Post Retirement

       I should now have more time for knitting, gardening, and to a lesser extent cleaning and cooking. Yes, I was retired at the end of November. Hurrah!
       As I haven't posted since July (last year!) I shall do some catching up.

       We had a terrific raspberry crop again this year!

I was surprised because I thought they were on a good year/bad year cycle. However! A generous application of horse manure in the spring might have had something to do with it. They're an unknown (to me) variety, with very tall ( up to 3 metres) smooth canes which produces fruit from August first or so for a good three or four weeks. I have a lot of jam and frozen raspberries in the freezer and so do many of our friends! Despite this success (or perhaps in case something strikes them down sometime) I've started another bed of raspberries, from some canes I got from Anne. Again, unknown variety, but hers are more typical, with thorny, shorter canes, but are a bit later and have huge pyramidal fruit. She also has the golden fall ones (called "Anne") and they are suckering up all over so I may get some of those too. Problem is where to locate them, as they need a permanent spot with lots of sun. Our original ones are getting to be shaded by some growing trees so they may have to be relocated sometime in the future. So far so good, however. 

In addition to "Primuland", I developed a new bed at the entrance to the woodland garden this summer. It has things which like a bit of shade. I visited a garden which had a load of geranium macrorrhizum bordering the beds, and, as I had a shedload of these seedlings, I bordered it with them. There were a few things which had to come in for the winter (fuchsias, etc), but the other day I was out looking and the hart's tongue fern is still there, and still green. The painted Japanese ferns have of course disappeared for the winter but I'm confident they'll be back. I had a couple of little tiny seedling Japanese maples which I put in here as well. Maybe it will be my Japanese garden? I have a couple of rhododendrons in the woodland garden, and one of them was viciously attacked by some beastly insect (I suspect) so I don't know if it will survive. It was an Elphidote - one of the miniature ones, like Karen Seleger but white blooms, and it had bloomed a lot in the spring.

        Other lovelies: In the bed in front of the lilacs, a  

nice mix of sweet William, geranium, and rose campion. These are the ones which I am sure will bloom again next summer (they grew many sets of basil leaves after blooming) and which I have very successfully grown from seed - in abundance, waiting in the vegetable plot to be planted out in the flower beds. There is a really lovely bright magenta one which looks superb with the grey foliage, but we can't seem to get it - or the white one - to survive/bloom. Luckily I like pink, but I'm not giving up on the others! Loads of people have them.

        Five years ago I started a new garden, based on shrubs, to the west of the house. I wanted to collect many of the superb hydrangeas which have been developed recently. It takes a long time! But I have many of my favourites and am now impatiently waiting for them to develop and bloom. This one is a big fave, as the blooms last a long time. I think it is "Nikko Blue" macrophylla hydrangea. In the past few years I've added some rhododendrons to this area too, two last year: Rhododendron "Roseum Elegans" and a "Minnetonka" which is the only one of the lot with buds on. They are all in a line above the path at the top of the west garden. I see many more places for rhododendrons, including a spot where we've cut a hole in the spruce hedge to be able to see the water again from the deck - the rhodos will fill in the hole and cover the spruces' dead lower branches, but not block the view. That is the plan at any rate.

         Last but not least. I've been wanting one of these

veronicastrums for years, and now I have two! They are still very small, but I hope they will settle in here and develop. They also come in white (mine are both pink) and they are very tall.Perhaps I need some white ones too.

Chilly April

 

Crocus, up and blooming under the viburnum!

       I'm having a domestic engineering day, because it's only 5 degrees out and I don't want to have to bundle up in winter gear to get out and garden. And anyway the house needs work. I am planning an all-out assault on our bedroom - Spring cleaning, if you like. The duvet cover is in the laundry and I think the curtains are coming down for a wash. I may even replace them for the summer, I don't know. A freshen-up is in order (and there's a wide variety of curtain fabric on clearance at the shop).
       Spring is progressing, as is gardening - I have re-skinned the greenhouse, and, innovation for the year, I have a thermometer out there, which, yesterday when the sun was out, was reading 40 degrees C. I opened up the ends to cool things down, although the only plants out there at the moment are onion sets, sprouting. I must also get some potatoes chitting right away.
        I finished feeding and mulching half of the raspberries yesterday. I am using for mulch some bags of wood pellets which had spent the winter outdoors and absorbed a lot of water, returning to their original sawdust form. I hope the fertilizer I put underneath will prevent it from leaching all the nitrogen from the berries as it decomposes. I am planning to give them a high nitrogen feed once the leaves start to emerge. I put lots of newspapers under the sawdust, as I am trying to control the cooch grass which is everywhere underneath the raspberry canes. I am trying to just dig it out of the vegetable garden, but it's impossible to get out of the raspberries, short of digging out all the canes. That's Plan B, if the mulch doesn't work! I have also carpeted between the rows, so the cooch should be well-suppressed.

     My "Pot for Winter Colour" is making good progress. There were some lovely dark purple crocus which lasted for weeks, and now the tete-a-tete daffodils are taking over. I haven't moved it indoors for the night in quite some time, even though we had a night-time temperature of  -7 a few nights ago. The flowers seem to have survived, and I hope the pot has too, as it's an unfired one. There are actual tulips coming as the next layer. At Beechgrove, they kept the bulbs in one of their layered pots, dried them off in situ, and got them going again in the fall - just to see what would survive, and it did quite well. I am not sure if I can spare the pot or the space - oh, I suppose it could summer in the greenhouse! Maybe I'll try it.
      My hellebore is blooming, at last! I planted it last spring, and it just sat there with the same 4 leaves all summer. I guess it was building up its strength, because this year it has produced two healthy flower stalks. I am as pleased as Punch.

        Here it is, looking at itself in the mirror so I can see the bloom, as it is a nodding one. There are many more blooms to come, I am pleased to note!

Greenhouse is Up!

 So, we got the hoops up without any trouble at all, and then this morning Anne and I fastened the three lines of strapping to the hoops- one across the centre of the ceiling, and two at the sides. They are much sturdier now that they have been joined together. Naturally it was raining, so we couldn't put up the skin. However, I did finish potting on my seed-raised strawberries, which are looking healthy. Then I had lunch, and after it was drier (and even a bit windy) so I pulled up the two pieces of plastic to see if they would dry - enough to tape them together, anyway. This greenhouse is smaller than the tent, so my shorter piece fit fine, and the longer one probably needs to be cut off. I put the railway ties on the edges, as it was still windy and the canopy was threatening to take flight.

I then went on to work on the raspberries - I used all of the two reels of 12 ga. wire and could use one more - however that took care of 7 of 8 of the needed strands. I then cut up a lot of green polarfleece into strips and got busy tying up the canes. They are still a bit bent over but at least you can get through the rows, and there wasn't too much damage to the fruiting canes - and none to next year's crop, as far as I know. There are still lots of WEEDS, but I've pulled out a lot and could do a lot more.

The greenhouse is 12 x 15 feet, and the hoops were all 20 feel long, so it is about 6 foot or a bit more high at the centre. I don't know exactly how I'm going to fit the door, but we're planning a visit to Lee Valley - they have clips to fit 3/4-inch plastic pipe, and a stick-on zipper for construction sites that might work. 

I have all the remaining plants back in, although I should try to get the annuals out into the garden this week, before we go to Halifax later. I may have to get Karen to water the plants as well as feed the cats!
The roses are still struggling to come out. I did have a Souvenir de Philemon Cochet partially out to day, but there just isn't any warmth in the sun (even when it is out) so I am not expecting any big flush of roses anytime soon.