First fire

It has been a good couple of days. A friend of mine came to visit and after a quick bike ride down the flooded paths of the River Thames and an unnecessary amount food that I cooked for dinner, we made full use of the winter garden and had the first fire of the year in the chimnea. 

Copyright 2016 Robert Widdowson

It has been a sunny but cold couple of days and we have had a light frost in the garden for both of the nights, but the fire kept us warm despite the lawn being crisp underfoot and what few stars can be seen from our city location were glinting away. This provided entertainment as well as listening to the passers-by on the busy road outside our house, who always provide some kind of interest to the quiet listener. 

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

After both of us feeling exhausted from the days pursuit, we were  dropping off in our chairs by mid-evening. Some chocolate brownie and custard seemed to revive us and we ended up staying outside until the early hours of the morning.

By early afternoon yesterday, my friend had headed back north and I was left with a little time. I started to clean up the spoils of the night before and when tidying away the garden chairs to the shed on the front, I decided on a whim that it may be just dry enough to give the lawn an early but much needed cut. Despite it being slightly damp I managed to get it done without electrocution and it felt like it was really the beginning of the gardening year.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

The lawn looked better, though not great but this spurred me on to do some further work. I had taken quite a lot of the container plants off the decking when we had the fire so I used the opportunity to reorganise them. I decided to show off the weeping willow which was showing its first signs of life. I gave it a tidy up and removed old dead leaves and trimmed the tips of the falling stems where needed and put it in pride of place on the corner of the decking.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

With that done and the the tree looking great for late winter, I moved on to more trimming and tidying around the garden, preparing it for the early growing season that seems to have arrived despite the recent return of the frost. The honeysuckle in the corner of the decking required some control by tying it to the trellis from which is was making a valiant escape. I am trying to train it into the Buddleia but this is not the most direct path to light but is the ultimately going to be the best for it I hope.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

My partner had been away with work for the night and she was coming home soon. I had managed to spend much more time than I had planned with my initial tidy up but it was great to make some early progress towards the aims of the year. I headed off to the supermarket full of ideas and plans for other little things that need to be done.

    

10 plants I am Looking Forward to Growing this Year

It has been a stormy and rainy day and apart from taking out the compost and hanging a bird feeder, I have not been out in the garden. Instead I decided to sort through my collection of seeds and bulbs and plan what we are going to grow this year. I plan on growing as many different plants as possible and filling the garden to bursting point with colour and scent.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

Part of our seed collection that I was sorting through today

I made a video showing the ten plants I am looking forward to planting this year but I will run through them here too.

The first is Tomatoes. When we first started the garden two years ago, I got a couple of tomato plants from the supermarket and ever since then I have been hooked. I love the smell of the plants, the speed at which they grow and of course the fruits. This year I will be growing two plants in containers at the front of the house.

The second is Dahlias. We were kindly given our first Dahlias by my partner's mother and we planted them in a crate to grow. I loved the flowers, intricate and beautiful and so varied. This year I  have bought three more varieties to try and will also put them into a container to make them easier to protect during the winter.

Third is Mina Lobata. This is a exotic looking climber that produces fiery tri-colour flowers similar in shape to Wisteria. I got the seeds for this plant last year, a little late in the season and started them indoors. When I moved them outside, they did not take well to being hardened off and grew poorly in the soil with only one plant producing a single set of flowers. This year I am determined to do better. I will grow them outside in the cold frame so they become accustomed to being grown outside from germination and then I shall keep them in medium sized pots and place them against the fence to see if they fair better in compost rather than our soil which is an odd mixture of clay, topsoil and builders rubble.

Fourth is a classic, Sunflower. I grew five last year, three behind the rose arched bench and two close to the fences in the border. They all grew to various heights, with one of the three behind the bench being the tallest at a good seven foot plus in height. In terms of the aesthetics of the garden, the shorter plants looked better than the giants, interspersed between the other flowers in the borders, but it is just too tempting to try and grow a giant.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

One of the smaller Sunflowers we grew last year

Fifth is Gladioli. I have never grown these before but the purple and white flowers of the Lakeland variety I have bought were just too tempting in the shop. I will plant these in the borders and see how they go and maybe use some as cut flowers for the house too.

Sixth is Climbing Beans. I have a lot of fence space in our garden and as the garden is new, it has relatively few plants of any decent height in it. I want to create the feeling of being enveloped by plants when in the garden and so I want to cover the tallest fences with climbers to create the effect. Although Climbing Beans are maybe not everyone's first choice as a decorative plant, I think the leaves and flowers of Beans are beautiful and the plants are easy and fast to grow and also should produce a decent crop of food for relatively little ground space.

Seventh is Cosmos Picote. By the end of summer last year, the garden was almost overwhelmed with the vast amounts of Cosmos I had planted. It was our first real year of growing and the Cosmos seeds grew quickly and easily and were a simple way to fill the empty newly dug borders. The Picote were my favourite variety of Cosmos I grew because they flowered heavily for a long period and the plants themselves were reasonably small and dainty in comparison to the others. I will mix them among the other flowers I am planning in my more diverse borders this year.

Eighth is Chard Bright Lights. I grew some of this last year in a medium sized container and it grew well. It provided us with one meal of tasty Chard and the stems of the plant are beautifully brightly coloured. The Sparrows that regularly visit the garden also enjoyed eating it too. This year I will plant it in the borders to try and increase the yield and also add some low cover and colour to the borders.

Ninth is Morning Glory. In a further and unrelenting bid to ensure full fence cover this year, I have some Morning Glory seeds to plant out. I don't really have a fixed plan on where I will grow them but I will no doubt catch a moment of inspiration at some point before the beginning of March when I plan to plant most of our seed collection.

Last is Calla Lily. I am always spellbound by these flowers whenever I see them in supermarkets or garden centres. I only have three bulbs to try this year as a little experiment but I am really looking forward to hopefully seeing them flower.

I have plenty of other seeds I am going to plant this year and I am sure will will cover all of them as the year moves on.            

Valentine's Day Kokedama Gift Idea

A kokedama is an Japanese ornamental plant display traditionally made from a ball of soil covered by moss which is wrapped in wire or string and often suspended in the air. The word 'kokedama' translates into English as ‘moss ball’ but as live moss can difficult to obtain without damaging the natural environment, I have made a moss free version which looks great and makes an ideal romantic gift.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

 

I have chosen to use a red Gerbera for my Valentine’s themed kokedama but any small perennial, ideally in flower could be used depending on what you have available to you in your area. Rose or Cyclamen for example could make great alternatives.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

Kokedama traditionally uses a mixture of peat and Akadama, which is a clay like mineral, but I have used a peat free potting compost, which will suit the needs of my Gerbera plant and is easy to get. Below is a Video I made, which shows you how to make my kokedama step by step:

 

Visitors to Garden

One of the great things about having a garden, even if it is a small city garden, is enjoying the wildlife it can attract. In this post we will have a look at what has been visiting the garden during the time we have been creating it.

We have a wide range of insect visitors including bees and butterflies which we shall continue to try and encourage this year. We put a pair of bird feeders in the garden soon after we bought the house, but for the first year they did not really attract anything. As the garden developed, the potential habitat for birds improved, with the increase in visiting insects and places for birds to hide and look for food, birds did begin to visit the garden, especially during winter and nesting time in the spring.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

     This Robin was one of the first visitors to our garden and at least one continues to visit daily

The Robin was one of the first visitors to the garden but others soon followed. The large tree in the house behind us has some disadvantages for the garden. It absorbs a lot of water in the summer from our garden, meaning we have to water relentlessly. The tree also also creates a lot of shade. However it also brings advantages such as attracting local birds. The next bird we noticed visiting was a female Chaffinch, which first started her visits during the nesting season, looking for material to nest with and also visiting the feeders too.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

 The female Chaffinch collecting Spider's silk for her nest from our fence

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

Looking for insects on the lawn

During nesting time we also had at least one pair of Blackbirds visiting the garden looking for nesting material. they inadvertently managed to destroy quite a good proportion of my seedlings, as the female was using the compost they were planted in for her nest. After my initial despair, I protected the seedlings with plastic covers until nesting was over and there were no more problems. The female was quite a character and would even drink beer from trays we were using to trap slugs!

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

The male Blackbird patrolling our garden last year

Once the birds had nested and the young had fledged, a very noisy family of around fifteen Starlings started to visit us for quite a few weeks. They would raid the bird feeders at the break of dawn at about 5 am, making a hysterical racket and eating everything in the feeders within about ten minutes. We ended up rationing the food as otherwise we would have been spending an untold amount of money on bird food each week. Despite this, they were great entertainment and we are both hoping a family visits this year!

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

One of the young Starlings posing at the top of the the feeders

As well as insects and birds we have also had some mammalian visitors to the garden. I have always suspected there have been a few Wood Mice in the garden as I could see the trails they left on the lawn. I have to admit I am not not entirely keen on mice, mainly due to their extreme speed which always makes me jump. I have only seen a mouse in the garden on three or four occasions so I have reluctantly accepted their presence but I do try and keep bird food from the floor so they don't get too easy a meal. The last visitor I will introduce today is a much rarer fellow these days, than when I was a child. The Hedgehog population of the UK has declined by around ninety percent, so when I first spotted one in our garden when I was outside one night, I was really pleased as I had not seen one for years. Not only did we have one hedgehog but by the end of the summer in our first year in the house we had a whole family, with young Hedgehogs frequently feeding in the garden at night. We did not see them as often last year, which was a bit concerning, so we are hoping they will make a return in full force this year.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

One of the Hedgehogs having a feed on some cat food in our garden

Pruning the Buddleia and Planting a Foxtail Lily

Buddleia is perhaps not the first choice for a small garden such as ours. But it was one of the first things we planted when we bought the house and it had of course grown well. From being a tiny plant of less than 30cm it was over 2 metres tall by the end of last year. It is planted near the decking and the fence between the next house and ours. This worked out as a good planting spot as it provides some privacy on our decking, as the fence to the next house is low. Buddleia attracts Butterflies and other pollinators, which is great for, but it is also listed as an invasive species in the UK. The reason why is obvious. When taking any train journey you will see it follows the tracks, often unbroken for miles in places. It's seed is very mobile and able to grow in the mortar of walls and buildings, which can cause significant damage if left unchecked. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are asking gardeners to remove flower heads before they go to seed to try and reduce the problems it can cause if it escapes the garden.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

 Pollinators such as Butterflies love to visit Buddleia when it is in flower

I feel if pruned well and hard, it can fit into most gardens if wanted and although it requires care to stop it becoming too large and taking over, it is not difficult to cut it back to a manageable size. In the video below I show how I have pruned our Buddleia this year to try and create height and a canopy effect as well as allowing light and space into the garden.

Also in the video I planted A Foxtail lily (Eremurus) into a tarracotta container. One of the reasons we are planting in containers is to make it easier to take our plants with us when we one day move from our small one bedroom house to somewhere larger. However another reason is due to the presence of Horse Tail (Equisetum) in our garden, which is another highly vigorous plant, but unlike Buddleia is native to the UK. When we do eventually move house we do not want to take the Horse Tail with us. If we dug up plants from the borders we would almost definitely be transferring it to where ever we happen to go. Horse Tail is an annoying plant when not wanted in the garden to say the least, but is also an interesting plant which we will discuss further, when it not doubt starts to grow in the garden again this year.  

     

Repotting a Camellia Japonica.

For my partners birthday, I bought her a Camellia Japonica. Yesterday I repotted it into a terracotta pot, which will be it's new home for at least the rest of this gardening season. Camellia Japonica is also known as a Japanese Camellia or 'Rose of Winter'. It is a Tea plant belonging to the family Theaceae. It is a winter hardy plant and can withstand temperatures of -15 degrees Celsius. It flowers between January and March, so it provides some winter and spring interest to the garden. 

The plant requires ericaceous compost or soil, as it requires an acidic soil free of lime. As we live in a hard water area (a very hard water area), it should ideally be watered with rain water. This is not a problem for us right now given the wet weather, but as our garden is small, we do not really have space for a water butt to collect larder amounts of rain water and so we may have to temporarily use filtered tap water in the summer if it is very dry.

I have recorded a video showing how I repotted the plant which is below: 

 

The plant prefers some shade, which is great for us, as it will stay on our decking area, which mostly receives some morning sun and then is in shade during the heat of the afternoon in summer.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

Camellia Japonica in a terracotta container

   

Rain Rain Rain

It has been the wettest winter on record here in the UK. The days that it has not rained in the last three months can probably be counted on both hands and after this morning's rain had finally ceased, I took a look around the garden to see what effect all this water has been having.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

Droplets of rain hanging on our Maple Tree

Our garden can be divided into two general areas; the sunny, well draining half and the shady half with poor drainage. The bed on the well draining side has been benefiting from the constant deluges of rain and the Conifer hedge we have planted in the corner has been taking full advantage of this and is sprouting plenty of new growth. The plants which really require the free drainage, such as our collection of Lavenders have just about made through but don't really seem to have enjoyed it. We do have one Lavender which we planted below our decking area, where the drainage is relatively poor and this plant seems to have died. We shall see if it manages to produce some new growth this year but it looks doubtful.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

Our Grass was looking great with rain droplets hanging from it

Over on the Damper, shadier side of the garden, the main thing I have noticed is a proliferation of moss, growing from within the lawn and into the bedding area. I will try and keep this under some control and as the weather warms up it may well die back, but I actually quite like moss and may try and collect some of it for upcoming projects i have planned for the months ahead. We have quite a few tulips planted in this bed and due to the mild winter conditions, they are already springing up all over. We also have Foxglove planted here, they should flower this year and these seem to be fine, which you would expect considering their shady woodland homes in the wild. The have Dogwood and Hibiscus we have planted in this bed seem to be fine. We also have Clematis and Passion flower growing against the fence besides this bedding area and they also seem to have suffered no problems.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

Moss has been thriving in the garden with the very wet winter

I have noticed that the lawn has been growing a surprising amount this winter and is looking quite wild. Normally the cold weather would slow the pace of growth of the grass during the winter and although it has not been growing as fast as in the summers months, it is now quite long and will need to be cut at the first opportunity.

Copyright Robert Widdowson 2016

A close up of one of our Climbing Roses

Finally, the wet and mild winter weather seems to have meant less birds visiting the feeders. As the warmer winter conditions have been perhaps less challenging for them, they may have chosen to stay away. We have had the regular Blackbirds and Robin, as well as House Sparrows, Wrens and Chaffinch, as well as a the odd passing Goldcrest. One other creature in the garden and one that is definitely benefiting from this wet spell are the Slugs. They have already managed to have a go at the emerging tulips and have also got into the cold frame and eaten a Hydrangea cutting we had in there from last year. They definitely will be providing a challenge later in the year!