SPRING IS KINDOF HERE

Spring is slowly happening. Hellebores been out for several weeks now, but so much later than normal. In this garden every seed which hits the ground grows, so unlike my last garden, even though the soil was so similar (slightly sticky red sandstone). So 2 years ago we dug up loads of seedlings and planted them out in nursery beds, thinking I might use them in a planting to raise the tone of some of the public borders I do in Bristol. But the city seem to have run out of dosh for public planting and have just beheaded the chief of parks, or something along those lines, so the good burghers of the city will have to do without my hellebores. Anyway I did not expect them to be as ‘good’ as the parents (Ashwood Nurseries) but to my surprise they were. No really good dark ones, but lots good reds and spotties and this picotee.

Interesting to see an obvious genetic linkage between vigour and flower. The picotee are slow, rather weak plants, the reds very vigorous. The most vigorous is a double, which I am pretty sure I got from Wendy Perry at Bosvigo. Probably sterile as no sign of seedlings.

Lots of Barnhaven polyanthus flowering. Such wonderful deep colours or unusual and sophisticated tones. The story is well-known – they were bred by a lady in British Columbia (Canada) in the 1930s, but seed is now available from a nursery in France. www.barnhavenprimroses.com

The seed is hand-pollinated and jolly expensive, but they all seem to grow. The contrast with the offerings from the garden centres and the big money breeding programmes is total. Modern polyanthus seem to get more hideous by the year, as flowers progressively more enormous and colours cruder. I should imagine the breeders are investing in the latest everything-but-GM breeding technologies. The results are truly hideous. Let's save modern genetics for stuff we can eat shall we?

One relatively modern hybrid which is fantastic is Narcissus 'Tete a tete' which is a cross-sectional hybrid, so doesn't fit into the various classes which daff-folk have divided the genus. Its incredibly prolific and early and tough and just comes up to brighten the dreariest post - winter border. It is one of those plants which is so easy and now so commercial that some are already turning their noses up at it. But me, I'm going to buy a sack of them for next autumn and stick them in everywhere.

Also on daff-talk, I see some seedlings of the wild Narcissus pseudonarcissus from the famous wild daffodil area of Newent in Glos. flowered for the first time this year - five years from seed. That's the quickest any daffodil seems to take.


Just had to share this. It's from Tony Avent’s website, he of Plant Delights nursery in North Carolina. I once got an award for an entertaining catalogue when I had my nursery but this is far better, laugh out loud at your desk stuff:
www.plantdelights.com/New/bad.html

Read more ...

Swiss community gardens

While I was in Switzerland last week on vacation, I took a bunch of photos of vegetable gardens. We traveled by train, so I had to pull up the camera quick and hope to get a shot before we went into a tunnel or behind a tree. It was a challenge!

The gardens are full to the top at this time of year with all sorts of crops. They look beautiful!

The community gardens look a lot like ours here in the US, but I was surprised at all the little huts in the plots. I wonder why this is? Are there that many tools to store that its worth using garden space for a shed? Or are they used for growing something? There are also many high hoop houses and shelters over plants.






And here are a couple links to photos by eamesd on Flickr of an enormous community garden area in Basel, Switzerland. I missed seeing this and would have loved to have walked through here! Next time...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eamesd/1804275000/sizes/o/in/set-72157602797493837/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eamesd/1803441757/sizes/o/in/set-72157602797493837/

Read more ...

fall planting

Its mid summer and I'm well into the fall planting.

I had a email today from Lesley who just moved from Arizona to MA and is wondering what she can plant in her new zone and new vegetable garden. Here in Belmont, my first fall frost is usually early October (maybe Oct 10), so we have about 60 days of growing left.

Today I planted seeds for:

Carrots (St Valery)
Lettuce (Oak Leaf Mix and Prizehead)

I'm also watering every day to try to encourage seeds I planted last week (beets, lettuce and carrots) to grow. (Its SOOO dry!) I find I can never have too many carrots, as long as they are nice big long ones, so I'm trying for a good fall carrot crop.

What else can be planted now?

I looked up on the Johnny's Selected Seeds website for vegetables with time to harvest less than 60 days. Bush green beans, radish, all types of lettuce, spinach, arugula, broccoli, beets, collards, baby leeks. Winter hardy vegetables like kale are perfect to plant now. You can even offer cold protection by putting in a cold frame now and get several months (into December) of most of these vegetables here.

It’s a perfect time to start peas if you want to try for a fall crop. Its hit-or-miss and depends on how fast the weather goes from hot to cold this year. It usually goes too fast. I often try, but have never gotten a good fall crop of peas. But I like to try. I will plant some soon. I think tall and short shell peas (xx and Cascadia).

And garlic needs to be planted in the fall - I like to plant garlic in October. A bit of time yet for that. I will likely put this crop in my squash/pumpkin bed after its done for the year.

Some time back, I wrote an on-line calendar to use to calculate fall planting dates. Here's the link: http://bioarray.us/Skippy%27s%20fall%20planting%20calendar.html You can also get there from my side bar - near the top.

I think fall is also a very good time for planting perennial flowers from seed. If you can get a bit of growth in the cool fall weather, they will come up next year with a head start and do well. I have some poppy and delphinium seeds I'd like to experiment with.

Please leave me a comment and let me know if you're doing fall planting, where you're located, and what you're growing. I'd love to get new ideas. Thanks!

Read more ...

Mitteleuropa

An invite to lecture at a new garden event in Vienna – Flora Mirabilis. Very stylish, in the way that these things usually are over here. The posters for it are shown above. Wonderfully kitsch-Botticelli,  and rather naughty (look at the guy’s pants). Probably wouldn’t be acceptable in prudish Britain.

Over here – on the mainland. I drove over, a long way, but having the car enables you to be so flexible and you can just throw all your possessions in the back and not worry about squeezing everything into a flight bag; and you can stop at nurseries and buy plants, ditto winemakers and cases of wine etc. I used to do this a lot – drive all the way to central Europe, but haven’t done so for years. Back in the mid to late 1990s it was when I discovered the wonders of what was going on in German and Dutch gardens – crucially Jo was working in Bratislava 1993-1995, just after Slovak independence, and so I got into the habit of driving, which enabled me to visit gardens on the way – and if you take a kind of broad corridor from disembarking at Calais to say Munich, there are just so many stunning examples of horticultural innovation on the way. And so many great historical gardens too – if the sight of perennials and grasses gets a bit much after a while.

I made the first trip in June 1994. This was a month after my mother died, which was kind of symbolic, as she had been a great traveller in Germany and Austria in her youth. It is one of the curses of the human condition  that we burst with questions for our parents when it is too late. There is so much now that I would have liked to ask her. She came over with a bicycle and made several big trips in the 1930s – the last time a month before war was declared in 1939. This was a time when educated Brits were far more likely to spend time in Germany than France; it seems strange now – the Brit summer middle-class rush to their second homes/gîte in France now takes on the appearance of the annual departure of the Gadarene Swine – but most of them come back complaining - about a) too many other Brits and b) the French. Now Germany is just seen as a large car factory with a bit of rather gloomy forested scenery attached.

I have my mother’s diary of her German cycling travels – I have thought about trying to retrace it (although how much I would do on a bike is debatable). Reading it now, I inevitably do so with the knowledge of the horrors that came after, which I think is a real problem in dealing with anything to do with 1930s Germany. On the garden front, Karl Foerster had the sense/decency to go into exile (Sweden), Willy Lange accepted a Nazi medal – do we trash his reputation as a result? Anyway back to my mum’s diary – most of it is actually pretty boring, she wasn’t a very political person and anyway life in ‘interesting times’ goes on much as the same as it always does. She complains a lot about how dirty places are, and how friendly everyone is.

As a kid we often had family holidays in Switzerland, where my mother’s German proved invaluable. Her first trip back to Germany was in 1966? when we did one of those boat cruises down the Rhine. I remember standing in a bomb site in Cologne which just seemed to go on for ever – it must have been a deeply emotional moment for her. Another time we did the Romantishe Straße through all those fairytale towns in Bavaria (now signposted in Japanese by the way), and I remember a lot of her memories came back. I have her photograph albums – which are fascinating to look at, especially when you realise that much of the cityscapes she photographed were bombed into ash in 1944-5. There are a number of photographs missing – just as I’m sure you’d find with many surviving German/Austrian  albums of the time too.

Students at BOKU show off their planting design projects

Since 1994, I think I have been back to Germany almost every year. There is so much to see here in the garden world, but in a kind of mirror image of back home – the interesting things, the innovation, is all in the public sphere: garden shows, urban planting schemes, parks, green roofs. The same is largely true of Austria and Switzerland, which makes events like Flora Mirabilis, aimed at the private gardener, all the more interesting. I hope it succeeds, I’d love to come every year. And those posters – well – maybe these will become the garden equivalent of the Pirelli calendar.

Read more ...

vacation wildflowers

I've been away the past week. Any guesses where from the local wildflowers?

I suppose you can't really tell where I was from the wildflowers, so here's a scenic photo:



This may have been one of the cooler locations around the Northern hemisphere this past week. Even so, it was warm here. The glaciers are suffering from the heat.

Read more ...

Mob rule in Bexhill

It is not often I have to face a baying mob whilst planting. But I did last week in Bexhill – a small and rather town on England’s south coast, one of those middle-middle places between the better known bohemian/down-at-hill Hastings and trendy Brighton. The town’s chief claim to fame is the De La Warr Pavilion, a superb early modernist building; it’s just had a refurb and of course it is now the surrounding landscape, including a section of seaside promenade which is getting some attention from the local council.

There has been local opposition – there probably has been a failure of community consultation (a mixed blessing at the best of time, see below), but you can’t help but feeling that there are a lot of folk here who just dislike any change - Bexhill does not feel like a go-ahead with-it kind of place. The planting in question was right behind the walkway that runs along the top of the beach – right in the teeth of salt-laden winds and spray. I’ve looked at a fair number of coastal gardens over the years, with varying aspects, and got a good feel for the tough wiry sorts of plants which survive, a lot of them Mediterranean sub-shrubs like lavenders and cistus and grasses. And I took advice from Naila Greene, a garden designer in Devon, whose garden is in a very similar location on the south coast – and is a superb mix of intermingled perennials and low-growing shrubs.

The Bexhill locals who gathered on the other side of the Harris fencing where we were setting the plants out maintained that nothing would survive here. I went out to meet “the local residents”; some of them were prepared to engage in a discussion about what would work and what wouldn’t, but one woman got into a total frenzy and started to shout at me about the whole development, with her gang adding in their halfpenny’s worth in the background.  She was just short of abusive. You end up feeling like a scapegoat for everything they don’t like about the new development, which by the way includes play areas, seating, shelters and shower points - scarily trendy stuff - replacing grass, a low wall and strips of annual bedding.

I suspect there could have been more ‘community consultation’. But this does cost a lot of money  to do properly – which means less to spend on the actual development, and you will never satisfy all ‘the community’. Besides which ‘the community’ have a variety of views, and many of these are conservative, unadventurous and driven by prejudice. I think many of us felt sympathy with the well-known garden designer at a Vista evening who declared “f*** the community”. If all landscape designers were led by ‘the community’ we would never get anywhere further than beds of petunias and grass. My own feeling is that it is important to listen to people: their ideas, experiences of the locality and fears, but at the end of the day, a landscape designer has to be allowed to be creative, without which there will be no innovation.

Read more ...

Planning a Cutting Garden and a New Competition!

Have you ever been tempted by the idea of starting a cutting garden? Maybe you’ve had enough of paying for stems of over-engineered, chemically coated and unscented shadows of a former bloom, when you know very well you are more than capable of growing better yourself?  I know my answer to both questions and I imagine I’m not on my own here.

   

Since I’ve had a garden I’ve grown flowers for the home and I guess that started with my Grandmother bringing Roses in to her home and naturally roping me, an animal crazed youth, in for earwig duty. That was much more exciting at the time but the Roses never failed to amaze either.  They were always large, old fashioned, scented blooms in shades of pink and red, a much better quality rose than the mainstream tight budded chaff that is churned out en mass nowadays.  To date, I have refrained from growing roses but that doesn’t mean that the influence of growing cut flowers has been lost.  

My small garden is host to a number of plants and flowers that could be considered as vase worthy and I have been known to sacrifice a few for the home but this is not without a touch of resent.   A few decapitated blooms in a small space is often too great a loss, at least it is not something that is entirely sustainable, and it is therefore my intention to dedicate a bit of space (a small space at that) on my allotment.  The question is – What do I grow?

I have visions of growing a mix of annuals, perennials and bulbs so that I can create seasonal displays. I have a vague idea of what to grow but I want a wider and more informed view of what will grow well and last and in true Ryan’s Garden style there is an upside to this - there’s a prize in it for you!

In association with clothes retailer Lands' End I am giving away six £25 gift vouchers and several packets of Nasturtium seeds, which are perfect for sowing next spring in the garden or on the allotment.  Lands' End sponsor the Colour Garden at Barnsdale Gardens.  I was lucky enough to be invited to the garden this year but I couldn’t attend.  I will visit next year for sure as part of a number of much needed garden visits.  

So the question is - What Spring bulbs would you recommend for cutting?  To enter the competition please click here.

Read more ...

my kitchen garden

Here's the vegetable garden I grow on the side my house. This is the view from the east - the shady side. That's the potato bed in the foreground. The cold frame is at the far right in the bright sun. It is mostly full of cucumbers right now. They are amazing this year. I pick 2 or 3 a day. Much more than I can eat. I will make another batch of pickles soon.

On Sunday, I removed the melons from behind the cukes (they did not do well here) and planted a couple rows of fall beets and lettuce. The seedlings were started inside under lights. Soon the cover will go back on the cold frame. I'm hoping this bed will produce greens into the winter.

One of the items on my list of things to do this week is to call a tree trimmer. One big branch of the giant shade tree to the east is hitting the roof of our house. I am hoping in addition to removing this branch they can remove some others and give my garden a bit more sunlight.

Read more ...

here's Skippy

One of the nicest things about coming back home after vacation is to see Skippy again! My parents took very good care of him while we were away. He's happy and healthy and cute as ever!

Read more ...

Allotment update: The harvest just got better

You may remember that back in May I got a call to say that my time had come  to become an allotmenteer after a lengthy wait on the waiting list.  I was offered a quarter plot which was just a little overgrown (see here) and since that day the allotment has come a long way.  Today's harvest was easily the best yet.





The Nero di Toscano has grown well alongside my other Brassica's, the Courgette's have been unstoppable (no surprise there then) and the beans have grown amazingly well this year.  I have eaten more beans than I think I've eaten in my whole life combined.  Some of my favourites have been Runner Bean 'St George' with its red and white flowers, Broad Bean 'Bunyard's Exhibition' and French Bean 'Purple Queen'.  The latter is an amazing bean that has gorgeous purple flowers and pods that are almost black .  Upon boiling the beans magically transform and become green as per your standard French Bean.  I couldn't help but think that if there is a way to get kids interested in vegetables and cooking then this little bean may have what it takes.  It certainly entertained me.





Besides the obvious vegetable excitement you may have noticed a new addition to the harvest?  That's right, one of my new girls laid an egg today and I'm hoping that the other two will follow suit shortly so that I can make something substantial. 

The Speckledy hen above is the one that is the most likely to have laid the first egg as she is supposed to lay brown speckled eggs, the Cotswold Legbar (the brown hen above with the great hair do) is likely to lay a blue/green egg and the Copper Black Marans below should lay quite a dark brown egg.  Only time will tell but I cannot convey how excited I was to find the first egg today!

The small but perfectly formed egg was put to good use and helped to make today's Yorkshire puddings (pictured below) and besides the obvious benefit of keeping hens I'm learning that they make for great company. They have great personalities, dispose of pretty much anything, including waste from the plot or from the kitchen and they are sure to increase the fertility of my compost.  

Gardening will definitely be more interesting from here on in and I'm looking forward to my first  omelette!

If you have any Chicken keeping tips please leave a comment below!

Read more ...

What do you do when the Schau is over? Travels in Mitteleuropa part 3.

     What happens when the last Stein has been drunk, the last leaflet on bio-dynamic slug control handed out and the last Tagetes wilts in autumn's first frost?        
     Gardenshows are a big part of the German garden scene, lasting all summer and (key thing this) leaving behind the legacy of a regenerated urban space. Many of the best parks are former Gartenschau sites. We tried it in Britain during the Thatcherreich but no attempt was ever made to keep them as public spaces, and in the sad case of Liverpool, the show site is now quite well-known for its grafitti daubed ruined Chinese garden.

Playground - durability all right! Had to stop myself running up it.

            How you turn a one-summer event into something permanent is a challenge, one which has apparently been met pretty well here. Of course I tend to visit the successful ones, but I have seen places with  artworks that look like beached whales, avenues which go nowhere, and perennial borders run amok. A couple of days ago I dropped in on a 2004 Bavaria State show at Burghausen. On the whole a successful transformation, 8 out of 10, I think Herr  (or Frau) Burgermeister. One series of perennial borders pretty well abandoned – why not just replace with ground cover? and some strange objects which could only be artworks, but a fantastic children’s playground – the kind of really inventive place which can be one of the best features of these events, overall a good urban green space, and a whole series of little gardens between beech hedges – nice intimate spaces (assuming the good folk of Burghausen don’t go in for too much spliff-rolling or needle-based activities, which is always a problem if you create too much quiet space in urban parks). These were all designed by design practices, a bit like Chelsea Flower Show gardens, but permanent. Some looked really good, the others … well, I am sure the designers would be horrified if they could see their names attached. There is always a real problem with these individual gardens in places where they become permanent and get maintained by the same staff – they all sink to a common level. On the whole though they make for garden vignettes you would never get normally in a public park.

Panicum virgatum grass with Aster dumosus at Weihenstephan

            Quick visit to Weihenstephan, home to the world’s leading collection of perennials, meet the new prof. of planting design, Swantje Duthweiler, whose interest in early 20^th century planting styles heralds the prospect of some interesting new takes on plant use (watch this space?).

            Now in Switzerland where I have spent a fascinating day at Hochschule Wädenswil, a teaching and research centre in canton Zürich. They have done a lot of work on perennial mixtures – randomized combinations of plants for particular visual effects or management techniques, sometimes just perennials, but sometimes including bulbs and annuals too. Some very high tech means of teaching plant ID too – you use an iPhone app. to zap a code on a pillar and your phone downloads a plant list, plant information and other stuff about the planting; meanwhile some nicely designed little leaflets give you plants lists too.

Most stunning of all though are the vertical gardens they are working on for indoor environments, including some wonderful ‘plant pictures’, exploiting the fact that a lot of tropicals perform well when growing vertically.

            A lot of fruit growing happens at Wädenswil too – it has a mild climate, being on Lake Zürich; some fascinating unusual fruit here too. Actinidia arguta makes tiny sweet little Kiwi fruit – much nicer than the normal kind, and I never realised you can eat Schisandra chinensis berries – although to be honest the flavour made me think of what it would be like if you bit into a chunk of incense – a challenge for the truly innovative cook perhaps.

            Odd how in the German- speaking world, it is public horticulture  which is where innovation happens, and private gardens are relatively unsophisticated - mirror image of back home. Our nearly all having private gardens (in the UK) has meant, sadly, a lack of political pressure for quality public space. But given the very different agendas of private and public gardening, there is so much scope for cross-fertilisation of ideas.

Read more ...

Timelessly wandering in Spetchley Park

Cyclamen repandum and cowslips in grass by the lake at Spetchley

I’ve only recently got to know this delightful garden, www.spetchleygardens.co.uk

and will try to make repeat visits through the year. It’s one of those places which feels timeless: lots of big old trees, walled gardens, box-lined beds and paths which lead through a pleasantly bewildering variety of spaces, just full of wonderful plants. This is the perfect ‘plantsman’s garden’, lots of rarities, often very well-established, and very thorough labelling. You can just wander around, at random, crossing and re-crossing your previous routes through, getting different perspectives through the trees, continously finding little nooks and crannies. It is something of a miracle how the staff of four keep on top of it all, and it has to be said that a bit of an atmosphere of faded grandeur is all part of its very characteristic feel.

Owner John Berkeley was one of my customers when I had my nursery north of Bristol many years ago, as head gardener Kate Portman said to me, “I think he knows every nursery in the country”. There are some wonderful plants here, and some lovely combinations. What is particularly interesting is seeing sizable and very well-established examples of garden plants, the most spectacular being what must hundreds of square metres of partially-shaded lawn invaded by self-sowing Lilium martagon.

A total absence of modern design ideas or self-conscious fashion gives this place real character, and a very restful feel. Just as well, as any plant-conscious gardener is also going to be very excited by so much of what is growing here.

Read more ...

seeds in the mail

I often get requests from small seed companies to check out their seeds. Here are packages I received from Urban Farmer. Shirley poppies, Roma tomatoes and Large leaf Italian basil.

The packages are recycled magazines. They have a nice website to check out. Here's a link: http://www.ufseeds.com/

I looked up the poppies on google images and found: this link. Beautiful! I also looked up when to plant and it says fall or spring. I will save a place to put these seeds this fall.

Read more ...

Cow Parsley gardening

    

        This year’s Chelsea Flower Show seemed to mark a return to horticulture, rather a relief after the show becoming increasingly dominated by sculptural assemblages (I’m trying to be polite here) or flocks of statuary. A lot of the gardens were just well planted, with a refreshing lack of pretentiousness. Andy Sturgeon’s winning Mediterranean Garden (for The Daily Telegraph) was a model of all that is best about British garden design – the classic balance between strong structures and exuberant planting – but all in a very contemporary style.

            No cow parsley though. I’d like to put in a bid to do a cow parsley garden. Queen Anne’s Lace to American readers (I think). This cream-white flowered umbelliferous plant dominates a vast proportion of British roadsides, seemingly able to compete with the grasses which, fed on nitrogen pollution, more or less suffocate the rest of our limited wildflower flora. In my last garden, I conducted an experiment in letting it seed one year, and then controlling by pulling up after flowering. It worked, in that I got a respectable amount of cow parsley but without it competing with anything else. So, now I’m repeating the experiment here.

            What I like about cow-parsley is the delicate flowers and, because it is such a common element of the British countryside, brings the landscape into the garden. The colour is also a buffer, toning down and blending the brighter colours of border plants. In theory I’d be quite happy for the stuff to distribute itself  around the garden, but only if it isn’t going to become a weed and out-compete my border plants.

            Cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) is a biennial which survives year to year by seeding and apparently (though I have not verified this myself) by the production of bulbils at the base of the plant. It has a very narrow profile, doesn’t spread sideways or sprawl about, and dies from July onwards. Not something which could become a major problem then, and its reproduction can be controlled by pulling out before it seeds. Welcome to the naturalistic border!

Read more ...

digging sweet potatoes!!!

My son helped me dig sweet potatoes on Sunday evening. What a great event!!!

I have to admit that to get my 18 year old into the garden, I had to trade for something he was interested in - $$. Since he currently doesn't have a job, but wants cash, I offered him the rate he got at his most recent job. Anyway, he got the garden fork and started in on the bed as I ripped out the vines.

My sweet potato bed was about 4 by 4 feet. Located just east of my popcorn (that failed this year :( ), its was bit shaded, and the vines had grown up and into the corn stalks. Its my first attempt at growing sweet potatoes and I was nervous.

Underground crops are such a suspense. I may have been holding my breath as we started. But with my son's first digs, he turned up beautiful orange, red and white tubers. And as I pulled the vines, lots of tubers came up attached to the plants. Wow! What a nice crop. My final weighing said 8 pounds of sweets. A good size bucket full.

One of the best parts was when my son said "I'm finished. I've got all of them." I asked if he would double dig just to make sure he found all of them. He said he had been double digging and they weren't any more. So I offered him a dollar for any additional ones he could find. His eyes lit up and he went back to digging. I tended the basil, weeded here and there, picked the pumpkins, and he dug. He kept announcing "Here's another!" ... "One more". Eventually, he earned another $15 and I finished the rest of my garden work with great company.

There is something very exciting (or not) about underground crops. I was so excited to dig potatoes with my parents this year and they turned out horrible - eaten by voles. Who would know. The leaves look great, but what'[s underneath?

The sweets we dug were all sizes and shapes. Tiny ones, big ones. Red, orange, white. Sunday evening I threw a few baby sweets in to roast. They were delicious. I started to peel them, but learned that baby sweets don't need to be peeled. I've never had a baby sweet potato before.

So I have another basket for my larder. We love sweet potatoes! I am looking forward to enjoying all of them.




Click on the label below to see my past posts about sweet potatoes.

Read more ...