Pot Luck

"I think it's some sort of Hemp" said our friend...

Just for a change, I'm sitting at the computer listening to torrential rain ricocheting off the lean-to greenhouse, and I've just had to put a light on in order to see where to get the memory card out of my camera, despite it being midday and August. 

It's great to be home!

We've been away from home for a week, visiting Jon's new baby grandson (plus proud parents and almost equally proud uncle), my folks in Southampton and a few other friends we haven't seen for years. 

For their own protection, a couple of these friends need to remain anonymous.  We spent a very enjoyable day in their company catching up on news, sharing photographs and eating probably the best cheese scones in the world, before taking a quick stroll around the garden between heavy showers.  We don't have a monopoly on them up here, evidently.

An unusual, elegant and architectural plant gracing the border close to their bird table caught my eye.  It was easily my height and had a leaf similar to an acer but clearly from its shape and growth habit it wasn't a tree.  "I think it's some sort of Hemp" said our friend.

Not an Urban Myth - something narcotic in the bird seed?

 It didn't look like anything routinely found on sale at the Garden Centre, that was for sure! 

It had apparently "just appeared" there, Officer. 

"Yeah, right!  Tell that to the Judge!" you might be thinking, but many years ago as a kid I can remember being told by my mother to sweep up all the wild bird seed that fell on the ground under the bird table because some of it was supposedly cannabis and she didn't want us to be arrested if it started growing. 

I always assumed this was an Urban Myth; certainly nothing that's ever fallen from my bird table has ever grown into anything that wasn't just wheat or oats.  Maybe I buy cheap and nasty bird seed compared to our (nameless) friends, or possibly the cool, wet Staffordshire climate doesn't favour germination in the same way as that of balmy Hampshire.

But I can't help wondering if we now know why those cheese scones taste so damned good!

From wedding to weeding

I mentioned a couple of blogs ago that I finally had a proper commercial project on my hands after relying on my former CAB co-workers for altogether too much of my very limited gardening tasks to date.  It's only a small-scale job, planting up a herb garden and adding some ground cover to some borders that are parched due to having quite thin soil and all the moisture in it sucked up by the roots of a cherry laurel hedge, but it's a proper start at last.

It's also a job that came my way via a peculiar sequence of coincidences, starting from my enthusiasm for photography.  It's something I've been enjoying as a hobby for almost as long as I've been gardening.  They did have cameras back then, but none of this digital paraphenalia - my constant companion for many years was an 'Olympus Trip', with an old Practika SLR for the clever stuff, and I took slides, which was great discipline for making me compose a shot carefully, as there was no scope to cut or crop later and of course none of that 'photoshopping' malarky either.

When I eventually relented slightly of my Luddite ways and got a digital camera (my trusty Nikon D40) it was so that I could do the photos for a young relative who was getting married on a very tight budget.  The bride and groom were delighted with the results and, to be honest, so was I.  Naturally, I've never looked back, apart from occasional wistful comments about the quality of the light in slides.

Back to the 'how I got my herb garden commission' story.

I took some photos last year of a local carnival where there was a Town Criers' Competition and, being pleased with the results and having enjoyed seeing and hearing the Criers in action, gave a disc of the best shots to the councillor (and Town Crier) who had organised the event.

Some months later, he was showing the photos to his brother and his brother's fiancee, and they saw this picture.

And on the stregth of this shot, asked if I could do their wedding photos.  My Town Crier friend asked and, making the assumption that it would be quite a small-scale wedding (being a second marriage for both) I agreed.

The wedding actually proved to be a fairly fabulous affair with a country house hired for the weekend, gorgeous frocks, the groom and best man being flown in by helicopter, a piper, a wedding singer during the wedding breakfast and even a fly-past by the Red Arrows, though I'm still not sure whether that was planned or just happy coincidence.  I missed them, but thankfully I got some really good shots of everything else and the bride and groom were really pleased.

When I took the disc of pictures round for them, I happened to remark that this wasn't my usual line of work at all, but in fact I was trying to establish myself as a gardener.  Luckily, they had work for a gardener to do, specifically some begonias to go in for summer bedding, but also a couple of borders at the back which needed planting, and some bare patches in the front where nothing much wanted to grow except weeds, especially chickweed (the unfairly glamorous sounding Stellaria media).

We were soon talking herbs and perennial ground cover...

I spent one morning planting out the begonias and trying to figure out the strange soil conditions, then had a quick shopping expedition with 'the bride' to choose some herbs, and finally spent another morning planting out the herbs and getting some of my indestructable Alchemilla mollis tucked in around the feet of that cherry laurel.

Culinary herbs in a sunny border, with the fennel looking a little shell-shocked from transplanting!

What has been particularly enjoyable has been working out in her garden with 'the bride', teaching her a few little gardening tips and talking about what aftercare the plants will need, and just chatting, getting to know what she would like from her garden, what colours and leaf shapes appeal and, since aromatherapy is something she has studied in a professional capacity, what scents and fragrances we can use. 

There are some more gaps to fill in the front and some spring bulbs would fill the spaces when the herbaceous perennial herbs die back for the winter, so I am looking forward to returning to do some more work for this lovely couple in the near future.

Blighted

Happy memories - last year's Kestrel crop

There was I, wondering what else could possibly go wrong in the garden this year, when it should have been blindingly obvious.  A wet summer followed by this recent period of slightly warmer, humid, thundery weather can only result in one thing...

Phytophthera infestans!

In case the Latin has you confused, it's the equivalent of the 'Avada Kedavra' curse in the Harry Potter books, only for taters.  Better known as Potato Blight.  And right now, it's ripping through the allotment shrivelling the leaves of my beloved spuds and threatening to wreak havoc on the tubers too.

There's too much rain about to get a dose of Bordeaux Mixture on them - Bordeaux Mixture being a copper sulphate fungicide and a sort of all-round 'Expelliarmus!' solution to all manner of evil - so all I've been able to do is cut off the haulms of the worst affected and hope that the Sarpo cultivars live up to their 'blight buster' reputation.

Most disappointing is a significant failure of the usually reliable 'Kestrel' second earlies.  I had thought the row of little stunted brown sticks was all that remained of a new cultivar for me called 'Ratte', of a similar shape to the Pink Fir Apple and also a salad spud, but sadly not.  I lifted two roots and found they were the Kestrels after all, recovering three whole new potatoes in the process, one inevitably impaled by the fork.  The funny little 'Ratte' taters are actually plentiful, but need more time to grow with the benefit of foliage to reach a decent size, so I'll just have to chance leaving the haulms on for a little longer.

Despite taking a hit on the foliage, the Highland Burgundy Red root that I lifted had produced a fairly decent crop and suggested the remainder could have benefitted from more growing time with their leaves on, but there was no sensible alternative to slicing off the top growth with the dark infested splodges everywhere.

Elsewhere, a modest triumph is a surprisingly good ongoing crop of raspberries, and we also did fairly well for blackcurrants as, for some bizarre reason, they don't seem anything like as popular with the blackbirds as the red and white currants were. 

Raspberries - one day's crop.

Nice, but hardly likely to sustain us through the winter!

Kidsgrove Station in Summer

Shrubs and perennials on Platform 4

At the start of this year I posted an article praising the work of the volunteers of Friends of Kidsgrove Station in restoring and improving the lovely gardens on the platforms of our local station.

Wall basket on the island platform waiting room.

Even in the winter they looked immaculate, but now the summer is here (well, sort of...) the gardens are really blooming.

Herbaceous bed between Platforms 2 and 3

Sadly, there have been a few problems with theft of plants and baskets, but not the level vandalism that some doom-merchants predicted.

Summer bedding on Platform 2

It's always a pleasure when using the station to arrive a few minutes early and see what new plant or planters have been added.

Hopefully other passengers also appreciate everything the Friends have done.  It's really been an incredible transformation.