Fruits in the Garden - Part 2

It's been a while, but as we mentioned in Part 1 we decided to add to the collection of edible bushes & trees in the garden.  

This post has been delayed because we were waiting for three more bare-root fruit trees to be delivered, but after two months the nursery simply refunded the money and cancelled the order.  Not a word about this cancellation to me of course, either before or after the event - I only spotted it from the credit card statement.  They've shown themselves to be complete amateurs and so I'll be avoiding Chris Bowers & Sons in the future.

Anyway, this year so far, we've bought the following new plants :-

Supplied in larger pots :-

Macadamia Nut (exact cultivar unknown) - Macadamia integrifolia (UK hardiness H3)

This evergreen tree was already quite large when delivered.  It has been grafted, and the variety above the graft has very different leaves from the rootstock. The grafted cultivar leaves are of a lighter green colour than the rootstock, with fewer very sharp spines along the leaf edges and a longer petiole.  The graft has been made quite high up on the trunk of the rootstock, around 600 mm from soil level.  

Macadamias can grow very large if not controlled, and so I'd have preferred the graft to be nearer the soil and for the cultivar branching to start much lower down, to make a more compact tree better suited to containerisation.  Macadamias are only half-hardy and the pot will need to be brought into the conservatory for the winter.

However, it's not a bad looking tree and is growing away strongly, so I cut off all the branches below the graft to stop the rootstock growth sapping the strength from the cultivar.

In the photo pairs, the image on the left is 'as received' from the supplier, and on the right is after my initial training cuts.

Garden Casualties ....

In the early hours of last Friday morning, just before I was off to bed, I noticed our cheap-and-cheerful 4-channel digital thermometer was reading -12.2 degrees C from the outdoor sensor.

It's hardly a precision instrument, more of an ornament than anything else, but its greenhouse sensor was also reading below -10 degrees and so it was worthy of further investigation.  I dug out a torch and went outside to the bottom of the garden, where I've a 'proper' mercury max-min thermometer mounted on the shed wall.

Sure enough, it was cold, -10 degrees at that time and when I checked again during the day it had been down to -11 degrees C, a record low in the ten years since we've lived here, and by quite some margin.  

coldest temperature recorded here in 10 years ...

Local Conditions - Weather & Climate etc ...

I put this post together because I was beginning to describe the local weather conditions etc within another post I'm preparing about the new fruit trees we've just bought, but such information is also very relevant to growing anything at all here and so I've made it a standalone reference.

Location

Our home is located in England at around latitude 55N longitude 2W, to the nearest whole numbers only.  This is vague enough to cover a huge area of the north-east ...  

As best as I can determine from online resources, our property elevation is 111 metres (365 feet) above sea level, which is somewhat higher than I'd previously thought.

The nearest comprehensive weather station to our home that has data stretching back several years, is located around 11 miles to the south of us and some 61 m below our elevation.   It's also more urban than where we are, so perhaps not an ideal basis for direct comparison but unfortunately it's the best data we have.

Fruits in the Garden - Part 1

We're intending to significantly increase the quantity and variety of the edible perennials in the garden, mainly in the form of additional fruit bushes and trees, but all the new plants we've bought recently will be described in Part 2.

In this Part 1, we're summarising the edible perennials we already have growing in the garden.

Growing in the ground

Rhubarb (unknown variety) -  we've three crowns planted next to the raised bed area, and these produce a lot of stems throughout the year.   Very undemanding to grow, it needs next to no attention at all.

Chives - not a fruit of course, but then strictly speaking neither is rhubarb ...  There's a patch of chives in the raised bed area.  Being an allium, it's evergreen, can look a little straggly in winter, but it comes back strongly again every spring.   If left to flower it becomes a magnet for the bees.  With nothing to do except harvest the leaves as required, it's the very easiest edible perennial you can grow.

Garden update - Summer 2020 - Six on Saturday

1.  Garden Tools

We bought a cordless lawnmower in June, £100 from Lidl without any batteries or charger.  But I bought this model because I've ten (!) other cordless power tools in the same range and which all use the same batteries, so I've already four 4Ah & five 2Ah batteries, plus several chargers.

I'm impressed with this mower so far.  It's lightweight and very easy to handle, and can cut all our three lawn areas twice on a single charge using the 4Ah batteries.   It operates at twice the voltage of the other power tools in the range, and so takes two batteries to power it.

However, the petrol mower is still in the shed for now.  Keeping the lawns tidy every week in the summer is a world away from hacking down long wet grass during the winter and early spring, and I don't yet know how the cordless mower will perform then.

The other garden tools I have in the same cordless range are a chainsaw, a standard hedge trimmer, a long extendable hedge trimmer and a pressure washer.

Hedge gap in-filling by underplanting - Six on Saturday

Since we removed our old greenhouse, we've exposed a four-metre length of the old hawthorn hedge at the northern boundary.

Although it has quite healthy upper growth and is still making good shows of blossom and berries, this hedge is very old and spans the length of the boundary which we took over when we bought the slice of additional land to the west to extend our garden.

Amateurish attempts have been made in the past to 'lay' the hedge by partially cutting through some of the trunks and bending them over to the horizontal so they maintain a growing connection with the tree, but then sprout more upward branches to fill in the lower areas. 

However, what with this poor quality laying and the lower part of the hedge being shaded by our old greenhouse for seven years, the base of the hawthorn hedge is very open and provides little or no low-level cover and wind protection to the garden now that the greenhouse has gone.  

And hawthorn is deciduous, so it will be even worse during the winter months when there are no leaves on the upper branches.

large gaps lowdown in the hedge behind the retaining wall
(photo taken before we moved the fig tree here)

Although winds from the north are not too common here, when they do arrive they're usually strong and very cold, so we thought we'd try to fill the lower gaps to protect the garden, and with a longer-term view of creating a full-height evergreen screen.

on a white theme ... Six on Saturday

New Zealand holly bush, olearia macrodonta ...

click on any photo for a larger image ...

In flower today - Six on Saturday ...

first of the bright orange poppies ...

Relocating the Fig Tree ... Six on Saturday

When we built our fig tree planter, we packed out the base with layers of bricks to make an inner wall below the soil level, to confine the tree roots.  This is supposed to improve fruiting.

However, when combined with the soil mix and a fig tree that's grown considerably larger in the past three years, it also makes the planter extremely heavy !   The weight hasn't been a problem until now, because we've never tried to move it more than a few feet, and then we just skidded it around on its base.

But this week we decided to relocate this planter to the new paved area at the front corner of the garden, created when we demolished the old greenhouse.   This new spot gets much more sun throughout the course of the whole day, although it's not quite as warm as the old location which is a semi-enclosed sun trap formed by the kitchen wall, workshop extension wall and the boundary fence at the east.

old location, sheltered and very warm, but only
a few hours of direct sunlight each day 

So, how to move this very large planter from outside the back door and around to the new paved area, a distance of some 30 metres ?

Gardening on the other side of the world ...

A few months back, I stumbled upon the Australian equivalent of the BBC's Gardeners' World television show, i.e. ABC's Gardening Australia.

This programme has been running for over thirty years down under, and I think it's quite good.  There's typically more than 40 shows each year, all of them an hour long.

I've streamed several episodes that were broadcast over the past few years, and as well as seeing some wonderful new native and exotic plants (and pests) you can also pick up some really interesting hints and tips, and see how the approach to cultivation and pruning etc, often of the exact same plants, differs significantly from what's common practice at home. 

Water conservation and re-use for irrigation is also a very big theme throughout the shows.   And there are some other very interesting differences.   The presenters bang on all the time about how great it is to have a north-facing garden, which of course is not ideal here in Europe.

In the northern hemisphere, the sun appears to travel in a clockwise arc from east to west throughout the day.  But of course, south of the equator it appears to travel counter-clockwise, and in the northern sky.  And although I knew this already, having travelled in southern Africa and South America, it's not something I've ever really given much thought to in gardening terms - south equals sun is an ingrained concept here !

The programme features regular presenters from most of the Aussie states, from the tropics in the far north, the subtropics of coastal Queensland, Perth in the west, the arid heartlands of the country and the temperate regions around most of the southern coastline.

But it's the stuff from the cooler regions of Victoria and Tasmania that I find most fascinating.  They grow a lot of the same flowers and edibles that are garden favourites here in the UK, too.

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 3 - Six on Saturday

This is the final instalment of our major project to demolish the old greenhouse, clear the space to make a paved courtyard area and build a new greenhouse alongside, re-using the glass panels.

Since the last post, I've terminated the incoming power cable from the mast, although I haven't yet ran an internal cable from the isolator and installed a socket point.  We've no pressing need for electricity in the greenhouse at this time of year, but in the autumn we'll likely install some LED lighting and the sockets can also be used for heated propagators etc next year. 

The aluminium louvre covers for the rear upper vents arrived, and these were fitted in five minutes.

isolator switch, and vent louvre from the inside ...

Building Raised Beds - Six on Saturday ...

Yet another lockdown garden landscaping project ...

Inspired by some new raised beds I saw during a review of the Six-on-Saturday submissions recently, I decided to re-configure our main vegetable growing space, referred to as the 'side bed' in our garden layout. 

We have several types of vegetable seeds germinating in cells in the greenhouse, and our trays of leeks and onions sown earlier in the year are too small for planting out yet, so we've still plenty of time to prepare these particular vegetable beds.  We've already planted out garlic in the front bed, and sown radishes and spring onions in the cold frame.

Here's the 'before' picture of the space, although this was actually taken after I'd already relocated our large stainless steel table, which itself took a couple of hours what with first moving our quince tree (it's in a large planter), putting down a weed membrane, repositioning a few paving stones to fit under the table legs, emptying the shelf of all the bags of compost & stones, then shifting the table and replacing everything.

the side bed - that's our cold frame on the right, with the glass removed ...

To make the new raised beds, I still had a lot of pieces of unused wood lying around after the new greenhouse build, most of them offcuts of various lengths but also four full-length timbers.  I'd intended to use this wood to re-make the garden gate, but that job can now wait until later in the year at which time, hopefully, the timber yards will be open again.

"Is this some kind of bust ?"

"Well, it's very impressive, yes, but we need to ask you a few questions".

In memory of the actress Gina Mastrogiacomo, who died in 2001 aged 39 ...  I first saw this film in a cinema in San Diego when visiting a friend who worked in the shipyards.

Anyway, at the end of a business trip to the Netherlands in early February of this year, my wife and I stayed in a hotel on the seafront at Scheveningen for our last night. 

Scheveningen - photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

On the morning of the Sunday, before we drove to catch the overnight ferry departing from Ijmuiden to Newcastle, we visited a large and popular fleamarket in the centre of The Hague and one of the things we bought was a large plaster bust, for 20 euros.

It's a good size, around 550 mm (22") tall.  I thought it might be a copy of some famous sculpture, but if so then I couldn't find any reference to the original during an internet search after we'd brought it home.   I also researched the subject matter to see if I could identify a particular Greek or Roman goddess, but that also failed due to a lack of iconography - the girl in the bust is simply holding a shawl around her shoulders, and is not carrying anything.

We thought the bust would look good on a plinth as the centrepiece within our new circle in the front garden.

The only problem being, of course, that it's cast in plaster and not resin or concrete, so if it was left outside unprotected it would likely dissolve into a puddle of gypsum slurry after the first heavy rains.

Back in February we'd bought some specialist stone-effect spray paint and clear lacquer to protect it - the paints actually cost more than we'd paid for the bust - but it was too cold and wet for painting at that time.

The paint was to turn it back into its original colour, because it had been hand-painted by a previous owner and they hadn't made a very good job of it.  The lacquer is required so that the bust will shed water without it soaking in to the surface of the plaster and causing damage.

So, during a recent spell of fine weather, it was time to tackle this mini-project.

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 2 - Six on Saturday

Following on from our Part 1 post last week, this is where we left the project.

The first post described the process up to completion of the basic timber framework. 

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 1 - Six-on-Saturday

In the early spring of 2013, we built our large greenhouse using 14 shower panels we'd picked up on the cheap.   

This 12' x 6' 6" (3.6 x 2.0 m) building has served us extremely well for the last seven years, but during the winter we made a decision to demolish it and re-use the glass panels to make a similar smaller greenhouse in a slightly different location.  There were a few reasons for this :-

• some of the greenhouse roof beams are suffering from rot which may soon become a structural problem, so they'd have needed replacing anyway.

• we want to reclaim the corner of the garden where the larger greenhouse is currently sited.  With the greenhouse removed, it's a large paved area surrounded by a concrete plinth, so it's an ideal place to plant some shrubs either in large pots and / or by selectively removing a few of the paving slabs and planting directly into the ground.

• by building a smaller greenhouse than the original, we can re-use all of the glass panels and make it glass-sided all around - at present, the back (north) wall is made from timber, and although we'd faced the panelling with reflective aluminium foil insulation, the back side of the greenhouse is still a little dark. 

I could have removed all the glass panels, and then just modified the existing carcass to make a smaller greenhouse, repairing the roof in the process, but I think that's actually much more work than building a new framework from scratch.  It would also have been very heavy to move, even though it's not far to drag it over to its new position.

So, before our recent holiday, I'd drawn up plans for a new 8' x 6' (2.4 x 1.8 m) greenhouse and prepared a base using paving stones I'd recovered from elsewhere in the garden.  

new greenhouse base area cleared and levelled ...

Hard Landscaping in the Front Bed - Six on Saturday

Back in 2017, our neighbours gave us the outer ring sector stones from a brand new 2.7 metre (9') diameter paving circle - they'd only laid the two inner rings themselves in their back garden.  

I spotted the pieces being loaded into the boot of their car and asked what they intended to do with them, and they were actually going to take them to the tip !   These are cut from stone, not mould-formed in concrete, so I bet the full circle kit was very expensive and, of course, it being the outer ring they were discarding, they were throwing away around three-quarters of the weight of all the stone they'd paid for ...

Anyway, we managed to rescue them, and for the last couple of years these 24 sectors have formed a winding path across the length of the side bed (see also the satellite image on our garden layout post).

As with almost all our paving, the stones were simply laid loose onto levelled and compacted soil - no hardcore foundations or mortar bed fixings - because it's not the first time we've decided to relocate sections of paving.

the long and winding road, to the left...

And last week, we decided to move all these paving stones to the front bed and reconfigure them to their intended purpose, i.e. as a ring.  

From a different perspective - Six on Saturday

We're currently away on holiday in much warmer climes, but I regularly check out the old homestead via our IP video cameras.   These automatically capture still images every 30 seconds and also record video when motion is detected in certain areas.

One of these cameras is a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) unit mounted on a tall pole above the apex of the first-floor extension gable, which can be controlled remotely over the internet and affords a panoramic view of the garden, so I took a few stills this morning and thought I'd join in again with the Six-on-Saturday crowd hosted by The Propagator.

In the Bleak Midwinter ... Six on Saturday

Well, the winter solstice is with us tomorrow and so things will shortly be on the up again.  Roll on the lighter evenings ...

I've been outside this week tidying up the gardens a little, sweeping up leaves and pulling up all the old annuals etc to start filling one of our new composter bays.

Despite the time of year, the garden's not looking too bad at all - we've plenty of evergreens that provide year-round interest - so I took a few photos and thought I'd join in again with the Six-on-Saturday brigade hosted by The Propagator.


1.  The parallel hedges to the west

In winter, when the deciduous hedge has lost its leaves, you can better see the extent of the growth on the parallel evergreen Cotoneaster Lacteus hedge planted in June 2017.  

This is intended to be an eight-foot high privacy screen and windbreak.  It's never been trimmed but probably now needs a slight haircut in the very early spring.

The hornbeams in the mixed native hedge behind tend to hold onto their browned leaves well into the winter, and maybe even until we get strong winds in the early spring.

click on any of the photos for a larger image ...

In the foreground is the evergreen New Zealand Holly (Olearia macrodonta) which has now established itself very well.

Building a Garden Composter ...

This year, as is fairly typical, we've bought in excess of 700 litres of multi-purpose compost for the garden, usually when there were 3-for-2 or other special offers on large bags at the DIY chains or garden centres.  Even on offer, the costs add up over the year for such a large quantity. 

If 700 litres seems a lot, then to put it into perspective I've just started off next year's garlic crop, with each seed clove in its own 2-litre pot until the spring, and there's 25 of them so there's 50 litres for a start ...

So we use the compost for starting off seeds, filling tubs & planters for flowers, shrubs & trees (generally mixed with topsoil and or / grit and pearlite) and for the tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers and aubergines etc which we grow in large pots in the greenhouses.  When the greenhouse crops are finished in the autumn, we empty the compost from these pots onto the beds and borders as a mulch and to improve the soil structure.  The bed at the front of the garden sits on particularly heavy clay, and so every year we try to add more organic material.

But every year, we also need to dispose of large quantities of green and brown garden waste in the form of grass cuttings, hedge clippings, prunings, deadheaded flowers, fallen leaves and other dead plant material from all the vegetables and annuals.   We already have a small, upright plastic compost bin which can contain a couple of hundred litres of material, but it's certainly not sufficient for a season's worth of waste.

So, we decided to build a new two-bay composter in front of the large shed.

After looking over the location and producing an outline drawing, the first job was to lift some of the paving stones in this area into which the composter could be placed.   These are 450 x 450 mm flags, and we removed eight of them and cut another four almost in half to create a sunken composter base area of around 1,800 x 1,100 mm.

paving slabs lifted ....

Garden Layout

This is an orientation plan showing the latest layout of our garden.   I originally drew this up shortly after we moved in here, and it's been updated every time we've added or relocated a garden building, or made significant changes to the landscaping. 

click on the image for an enlarged view ...

The combined footprint of the house and garden is around 650 square metres in total.