Thursday 29 November 2012

Crazy Weather, Floods and a Broken Plum

What a couple of weeks it has been for weather. I hope everyone has avoided the serious weather we have been having and if not, that the damage is not too bad.

Over the past month, I have been kept busy with work and studying and the lack of light of an evening has meant my gardening has been restricted to the weekend. However, not even this has happened with the amount of rain that we have had recently. As previously mentioned, I have created a large pond in a natural run off area of the garden, and have designed an overflow which feeds the bog garden. Over the past week or so the pond has flooded almost on a daily basis, meaning that the bog garden is well and truly boggy, which is fine for the plants (although I am worried about the water freezing around their roots). 

This picture was taken last yesterday on a walk near my house. I have never seen the water so close to the top of the bridge and it had flooded the road. It floods often, but only normally onto the fields, not the road. In my last post, I finished talking about what I had already done within the garden, so from now on I will talk about what I am currently doing and what I want to do in the future.


Present
In the last post, I started to talk about a new border that I was extending to add a spring aspect to the winter border. Since then, I have added hundreds of bulbs including daffodils, crocus, fritillaria meleagris and chiondoxa fobesii and luciliae. These are planted within the winter border, which includes a range of Japanese Dogwoods "flaviramea, alba sibirica". These are planted in full sun, which means that the stems are able to be at their brightest. 

I have also been looking at increasing the number of plants and trees within the garden that provide winter berries. I have a number of different plants that were planted before I came to the garden so I do not know their species, but have always liked them due to the bright colours on frosty mornings. 

The Allotment
The wet weather seems to be affected this years winter crops, with my brassicas taking a battering and really struggling to survive. I have staked my sprouts, but the strong winds seem to have 'blown' the sprout heads. This wind was also responsible for snapping my 10 year old plum tree in half, which was upsetting as I remember planting the tree when it was a small sapling. However, the other half of the tree is still going strong, so hopefully the tree will just come back stronger than ever next year. I have harvested my first leeks grown this year, and I am very happy with the results. They may not be the same size as those in the shops, but like most things, they taste so much better. I would recommend anyone who doesn't grow their own to give it a go. For the cost of a packet of seeds, and a small amount of your time, you can get hundreds of plants. 

Apologies for the poor picture quality, but I dropped my camera so am using an old one until I get it fixed. They were sown in march, left to grow until a reasonable size, then pricked out into their growing place. I found that this method was most effective as I did not waste time potting on.


Recipe Idea
Leeks are one of my favourite vegetables and I miss them when they are out of season. They are great with a bit of cream and baked or even spiced with cinnamon, cumin, coriander and turmeric. These can then be made into patties and fried. They are great served with natural yoghurt and offer a healthy alternative to meat for burgers. 

I will leave it there this week and will speak soon. If you have any plants or trees which have good winter berries, then please get in touch and I would love to see some of your pictures. As always I look forward to hearing your thoughts and own gardening tales. Take care and happy gardening.

CG.