in among the trees to provide for shredded material. The cardboard is covered with shreddings, with straw from the poly tunnel paths, with compost and with clippings, bits of bramble and nettle and anything else which is bio degradable. This gets a soil, of sorts, going. It is then a fast track to getting trees established so that the trees can drop leaves and the whole cycle starts to build up a momentum of its own. The Ribes plants which will create the under-storey were already parked among the new fruit trees 'in waiting' (as it were) and there was even the start of a willow arbor for when the permaculture crept over that far and Colette could sit and look back at the orchard.

It was a very enjoyable and inspirational visit. Thank you very much, Colette, for that. As with all these garden visits, you don't come away wanting to copy every last thing and produce a Bealtaine 'clone' but you note the ideas down and keep them in your back pocket to add to other ideas you have seen at other gardens, and translate them into your own site. We do not need to do the soil-creation so much - we have 18" of pretty good stuff. But we did bring away the '3 layers woodland' idea and the notion that you can have currant bushes and a herb-rich layer under your fruit trees. We love that creeping buttercup is perfectly good as a herb in a mixture and doesn't need mowing, rooting out or eradicating where ever it appears. We love that you can save seed, so keep a few chard or broccoli plants and some bronze fennel. We love the idea of doing a few trees each weekend and always having some seedlings or cuttings on the go. We liked the hot and cold composting. We loved the idea of scrabbling up straw from the poly tunnel beds to add mulch to another bed. We particularly liked that this is a long term thing. Gardens, like Rome, are not built in a day and we can now look forward to 9 years and more of consolidation and improvement.

Thank you, Colette, for a brilliant day and a rake of good ideas to bring home.

Mary, Mary, (2)

This post continues on from "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" and is my Garden report. Mary Mary (1) saw us in the west field enjoying the vegetable crops.

Moving on round we come to the 'secret garden', the first bit Dad tried to start gardening in while we were all still living in the caravan, snatching the odd hour of gardening opportunity by getting up early and getting done before the house build work started at 0800. This has turned out to be way too much of a leafy shaded glade to do any vegetable gardening in now that the leaves have come on the beech to the west and the ash to the east. Pretty much everything went all spindly and etiolated although the spuds did, amazingly crop. This was even though they were hit badly by blight all of a sudden - one day perfect healthy green leaves and when we looked again about 3 days later, no living tops at all. Luckily, by then, the spuds must have formed underground because we were able to dig a few meals worth of nice, if rather small, new potatoes with very few blighted tubers.

The main problem with the secret garden bit is the HUGE black-spruce trees which we know from Vendor Anna L were planted by TK Max in the late 50's or early 60's as saplings for a windbreak. Muppet! Apparently according to our man "Oliver Splits" local tree surgeon / tree feller / log splitting contractor these were planted all over County Roscommon and many many houses now have these huge tress all roughly the same age and size. Keeps him in work, he says. The are called "Dale trees" locally but Oliver agrees with me they are probably black spruce (Picea Mariana) as identifiable from the long cones, the flattened leaf shoots, the blue cast to the new foliage and the white bands under the individual needles. These trees are now a good 60' tall and would need some kit more serious than Dad's little chainsaw to get them down. Oliver reckoned 2 days work for him and a mate (€300 a day, ker-ching!!!!!) plus hire of a cherry-picker machine at €140 and that would be without him splitting them up for logs, or tidying away the trashy small branches. Big shredders are also €140 a day to hire. €1000 or so to make a veg garden tidy and use-able? We think not. Dad will just abandon that space as a veg plot and 'do it all' in the raised beds. The chickens can have it as their run.

 In other news, the keyhole bed we described in an earlier post is now complete and filled and just needs something growing in it. Look carefully though and you can see the small green splash of a thyme plant which came from Steak Lady along with all the other cuttings and which got built into one of the cracks as the outer ring wall was being assembled. And finally, just for fun, the 'cauldron' of snap dragons now doing very well outside the front door. These plants were from a worn out, bedraggled old tray of exhausted, dried out, pot bound specimens which someone cast off to us. They did OK didn't they! I think you could say they are fully recovered and we hope they will self-seed around the place. The other matching cauldron has bright yellow winter pansies in it. We look very colourful out front at the moment.

And that concludes the garden update.
Deefs

I Clavdivs

After they enjoyed the BBC drama "Rome" so much, the humans had to shoot out and get the 1976 series "I, Claudius" on DVD boxed set, and we've been watching it ever since. On the TV titles, the "u"s in "Claudius" were always depicted as "V"s, and it's been a family joke ever since, to pronounce them that way. Little things..... But let me tell you, there are no dogs, no animals, no barking in it at all, nothing of interest to a westie, so my pics today are of the three of us plus Felix curled up on the settee "watching" I Claudius.

Meg is in her favourite position on the "far end" (Dad thinks her favourite position is where ever he wants to sit). I am (as ever) up on the back of the settee, either looking down on them all, or with my nose squeezed into the crack between the settee and the wall. Haggis here is curled up with Felix looking quite cute. Which ever one of them is on the sofa first, the other seems to wait till they're settled and then kind of squidge in alongside. Not sure what felix is doing with his head on one side in the front-on shot. Stretching maybe? Weird cat.

Dad has treated himself to a new shredder for the garden, so this afternoon we whizzed through all the cuttings of vibernum, bay and paulownia in double-quick time. Dad is delighted. he can finally throw out the old noisy rattly blunt thing given to us by the Pud-Lady, even though it was beyond its sell by date then.

Have a great weekend

Deefs