Drainage and Water Conservation

I haven't posted for a while, what with the bus-like nature of festivals - and getting a bit distracted by football (COYS!), trying to work out the new Facebook interface, historic elections I couldn't even vote in, and - oh, yeah - some actual gardening! But things have happened since early October...

We have made an attempt to sort out the drainage issue. The otherwise excellent architects of our estate seem to have had a bit of a brain-flip when it came to guttering. They decided, in their wisdom, that each row only needed one downpipe per two houses, and none at all on the ends. During the summer, we discovered the result of this was that every rain shower produced a ridiculous waterfall out of the end of the overburdened gutter, dropping straight down the side of the house, some of it leeching into the brickwork and the rest washing across the patio.

Obviously, we needed a new downpipe fitted. And since it takes around 8 ten-litre cans of metered water to water the garden if it doesn't rain for a couple of days (no, I don't understand how, either), it seemed to make sense to fit a water-butt at the same time. Particularly as, in keeping with the 'one per two houses' thing, there is no accessible drain anywhere around our end of the row - the nearest one being in our neighbour's garden. So we had the gutter adjusted to send most of the water from the roof running to the original downpipe like it's supposed to, and got a new one fitted at the other end to carry excess to a 210ltr water-butt.

And that should have been that - but life is never simple, is it? Firstly, I misunderstood the instructions for fitting the tap, and ended up cutting the hole for it slightly too big, and no amount of sillicone sealant would fix it, so we had to get another one. Secondly, although during the summer, a 210 ltr butt should keep us going for weeks without any trouble (because I'll be taking out the water regularly), at this time of the year, it fills up far too quickly! Then it overflows, and we're back to square one. Although a larger butt would help, our rubbish climate ensures that we'd probably hit the same problem at some point during the winter regardless. Spouse has partially solved the problem by fitting a second tap at the top and attaching a hosepipe to take the water under the fence to the drain next-door (where it would have been going anyway if the gutter worked properly in the first place). This works fine until the point where the rain is heavy enough that the water filling the butt through the downpipe flows in faster than the narrow hosepipe can carry it away. I will have to work on my water management to keep the thing empty enough to avoid future overflows. It doesn't help that the garden is plenty wet enough at the mo, but I do have a thirsty gardenia, a lemon sapling and some windowsill herbs indoors...

Interestingly (to me, anyway!), having watched the overflow from the water butt has given me a clearer idea of what's been happening to the rain run-off from the gutter this summer - before, it wasn't as obvious where it was all going, or how much of it there was. Now, looking at the lawn from the first floor window, I can see a distinct boundary between one corner of the lawn and the rest of it - certain differences in the grass, like the direction the blades bend in, the thickness, the colour, places where it springs back from being raked and ones where it doesn't... and because I know where I put seed down, I know it's not all down to new growth. I think it could be a kind of 'tide line', marking the edge of regular seepage from the patio. If (and it's a big if) I'm right, then it would explain why that particular corner is resolutely soggy, and would mean there's a chance that the crapness of our lawn is not completely down to the shade and the bad soil. Catching all the water that's been keeping it so, um, Scottish might dry it out. So getting the water-butt working properly could bring us one step closer to Spouse's happy piece of parkland!

Ten Tunes to Garden To

Off the top of my head...


1. Unit 4 Plus 2 - The Concrete and the Clay
(see previous post)

2. Crowded House - Four Seasons in One Day
(Self-explanatory. We're in Britain.)

3. The The - Love Is Stonger Than Death
("Here come the blue skies/ Here comes springtime/ When the rivers run high and the tears run dry/ When everything that dies... shall rise." )

4. Galliano - Earthboots

5. Yasmin Levy - Kondja Mia, Kondja Mia (My Rosebud, My Rosebud)

6. U2 - Wild Honey
("Are you still growing wild/ With everything tame around you?/ I send you flowers/ Cut flowers for your hall/ I know your garden is full/ But is there sweetness at all?") + Local interest.

7. Louis Armstrong - What a Wonderful World
("I see trees of green/ Red roses too/ I see them bloom/ For me and you...")

8. KT Tunstall - The Beauty of Uncertainty
(Yup. That's gardening.)

9. Elvis Costello - Tramp the Dirt Down.
(David Cameron's "Thatcherism with a heart - honest" conference speech reminded me exactly how much I'm looking forward to blasting this out at full volume whilst giving a whole new meaning to the term "champagne socialist" - but for the time being, via headphones whilst stamping in grass seed will have to do...)

10. The Beatles - Blackbird.

Any other suggestions?

Making Mud-Pies

After a fortnight's effing and blinding (not all of it out loud), I have now finished preparing the flower-bed for the Spring stuff.

It is in no way the gravel-free plant paradise it ought to be for the amount of work I've done on it. See that pile along the base of the wall? The stuff that looks like a heap of mud? That's not from the digging I was moaning about last week. That's just what came out with the

sieve and trowel
afterwards.

(This is what came out with the fork!)

On the basis that I never want to crumble up another sieveful of solid packed earth ever ever ever again, I mixed in the last of our compost supply to try and improve what it now pleases me to think of as "soil". I'm hoping that if I put swept up leaves on it and dig them in, they will rot down to provide some extra nutrients before I need to plant primroses or violets. In the meantime, I have put in my anenomes and snake's head fritillaries around the pear tree. That's potentially 30 flowers. When they start coming up in Spring, I will be counting...

Vegetable Beds Finally Finished!

Ta-Dah!

I made those, I did!

They're not exactly straight and they're not exactly level - but if anyone has a problem with that, there's a shovel and a sledgehammer in the shed - be my guest!

Looks a bit different to the original plan... Because once I had dug it, and laid out the border, it became apparent that I wouldn't be able to reach the middle of it. I had allowed a 30cm pathway between the rows of squares, thinking this would be enough to walk across the bed to reach the central squares for weeding - but forgot that weeding involves not only walking, but also kneeling down, which takes up more space (doh!). So I have taken out the central row and made a proper path, and my one large bed is now two smaller ones.

Luckily, my original crop rotation sudoku grid had a row of three squares at the bottom which didn't fit into an internal rotation set, so I took them out, and shifted the other rows accordingly.

Here's the new Sudoku Grid (Killer version - includes over-wintered, early and follow-on crops):

Very glad I realised I needed to do this before I'd filled the bed with soil!

Maths has never been my strong point, and somehow, I managed to mis-calculate how much soil I needed by a vast amount. I don't know what I missed out in my area-to-volume calculation, but it was obviously a bit key...

I reckoned that the 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat-substitute mix needed 60 litres of each ingredient for the whole of the bed as originally planned. As it turned out, this didn't even fill one of the smaller ones... The soil in them now is thus a little less "Mel's mix" than "Contrary Mary's Whatever-was-to-hand mix".

For the record, each bed now contains:
100 litres Sainsbury's Multi-purpose compost
70 Litres J.Arthur Bowers Cocoa Shell
150 litres Homebase Enriched Peat-Free Compost
60 litres Vermiculite

Or, to put it another way, a grand total of 580 litres more stuff than I thought. And the proportions are completely blown. Never mind. We'll see how it goes, eh?

Crop Rotation Sudoku Initial Solution

Click on it if you actually want to read it!

Okay, so I "cheated" - I took all the peas and alliums out altogether. The plan is to put the garlic around the edge as part of a pest barrier, and to find somewhere at the front of the house for sugar snaps (shame about the onions). I am also going to give the bed a "jubilee year" after one full rotation, and grow comfrey on it to dig in as a fertiliser. I know that square-foot gardening is not supposed to deplete the soil, but I want to make sure... And I know it should be after seven years, but I reckon the more often I let it rest, the better the yields will be, and Year 5 seemed to be the natural place to stop, given the rotation rules.

Ten Types of Crap Dug Out of Our Garden

1) Bricks (Half- and Whole)
2) Smashed roof-slates
3) Chunks of concrete
4) Fragments of window glass
5) Shards of broken beer bottle
6) Bones. Probably of the pets of long-grown children...
7) Rusty bits of metal, including something that looks like it broke off an anchor
8) Broken crockery
9) Clothes-pegs, and other random plastic, including -
10) A mystifying number of empty biro casings.

Any DIYers, glaziers or barbecue-going litter-bugs who've stumbled on this, please take note: It's the glass that's really objectionable. I just know I can't have got all of it, and look forward to ripping my gloves/fingers on it for years to come. Is it really such a hassle to take it to the dump? Or find a recycling bin?

Back-Breaking Work of Staggering Tedium

My bulbs and seeds arrived, and I had what I needed to construct the vegetable bed. Just one small hitch.

The ground around the vegetable bed was so solid that I would never be able to knock in the log-roll properly. I would have to break up a trench before I could make the veg bed. Not to mention digging out the unwanted shrub growing right where the back edge of the bed would go.

I also knew from Operation Lawn Resue that stuff will not grow in hard-packed earth, so the flower-bed would have to be dug over as well. When we'd removed the ivy from the base of the pear-tree way back in January, I'd found that much of the flower-bed was packed with stray gravel from the patio. The roses don't seem to mind it, but I wasn't sure that bulbs or primroses, or anything else, would be at all happy in stony ground, so I would have to get it all out. Which would mean sieving the loosened soil once I'd done the digging.

Can't say I was looking forward to any of it, but it had to be done, and happily, we've had about a fortnight now without rain, so I just got on with it as best I could. It hasn't helped that, as it turns out, we don't really have topsoil.
No.

What we have is actually rubble, covered in mud, held together by weed roots.

As well as the gravel, the flower bed contained a large amount of debris, presumably from the building of the retaining wall and the underpinning. There might be an argument that some of it was left there to help with the drainage - if it wasn't for the sheer volume and variety of stuff I've been digging up.

By the middle of last week, there was a predictable and monotonous pattern to the job:

Plunging of fork into ground more in hope than expectation, followed by a sickening crunch reminiscent of the tackle that ended Danny Thomas's career, accompanied by a response more usually applied when hearing the words "BAE Systems" "Al Yammamah" and "scandal" in the same sentence ("Oh, for the love of God! WTF is it this time..?"). Then ten minutes or so of wiggling and heaving the fork in order to loosen up the area enough to dig out the offending item(s). Repetition of whole process one fork width to the left.

In spite of the frustration of what should have been a relatively straightforward job turning into some kind of nightmare archaelogical dig, it's actually been weirdly enjoyable, possibly because it's not so many years since I would have been completely physically incapable of it.

And it's still less of a chore than reading David Eggers.

Things to Do on a Rainy Day (IV): Crop Rotation Sudoku

Hours of fun....

Here is your Grid:

It is divided into two smaller internal four-square grids with an addititonal four-square row along the side and three squares left over along the bottom.

The game is to create a four-year rotation cycle using this grid, four times (one for each year).

Each square must be filled with your choice of vegetable crop from one of the five groups listed below, according to the following rules:

1)No square should contain the same crop as the one next to it.
2) You do not have to use all the individual crops suggested, and may if you wish, use some of them more than once - but there should be no more than two individual squares of the same crop in the whole grid.
3) To ensure healthy plants and good yields, these crops should rotate over the four years through the smaller internal grids/rows in the following order:

a) Nightshade Family
b) Pea Family
c) Brassica Family
d) Roots/Alliums

*If the crop you start with in Year 1 is from Group c) on the list, then your Year 2 crop will be from Group d), then it's back to the top so that your Year 3 crop is from Group a) and so on.

4) The following should not be planted in adjacent squares, as proximity may damage the yield of one or both crops:

Peas and Alliums

5) You may at any point choose to play a "Joker" by filling a square with one of the suggested salad crops, as these may be safely placed anywhere in the rotation scheme. There is no limit on the number of jokers you may play. Just bear in mind that there is only so much lettuce a normal human being can eat in one summer.

Nightshade family
Potatoes
Chillies
Cherry Tomatoes

Roots and Alliums
Parsnips
Carrots
Garlic
Onions

Brassica family
Brussels Sprouts
Pak Choi
Sprouting Broccoli

Pea Family
Mange Tout
Sugar Snaps

Salads
Lettuce
Rocket
Spinach beet
Chard

Tip: Try to account for the expected height of your selected plants, the amount of shade they will create on the squares around them, and which of your other crops will need lots of sunlight.

Enjoy!

Square-Foot Gardening: For, Against and Adaptation

Given that I am limited for space, the square-foot method seemed like the way to go.

The idea is to make a 4ft x 4ft bed (around 120 cms x 120 cms), fill it with a special soil mix, divide it into 16 squares, plant a different crop in each square. It claims some significant advantages:

- It takes up less space than a conventional vegetable bed for the amount you get out of it.
- The planting method results in fewer seeds being used, meaning less wastage.
- Because of the soil mix, the water retention is better, and the theory is that you don't need chemical fertilisers
- No double digging!

Then I started thinking about yields. In each square, you're supposed to plant either 1, 4, 12 or 16 seeds, depending on the conventional spacing instructions on the packet. To me, this seemed like a bit of problem if you want to grow more than one meal's-worth of stuff. (16 parsnips a year, anyone?) Now, you're supposed to be able to simply re-plant in the square where one crop finishes to get a succession of it, but as a novice, I wasn't confident that I would be able to get all the succession planting right, especially with the rotation involved. And I couldn't get my head around how it would work out with slower growing crops, unless I wanted to plant the whole grid with the same thing, but at two to three week intervals between each square... I guess I must be missing something, but I had to plan around my current understanding.

I could, of course, get more of each crop by having more than one 4ft x 4ft square. Problem is, if I built enough squares for a reasonable amount of veg with the recommended work space around each one, we would no longer have a garden - we'd have a farm!

To get the best out of the space available, I had to adapt the method a bit. I planned out one rectangular bed, with a small pathway through it so that I could reach the middle for weeding. My internal grid will contain 2 ft x 2 ft (60cm x 60 cm) squares, rather than 1 ft x 1 ft ones. I will still use the square-foot spacing instructions, as I don't see why they shouldn't work on a larger square (so long as it isn't too much larger). I was working on the basis that I would get the benefit of the same working area as I would have with 3 and a half "conventional" square-foot beds, but without taking up the same amount of garden.

The next adaptation was a matter of environmental concern. The soil mix recommended by Mel Bartholomew is 1/3 peat moss. Peat moss comes from bog. Bog is important, endangered, and in addition, I like bog. Okay, in the winter, it's probably as miserable and grim as everyone thinks it is... but in the summer and up close, it's lush, and springy, and full of beautiful tiny little plants with colours so vivid no camera could catch them properly...

This is bog. In Scotland. Where it belongs. If I want Scotland in my garden, I'll just let the lawn go soggy.

The nearest substitute to peat is cocoa coir, which I couldn't find locally. Looking at what was available, I decided on cocoa shell, which the blah on the bag says will eventually break down and enrich the soil - which is what the peat is there to do in the first place.

All that said, I'm not an angel, and it's very difficult not to buy cheap multi-purpose compost with God-knows-what in it when Sainsbury's are selling it at £2.50 for 50 litres and you're trying to save money. But at least I'm using less of it than I would be if I stuck to the original mix.

I suppose what I've done here is to try and get the best of all possible worlds by thinking about the reasoning behind each bit of the square foot method that caused me a problem and then doing something else which will hopefully achieve the same thing.

However (and I can't emphasise this enough), I don't really know what I'm doing - so don't regard my adaptations as necessarily sensible ones. I'm sure any serious gardeners reading this, particularly of the square-foot variety, will be kakking themselves laughing by now.

Things to Do on a Rainy Day (III): Considering Summer and Autumn Flowers

So I know two things about summertime flowers. I know what I would like, and I know what I absolutely do not want to end up with.

I would like to fill the edges of the lawn with lots of bright, cheery things like poppies and cornflowers and big, happy ox-eye daisies and lupins - I love lupins! I remember them all around the sides of the field behind my grandparent's garden, they come out in high summer in lots of bright colours like so many roman candles... and they'd be tall enough to hide the fences.












Ideally, these would be followed in September and October by lots of fiery reds, yellows and oranges in the same spots - dahlias and rudbeckias would be perfect.

Unfortunately, most of these plants like lots and lots of sunlight. This is why they grow in cornfields and not in woods. Now, our back fence gets lots of sunlight, but first of all, this is where the trench around the lawn is deepest, so the small seedlings would probably get shaded out. I will also need most of this space for raspberry canes, as it is where the fruit has the best chance of ripening properly. The trench along the side of the lawn is the bit of the garden which gets the least sunlight, because of the shade from the fence - so it's no go there either. I know from the old place that dahlias and rudbekias do really, really badly in shade. Cornflowers might just about work, and ox-eye daisies seem happy enough in the shady gardens of the surrounding streets.

So began a process of research on plants for shady gardens. This was initially depressing, as it seemed to involve the very set of boring non-native pretentious-colonial-botanist's-collection stuff I associate with the dank, gloomy, formal gardens of dank, gloomy, formal mock-gothic mansions. What was it with the late Victorians? All death and respectability, no fun.




I cheered up a bit after flicking through a pocket paperback on shade plants in the library. It seems most of the summer plants I want to put in the bed under the roses will tolerate partial shade, so I'll fill it with columbines, London Pride and stocks (for scent). I also decided that I will only need about half of the trench along the back fence for raspberries - so the section up to the almond tree will be getting the cornfield treatment after all. Two metres of it will look a lot less dramatic than the whole garden edge, but hey, it's better than nothing. I still won't get dahlias, though.

So what can I do about that terminally shady right-hand trench?

I can use foxgloves instead of lupins, for a start. Bees and butterflies love foxgloves, so that's good. And they have the height to hide the fence. I'll experiment with some of the cornfield type flowers next year and see what happens. Perhaps if I put them in grow beds so that they are level with the lawn, they will get a bit more sunlight, I don't know (I can't just build up the soil to the right level, because it would get soggy, and probably rot the bottom of the fence).

"Bleeding heart" is also apparently reasonably shade tolerant. I'd never heard of it before, but now that I have, I have to have one. Or maybe two, as there is also a white version - appropriate for the garden of a Spurs fan! I think they would grow high enough to give some good cover and colour in the back right-hand corner.

It's all still going to look a bit bare in the autumn, though. The obvious thing would be to go for a climber up the fence which would go bright red. The trouble is, most of them will only do that if they get sunlight. And I hate Virginia Creepers anyway. There's something about the way they spread all the way over walls and along the ground which gives off a 1950s sci-fi comic book vibe - like they want to take over the world while you're sleeping...

Spouse, incidentally, has expressed limited opinions on flowers ("daffodils are evil", and "Bluebells, please!).