Winter & Weather


I’m not really a subscriber to the practice of putting the garden “to bed” for the winter, chopping it all down and forgetting about it until Spring bank holiday. This is not the way plants naturally deal with the seasons; it potentially robs the beneficial predatory insects of hibernation sites near where they can help with the “pests” next year; and all those stems and stuff will struggle to compost when it’s too cool for the microbes to get to work. For sure, things aren’t as frantic in the cooler months but there’s still plenty to do…repairs, renewals, servicing, planning, and sometimes just taking the time out to observe. When it’s too frozen to get your leeks out, even with a crowbar, observation is all you have left.

When most of your working life is spent outside Weather is something of a changeable constant, the solution is usually an equally constantly changing set of layers clothing. Sometimes it’s more of a juggle with the task venues, pruning fruit when its milder, fixing tools in the shed when its torrential. Unusually for me, the succession of weather at the end of last year did curtail activity for a while. November brought us saturation, and December, almost two weeks below freezing with periods down to -12ºC. Being quite low down and near a river these temperatures, the high humidity and low wind led to some spectacular frost. This is what you hear referred to as “more severe & more frequent weather events”. A reminder of why, like us, everyone should be growing Peat Free.

It should also remind us all, including me!, that we should all grow to our own local conditions. We’ve taken some losses to the wet / cold & extra exposure of being in a pot combination, and a few to hungry voles with reduced natural forage. I found it interesting that some plants fared better in open ground, which suggests saturation may have been more of the issue. Peat Free growing mediums are entirely different to manage in many aspects than the habitat destroying and climate busting peat. It’s a quality a lot of PF media is not good on, but it certainly attests to the water retention ability of the Dalefoot Wool Compost we use. Great for containers in Summer, but for plants of hardiness less than H5 (-15 to -10ºC) it seems a bit more grit is needed in the mix.  Also, a quiet word with the Cat!  While we can be certain no two years or growing seasons will have the exact same weather, I can be sure that the winter survivors that we offer for sale at events this year are truly hardy.

Website

An unexpected upside of the weather over winter was the chance so spend some time to make some improvements to our Website.

Since it went live, the glaring omission was the lack of a plants page. This was partly due to the fact we don’t sell online (See here). But was mainly due to the large amount of data I needed to compile and the complexity of getting it up there and working correctly…and me being a gardener not a WebDev! For their support I’d like to thank Plant Heritage for letting me trial their members data base which was instrumental in getting the data together and organised, and also Jen  Weaver for ongoing encouragement, support & tweaks.  At any rate its now sorted and you can find it HERE. The initial selection of plants on there is, according to my spreadsheet,  those I was pretty certain we will have at shows in 2023. Until the frost! By about April I should know if everything pulled through and make the necessary in / out of stock adjustments. As propagation begins this month there will almost certainly be additions.

We’re a small nursery, with a wide range, and not a lot of space, so, over time different cultivars will cycle between available or not. Please realise this list is to be viewed as more of an inventory of species / cultivars grown with an indication of likely availability rather than a catalogue of offers for sale. I’m open to requests to bring plants to a fair for you, even if I wouldn’t have selected them as they’re not in, or about to be, in season. Please use the Contact page to make any such requests.

The other area of the site that has had some work is the Resources section. Most of this was in the Description, classification & Botany section . A better format has been adopted for chunk selection and which also allows for future expansion.  Some of the longer sections have been broken down in to more easily digested chunks, and a new section on botanical fruit added. The next section up for expansion will be “Growing Conditions” with the aim being to demystify the hieroglyphics often seen on plant labels and give an understanding of how the various elements interrelate to enable better plant placement. As ever, it will happen when time is available.

Our “Find Us Here” page is now up to speed with all the events we know we will be attending in 2023 though there are a few further details to add in as I get them. We hope to see you there.

Other formatting and optimisation tweaks were made but probably will not be immediately apparent. If you find any broken links, typos etc feel free to let me know.

Wildlife

As ever winter is a tough, but natural, period for wildlife and lots of creatures survive it as dormant or diapaused eggs or pupae, or hibernating adults. While tidying one bed I came across this huge, 50mm, Elephant Hawk-moth pupae tucked between a few pots. It was about 4m away from where I saw both green and brown forms of the caterpillar feeding on Willowherb last July. I tucked it back in where it was and if I’m lucky will get to see the adult in late spring / early summer. It’s also been delightful to have had a pair of Nuthatch putting in occasional appearances at the feeders.

Podcast Coda

There is quite a bit of garden work that is pretty mundane. To keep this time productive, I often listen to an ears worth of podcasts, (keeping the other ear free!)
 It keeps me both educated and entertained. By way of signal boosting for them I’m going to include at least one on each of these posts from now. First up are the big names in the “gardening establishment”.



BBC Gardeners Question Time


Available here and from most podcast and streaming services. After years of listening to it, for me GQT is more of a self-test quiz these days, but most episodes contain something I wasn’t aware of. If you’re newer to gardening, you’ll get a lot of milage from this one. It is not as up to speed on ecological matters as I would like but is moving there slowly. There is, compared to where I am a bit of a southern bias …but it helps to be reminded of what will happen next oop north!



Gardening with the RHS.

Available here and also from most podcast and streaming services. My feeling on this one can vary by episode. At times its almost more BBC than the BBC and a little plummy to boot, on occasion, in pursuit of newer audience inclusion I have known it be overly simplistic and patronising. Aside from that I can’t fault the accuracy of the plant information.  They are probably ahead of the BBC on ecological matters, but there is not much in it. Both tend to avoid acknowledgement of western horticultures colonial past. Overall, I prefer the broad base of in-depth info here to the BBC.