Merry Christmas to all our readers.

Merry Christmas

Lynn’s home-made wreath features Christmas Box (Sarcococca confusa), holly and the trimmings off the bottom of the Christmas tree.

Dinner will feature many of our own vegetables – roast potatoes and parsnips (the former sitting under the duck to soak up the fat), steamed sprouts and carrots and stir-fried beetroot with red cabbage.  No photos of the vegetables, as getting on with the cooking is today’s priority.

Well after a two year wait, we can finally start harvesting from our asparagus bed in the back garden as the spears have started to appear.

Asparagus 25 April 2012

It is quite noticeable how much thicker and stronger the spears are this year than they were for the first couple of years of growth, so the patient wait does seem to be the sensible thing to do.

There will be plenty of cold (and probably wet) weather to get through, before spring is safely here, but a couple of rather more pleasant days recently have left the garden looking as though it is starting to wake up.

In particular the emergence in the last couple of days of some crocuses/croci (choose your preferred plural) provides a real promise of things to come.

The rhubarb is also starting to come through and while we don’t force it, we do use a cloche to give it a little bit of protection once it has started to grow away.

Inspired by a bit of sunshine we completed the winter prune of our Wisteria.  This is now relatively mature (we planted it 15 or so years ago, but it was already showing flowers when we bought it) and we have largely got a framework, with which we are happy.

 The photo below shows what it looked like four summers ago and later this year we’ll give you a sight of how it has developed since then.

There is the promise of some decent weather early next week, but probably more cold to come after that so let’s hope that these early signs aren’t a false dawn.

There has been a distinct lack of news from our garden this year.  Largely this has been because there has been little to report, especially on the ornamental side.

To be honest, after some early season tidying up, we rather lost impetus as the weather deteriorated.  Mark’s work on kitchen gardening over the summer and our joint efforts on the allotment took priority and the cold wet weather soon dampened enthusiasm for shrubs and flowers.  On the fruit and vegetable front, the asparagus bed has developed and next year we should start to harvest, so there will definitely be a posting then.  Our small cabbage bed has done well with both Minicole and Kalibos cabbages in store to see us through the early part of the winter and we have had plenty of leeks.  The rhubarb did very well and as well as eating lots of freshly cooked crumbles, jars of rhubarb jam made their way into the cupboard and rhubarb pies into the freezer.  We had mixed success with container growing – potatoes and carrots did quite well, but the more exotic crops, chilli peppers and aubergines struggled with the lack of light and warmth, as did the tomatoes.

Re-using the re-cycling tub

The autumn has seen renewed efforts in the garden, especially in the back garden where we have put some serious effort into tidying up the beds, including moving a couple of the more overgrown shrubs.  We should now have a fairly solid framework for next year and have plans to grow more annuals to splash drifts of colour amongst the borders.

One pleasant autumn afternoon provided a powerful catalyst.  Making a small improvement in one corner suddenly provided the incentive to get the rest of the garden up to the standard of the bit that had been done.  The energy provided by making a visible difference in one place inspired the latest musing.

We cleaned and re-filled the bird feeders in the run up to Christmas and while the mild weather seems to mean that there are plent of insects around judging by the way that tits are feeding on various plants, the birds have been using the feeders.  There was much excitement this morning when we saw a nuthatch on one of them.  After a bit of stalking we got some good pictures, one of which is here.

Nuthatch on the feeder