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!

That was the year that was...

And what a year! 

This time in 2010, I was considering taking voluntary redundancy.  I'm glad I did; I could never have imagined how good my course at Reaseheath would be, and certainly had no idea that I would have the opportunity to work on the building of a large show garden at RHS Tatton Park, and then to discuss it with visitors to the show.  Definitely the horticultural highlight of the year.

"The Secret Garden" by Reaseheath College

OK, so we felt a bit robbed to get a Silver medal (we thought Silver Gilt, and Carol Klein on BBC Gardeners' World also hinted that we'd done better than perhaps the judges had assessed), but the actual experience of working in a great team on such a gorgeous project, and seeing how Carol Adams and Louise from the college designed and organised the planting, was the best possible inpiration for a gardening career.

The build team (those present on the last day before judging)

At home, the garden and allotment emerged quickly from a freezing winter to a warm spring, but we seemed to get the only rain for miles around through the summer.  While everyone else fretted about drought, I regularly tipped an inch or so out of the rain gauge every couple of days.  We did really well for salad leaves and got the best potato harvest ever, short on slug damage even to the Highland Burgundy Reds.  The tomatoes were good, once they got going, the squashes and pumpkins reasonable considering the lack of summer sunshine, and the onions excellent.  As usual, the carrots were a waste of space.

Onion crop drying in our allotment shed

The fruit crop was amazing - a fair bit of the soft fruit went to feed the two broods of blackbirds, but we had more top fruit than we could handle.  The freezer is still full of frozen plums (especially the Oolins Orange, which cropped well for the first time ever due to mild weather at flowering time), and I was even able to sell the excess pears, though with hindsight I suspect I may have made more money selling them from the front gate with an "honesty box" than via the farm shop.  Lesson learned!

There were flowers too - the front garden looked good until the poppies faded, but hopefully next year the perennials will have filled out a bit and there will be more autumn colour.

Then the decision to go "self-employed".  The business plan for this year is essentially "don't actually lose any money"!  At least I know - after Kevin's garden - that I need not be afraid of quite overgrown sites.  New adverts will go up in the local shops next week, and maybe I'll get a few customers.  I have a veg garden project to do with some other former work friends and some likely venues for car boot sales of herbs (definitely not back to the farm shop with them!), and my second set of RHS level 2 exams in February.

Happy 2012!

Midwinter madness

Well, here we are at the shortest day of the year.  Last year, we were snowed in with frozen pipework, without a functioning washing-machine for a month.  This year is a bit different.

At RHS Wisley on Friday (16th December) we were buzzed by a huge bumble bee foraging about in camellias in flower.  Still, that is 200 miles south of here.

Camellia at Wisley in mid-December

But this afternoon at Great Haywood (near Stafford) we spotted a bumble bee taking a rest in the sunshine on the bow rope of a narrowboat!  Hardly surprising when there are still plenty of late summer flowers in bloom - I still have Calendulas, Antirrhinums and Fuchsias in full flower, plus the Hellebores (these are completely confused and have been flowering since September). 


Even the zonal Pelagonium which I've so far neglected to move into the greenhouse is still growing healthily out of the patio table (must move it in tomorrow though!).  It'll be interesting to see how early (or not) the spring bulbs are, and if we get too little frost for a decent crop of rhubarb.