Spring Is Sprung

  

                                  

Aww…bless! The Kindly Smallholders’ lambs are gambolling round the field and the plastic bottle crop is growing nicely. Not so sure about the plants inside them, though. The first row of scabious I planted out look happy enough, but I’m not sure if they’re actually growing. I keep peering into the tops of the bottles and trying to judge if they’re getting bigger, but I can’t really tell. One minute I get a panic that it’s the end of March already and things should be romping away (Sarah “I’m Not Worthy” Raven is no doubt picking armfuls by now), but then I think how half the country is covered in snow and how, this time last year, all I had were a few seedlings in a greenhouse, and I think it’s all going swimmingly. Then the sun goes behind a cloud again and my confidence goes with it… 

I put a load of cornflower plants out yesterday. I’m growing the traditional blue but also ‘Black Ball’, which are a lovely dark crimson, if somewhat weedy of stem. They’re good for blousy, cottagey bunches (they make a fabulous dark foil for orange eschscholzia and lime green euphorbia) although not so good if you’re doing a hand-tied bunch where you want the arrangement to stand up on its own. The plants were sown in the autumn and have been looking a bit sad and mildewy in the cold frame, which is why I decided to plant them out.  They’re too big for the plastic bottles but they need some protection from the slugs so I’ve made these collars of plastic to go round the stems. They looked really unhappy when I left, but it’s been rain, sun, rain, sun all day today so hopefully they will have perked up.

I’ve also booked myself in to a couple of farmers’ markets for the last week of May. (Eek!) The way things are at the moment, I can’t imagine having any flowers by then at all, let alone enough to sell. Keep looking at pictures of other flower stalls and the stallholders can hardly see out for all the dozens of buckets of perfect specimens. My stomach plummets with nerves when I think about having promised to do something I won’t be able to come good on, but then I look at the pictures of the bunches I cobbled together out of practically nothing last June and all the space I have to plant in, and it seems I’ll have more flowers than I could ever know what to do with.  Hate not knowing how things will work out. If we could just have a couple of weeks of sunshine, everything would really get going and then I think I could relax. Maybe.

Terracotta Army? Pah!

Planted out my first bed of seedlings! Forty scabiosa plants. Despite the incredible winds (I was blown over twice!) the plastic bottles seemed to stay in place. Am slightly worried that the condensation in the bottles might be too damp an environment for the seedlings, but until I identify the pest targetting my crops (sacrificial cornflower plant now well and truly eaten – but only one footprint! Maybe it’s not a footprint. Maybe something else made it and the slugs just got the cornflower?) the protection is essential. Feel a planting-out frenzy coming on.

Pesky Little Critters

The rabbit-proof fencing is finished at last! The rabbits, however, don’t seem to have realised this. OK, so I didn’t really do it properly – electric fencing was too expensive and the consensus amongst everyone I asked (all three of them) was that chicken wire would be fine, so I went with that. Having looked up how to do it on various websites and only having 50 years of life left if lucky, I dismissed the idea of digging down a foot or so to bury the bottom of the fence. Instead I just laid the wire along the ground a bit and weighted it down with bits of wood, kindly donated by Phil the Mill. Not being 100% confident of its effectiveness (confidence percentage hovering more around the 27-30 mark), I decided to do a bit of detective work worthy of Columbo at his most sneaky – and raked the beds smooth.

And damn me if the next day there weren’t some footprints! Not many, but definitely rabbit sized. The two sacrificial cornflower plants I’d left exposed and shivering as bait, though, hadn’t been touched. Hmmm. Could one picky rabbit have been trapped inside? Or are the pesky little critters just getting through? Not sure. Will have to do some more tests.

On a more positive note, the fungus which seemed to be covering much of the compost has dried up and died. Of course, this could mean it’s just reached the end of its life, having spread its spores over the entire area while I wasn’t looking. I had a little look on the Net but couldn’t find anything that resembled it exactly (although “bird’s nest” came pretty close, as did “dog vomit fungus”). Anyway, I’ve dug up as much of it as possible and am not that concerned, as fungus is an important part of the composting process so I can’t imagine it’s that harmful.

 The fungus – nice!

I have also started to dig a narrow border around the area. The initial aim was to make a bit of a gap so the grass doesn’t invade the beds, but one totally unexpected advantage is that it looks so much better! It sort of finishes it off, making it look like it’s an area of beautifully tilled beds which are meant to be there rather than a load of cardboard and muck dumped in a field.  Anyway, it made me smile. Blimey, might have to actually put some plants in soon…

In Which I Stop Planning And Start Doing Something…

Actually, I have been doing something already – all bloody winter, in fact:

While most people will have been spending their winter weekends meeting friends, sharing food and big glasses of wine, swapping anecdotes round a pub table or snuggling up to loved ones in front of roaring fires, I have chosen to spend mine covering a bit of field with cardboard boxes and shovelling 15 tonnes of steaming compost on top of it.

Despite what it looks like (Mass grave? Outtake from Tremors? Bloody mess!) it’s actually my attempt at the No-Dig method. And this is what I’m basing my whole flower-growing thing – and future? — on. Hmm…

The Smallholders very kindly lent me this land, but I had no idea about how to go about cultivating it. It had just had sheep on it and the grass was thick and thistly. It was too hard to plough, too stony to de-turf. No-Dig had to be the way to go.  Ploughing or rotovating apparently not only chops up the worms but also destroys the beneficial fungi in the soil. The idea with No-Dig is that, instead of ploughing, you just dump organic stuff on top of the topsoil (or on top of the grass if you’re too lazy to de-turf it first) and let the worms do the churning-up for you.  It sounded a great idea  – easy! But that was before I was actually faced with the task of shovelling the compost (beautiful, crumbly, warm stuff from the local dump) into a wheelbarrow and laying it out in rows. Ooh, me aching back…

Anyway, it’s done now – and I have to say the first rows I laid out are full of worms and the cardboard has rotted down nicely, so we’ll see. Gonna plant out some of the biennials I’ve had festering at the bottom of the garden all winter this weekend, rain permitting. It will be interesting to see if their roots, pretty sturdy by now, manage to penetrate the pan of  stoney, yet strangely clay-like, soil below what was the grass. 

Will keep you posted. (Arf! Arf!) *

*Spot the new blogger. 

PS That’s my new van in the background!