In Planning Mode

We have always meant to create a garden on this site alongside the productive, small-holder bits but had only vaguely formed fluffy notions that it might be here and it might contain this or that plant. We have started last year with a nice flower bed 'out front' using seed salvaged from the Kent garden - hollyhocks, Erigeron (Spanish daisy), love-in-a-mist, Welsh poppy and Californian poppy and Granny's Bonnets - and we'd started to accumulate bits and pieces in pots in the yard, but it was all very late by the time we finished builder-ing and things did not really get cracking.

Not a bother. Gardening, to us, is always a long term project, never an instant-gratification, weekend make-over fix. We tend to happily plant things 'this year' knowing they will look good 'next spring' or even a decade or more away. In Faversham we had been gardening for 19 years and had the 100' by 24' strip crammed with perennials, shrubs, the (very crowded) orchard with the 'woodland garden' under it. I took a separate allotment to give me some veg' growing space but we were, by the time we'd 'finished' lost for space and unable to buy any plants because of not having anywhere to plant them. What we did buy had to be small and stay small. Here, on our 2.5 acres, we have the opposite problem. Small plants would be lost in the space, so we need to be talking 'drifts' of colour and bigger shrubs and trees.

Both Liz and I are keen and (if I can say this modestly enough!) quite knowledgeable gardeners by now but as spring starts to move and give us parachutist's "ground-rush" we were still dithering even as to which bit of the site to do the gardening in. I have started digging a pond in the space between the hay barn and the orchard, so one candidate was the (as yet only gleam-in-the-eye) "Pond Garden" but most of the decisions had been up to now, NOT to garden in places. We like the front lawn as an expanse of green so this is only likely to get drive edges of ox-eye daisy and Gypsophilia. Up the left hand side of the barn has the ex-Steak-Lady offerings in it but is probably just a holding area.

Things were given a boost by local Aladdin's Cave shop Wispy's who suddenly launched their garden centre display stocked with an amazing rage of plants at silly prices - 3 for €5, €1.99 and so on. Liz and I fell upon the display and filled a bag, climbing rose, mock orange, Convallaria, Echinops, red hot poker, Echinacia, almost-black hollyhocks..... Driving home we got to talking that NOW we'd need to start the garden to have somewhere to house this bounty.

We love this stage and have a good team method. I go striding about in the frost with my gloves on and my biro sputtering in the freezing air to create a rough plan. Liz converts this into a sensible scale map with 1 m squares with the software package 'MS-Visio'. It is a joy to watch her. She borrows Visio's pre-prepared cloud shapes and squishes them long and thin to represent hedges. She draws lines and pulls them out of shape to make bits of pond shore-line, re-sizes stuff and colours in boxes for 'the'allotment' or adds circles to represent trees in the orchard.

The Visio map we can then print several copies of to allow for some quick 'concept' scratchings as we dream up a path here or a gentle bank there, a trellis to hide the caravan or a willow 'igloo' over there. Things get rubbed out as many times as they get created. The many gardening books come out as we start to home in on what might go into the space - Monty Don, Geoff Hamilton, Bob Flowerdew, Penelope Hobhouse, Hessayon's 'expert' series all get gleaned for bits on damp gardens, damp shade, structure, colour. The umpteenth version will be the one that gets kept. Liz jokes that she will preserve that so that in ten years time we can look back and say "Well, that is what we were going to do, but we never did ANY of that!". That is the way of gardening.

Things evolve and move on. Some of the plants we plan, we never actually find for sale so other things slot in. Some bits work and others don't. Some plants take off like mad things. You get given donations by generous gardener friends. We like that here because space is what we have for the moment, so "invasive", "rampant" and "thug" can be good words. Well, I wake up this morning to find that Liz was at it well into the wee small hours and the 'umpteenth' map is well peopled with Achillea, Regal Lilies, Rudbeckia, Hostas, lavender, foxgloves, lilac and Potentilla  and Crocosmia.

Now we just have to go out there and 'do' it. The pond itself needs finishing so that the spoil can be shaped into the landscaping and the stones can become the edges of mini raised-beds for the less wet-tolerant species. The bank on the west side needs clearing of its fallen elder, grown-up-through nettles and stoloniferous grasses and , it turns out, we need to unearth the buried 'treasure', in this case a tractor mounted fertilizer spreader; we could only see the rim sticking up and had thought it might be an oil drum. Thank you Mr Farmer for that nice surprise!

All the fine-tuning, digging, raking, preparing seed beds and planting holes is a bit of a way away, but the future beckons and we have 'The Vision Thing'. We can see ourselves sitting in our Darby and Joan chairs watching the sun go down over the pond as the geese splash about in the evening light. The leafless winter dogwood stems glow crimson and the happy perennials sleep beneath their mulch of compost. We'll get there.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Time, I feel, for a garden update. You've had house building, projects, chickens and small animals to saturation point now, surely. Time to put down that trowel, take a seat in any one of the nice sunny sitting positions about the place and maybe accept a glass of chilled pink and take the weight off. Look around you, see how much we have achieved in such a short time, bearing in mind that we only started in May, that three of the railway sleeper raised beds only went in in June, and allotment raised beds are only since July and we only started attacking the "bit we don't talk about" (BWDTA) in August. Some bits we're very pleased with; other bits have been disappointing or are still very much 'work in progress'.

The front lawn is an area where we have definitely won just by dint of almost weekly mowing. When we moved it was a rough  area of rushes and tall thistles and creeping buttercup but the rushes proved to be shallow rooted and could almost be sliced off the turf and the rest is no match for regular mowing. We had one setback where some cattle got in from the road and pock marked it with hoof dents but Dad has put hoof-sized wedges of turf in these and in the rush-digging holes. We like the 'huge expanse of green' look and will probably keep it like this, with just the low box hedge up at the house end.

Against the front wall we started a small flower bed intending it to be filled with the 'imports' from the Faversham garden we love so much - Californian and welsh poppy, hollyhocks, erigeron (Spanish Daisy), love in a mist. The Calif. poppies have started to do OK and we hope will now self seed, but the welsh and the erigeron never showed. The hollyhocks have done some nice rosettes of foliage against the wall so we are hoping for some action next Spring.

Just inside this wall on the left was where we put the old inherited TK Min tractor tyres in which we planted purple verbena and a perennial wall flower but have since added a strong erigeron plant we found at a local garden centre. Behind these covering a goodly area went 3 crates worth of assorted cuttings and slips from Steak Lady, under planted with 2 generous nets of assorted daffs. Whether these poor things will love us for sticking them in Roscommon's cold wet clay, we don't know yet, but we live in hopes.

Continuing our clockwise perambulation we pass through the BWDTA and into the west field. The BWDTA was called that because it sat looking balefully back at us when we watched the sun go down over the 5 acres field out to our west, a mess of tall weeds, dumped heaps of spoil (one of soil mixed with coal, anthracite and stones), long rotten and overgrown hay bales, black plastic. Eventually we could stand its embarrassment no longer and Dad was put to work with the old Sussex 'grass-hook' scythe to cut off the trash on top and expose the actual topography underneath. Then we'd know what we'd got. The spoil heap was sorted through to extract the useful fuel and good stones and the soil could then be spread out flat.

'What we'd got' turned out to be a reasonably flat saucer shaped parcel of land which was a bit boggy and had been used as a tractor route from front garden to west field(s) so was also a bit smeared up and not well drained. We had a bit of a 'light-bulb' moment and could see a big pond! Mum and Dad are keen wildlife gardeners as you know, and have always had ponds. We also know that under a foot or so of good soil round here is good ol' sticky yellow Roscommon Clay so we are hoping that if we can dig down to this and then puddle what's there and smear it up the sides, we may end up with a waterproof pond which does not need a liner. That's the plan anyway.

2 bits we are now delighted with are the kitchen garden (with it's railway sleeper raised beds) on the immediate west end of the house and the allotment now we have started to turn it into dug, 'lazy' raised beds. In both of these the veg has been enjoying the raised status, up out of the cold, damp, waterlogged flat soil and we have started to see some good crops of beans (broads, French, climbing French and runners) and peas, of green cabbage and red cabbage, curly kale and 'Cabalero Nero' (black) kale, as well as various salad leaves and pak choi type stuff. This is all a bit late. The leeks only went into the nursery beds as seeds in June and are only now, in September, reaching transplantable size, but Dad has optimistically planted out a raised bed full in the allotment (pictured) and these may or may not produce an edible crop in the remains of the summer.

I am getting a bit nervous of the size and vulnerability of this post as yet unpublished, so I am actually going to pause here and publish this bit, just in case of kittens climbing on my keyboard. I will continue in the next post.

The Heat is On

Summer is definitely here, and we spend most of the day trying to find shade in the garden, only going for a walk once the intense midday scorchio has died down and it comes up humid and all thundery-expectant. 2 nice pics of the front garden here, which currently features the hot orange of Californian poppy (eschscholzia ... as far as we know the only word with schsch in it!) and the towering bursts of Nectaroscordum. They are called "Rapunzel castles" around here because as the flowers get pollinated and set seed the individual heads sheath up and stand up like magical fairy tale castle turrets. It says 'ere.

The walk was out around the back way to the allotments and back through same. It's very very dry up there and could definitely use the thunder-rain. Embarrassingly, when it's so dry, the only thing that performs really well is the very very deep rooted marestail weed that grows in from the nearby railway bank like some kind of dinosaur-forest plant. A true survivor, it stays green and crisp when everything else parches and dies back.

Dad is on weekend cover so he's been in to work today and has picked up the series of texts and conference calls that go with it. A little bit more of same tomorrow and then a final call at 07:30 Monday, after which he can hand the "operation" back to its rightful owners. Interestingly he has also been contacted by a local film maker who wants to pick his brains on the subject of Thames Sailing Barges. taht won't take long then, will it Dad? Oy!

Deefski