Time to tidy!

My compost bins have worked very well since we started them a few years ago. I built three bins with slatted fronts that can be removed to take out the contents, on an earth base. They are sited under a thick Privet hedge, so stay quite dry for most of the year, but we do cover them with old pieces of carpet once they are full, to stop the compost becoming a soggy mess! Our local garden centre sells an activator and we add this to the layers every so often to speed up the rotting process. The bins are turned once a year and all of the rotted compost is used as mulch on the borders. I don’t think you can put too much mulch on borders; it helps to keep down weeds, conditions the soil without the need to dig and also helps to seal in moisture if applied after the spring rains. Mulch, mulch and mulch again as someone once wrote in a gardening column!

As well as garden waste, which needs to be chopped into small lengths if it is in any way ‘woody’, we add all of our vegetable peelings from the kitchen, shredded papers and some of the ash from the wood burner. Chicken manure and wood shavings are also added when I clean out my bantams and saw dust from cutting up logs rots down really well. 

This year, I am going to site a couple more water butts to save carrying water from our one outdoor tap to the outlying areas of the garden! The garden shed roof is a good place to start, so I need to put up some guttering to channel the rain off that. I may tap into one of the down pipes from the house roof in the front garden as well.

When the weather has been so wet, there seems little point thinking about saving water, but there is usually a dry spell at some point in the spring or summer and planted containers and hanging baskets don’t take long to dry out once they are established!

We have a very dry border near to the house in the back garden and planted a climbing Honeysuckle (Lonicera) there with an ornamental grape vine. Neither thrived to begin with; the Honeysuckle was always getting mildew and bad attacks of aphid, a sure sign that the plant was under stress. We decided to lay some leaky pipe irrigation around the base of the plants and during dry weather, crack the outdoor tap and leave it on for a few hours a couple of times a week. The improvement in the plants’ health has been amazing and last summer, the Honeysuckle was full of golden yellow flowers that contrasted beautifully with the claret purple leaves of the grape vine. Once I have tidied the Border Cranesbills (Geranium) that grow under the climbers, I will top dress the area with pelleted chicken manure and mulch to save as much valuable moisture as I can!

Mr McGregor

Early Colour

The mild weather has meant that many plants are beginning to flower earlier than usual in our garden. We have already had the ‘Rinjveld’s Early Sensation’ Daffodils  flowering in November and now my Lenten Roses (Helleborus x hybridus) are rearing their beautiful heads, crowning the handsome deep green leaves below. We have a particularly striking apple green seedling that is covered in strong bud branches and about to show off the freckled flowers with matching fluffy stamens that complete the picture.

 All this activity has encouraged me to begin tidying up my borders, although I am wary that we could still get a spell of hard weather. At the moment, plants are suffering from wind scorch on their unseasonally soft growth rather than frost damage, which has been the case for the past three winters! Tender plants such as Penstemon and hardy Fuchsias may look scruffy but all of the old growth will need to remain for another month or two if I can bear it! Never the less, the borders are taking on a different feel as the green shoots of Daffodils and Snowdrops begin to pierce through the soil, along with the perennials  Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, Hemerocallis (Day Lilies) and Pulmonaria ‘Blue Ensign’. Pulmonarias are such useful plants for shade and early colour – often starting to flower in January and February, when there is usually very little apart from evergreens to give interest.

Evergreens are the furniture of the garden and still give the most interest at the moment. The Myrtle (Luma) that I planted as a cutting from my grandmother’s garden years ago is now a huge tree. The tiny, deep green leaves are very wind proof and the bark is now mature enough to take on a beautiful cinnamon colour despite the local cats using it as a scratching post! Of course, plants that are known as ‘semi evergreen’ such as Abelia and shrubby winter flowering Honeysuckles have also kept their leaves because of the mild weather and we even have a semi evergreen climbing Honeysuckle Lonicera ‘Halliana’, in flower! The Hebes in the front garden have made pleasing, evergreen mounds and one has fluffy white flower clusters, which are more usually out in late summer, when they attract butterflies and moths.

 My Miscanthus grasses have looked amazing all winter; their leaves and stems bleached out to faded browns and the skeletons of the feather duster flowers hung on until the last vicious gale that we had stripped them bare. There are already plenty of new shoots coming up from the ground, so I have removed the old growth and chopped it up into short lengths for the compost heap.

One of the bins is ready to be turned and the compost closest to the base is rotted enough to use as mulch over any bare soil as I tidy the borders. This really does help to keep the weeds down and will help to protect my Crocosmia clumps if hard weather does threaten the soft shoots that are appearing. 

Mr McGregor