Rain and Redevelopment

Gardeners everywhere have been getting funny looks recently. We’ve had a month of lovely weather, two four-day weekends with lots of sun, and even a royal wedding, yet mostly what the gardeners have been saying is “We really need some rain”. Cue the funny looks. Well, we got what we asked for. But now we’ve had a good downpour, if we could go back to the nice sunny weather, that’d be great. Please?

I’ve previously blogged about the redevelopments that have been happening over the winter at Ryton Gardens, and now a year on from Helen, Claire and myself starting, it’s amazing to see parts of the same gardens looking so different. Other parts are still the same though – the Judas tree is flowering, which it was doing when we started, and it’s a reminder that we only have a few weeks left. It’s been a brilliant year, and I have learned so much just from being around such good gardeners. The highlight for me though has definitely been making the videos each month. I’ve really enjoyed the whole process, from filming through editing to the finished piece, and hopefully they’ve been informative in some small way. Who knows, maybe I’ll keep doing them! Anyway, I’ll definitely be back to Ryton Gardens to see how the gardens and the people are getting on.

Sowing Summer Seeds

Things are in full swing now in the gardens. The winter is gone, the evenings are lighter, and everything is growing! I’ve been busy sowing seed, I’m nearly half way through, and I’m preparing the beds for planting out. I just finished preparing the cold frames in the Vegetable Inspirations garden for the first planting of lettuce, by taking the doors off and giving them a dose of our compost. Everyone is sowing now, and I think that we’re going to be fighting for space in the glasshouse and polytunnels soon – we start a lot of plants off early under heated glass, things like squash, tomatoes, chillies, basil and in my case mouse melons. Basically, things that like the warm and dislike the cold. Doing this means by the time the weather’s warm enough for them to be planted out we already have nice sized plants, and they will begin to crop sooner and therefore longer, meaning more food for us.

For Helen, Claire and myself diploma assessments have been a frequent occurrence as we near the end of our time here. We’re being assessed on all sorts of things, from sowing seed to watering to correctly applying nutrients to plants. We also have a more theoretical side to the diploma, in the form of test questions to answer. I now know that yellowing of young leaves, particularly of acid loving plants, indicates an iron deficiency. And now, so do you!

Garden Redevelopments

We’ve been doing a lot of redevelopment of the gardens over the winter, removing an old garden, enlarging an existing one, and installing a brand new one. It has been hard work, and once again the volunteers have proved just how valuable they are to us, but now it’s starting to feel like we’re getting there. The big project has been the enlargement of our allotment garden. This started a while ago, at the beginning of 2010 with the moving of two semi-mature oak trees to make way for the new garden. They didn’t like it, but we’ll see how they cope in their new home! Since then, we’ve put in a new fence, greenhouse, fruit cage, pond (my favourite), and re-laid all the paths. It looks lovely, and I don’t think any of us can wait to see it brimming over with veg come the summer.

We’re currently in the process of removing the old pest and disease control garden, the key messages from that garden will be moving to the new and improved allotment garden. In my opinion the most interesting development is the Cuban garden. This is going to be an exotic garden with a feel of Cuban urban growing. We have a new walled courtyard area, which is (supposed to be, I should add) part tumbledown, and we’ll have beds growing more unusual veg acquired by the Sowing New Seeds team. We’ve got quite a few exotic looking plants to put in, and some painting to do, and I think when it’s finished we’ll have something unique to Ryton Gardens.

Tree Work

Yesterday, I spent a very enjoyable afternoon working on some fairly mature trees at Ryton. They had got to the point where low branches were attacking people as they walked by, so we gave them a crown lift. For me, this was enjoyable because working with trees is my favourite thing to do in the garden – trees of any size. The fact that these are mature trees also means I have this sense of caring for something which has been in the gardens for a while, and will hopefully be here for a lot longer.

There is something of an art to removing large branches from a tree (if you don’t have or don’t know how to use a chainsaw), so that you don’t damage the rest of the tree. Some of these branches weigh quite a bit, so as you cut through them, the weight pulls them down and splinters the wood, sometimes peeling large amounts of bark off. Instead, we make two cuts, one underneath the branch, then another above and a little closer to the trunk, so the branch comes away cleanly. Then, if you want, you can shout “Timber!”.

Last weekend was Garden Organic’s Potato Weekend, so the whole team have been busy, organising the layout of over 100 varieties of potato for visitors to pick from. I plan to include some of this event in my next video, look out for that soon.

Cold

Gardeners will often tell you that one of the reasons they like to garden so much is that they like the feeling of being close to nature. They like to see the birds, the insects and all the other wildlife, and see the seasons change. It is definitely true that the more you garden, the more you become aware of the seasons, and the natural world. There are occasional days though, usually when my car tells me it’s –3°C, that I start to think maybe my desk is close enough to nature! That feeling does very quickly disappear though when I get outside and start work. It’s hard not to marvel at all these plants, from big old English Oaks down to little Primulas, that sit outside through the whole of the winter – while we’re all snug inside – and take everything the weather can throw at them, then happily grow away again in spring. There are even some plants, for example snowdrops and crocus, which seem to think this is the ideal time for some flowering! Without them, January and February would seem longer than ever.

Unfortunately though, there are some plants we grow that just haven’t evolved to cope with a British winter. We have quite a few of them here at Ryton Gardens, and they are kept in heated glasshouses over winter. One of those glasshouses is in the Vegetable Kingdom, and when I walked in today, I was greeted not with the lovely scent of the heliotropes, but with the smell of decaying vegetation. The heater and the frost had had a fight, and the frost won. The banana is looking very sad indeed, and later today I’m going to wrap it in fleece for some extra protection. Hopefully it works!

The Heritage Seed Library

Last week at Ryton Gardens was incredibly productive. We are very lucky to have some wonderful volunteers who come to help us, and thanks to them I’ve been able to plant out a large area with kale and cabbage to overwinter. Both the cabbage and the kale are varieties from Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library, and my plan is for this area to showcase some of the interesting veg they have to offer. The Heritage Seed Library is a living collection of veg varieties no longer commercially available, or in some cases varieties that never were commercially available.

So why do we do this? In order to sell seed of a variety of vegetable, it has to be registered on a national list. To register a variety on the national list is very expensive – there are two years of tests to go through, and admin fees too. This means that getting a variety to a marketable point is weighted in favour of large-scale seed producers able to cover those costs. Now, I have grown plenty of veg from the big seed companies, and they do really well, and taste lovely (any problems I’ve had can be attributed to my gardening ability). However, there are many varieties of veg grown locally, perhaps passed down through generations of a family, grown in back gardens and allotments, adapted to local conditions, and just as tasty. One or two amateur gardeners simply can’t afford to register these fascinating varieties on the national list, but we are interested in keeping these vegetables available, both for the home grower and to maintain genetic diversity. To quote a poster in our offices – “Diversity is vital to combat disease…Cures have always come from older varieties or wild relatives…If the old varieties vanish, how will we safeguard our food supply?”

Vegetables in Pots

I woke up this morning to a garden I would have to describe as “foggy”. Taking a quick and slightly chilly wander, I noticed webs everywhere, telling me that the spiders know it’s September too. It has since warmed up and it’s now 20C, but even so I get the feeling autumn is on the way.

The main job on the agenda for today was to plant up a lot of pots with a variety of veg and ornamentals. The idea is to show that you don’t need a large veg patch in order to grow something edible. One pot, some compost and some seed is all you need. All of our newly planted pots will be travelling down to Clarence House in London for the START Garden Party, a 12 day festival to promote sustainable living. Garden Organic will be encouraging people to put their used coffee cups to good use – pot up one of our seedlings and take it home to grow on!

Things are starting to calm down a bit in the gardens now. There’s no longer the feeling that watering is a full time job, and the weeds are (sort of) back under control, but the fruit and veg is still coming in strong. We’re on to apples now – in fact I’m looking at three crates and a shopping basket full of them sitting in our office right now. Needless to say they won’t last long.