Off the Shelf: The Gardener’s Year

After a couple of years living in the wasteland that was my allotment, my lavender plant has gone a little wayward and woody. The rosemary is the same way, really. They should have had an annual chop after flowering, to keep them nice and fresh. It’s possible that some serious remedial pruning later in the summer will shock them into more appropriate behaviour – but it’s not guaranteed. The garden wouldn’t be the same without rosemary and lavender (their flowers and their scents, their lovely flavours), but they’re easy plants to replace if they get out of control. (There’s nothing inherently wrong with a big, bushy lavender or rosemary, I just don’t have the space to let them grow.)

After another weekend working hard in the garden, it looks very different again. Ryan was working on Saturday, so I spent the morning outside. The first thing I did was erect my new raised bed cover, which would have been easier had it not been a bit breezy! But I got there in the end. It’s basically a plastic cold frame that fits over the top of my raised beds. It has nice long anchor pegs to hold it down, and is now being used to harden off plants before they go outside, and protect my brassica seedlings (I bought Flower Sprouts and Purple Sprouting broccoli from the garden centre; now I have to spend the summer protecting them from every pest in the known universe!).

The garden and I have not spent much time together this summer. I’ve been busy… there was weather… there have been too many days when I didn’t feel like going outside. Since the courgette and summer squash started fruiting, I’ve been a bit afraid to go outside in case there’s a mountain of fruit to pick. But the light was nice this morning, so I ventured outside to take a few photos (and the squashes seem to be slowing down, so it’s safe).

Every month this year I’ve been trying to read one of the unread books on my shelf, and to then decide whether it gets to keep its spot or needs to be set free to find a new home. For June I chose Nature’s Wild Harvest by Eric Soothill and Michael J. Thomas. It was published in 1983, and has been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, since I bought it in our local secondhand bookshop (which only opens on Wednesdays).

Yesterday I noticed that one of my Calycanthus floridus is in flower. I have two, currently both in pots, and it’s rare for me to be able to find both of them at the same time. They are refugees from the old garden; they were too young to flower there. They were planted in my parents’ garden in Malvern for a year or so – whether they flowered there, I don’t know. I suspect not, as they were given a rather shady spot. After we moved here I reclaimed them and planted them back into pots. So they haven’t had the best start in life, and I’m happy to see that at least one of them seems to be thriving regardless.

It’s at this time of year, I think, that a polytunnel or greenhouse really comes in handy in the garden. Over the summer it may just be a tangle of tomato vines – productive, but a space that you really only go in to keep up with the watering chore, or to harvest ripe tomatoes. You know you’re going to come out with green stains on your clothes and hands that smell funny – tomatoes are like that. Those tomatoes will hang on longer into the autumn than you thought they would, and by the time you’ve cleared out the polytunnel the season will be so far advanced that it will be cold and dark and your crop of overwintering salads will barely be growing – just marking time until the days are long enough for them to actually grow.

I’m not the kind of person who creates a meal plan and shopping list every week, and then sticks to it religiously. I do like to have some idea of what we’re going to eat, however, as this cuts down on the number of nights when there’s nothing for dinner. Our current methodology is to fill the fridge and the freezer with things we eat regularly, and to eat them in rotation to avoid food waste. It’s a mix-and-match, ‘that will go nicely with this’ kind of thing, rarely looking more than 2 days ahead unless there’s a special event happening. It works for us, and we have very little waste.

This morning I have finished reading the Introduction of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, a call to arms to everyone on the planet to prevent climate change becoming a human-extinction event. A week ago, the Guardian published an article suggesting that using the narrative of war for environmental purposes may not be a good idea. The author thought that it may be deepening the divisions between us, making it harder to get our message across. It didn’t suggest any alternative wordings, except:

We’ve had the Hydroponicum for over a year now. It has kept us supplied with salads and stir-fry veg, and I’ve grown one or two more experimental crops as well. Not everything I have tried has been successful. My spinach bolted (I’m not sure why, and I haven’t tried again yet). Alliums don’t seem to like germinating in the hydroponic seedling tray, and coriander downright refused. Coriander seedlings will grow hydroponically, though, so I may try allium transplants at some point.

This is our garden plan for the front garden and the ‘back’ garden (which is at the side of the house, strictly speaking). The red areas are paving – a garden path, a wide patio and enough hardstanding to go underneath two sheds (one of which may turn out to be a greenhouse).

We see a lot of articles about how you can save money by growing your own food. And it’s true, it’s absolutely true, you can. A packet of salad seeds is roughly the same price as a bagged salad, and will keep you in salads all summer (and probably beyond). You can save money by picking up seeds at seed swaps, saving your own seeds, sharing with friends and neighbours, making your own compost and plant feeds and recycling household items into pots, etc. But there’s an elephant in the room – a factor that’s often left out.

I have been out in the garden a bit more over the last week. Rather than wait until later in the day, when I generally don’t feel like going outside, I have started going out to do something first thing in the morning, before I sit down at my desk. The weather is very mild, and a lot of days have been dank and overcast, but on the brighter mornings I can happily potter about for an hour before coming inside. It’s quite often the nicest part of the day, weather-wise.