Where the hell I've been

Wow. July, huh? That's quite a long time ago, isn't it?

The thing with gardening is that it requires time, especially if you're planning on writing about it afterwards. Something else happened in July which put something of a crimp on my time:

Daughter 2 of 2. Please see instruction manual for correct operation details.

Turns out that two daughters are actually more than double the work of one and I didn't actually get back out into the garden after that last post. This meant that a lot of it died a horrible, painful and messy death.

However, there were some successes from the year. I learned a great deal about sweetcorn and the fact that you do need to give it an awful lot of space if you want to get anything from it. I produced a massive amount of plant and sod all actual food from my Three Sisters garden. In fairness, the beans and the courgettes did produce, but I didn't get a chance to get out there and harvest, so they rotted on the vine.

I also learned about some of the odd foods that I grew. New Zealand spinach/kokihi - tasty, virulent, produces like nobody's business but not something I use very often in cooking. Oca - generally tasty, requires more space than I gave it, really didn't play nicely with the tomatoes. Purslane - hard to tell apart from weeds and probably got uprooted, as I got none. Sea kale - does not like pots and takes a year to thrive even in the ground. Daylilies - delicious to slugs and snails, dead now.

I also managed to achieve my goal of a purple soup. The purple cauliflower let me down, but I managed to use ordinary white cauliflower without diluting the colour of the purple potatoes and purple carrots too much.

So, now the daughters are both a little bit older and I have a little bit of free time back. Back to the gardening? Well, yes and no. I've just moved house this month, which gets me a larger house (to fit all the daughters that I have in), but significantly smaller garden space. I reckon I can fit in 2m² of raised beds in the back garden, which is something of a downgrade on the 14m² that I had at the old place, not to mention the myriad planters, pots and bags that were scattered inbetween.

This has forced me to a) concentrate on what I actually want to grow and eat, and b) get creative. The front garden now contains 2 x fig trees, 2 hanging baskets of strawberries, 1 hanging basket of blackberries, 2m of window box filled with strawberries, 2 blueberry pots, 1 gooseberry in a pot, some jerusalem artichokes, 3 planters for oca, and a bed which I plan on putting 2 rhubarbs and surrounding them with nasturtiums so that they don't look weird. I've also managed to find a very interesting bush raspberry - instead of growing up tall and taking over, it spreads outwards and can form a hedge, so I've got three of those on order. Oh, and a dwarf cherry tree. Front lawns are overrated.

Of course, this downsizing does mean that I've got an awful lot of stuff that I need to get rid of. Remember the broccoli cages that I constantly effuse over? Well, I have about 7 of them and need only 2. The spares are free to a good home, or even a mildly bad one.

Also, I have about 7-8 raspberry plants going spare, as well as some seed jerusalem artichokes. I would recommend both to anyone with even a little bit of space in their garden - they grow straight up, so require very little dirt, grow anywhere without complaint and produce loads of fruit/tubers. Anyone who wants one/some, let me know.

Oh, and there's plenty of mutant raspberry if anyone wants that. It has eaten through all of the barriers and colonised the bed next to it. I think moving was worthwhile just to put some distance between me and it.

PJW

Knowing when to fold them

Someone I know has just bought a house and acquired a hugely impressive back garden with it, complete with several empty raised beds. Always one to try and spread my addictions, I've provided him with as many of my spare seeds and plants as he'd take.

However, because I'm not a very nice person, I have also taken the opportunity to give him what I can only describe as the horticultural equivalent of a practical joke. It's a mutant raspberry/loganberry/tayberry/tribble thing which has the advantage of producing lots of tasty fruit, but the fairly major disadvantage of being utterly uncontrollable. I was given it myself by a friend who in fairness did warn me that it would spread everywhere, but I was confident that I could contain it.

On a related topic, let me tell you about what I've been doing today:

He said, "Don't dig it there, dig it elsewhere. You're digging it round and it oughta be square."

More observant people may notice the green leafy thing on the right of the picture. That is the mutant raspberry/tribble. Earlier this year, the scene looked a little more like this:

Mutant raspberry on one side, in its own raised bed, surrounded by bricks and safely walled away from the bed where swedes and cauliflowers will one day grow. I thought I was safe, simply because there was no physical connection between the two sections of garden.

Fast forward three months and I've got little mutant raspberries popping up right smack in the middle of the bed. I would like to make it clear how impressive this is - the plant is going down through gravel, through sand, sideways through a small brick wall, and then breaking up through weed-proof plastic matting and popping up over a metre away from its original source. There are people who escaped from Colditz who would envy that kind of tunnelling ability.

I did have the option of just playing whack-a-mole with it and chopping it down every time it popped up, but I could see that becoming a losing battle very quickly. So instead, I spent the day emptying a 30cm deep and 130cm2 raised bed of soil and packing it into bags, before covering the area in a weedkiller so poisonous that it legally couldn't be sold to me as weedkiller due to EU regulations (if anyone asks, I was either disinfecting a path or clearing away foot-and-mouth disease). I now have to wait a minimum of 2 weeks before putting the dirt back in and another 2 more before I can plant anything there.

Not pictured - the unnerving sizzling noise and the frenzied flailing of dying earthworms that I didn't see before pouring it on.

I then put down two layers of super-strong weed-proof plastic and bricked the whole thing in. The only way that the mutant raspberry is getting in this time is by tunnelling through concrete or going through this woven plastic fabric, twice, which is guaranteed impermeable for 15 years based on just one layer.

I fully expect to see a mutant raspberry sprout popping up before the end of the season.

In my defence, I did warn my friend what I was giving him. I don't think he took me seriously enough though. Sorry mate, no take-backs, even if it eats your house.

PJW