No Dig, No Cry

Wednesday evening I rushed straight out after work to see Charles Dowding* talk about his No Dig market garden business in Somerset. What Sarah Raven is to cut flowers, Charles is to No-Dig (although hopefully less sulky than Sarah revealed herself to be in the recent Sissinghurst series). When I first decided to go the No-Dig route, I was worried that adding that much organic matter would result in all leaf and no flower, so I emailed Charles to get his opinion. Despite not knowing me from Adam, he was very kind, readily imparting advice and wishing me luck and when, on Wednesday, I introduced myself to him he said he remembered me and was interested to hear how it was going.

Accompanying his talk was slide after slide of beautiful, pristine salad leaves and veg growing in crumbly, weed-free compost. Of course, we all do a bit of titivating when taking photos for public consumption but something about these photos made you believe that, yes, his place actually does look that fab. I didn’t know whether to be  inspired or depressed.

There was lots of “ooh-ing” and sideways commenting when the pictures first came up.  I can’t say I wouldn’t have joined in had I not been on my own and already sideways-commented often enough to make the woman next to me start edging her chair away. But although deeply impressed, at the same time a tiny little voice inside me was saying “Mine looks a bit like that! Mine’s like that! It is! It is! Miss! Miss! I can do that!”

So, OK, it doesn’t look EXACTLY like that – my paths still have annoying clumps of grass coming through if I don’t hoe down them regularly and the edges of the plot are messy and buttercuppy, with great piles of sort-of-composting debris and hoeings dumped along them, but the beds are more or less weed free, the compost dark and crumbly and the plants tall, strong and lush.

And assuming there’s no little team of elves coming out at night to do the work for me,  that must be down to them there mycorrhizae – cos it certainly isn’t me!

* www.charlesdowding.co.uk

And When You Pick Them…

…They look like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What A Difference A Year Makes

May last year:

Yesterday:

 

Occasionally I am still overwhelmed by a wave of  blind panic that I’m not growing enough, that I won’t have anywhere near enough flowers to fulfil the promises I am making and that I will bankrupt myself by buying in flowers, which I will end up selling at a loss!

But then I think about how many blooms there were just a few weeks after the top picture was taken and compare it with the way the plot is looking now and I have to do a little jig!

A Couple Of Surprises…

..On the allotment recently. The first was under some overgrown grass that I was making a half-hearted effort at clearing:

 

Disappointingly, not a snake but - almost as exciting - a slow-worm! There were two of them, but I only managed to get a shot of one on my mobile before they disappeared, hopefully to somewhere romantic where they could get on with creating lots of slug-eating babies. They’re a protected species and apparently fall prey to domestic cats so I will leave that corner uncleared for a bit (the excuse I have been looking for) and keep my fingers crossed for them.

The other welcome surprise:

  

I suppose I shouldn’t have been that surprised that these tulips were out, as I’d noticed the previous week that they were budding up nicely. But in my defence, they are called Maytime, which sort of implies… Well, not the middle of April anyway. For selling, they should really have been picked still closed to give them the maximum vase life. But there was no way I was going to waste them, and besides the customers would need to see how fantastically fluorescently pink they were. So, after a night packed tightly in tall buckets to keep them straight, they looked like this:

 

And now they’re all gone until next year. It’s heart-wrenching stuff, this flower selling!

All Still To Come

When I lived in London I used to walk to the Tube through Victoria Park. Each year there would be “the day” – that moment when the sun would become warm enough to make you turn your face up to it and the magnolia trees lining the central avenue would burst into bloom. Just before Bethnal Green station there would be a run of daffodils and as I walked along it, every year without fail I would think, “It’s all still to come!”

The transition from winter to spring is always so sudden – especially this year when just a couple of weeks ago, there was a layer of snow over the garden. With an apparent click of the fingers, the mood changes – people smile, the air smells sweeter and the greens become lime and zingy. Everything is suddenly gorgeous! And yet all the fab things about summer – waking up to blinding sunlight, never shutting your back door, long evenings outside the pub, it being warm enough to sit in the garden in the dark - the things you’ve longed for for months on end, they’re all still to come. 

 

I sold my first posies of the year this morning. They were mostly hyacinths (’White Pearl’, ‘Blue Pearl’ and the scarily bright ‘Jan de Bos’ ) so they were a bit short-stemmed and I could have done with some of the Iceland poppies on the allotment being ready to give more variation, but they smelt wonderful, I am confident they will last well and, most importantly, they sold!

All in all, not a bad start. And remembering what I had growing this time last year – i.e. zilch! – I was pretty pleased with myself.

And on top of that, it’s all still to come!

HOORAH!

And The Lesson For This Month…

..Snow is heavy!

 

 

I could kick myself. When I put the netting on the frame, I did it so I could unhook it  if necessary. So why didn’t it occur to me to take the netting down when snow was forecast?

Banjaxed And Bored

Yes, it’s pretty and, yes, why can’t we just enjoy it, but frankly more than a couple of days and the snow gets very boring. The jolly-ing effect on the nation  is of course great, especially when the sun streams down on the smiling shoppers from bright blue skies like it did on Saturday. But once Sunday gets here and you want to get on with stuff, it just becomes a pain.

My top priority at the moment is the polytunnel, still sitting in the field in soggy boxes with the ground too hard to dig.  I need it up soon - I really want to start sowing some seeds under cover this month. The antirrhinums and other slow-growing half-hardy annuals need an early start if I am to get anything more than a few weeks of flowers from them. And I want to sow some more sweet peas, as the autumn-sown plants down in the potting shed have frozen and defrosted so many times now that I’m not sure whether they’ll make it. Yes, I could sow stuff indoors, I suppose, but the erratic light levels you get on the windowsills means the seedlings are never as strong, retaining a certain legginess no matter how many times you pinch them out – and anyway, the potting compost is frozen solid.

So instead of getting on with sowing I’ve been getting organised. I’ve finally finished ordering seeds for this year and updated my reference chart (which I’m supposed to refer to constantly to get things right but which I normally only refer to try and work out why things went wrong), and there are some exciting new additions!

I’ve never grown tuberosas before – apparently they smell divine – but I’ve splashed out on a few bulbs, and I have also upped my lily collection. Both of these – in fact, most summer-flowering bulbs -are things that I could never have enough of but  they’re expensive to buy and with a bulb you get just the one flower a year, so it’s difficult to spend what little money I have on them when I could get a packet of cut-and-come-again seeds for the price of one bulb – no matter how much you tell yourself that in the long run they will be worth the extra outlay.

Polianthes tuberosa ‘The Pearl’

I’ve also managed to find some seeds for limonium latifolium – purple sea lavender – and orange carthamus, both of which I’ve been looking for ever since I first used them on my floristry course.

Limonium latifolium

 

 

                                                         Carthamus tinctorius ‘Goldtuft’

 

 

 

And, as part of my efforts to grow more perennials, I’ve ordered some seeds of Scabiosa ‘Fama’ – the perennial blue scabious you find in florists’ shops - to go with the fabulous tall annual pink and mauve scabious which were so successful last year.

       Scabiosa caucasia ‘Fama Blue’

And this is Didiscus caeruleus, a lovely blue, all the more valued for flowering late in the season when nearly everything else is red or orange.

                                                                                Didiscus caerulus

It’s all very exciting! And so now I’m sitting here hoping for rain in February – bizarre.

Wrapping It Up

 

Well, as you may be able to tell, it was a bit windy, but it didn’t rain so the dreaded flood didn’t materialise. The punters came thick and - well, fast isn’t quite the word, more like steadily – through the morning, completely disappeared all through the afternoon, then had a bit of a surge right at the end. Still, I sold nearly all the fresh stuff, which would have been wasted had it not sold (although if it goes on the compost heap, is it ever really waste?), and the dried wreaths which didn’t sell will store till next year - or even be cunningly re-jigged for Valentine’s Day.

The brave musicians sat blinking in the acrid smoke from Phil the Mill’s over-zealous brazier lighting, reassuring me that it didn’t matter that they had no audience because they needed the practice anyway (bless!) and Jo from Bath Organic Blooms heroically turned up with chocolate macaroons and encouragement.

All in all I am pleased with my first real day’s trading. It’s not a very accurate gauge of how well a flower shop would do as there weren’t really any flowers (well, except the pots of  narcissi, I suppose) but it has given me a good idea of what sort of things sell and what don’t. The hanging foliage and mistletoe balls were very popular, but the topiary balls, although they attracted a lot of compliments, didn’t sell – a bit of a relief in a way, as they were a real faff and I ended up hating doing them. I wish I’d done more pots of scented narcissi and I could easily have sold more pine-cone firelighters – all good lessons for next year.

Apart from the obvious benefit of earning a bit of cash at Christmas, and the not-to-be-underestimated advantage of not having time to worry about the usual Christmas preparations until the 22nd, it really  fired me with enthusiasm for the coming season. The winter – a real crunchy, cold winter for once – is flying by. The hellebores are out and, despite the severe frosts, the rhubarb is pushing through. Spring is tangibly close, a feeling reinforced by evenings spent poring over seed catalogues and gazing wistfully at pictures of the field in full flower, trying to remember the feel of the sun on my bare shoulders.

The next test will be trying to produce enough flowers to stock the shop by March. Bring it on!

All Over The Shop

 

A while ago I spent a few sunny days painting up this old garage, not far from the flower plot, to use as a space to sell my flowers. I keep going to use the word “shop” – not so much delusions of grandeur as an awareness that “come and visit me at the leaky old garage with a tendency to flood and no heat, power or water” isn’t quite as enticing so, in my mind at least, “shop” it will remain.

The idea is to open it on Saturdays only to sell my flowers, plants from a friend’s nursery and wooden, gardeny goods made by the guys at the sawmill which owns the garage. It has parking, a decent amount of passing traffic and is on the edge of a lovely – and stylish – village, so I’m hoping that it will pull in a more focused group of customers than the market stalls do. The biggest advantage, though, has to be that I can leave the flowers there overnight and put together bunches on site, in a “come and see the local artisan at work” kind of way, rather than staying up till gone midnight the night before, watching the water I’m sloshing about gradually ruining my polished living-room floorboards.

Having attracted a fair few enquiries from dog-walking passers-by, I decided not to wait till spring to open,  and have boldly (rashly?) announced we’ll be opening on the Saturday before Christmas. So now, of course, I have to produce something to sell…

To that end, last weekend I did a brilliant course at a willow farm up on the Levels (can’t recommend it enough – www.musgrovewillows.co.uk) and all week have been weaving rings and stars for wreaths and decorations. The front-room floor is hidden beneath a carpet of fir cones, baubles (not strictly adhering to the local theme, but I figured recycling stuff I bought years ago makes it OK), ribbons and twiggy bits, and the back room is full of bird boxes and planters.

However, being a grower, I feel I ought to offer at least a few fresh things. Hanging mistletoe and festive foliage balls I am confident of – I did a couple for friends last year.  Mossed wreaths I can play with till I get them right. Topiary balls to stand outside your front door, though, are a new idea for me, and one I thought would be relatively straightforward.

Hmm. Of the three I’ve tried so far, the first one was the least successful. The foliage ball slid straight down the trunk and broke in two. The second one got further – a cunning piece of dowelling stopped any downward slippage, and the ball, if I say so myself, looked great. Until I tried to move it and the trunk snapped clean in two!  The third, though, has made it! And it even withstood the wind last night! Now, how much to charge?

So, To Sum Up…

 

So, it’s the end of Year 1 - time to look back and assess.

Well, I haven’t made much money. But then I haven’t really tried. I’m working full time (Still! Grr!) so I haven’t really needed to, but then neither have I had the time or energy to. So that’s next year’s target – to tackle the selling seriously.

What I have done this year is learn. Masses! I’ve learnt that the scabious will flower and flower and flower as long as you keep picking, but that the bees love to linger on the underside of the flowers so expect to be stung while you’re doing so; that the antirrhinums grow tall and straight with just the merest support but that the California poppies are useless unless propped up right from the start; that just because Sarah Raven recommends something it doesn’t mean I’ll like it and, similarly, that just because I hate something doesn’t mean the customers won’t love it. I’ve learnt that I don’t need a whole row of everything but that I do need to make sure that I have a good variety of flowers every single week and, most valuable lesson of all, that I need twice the time I originally thought I’d need for absolutely everything I do.

I’ve got the basic infrastructure in place and the “shop” is almost ready (watch this space). This winter will be about getting the polytunnel up and functional (more barrowing of soil!) and then it begins for real. The more floristry stuff I do, as opposed to purely growing, the more I suspect that things will end up moving in that direction – which can only be good as that is where the money, if there is any, is.

The frost last week killed off the last brave annuals. The amaranthus have gone all Elizabeth Barrett Browning and are swooning pathetically over the paths. I thought of putting a picture of the devastation on the blog but then thought this picture of scabious in the shiny bucket would make me happier. Hope it does you too.

Here’s to Year 2. Can’t wait!