Vegetable aspirations

I'm very excited about the idea of having parties in the summer, and being able to use vegetables and salads that I have grown in the garden. We visited our friends the Skinners at Eastgrove Cottage Garden for Easter Sunday, and I spent a long time grilling Carol about how to grow different types of veg and salads.

I've already mentioned the courgettes, peas and beans, but I'll also be growing a salad mix, some rocket and Chard in two varieties: the first is the "Perpetual Spinach" which we can either have as baby leaves, or let the plant grow (to about 2' tall), then get spinach to cook off it all the way through til next March!! The other is a mixture called "Bright Lights" which has brightly coloured stems in shades of red and yellow. This one isn't quite as hardy, but should still last through to do Christmas lunch!

I've ordered some nematodes from the Organic garden supply people at Ryton, so they should arrive soon. They feed on the slugs under the soil and will kill off (hopefully) all the baby slugs that are hiding and waiting to eat all my seedlings! I've also bought some compost activator which contains all the microbes needed to build me a hot heap.

Plans for today are to build a bamboo fence for the front of the compost area (which is all nicely layered up again now), to plant up my salad seeds and tidy up a bit more in the side by the wisteria, to prepare for my peas going in.

Green grows my garden, oh!

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonders where the birdies is.....

With dad's illness and mum's previous back problems, our garden at home has become very neglected: it's generally well stocked, but the shrubs are overgrown, perennials need to be divided (Inula, dicentra and a sunflower thing) and annuals have seeded themselves all over the place (love in a mist, aquilegia etc). There is a very strong spirit of rebirth and renewal at home at the moment, very appropriate for spring and Easter. Mum has big plans to overhaul the garden, and I am hoping to make a big contribution myself. We spend a lot of time making plans of what needs to be moved/replaced/rejuvenated and what new things we're going to put in. It's a very exciting project! We have a few before photos which I will upload when I finally track down that round tuit!

In the last few days, we've been doing a lot of pruning, starting with E.S. and his team of students coming round from the botanical gardens on Tuesday to prune the wisteria. Apparently, our wisteria is particularly special as it flowers twice a year, grows longer shoots than it should, and flowers on these in the first year... none of this is "normal behaviour" apparently!

{We gave them dinner afterwards, of course, mum did a nice starter of poached smoked haddock, and I followed with a "Moroccan" roast leg of lamb which had been marinated in spiced yoghurt for about 18hours and served with a couscous salad. I tried to replicate a gorgeous one I had in Montreal, but it wasn't quite right. I suspect I didn't have the necessary gumption with the olive oil bottle! It was Delia's lemon roulade for dessert, very nice!}

So, inspired by the pruning book they gave mum, we headed out into the garden on Wednesday to have a bash at the Abelia (me) and the Viburnum bodnantensii (mum)
At first I had no idea at all what I was doing, and was terrified that I would either cut too much out, or else damage the bush for future years, but it got a lot easier after a while. We both essentially halved the amount of foliage, then bagged it all up for Birmingham's nice green waste collection men (we've got about 4 bags of stuff in the side entry now...)

Yesterday I started to look at doing the herb garden - our rosemary needed replacing to be trained properly, and I've bought a sage plant too. We've already got mint, but it needs dividing, and I'll probably get rid of most of the lemon balm. I've also got a few cuttings of culinary thyme which I've been growing in water on the windowsill.

Well, when I looked at it, I realised that the earth is more like concrete, and needs a lot of compost to be dug in, so my attention turned to the compost heap, which hasn't been turned (or organised) for at least two years. The dear doctors around the corner gave us some tiger worms a while back, and they have been doing a good job of munching, but the grass clippings tend to form mats which cut out oxygen and delay composting. So I decided it was time to have a go at fixing it all!
I read a few websites offering advice and have tried to mix the wet and dry things up a bit. There's some woody stuff that just wasn't rotting, so will need to chop that up a bit, and mix it all in with the wetter stuff (grass mowings mainly) to make sure they all compost nicely. Yesterday I split the heap into two piles (a lot of hard work with a fork, felt like mucking out the sheep in Berlin, only much worse!) so there's some nicely rotted stuff which will mature behind the shrubbery (ni!) and the other stuff which will go back when I've rebuilt the wall around it.

For vegetables, I'll be growing some mange tout ("Oregon Sugar Pod"), runner beans ("Scarlet Emperor"), courgettes ("Green Bush" on the new compost heap) and hopefully some lettuce at some point. So today I've got the beans, courgettes and some nasturtium "Empress of India" and "Whirlybird Mix" planted in our cultivator, which is getting nice and warm while I'm typing this in the garden!