Recently we have been visited regularly by a group of Redpolls. They are a type of finch, with pinky red patches on their heads and breasts like this one above. (Sorry it's so blurred, I was in a hurry to photograph it before it flew away). Some are more brightly coloured than others, I think it is the males that have more colour. If the first one to arrive had not been so brightly coloured, I would not have been able to identify them. The females are really quite non-descript. I had never heard of a Redpoll, let alone seen one, so I had to leaf through the bird book until I saw something that matched. They squabble with the Goldfinches who were already regular visitors, so I decided to get myself one of these extra large nyger seed dispensers, with multiple perches, so more could visit at any one time. They still squabble over it, even though there's more than enough room for all of them.
Over the course of my one hour, this is what I saw:
In my quest for substitute gardening activities during winter, I often turn to gardening books and magazines, but what I really enjoy is to immerse myself completely in some full-on gardening fantasy, ideally through the medium of a screen. I had seen adverts for The Victorian Kitchen Garden DVD collection in magazines, and thought it seemed rather expensive, and it recently occurred to me that I might be able to rent it instead. So I popped over to Lovefilm.com, marked it 'high priority', and it landed on my doormat in a couple of days. I was intending to spin out the couple of hours worth of Disc One over a few days, but ended up watching it all in the same day, then watching it again the next day!
It is quite an old production, I'd guess around 30 years old, the presenters are obviously from the Percy Thrower School, jackets and ties at all times. They waffle on a bit here and there, but they know their onions.
This particular kitchen garden belongs to a country house in Berkshire. It is a huge walled garden, with great expanses of glasshouses and coldframes, espaliered fruit trees on every wall, and perfect gravel pathways with clematis-clothed arches dotted around. There are rows of outbuildings, not only potting sheds and tool sheds, but forcing sheds, and soil sheds, and a special building to house the huge boiler which heats the glasshouses. There is a fruit store which looks like a small thatched cottage, and even an ice-house. (Forgive me if I'm confusing this last bit with Chatsworth, which is also featured in the Introduction quite a lot).
The series takes you through the gardening year, month by month, describing the day to day lives of the Head Gardener and his staff: what they would be doing, and how they would be doing it, in the days prior to the invention of plastic pots, bags of ready made compost, nylon netting and horticultural fleece. They had some pretty resourceful methods of pest control! Of course, being right next door to the stable block, they were never short of manure, including the fresh stuff for creating hot beds, but imagine how much time and effort would have gone into shifting all that amount of muck. Just as well they had a staff of around 20 people.
Wealthy Victorians enjoyed showing off at their dinner parties, and liked to impress their guests with the range of exotic produce on offer. If they took a fancy to aubergines, or pineapples, the Head Gardener was expected to produce them himself, on the estate. Not only did they have to produce enough to feed His Lordship and his family and dinner guests all year round, but enough for all the servants as well. The large gardening staff and the elaborate, purpose built equipment would have been essential, as would access to his Lordship's presumably quite generous gardening budget.
This is a relaxing, old fashioned TV series, perfect winter viewing for anyone who is dying to get on with the new gardening season, but finds themselves confined to barracks due to the cold, wet or frosty weather. You will be inspired with all kinds of new ideas. Or, if you're looking for some motivation to get you going again after the winter break, this will certainly help. So far I have watched January through to May, and I can't wait for Disc Two, with the second half of the year, to pop through the door. If you don't want to buy or rent it, you can also watch it all on You Tube.
It's too cold and frosty to work on the allotment at the moment, and I have been getting twitchy sitting waiting for the season to get underway. So I decided it wasn't too early to start sowing a few seeds. The only one of these I have done before is celeriac. Although the packet says sow Feb - March I normally start these off in January as they are pretty slow growers, and by the time they germinate it will probably be February. I guessed that as celery is very similar I could do the same with this. I know a lot of people sow their onions at Christmas, so I'm pretty sure I'm OK with these too.
They are all in the conservatory so they are well lit, and will all be covered in bubble wrap, and the celery and celeriac are sitting on my heated propagator. Once they have germinated I can move them onto the windowsill and make room in the propagator for the next batch of seeds, toms, peppers, chillies etc.
I have made a bit more progress with the digging during the mild weather last week, so the plot is nearly ready for spring. There is not much more I can do now until next month, when I will be buying and chitting seed potatoes, starting off the greenhouse seeds, pruning the autumn fruiting raspberries and, weather permitting, sowing broad beans.
I've been to the allotment today (first time in ages) to dig up the parsnips and sprouts for Christmas Day. I would have left it until nearer the time but the forecast is for wet and horrible tomorrow, and today was just beautiful. The sun was so warm I could have sat and sunbathed. However it was a little muddy for that, so I got on with the job in hand. The scale in the picture above is a little misleading, as both sprouts and parsnips look average-sized. In reality the sprouts are not much bigger than peas and the parsnips are monster bully-boys!
I have been busy at home as well, making crackers. They are one of those things which, once you have made them yourself, you never want to go back to shop-bought ones. A bit like growing veg I suppose. Not only can you make them look exactly how you want, you can also fill them with what you want. Party poppers, indoor fireworks (one of which turned out to be an outdoor firework, but that's another story), rocket balloons and chocolates, are just some of the things I have included over the years. I haven't yet done lottery tickets.....
We have also got plenty of lights and greenery festooned about the place of course, and the food shopping is done except for the birds which we will collect tomorrow. We are having a chicken, a duck and some pheasants for a change from turkey this year.
Well now it just remains for me to wish you all a very HAPPY Christmas (or in some cases, just a bearable one!) and a very PRODUCTIVE new year! xxxx
Thank you very much Jo at The Good Life for choosing me to receive this award. It's very gratifying to know 1) that people actually read your blog and 2) that they enjoy reading it! I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to carry out the instructions for passing the award on, as I'm not sure how to tell how many followers someone has..... if someone can enlighten me then I will try to identify 5 more blogs to pass it on to.
This is the area where we dug out that big old bramble a couple of weeks ago. We have put in some new supports for the grapevines and loganberry that we plan to put in.
And this is the remains of the bonfire we had last night, on which said bramble was ceremoniously burnt.
I have made quite a bit of progress with the digging, gradually removing all those chrysanths, which is a shame as they are still flowering away... the green bit at the back is the first bit I dug, which is now covered in weeds again!
And this is my 'shed' ... until such time as I can put up something a bit more substantial, with guttering for rainwater etc.
I've been thinking about clearing the greenhouse out for some time now. Normally I would have done it weeks ago, but there were still so many things apparently still growing. I picked the last of the peppers, almost ripe, but not quite. The tomatoes were still growing and producing flowers, although obviously they won't come to anything now. So yesterday I decided to clear everything except the chillies, because they are still busy ripening. I've made some wonderful, spicy chilli jam, which is going down well so I think another batch might be a good idea.
Even these outdoor grown tomatoes are still ripening!
Since my last post I have been on a trip to RHS Wisley. Unfortunately it was pouring with rain most of the day so it was a bit gloomy and soggy, but still very beautiful. The orchid above was one of many in their wonderful glasshouse, and the autumn colour (below) was amazing, even in the rain.
So back at the allotment, our task for this weekend is to get rid of this monster, to make room for some grapes, and my little cherry tree which is currently in a container and not doing terribly well.
By lunchtime today we had got to a point where you could actually get from one side of the plot to the other.
By close of play today it looked like this:
Tomorrow we will be digging out the rest of the roots and stumps and preparing the ground for planting. You will notice I say 'we' rather than 'I', and yes! there really were two of us today, my husband came to help for the first time in my whole allotment career! That's because he's the one that wants to plant grapes (for winemaking!) We'll see how long it lasts...
So with the lure of a big bonfire (in a couple of weeks, after it's dried out a bit) I might even be able to get one of my children up there for the first time!
I can't remember if I've mentioned, I have been elected Committee Secretary for the Allotment Association. This kind of happened by accident when I was put on the spot and was unable to say no when I was asked. I thought it would just be a case of taking minutes at committee meetings a few times a year, but it turns out it's quite a lot more than that.... liaising with local councilors, sending out the warning letters.... things I wasn't really prepared for. However, it does have its advantages, such as being first in the know when someone is selling off a very large roll of enviromesh at a bargain price! And after less than a year on this site, I already know a lot more people on the site than I ever did after three years on the old one. Many of them live very close by too so it is quite 'community', which is nice.
