Back to school

For almost 7 years now, Jon and I have been involved with an allotment project at our local primary school, which began as a spin-off from the fact that Year Six children have to learn about the Second World War as part of the National Curriculum, and a "Dig for Victory" garden fitted in well with this and the concern at the time about healthy eating in schools.  It's been a great success, teaching the children about how food is grown and enabling them to mess about in dirt during lessons - planting and digging potatoes is always the best fun!

School Allotment in June 2008

We've also found the allotment is a great place for looking for "mini-beasts"; allowing the blackfly on the broad beans to thrive (temporarily) encouraged an influx of ladybirds and allowed the children (and teachers) to see what a juvenile ladybird looked like for the first time. 

Today was my first visit to the site since the Christmas holidays, to winter prune the apple and pear trees and turn the compost heaps over and into one big (hopefully hot) heap.  The little trees actually look quite good.  The pear is a real survivor ('Invincible') , having been uprooted by vandals a few years ago, but after some strong winds recently, needed re-staking.  It's supposed to be a self-fertile cultivar but although it blossoms profusely, it hasn't ever borne much fruit, and none at all for the last three years, so this year I may cheat a bit and bring down a blossoming twig or two from one of mine, and a paint-brush!   

Pear Blossom

Digging Potatoes

The apples are a 'Bramley's Seedling' - which I ought to have pruned more vigorously for shape when it was younger, as it's rather a lop-sided little tree, though looks basically healthy - and a 'Red Devil', which produces a reliable and generous crop of very glossy red fruit with pinky flesh soon after the children return from their summer holidays in September.
Not so good is the general state of the beds.  There are six of these laid out in a rectangular pattern (two long 4' x 16 ones at each end, and two pairs of 4' x 6' in between, a 4' x 10' bed for blackcurrant bushes, then the "Dig for Victory" beds around a reproduction air-raid shelter shaped like a D, 4 and V respectively, and finally a Spitfire shaped bed! 

The school shares the same sandy silt loam soil as we have in our garden and allotment, and after seven years of quite intensive cultivation and the trampling of many pairs of small (and some large) feet, it's looking really poor.  Luckily, the compost heap looks as though it should be ready by March for digging in to one of the long beds and the other has a crop of Hungarian grazing rye grass sprouting up, which we can dig in soon, but improvement is still called for.  Ideally, lots and lots of what the "hortic" fraternity refer to as FYM - farmyard manure - needs rotting down and digging in.  Luckily, I have a good source for this at a local stables where I regularly spend an hour trying not to fall off of a kindly horse.

As I dug out the compost heap onto which the children put left-over fresh fruit and veg, a novel recycling scheme occurred to me.  It grieves me a good deal to see that quite a lot of fruit - particularly apples - is thrown away with little more than a tiny bite out of it (and sometimes no bite at all), also small bags of fresh carrots, where perhaps only one or two have been eaten.  My equine friend would make short work of these treats, and recycle them far more quickly and efficiently than the worms in the heap. 

So the plan is to ask the headteacher if a separate bin for almost whole apples and carrots can be set aside which I can collect and take to the stables, returning with donations to the compost heap from grateful horses.  That's what you call a "cunning plan"!

The Secret Station Garden

We were visiting friends in Manchester this weekend, and travelled up by train from our nearest railway station,Kidsgrove.  Jon can take much credit for the improved train service we have these days, having campaigned with local people, councillors and MPs to get us an hourly service to Manchester, two trains an hour to Stoke and a through service to London Euston.

An unexpected horticultural spin-off from the improved service and greater use of the station has been a tremendous voluntary effort to restore the garden at the station.  This is found on the "island" platform which sits in the "V" between the lines to and from Crewe, and those to and from Manchester, and was set out during the 1980s recession as a Manpower Services Commission "Community Programme", around the same time as the National Garden Festival was happening in Stoke-on-Trent.  But over time, without regular revenue funding or staff to maintain it, the garden plants disappeared under swathes of ivy and brambles. 

Blast from the past - dedication plaque for the original station garden project

When we first moved up to this area, there was virtually no trace of a cultivated garden - just a few ornamental shrubs poking out from the weeds.  But all that was to change, and like the Secret Garden in the story, the original has gradually been restored to its former glory.

About three years ago, Allan Dale came forward to help out at Kidsgrove station in response to a recruitment drive by the North Staffordshire Community Rail Partnership for volunteers to assist with improving their local station.  Allan recruited a team to help him and began to rediscover and clear the old gardens, successfully rallying support from Kidsgrove Rotary Club and Staffordshire Wildlife Trust and encouraging donations of plants, bulbs and funds to maintain the transformation.  In January 2010, Allan was given one of the first Citizen's awards by Kidsgrove Town Council - Jon Honeysett also got one for his work in restoring the train service!

Under the ivy for decades, uncovered in 2010

The garden project has also won numerous awards - including a Britain in Bloom Community Award from Newcastle-under-Lyme Council, Best Small Station from East Midlands Trains and runners up in the 2011 National Community Rail Partnership awards for Best Station Adoption Group.  Their commendation noted:

"the hard work and enthusiasm of this immensely proactive group has helped to transform Kidsgrove station from a run down, unwelcoming facility to a very attractive place.  Whatever the task, from gardening to raising funds, they always deliver and are real ‘Friends’ to the station. In bringing to life the long forgotten station gardens, they’ve won the support of numerous agencies such as Staffordshire Wildlife Trust and Rotary International."

Sadly, Alllan wasn't able to see this last award for all his team's hard work, as he passed away suddenly last summer.  But a very dedictaed team have continued to maintain and expand the gardens at Kidsgrove station, and dedicated a quiet rose garden to their much missed old friend.

Allan's work is continued by the remaining volunteers, including local councillors Elsie Bates and Mary Maxfield, and this year they have planted troughs and wall baskets for winter colour.  The gardens - like most - aren't at their best at this time of year, but there are still some nice features even in the depths of winter.



In summer, there are now lots of lush perennials cascading down towards the platforms.

I gave the team some spare plants last year, but hope to be more use to them after I've finished my RHS level 2 this February, and hope to occasionally help the ladies with their work - especially pruning anything a bit high up! 

So congratulations to them all for a fabulous garden.

First Blood

Indoors, and on the outside of a cup of tea, after the first proper gardening session of the year, winter pruning the pears in the back garden and then, because there was daylight left and also some freshly mixed Bordeaux Mixture, I decided to give the rose bushes a good prune too.


Rosa 'Queen Elizabeth'

I am an idiot where roses are concerned.  I think they are a lovely flower, but they need more regular care and maintenance than I have tended to have time to give them.  They bug me because they usually flatly refuse to 'get with the programme' as far as organic pest and disease control is concerned, and because their care gets done on an ad hoc basis - as today - I am never properly equipped for it. 

That isn't to say I have nothing I need - I always have nice sharp secateurs, disinfectant wipes to keep these sterile, and the pruning saw for thicker stems, because the roses tend to get their prune when I am working on the fruit trees, but I never seem to have a tough pair of gloves to hand.  I then persist in fooling myself that I can grapple with the plants without sustaining injury 'if I am careful'. 

This is never the case, as the roses here either have giant dagger-like thorns or masses of sharp needle-like ones, if not where they are being cut, but where they have to be held, or on the bit that inevitably snags your sleeve when you try to bin the prunings later, and then glancing at my hand I'll notice a big snudge of blood...  Today there is a jagged gash at the base of my left thumb and across the third finger of my right hand, plus a smattering of small puncture wounds, which isn't too bad.  Autumn pruning, done with fewer layers of clothes on the arms tends to be a bloodier business.

The roses here have had distinctly mixed fortunes.  Most were here when we moved in, a mixture of different hybrid tea and floribunda types planted together in a rather shady spot at the end of the garden and looking rather sorry for themselves, in what was to be the veg plot.  So they were moved to the flower garden borders, where they have not exactly thrived either.  That's a bit of an over-simplification.  One plant does do really well - a strong, pink-flowered cultivar which I think may be R. 'Queen Elizabeth'.  Another that seems to hold its own is, I think, R. 'Peace', though both do get black spot.  The remainder are absolute martyrs to black spot and make whispy growth with the occasional half-hearted flower.  I could be lazy and blame to soil, or the damp and cold climate, but they would probably all have more of a chance if I gave them more regular care.


R. 'Peace', I think...

I've added a couple of Old Garden types (R. 'Konigin von Danemark' and R. 'Cardinal de Richelieu') and a vigorous species hybrid R. 'Sealing Wax', which flowers profusely in early-mid summer and is a huge hit with the bumble bees.  These have done reasonably well, considering they haven't had much of a planned maintenance regime.  And this summer I treated myself to some new David Austin roses for the herb garden, encouraged by their marketting as 'disease resistant'.

R. 'Sealing Wax'

I don't think it's fair to expect any of them to thrive without a bit more work on my part, so I think I might make this year the one where I take the trouble to treat the black spot, cut out all the die-back, and dead-head regularly.    The gloves are going on...

An early spring?

Unusually, horticulture got a brief mention on BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme this morning, with a very short item about the problems facing the Yorkshire "Rhubarb Triangle".  Essentially, the problem is that the mild winter so far means that the rhubarb hasn't had the frost it needs to get it growing in the spring.

It's certainly still mild here today.  Lunchtime today I was picking both autumn oriental salad leaves and some fresh fennel leaves, and had to wash a few aphids off these - but not too many as the ladybirds are still about outdoors and active.  In the woodland plot at the far end of the garden, the snowdrops are now flowering - at least a month early - and in the front garden the first crocuses are coming up in the lawn.

It's tempting to start sowing broad beans and some other early crops, but it looks like the winter might arrive this weekend.

In the lab

Interesting day at college - not that they aren't usually - but today we spent the afternoon in one of the labs doing basic soil tests. 

A series of diagnostic checks - involving rolling damp soil into balls and sausage shapes - on samples from the garden and the allotment suggested that both are sandy, silty loams.  The sample from the allotment proved to have a slightly low pH for vegetable growing - around 6.0 - while the sample from the garden veg plot scored a healthier 6.5.

So it looks like the allotment needs a bit of a dose of lime; apart from being beneficial to some of the crops, it might also prove to be detremental to the annoying "Sheep's sorrel" weed which seems to be one of our worst problem plants.

New Year's resolutions

Today is not a good day for gardening.  It's literally blowing a gale and raining more often than not, but that's fine as I really need to get on with writing up some revision notes - specifically, learning the life-cycles and means of combatting a range of insect and animal pests.  It's the Defence against the Dark Arts bit of the course!

Yesterday was different - fabulously bright and crisp, like a perfect early spring day, and not really what 2nd January should be like at all.  An ideal opportunity to turn over the compost heaps into one big stack with added horse manure and straw, and a reminder that garden resolutions no. 1 and no. 2 are to collect manure regularly after my horse-riding lessons, and not to add the manure too early to the veg plots (apparently it can take nitrogen out of the ground to decompose).

Garden resolution no. 3 involves better management of seedlings, rather than nurturing them through their early stages and then losing interest when they get to the pricking out stage and leaving them to go all spindly or damp off.  In my defence I really don't let this happen to most seedlings, but there are always a couple of trays of something I'm not sure about, and probably got as a free packet or thought was too old to germinate, that just seems to be too troublesome.  The rule this year is simple - if you don't know where to plant it, don't sow it.

Resolution no. 4 is a tougher weeding regime - also inspired by college lectures and the horrifying thought that many weed plants can shed tens of thousands of seeds several times a season, some producing viable seed without even being pollinated first. 

Finally (let's not overdo it, after all), I'm going to sow salad leaves much more frequently, in small pots, all through the year, and starting today.  And grow them in slightly larger, shallow pots or trays for sale too. 

The gardening business has one resolution only for the first full year: don't actually lose money!