Front of House

While we were waiting for something other than weeds to appear our back garden, my green fingers got a bit itchy - even more so when I realised that the front of the house gets all the herb-friendly warm afternoon sun so desperately missing from the garden.

This provoked a trip to Shannon's, and the purchase of two troughs to go under our kitchen windows. In these troughs, we planted:

a) the herbs we were missing from our old place; Tarragon, Dill, and Chives, plus some Sage

b) Pak Choi, Chard and Sorrell

And when Spouse's parents asked what I wanted for my birthday, I thought about my wish-list of plants, and asked for a baby lemon tree, not really expecting to get one. Spouse's parents kindly provided not only this, but also, since it turned out to be slightly more "baby" than any of us expected, an olive tree to be its friend. And matching pots for them.

We'd already got a pot for the lemon tree before it was delivered, knowing that it would have to go in special citrus compost and be brought inside in the winter. Because the lemon tree is so tiny, our pot is way too big - but one day, it won't be. So rather than face the prospect of having to transplant the tree in a few year's time, I put it (in the citrus compost) in a flower pot inside the large one, then filled in the edges with standard compost and planted beetroot and spinach beet there. In Spouse's parents pots, we put the olive tree (much slower-growing) and a rosemary bush.

I wasn't sure how well any of it would work, and it was a bit hit-and-miss.

We had fresh pak choi leaves for our miso soup after about a month, and by treating the plants as cut-and-come-again, this continued until they bolted after a couple more months. The sorrell got crowded out. The chard didn't do all that brilliantly either - it got attacked by hoppers and never really recovered. The spinach beet, on the other hand worked fantastically. The stuff seems to be utterly indestructible. You can cut it right back, and it just keeps coming. And it really doesn't bolt. The beetroots were also great for leaves, eventually developing the roots. These were a bit small, as they didn't have a lot of room to spread out. We harvested them anyway, and they were quite tasty. They are the ones in the picture at the top, incidentally. The only real problem I had with either of those two was with nasty little flies eating holes in the leaves. Pyrethrum spray sorted that out, but I'm not really happy about insectides on food plants, so I'll have to research an alternative for next year.

The sage sort of took over the trough it was in, so the dill got crowded out and I had to put it out of it's misery. I'm now raising some from seed in a pot in the kitchen instead. The tarragon held it's own though. I remembered that it dies off in the cold, so I've now brought it inside for the winter.

The rosemary started off in the back garden, because Spouse didn't want it nicked. Now he has more confidence that it won't happen, I've moved it to the front so that the sun will give it a stronger flavour. I thought that the change of position might stop the local squirrels burrowing into it's compost - but if anything, they seem even more determined to plant conkers in it. Some squirrel netting will hopefully put a stop that.

Things to Do on a Rainy Day (II): Considering Spring Flowers

I have two areas to put flowers in. One is the corner underneath the retaining wall and along the fence, where the pear tree and the roses are. The other is the sloping trench between the underpinned lawn and the right hand fence.

English spring flowers are all about carpets of snowdrops, primroses, violets, anenomes, daffodils, bluebells... Thanks to a childhood of Sunday trips into Kent, and holidays with rural grandparents in Norfolk, I can pretty much recite the progression in my sleep. And they're all woodland plants, which is good, because in urban terms, we're in the woods.

No daffodils, though :-( . Spouse regards daffodils as "evil flowers"! He's okay about narciscii, but I feel about them rather the way he feels about muscari (narciscii = fake daffodils, muscari - fake bluebells). Still, he's agreed that I can put some crocuses in the sunny right hand corner of the lawn, as they will have finished by the time he needs to start mowing it. A mix of these, with some snowdrops and the almond blossom, should give that corner a lovely cheerful start to the year, visible from our back windows.

I will have to put wood anenomes, primroses and violets under the roses, because they grow low to the ground, so if they are planted in the trench, they will be lower than the side of the lawn and we won't really see them. Under the roses, they'll be hidden from the windows by the retaining wall, but at least we will see them when we are actually in the garden. I'll try chucking in some Snake's Head Fritillaries as well, because they're fun, and also - I could be wrong about this, but - I seem to remember them being endangered when I was a kid. I think bluebells should be tall enough to poke out over the top of the trench at the shallower end of it. All in all, February to May should be easy enough. Get bulbs, shove 'em in the ground, cover with netting to prevent the squirrels getting 'em - sorted.

It's the summer and autumn that get difficult.

Things to Do on a Rainy Day (I) What Veg and Herbs are Worth Growing?

Somehow I have a copy of the "Which? Guide to Vegetable Growing". I have no idea when or where I bought it, but I'm really glad I did. The best thing is that it de-mystifies all the technical stuff in my other gardening books. It has loads of clear, simple info on general veg growing, as well as fairly detailed advice on specific crops. I spent quite a bit of our miserable summer going through it, working out what I might be able to grow next year.

It would be all too easy to think that by growing our own veg, we could somehow change the habits of a lifetime and become shiny happy Government-and-Jamie-Oliver-approved healthy eaters. It's far more likely that having grown all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff we should be eating, we'd find it all too much effort to prepare and cook on a daily basis, and end up buying our standard supermarket vegetables after all... It's a waste of effort (and criminally, of food) to grow stuff we won't eat. I decided I'd better stick with what's already in our diet when I considered what to grow. So the next question was "What do we actually eat?"

Well...

If we have lamb, it has to have rosemary with it.

I cook loads of curries, which means we need onions, garlic, coriander and chillies. (Even I am not stupid enough to expect to be able to grow cardomom or a cinnamon tree!)

We eat loads of fish, and usually lemons are involved.

We also eat a fair amount of miso soup with noodles and kneidlh (Spouse's Auntie most amused by this - don't know why - have soup, have dumplings, no?). My version of this involves lots of random green stuff, including

- Pak Choi
- Spinach
- Whatever happens to be in the packet of salad we've only eaten half of, usually some combination of Chard, Rocket, Beetroot tops, Lettuce and Lamb's Lettuce.

Mint is always useful.

Chives and Dill are essential ingredients of Spouse's spectacularly yummy scrambled eggs (green eggs without the ham!) - Dill also good with salmon.

Tarragon useful for roast chicken, and goes well with chestnut mushrooms in red wine risotto.

Basil. Mostly for Thai Green Curry.

Potatoes. New ones with fish, or as potato salad (another use for chives).

Parsnips. Spouse loves parsnips.

Tomatoes. Wasn't sure about this at first, as we don't eat so many of them - but a lot of that is because supermarket tomatoes taste of nothing, so it's not worth it. Then I saw a demonstration on one of the weekend cookery shows of how to produce "sun-dried" tomatoes by slow-roasting them. I use shed-loads of the things, so if I can do that, it's worth growing tomatoes. If I grow cherry ones, they might even get eaten in salads as well.

Brussels Sprouts. Freeze well and keep their flavour - which is actually lovely and sweet and nutty if they're not boiled to a pulp a la traditional Christmas dinners.

Broccoli. We used to get through loads of frozen broccoli florets, but they do tend to go a bit mushy, and we don't really eat enough fresh to justify the amount of space the plants take up. Purple Sprouting Broccoli, on the other hand, is delicious but expensive - if I can grow that and get a steady supply, that would be handy.

Cucumbers. Just for a laugh. (I've got the tomatoes and the lettuce - I might as well finish the salad off. Alternatively, "Anyone for Pimm's"?) And only because the Which? Guide says there are hardy climbing varieties - otherwise it would be impossible without the greenhouse for which we have no space.

Peas. Easy and quick to cook when you need green stuff to go with fish and chips. Unless you're using fresh ones, which are a pain. Mange Tout and Sugar Snaps, on the other hand, are really convenient, and also good for stir-fries. Shame about the carbon footprint. Let's see if I can do something about that (sorry, Kenya...).

That's a good load to be going on with, then.

Ten Things That Have Happened in Our Garden This Year

1) One of the "shrubs" at the back blossomed, and turned out to be an almond tree. Result!

2) In April, it snowed:















Pretty!

3) I made a shade chart in around May, to figure out where to put the vegetable bed. Turns out it will be quite a good use for the bare ground left by the anhililation of the nasty furry-leaved weed patch.

4) It rained. And rained. And rained some more.

5) I marked out the area for the veg patch and covered it with black plastic for the remainder of the growing season, having read somewhere that this would kill off any further weeds in the ground by denying them sunlight. Hmm. We'll see...

6) We replanted the lawn. This happened sporadically, as I was using the "glycophosphate as many celendines and dandylions as I can see, dig over and put down new grass seed in the resulting bare patch" method. Pretty stupid really, as it kills off at least as much grass as weeds. Spouse did point this out, but there's a reason I sign these posts "Contrary Mary". Lesson learned. I'm using a trowel now.

7) There was a warm spell, resulting in much lawn growth.

8) I might have killed off the Japanese Knotweed in the gravel and behind the shed. But I'm not putting money on it (despite it's being a better bet than shares in Morgan Stanley).

9) The squirrels ate all our pears.

10) Spouse got some garden furniture.
It promptly started raining again.
Spouse not impressed.

So here's how things looked at the end of August:

The Reality

It's all very well to imagine your perfect garden, but you have to work with what you've got. And that's when the troubles starts.

It was well apparent from the size and spread of the surrounding trees, particularly that sycamore at the back, that the garden would be very shady. It is also north-facing, or north-north-east at a push. The soil is heavy London Clay, and because we are on the hill, the whole garden is underpinned to stop it sliding away. This combination creates some interesting drainage issues. It also limits what can be planted with any hope of success.

The problems were most obviously apparent in the state of the lawn. It was mostly moss in the left hand quadrant, and had completely died off in the patches underneath the spread of the existing shrubs. On the right hand side, it was full of weeds, in particular the large nasty furry-leaved incredibly invasive things which grow all over this side of Forest Hill and seem to love woody environments.

So we had a short burst of enthusiasm soon after we moved in, during which we cleared the ivy from the fences, cut back the shrubs with a view to removing them, and killed off the worst of the weeds. After that, it was difficult to know how to proceed. It was, after all, around the end of January. We had no idea what might appear in the Spring, and in any case, there was no point planting anything until we'd worked where the sunny bits were going to be, which we couldn't do until the leaves came out on the trees. We decided to leave it for a bit and hope that at least the lawn would reassert itself.

It didn't.

The Dream...

Last December, we moved into a new house. For the first time, we have a proper garden all of our own...very exciting!

It's about thirty feet, on two levels - a gravel patio (with a great garden shed!) off our kitchen/diner, and then some steps down to a lawn area. It backs onto the grounds of some nearby flats, which have a huge sycamore growing just behind our back fence, providing privacy and a sense of being actually in the "Forest" of "Forest Hill". It has a small pear tree and some roses, but is otherwise pretty much um, a "blank canvas".

So Spouse and I had visions of turning it into a lovely relaxing woodland retreat. Spouse wants a nice springy lawn like they have in the best parks, with loads of clover and daisies, suitable for rolling around on - or perhaps that was lolling around on? - during balmy summer weekends with friends and glass of something cold. We both want raspberries. I want a succession of traditional seasonal British flowers from Spring through to November - preferably a combination of the ones from my grandparents garden, and the ones I remember my Mum growing every year when I was little. These would include lilac, camelias, lily-of-the-valley, London Pride, dahlias, cornflowers, daffodils, tulips, columbines, bluebells, lupins.... the list goes on.

And there has to be a vegetable plot.
If nothing else, a vegetable plot.
Mum grew maize and lettuces, my Grandad grew everything from onions to squashes, Spouse's parents have raspberries, rosemary and mint - to me it wouldn't be a proper garden unless something came out of it that we could eat.

Neither Spouse or I have the required skill level for this.

Spouse probably has a bit of a head start, given that he is well used to using a lawn mower. We did manage to grow some herbs on the scrubby strip of earth in our half of our old garden, and even a chilli plant in a pot one year. But although our rosemary bushes did brilliantly until the arrival of the evil purple beetle from hell, the major beneficiaries of our (my) efforts were the local slugs and hoppers.

This means that what I do in the garden will mostly reliant on

a) gardening books
b) anything I can actually remember hearing on Gardener's World
c) vague memories of What Mum or my Gran or my Grandad did
d) advice from friends
c) frantically Googling the plant/pest/problem in the hope of a sensible answer
e) guesswork.

Oh dear...