Preparing my Carnivourous Plants for Winter

My carnivorous plants have been lovely this year, in this video I start the process of preparing them for the winter.

Get yourself a cuppa and see what my little munchers have been eating all summer long.

Love
Rebecca xx

Visiting Godinton House and Gardens for Delphinium week 2018

Splendid Delphiniums on Display

This week's video (taken on my brand-spanking new camera - the Canon M50) is a visit to the beautiful, tranquil walled garden at Godinton House near Ashford, Kent.

Set amongst 12 acres of grounds, the Walled Garden was the kitchen garden for the House and Estate.
It is now home to a huge Victorian-style greenhouse, clipped box wood, a  rich collection of herbaceous perennial plants, and the stars of the June show are very definitely the Delphiniums. So much so that Godinton House and the Delphinium Society host a 'Delphinium Week' each year.

Come and explore the Walled Garden with me, and experience these breathtaking plants in their prime, plus some cheeky extras in the greenhouse!

Enjoy!
Love
Rebecca xx

Carnivorous Plant Updates, New Arrivals and Seed Harvesting

Carnivorous Plant update:

It's been a really busy summer in my Carnivorous Plant collection.

Sarracenia var. unknown has had it's best year EVER! I've never had such big pitchers on it, and never seen it with such an intense colour either. That means I can stumble towards a partial identification, it's probably a rubra hybrid, though I couldn't be any more specific than that.

Sarracenia rubra ssp unknown looking amazing in July

Sarracenia rubra ssp unknown 2017 brings the best size pitchers and colour yet

My Venus Fly Trap (Dionea var. unknown) has grown well too. Some of the traps achieved much stronger colour than this photo shows, and it fed regularly on all manner of things including craneflies and earwigs!

Dionea var unknown growing well

I've never seen a Venus Fly Trap in flower, many experts say the flowers are dull and it is better for the health of the plant not to allow the flower stem to develop...but I really REALLY wanted to see the flowers, so I let it carry on.

Dionea flowers! So pretty!!

I wasn't disappointed! The white Dionea flowers are tissue paper delicate, with fine veining that looks like neat pinstripes extending from chartreuse green centres. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
 Moments after I took this photo, I snipped off the flowers right at the bottom of the stem, allowing the plant to use it's prey to feed up for the winter.

And now the Newbies:

For my birthday in June, my best friend bought me two amazing beasts from Triffid Nurseries (he had to be pointed in the right direction, but the choices were definitely his own)

Sarracenia rubra ssp. gulfensis 'Yellow River' Florida

This delicious specimen came to me in full flower, with pitchers over a foot tall. It's been feeding gluttonously in the greenhouse over July and August, to the point where there are small 'burn' marks on the pitchers, and you can just see the dead insects through it.

Sarracenia rubra ssp. gulfensis 'Yellow River' Florida

It's so massive I couldn't get it all in one photo and do it justice. The flowers are the most alien I've ever seen on a carnivorous plant. The clever landing pad forming a cup to collect pollen and seed.

Sarracenia rubra ssp. gulfensis 'Yellow River' Florida flowers are spectacular

Drosera binata dichotoma 'Giant'

Photo to follow! This Sundew is very aptly named. It's a huge, forked variety that attempted to take over the world shortly after it arrived. I ended up having to stake the 18" tall limbs to give everything else breathing space! It is sliding into dormancy now, so I'll have to take photos of it's fresh growth in Spring/Summer next year.

Seed Harvesting

As the Sundew flowering has been so spectacular this year, so I decided to collect the seed with a view to growing it next year.
Once the flowers had finished and the seed pods had turned brown, I labelled some small brown envelopes similar to this listing on Ebay. I wrote one envelope per subspecies of Drosera, then carefully cut the entire dried flower stem off each plant, as close to the plant as I could. Trying not to shake the stem, I opened the envelope with my left hand, and tipped the flower stem upside-down into the envelope with my right.
Drosera are very generous with their seeds, which look like fine, short clippings of hair, so dropping a few won't hurt! Believe me!!
I left the stems in the envelopes for a couple of weeks, until the seeds had fully ripened and dropped into the bottom of the envelope.
The next job was to clean the seeds.
I tipped the contents of the envelopes out onto a sheet of paper (one envelope at a time - don't mix the seeds up!). Then I carefully picked out all the bits of stalk, petal and seed head. Fine tweezers are invaluable at this point, and try not to sneeze or sigh heavily, or you'll be left with all the chaff and none of the seed!
When the seed is as clean of chaff as it can be, carefully pour the seeds back into the correct brown seed envelope, and seal it.
Seed from some species of Drosera need a period of cold stratification to germinate, others can be sown as soon as they are harvested.

Here are the requirements for my collection:

Drosera Species	Subspecies	Native Region	Stratify Seeds?
capensis		Tropical	No
capensis	Alba	Tropical	No
binata	dichotoma ‘Giant’	Temperate	Fresh – No /Stored -Yes
spatulata		Subtropical	No
filiformis	filiformis	Temperate	Stratification required
hybrida	filiformis x intermedia	Temperate	Stratification required
binata	T Form	Temperate	Fresh – No /Stored -Yes

As it happens, I haven't had time (what with starting my own YouTube channel - did I tell you about that? ;-) ), so everything is being stored until Spring, and I'll stratify or not, depending on the variety and it's requirements.

I'm really looking forward to sowing them though!
Have you ever tried growing Carnivorous Plants from seed? Tell me about your experiences in the 'Comments'
Love
PB xx

Triffid Nurseries Carnivorous Plants Unboxing and Review

There's something you don't know about me, I like to keep...

Carnivorous Plants

In the beginning there were Venus Fly Traps

I've owned carnivorous plants (on and off) since my teens, I seem to remember collecting margarine lids and sending them off for my first Venus Fly Trap (Dionaea muscipula).

It was tiny with three or four softly blushing traps. I wasn't great with it. I gave it tap water - very infrequently. I would try to make the traps close by poking it, try feeding it dead flies, you know how it is. Needless to say, the poor thing died very quickly - probably from tormented exhaustion!

Then there were Sundews

Later I got a gorgeous Sundew (Drosera), which was fantastic at catching fungus gnats, and other teeny tiny flies. The glistening, sticky 'dew' fascinated me, as did the unfurling leaves and graceful flower heads. My mother was very enthusiastic about keeping it on the kitchen windowsill.

I stuck with sundews over the years, though I thought I wasn't very successful with them. Now I realise they could just have been in their dormant phase...why didn't you tell me the go dormant?!

When we got the greenhouse I decided I wanted to step up my game a bit.

And then there were Pitcher Plants

Ohh yeah!

I currently have two Pitcher Plants...a tall one and a short one. The tall one is Sarracenia farnhamii, and the short one doesn't say. I bought them from a garden centre, so they didn't have very detailed labels. But what I do know is that they've come through two winters in the greenhouse, and they are throwing up new pitchers as I type.

Carnivorous Pitcher Plants, Sarracenia var unknown
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

When I cut back the dead pitchers, I split a few open along their length, and noticed they'd been very successful hunters, trapping and digesting huge blue bottles and wasps among other things!

Carnivorous Pitcher Plants, Sarracenia farnhamii
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

I also have a Cape Sundew Dorsera capensis alba...the big question is - Is it dead or just dormant? I guess I'll have to wait and see...

Carnivorous Plants, Sundew Drosera capensis alba
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

Buying from a Specialist Carnivorous Plant Nursery

Inspired by the new growth on my Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia), I decided to expand my collection. I looked around online, and settled on Triffid Nurseries, a UK based carnivorous plant specialist. Their website was easy to navigate, had good photographs and product descriptions, and the ordering process was very easy.

Please note, I paid for everything except for a free plant which was an offer on the website, and a packet of seeds. These gifts were genuinely available to all customers at time of ordering, I did not announce I was a blogger, or writing a review until after my order had despatched.

 I ordered:

Plants (supplied bare root)

• 2 Sundews Drosera capensis
• 1 Sundew Drosera x hybrida filiformis and intermedia (actually supplied in a square pot, not bare root)
• 1 Sundew Drosera spatulata
• 1 Sundew Drosera filiformis ssp. filiformis (Free plant as part of the Spring Offer)

Seeds

• Sarracenia purpurea ssp. purpurea x Open Pollinated
• Drosera binata 'T' form 

Plus

• A bag of multipurpose Carnivorous Plant Compost (UK)

I was also really tempted by the pygmy sundews, they're soooo cute! but I didn't want to get too carried away.

The delivery charge is £8.95, which at the time felt like quite a lot for bare root plants and some seed (the compost price already includes P&P), but the plant and seed prices were very competitive compared to garden centres, where you 're lucky if the labels tells you what varieties you're buying, plus the individual plant packaging is so intricate and careful, I soon realised the charge was totally justified

I picked varieties described as easy and/or hardy on the website, but they also ask you to give a few substitutes, just in case what you've chosen is unavailable. I just said that I was a 'mildly experienced owner of carnivorous plants, keeping them in an unheated greenhouse year round' so alternatives need to be 'hardy and easy to grow'.

I placed my order via the website on Wednesday 12th April. Normally their plants are selected and packed on the Monday after your order is placed, but as this Monday was a Bank Holiday, I fully expected to have to wait an extra week, which was completely fine with me. They also warn you that they do not send out order confirmation emails, so don't get anxious when you don't hear anything.

I did send them a message via their website, to see if they could advise me what the chances were of my sundew coming back to life. Not only did they confirm shipment of my order (which was sooner than I expected, and I hadn't directly asked about), but Andy also gently broke it to me that poor old 'Alba' was very probably dead *sadface* It apparently should have lots of new leaves by now. I'll do a post mortem once I have the new compost...maybe the roots will be clinging to life...maybe.

Triffid Nurseries Haul, Unboxing and Review

My parcel arrived by courier on Friday 21st April.

The box was an appropriate size and strength for the contents, and the filler was shedded paper, which I can recycle - yay!!

In the top of the box was a personalised letter from Andy and Alison of Triffid Nurseries, and clipped to the top was a ziplock bag with my two packets of seed and an additional free packet. The website stated 10 or 20 seeds of each, but there were definitely more than that in each packet. There wasn't a packing note though, and as you don't get an order confirmation, I'd kinda forgotten what I'd actually ordered (oops).

A personalised letter, with the seeds stapled to the front in a ziplock bag
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

Opening the box from Triffid Nurseries
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

Each plant was beautifully and creatively packed to protect as much of the leaf and dew as possible. The letter said the plants were just coming out of dormancy, but I think they were a bit further along than that, with lots of fully formed leaves. Each came wrapped in soaking wet paper towel (remember they are bog plants), and with a proper plastic plant label, so it was easy to identify each plant. I was really pleased with them all. Below are photos of every plant I bought and how it looked on arrival

Two lovely Drosera capensis plants
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

This pot should be Drosera hybrida filiformis x intermedia but look at the tiny spatulata (my guess) round the edge - so adorable!
Phot by Pumpkin Becki

Drosera spatulata
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

My freebie! Drosera filiformis ssp filiformis
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

The Pumpkin Becki Award for Most Ingenious Packaging - I love the sticky tape roll to give extra height!
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

All the seeds are sown, Drosera binata T-Form, Drosera binata 'Otaki Forks NZ' and Sarracenia purpurea ssp purpurea
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

 And finally...
'Alba' made it through after all!! Yay!!! I started pulling away the rosettes of dead leaves and discovered all this lovely growth. I am so bloomin' happy :D

Drosera capensis alba emerges from dormancy at long last
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

And when I unpotted it to upgrade it to a bigger one, I discovered strong shoots coming from the root ball as well!

The arrow points to a shoot coming off the root ball on Drosera capensis alba
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

Huge thank yous to Andy and Alison at Triffid Nurseries for sending me such fantastic quality plants, seeds and compost, and providing additional support via email. I would highly recommend buying from them, and I'm sure I'll be ordering again soon...I'm still hankering after the pygmy sundews afterall!

Let me know if you're interested in Carnivorous Plants in the comments,
Love
Pumpkin Becki

Spring Gardening - it's a busy time of year

Spring Gardening - Ornamentals

The Woodland Garden brings me so much joy in Spring. It's always been the main attraction at this time of year. Being at the front of the house, it welcomes me home from a tough day at work, or sends me out into the world with a smile on my face.

I bulked out my tulip collection quite a bit last autumn, keeping purple and whites, but adding pink and extending the season with different varieties

The Wood Anemones (Anemone nemorosa) are really starting to spread under the trees. I love the way they bask in the spring sunshine. Last autumn I felt the two clumps I had were big enough to start dividing, so with a trowel I took small sections off the outsides and planted them straight out in their new positions. I kept my fingers crossed for them all winter, and was delighted a few weeks ago to see how well they had settled in.

If you look closely, you'll also see the ridiculous number of sycamore seedlings I have to weed out - grump grump grump :(

Speaking of Anemones, the first of my Anemone coronaria (Garden Anemone) have come into bloom this week. They look electric here against the lime green leaves of the Creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia).

Late last summer I dug up my bearded irises, as the clumps were getting huge and needed invigorating. I broke off all the old or diseased rhizomes, trimmed down the leaves to approximately 10cm and potted the healthy rhizomes up into individual pots. These have been stored in the greenhouse over winter, and once I started to see green growth, I cut off all the old dead leaves and began watering them. This has worked really well, and I've just started planting them back out into the Woodland Garden in full sun.

In the greenhouse, spring sown Sweet Peas are growing well, they have been pinched out to encourage strong stocky growth, and have been potted once once already.

Spring Gardening - Edibles

There's lots going on in the edibles department too.

I've learnt over the 7 or 8 years I've worked my garden that there is absolutely no point direct sowing seeds in it. Early in the year they don't get enough heat or light, and the slugs are very active. The death rate is too high. I'm far better off sowing into modules or pots, and getting things growing well in the greenhouse or on the kitchen windowsill. Then I can plant out strong healthy plants which can withstand the slugs better, plus the weather and soil will be a little warmer.

Greenhouse bench - mid-April 2017
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

I sowed my first batch of Broad Beans (var. De Monica) early last month. They've been potted on once into 15cm square pots, and yesterday I planted them out into the square foot beds. In the meantime I've also sown some The Sutton and Masterpiece Green Longpod, which are just showing their heads above soil.

I apply the same system to onion sets as well. For me it's more reliable to pop sets into modules, let them get growing and then plant them out once they have formed 10-15cm long leaves.

I'm not having much luck with peas so far, they just won't germinate, but then lots of my seeds are very old, so I may have to start again with new seed.

I bought some parsnip plug plants, which went out into the square foot beds, but I will also sow some seeds of my own.

Leeks germinated well and are already 6-7cm tall.

I have pricked out my young chilli plants and put them next to my tomato seedlings on the kitchen window sill.

I have bought some young tomato plants as well, as an insurance policy, two orange sweet pepper (capsicum) plants, and a grafted aubergine plant. I have had great success with grafted aubergines for the last two years, so it was a no-brainer when I spotted one at B&Q last night.

I've put all these beauties on the bench in the greenhouse to grow on a bit.
Hope your season is going well too, let me know in the comments xx

5 Tips for Gardening in Autumn

Here are my top 5 tips for gardening in the Autumn.

Tree Fern Dicksonia Antarctica
Photo taken by Pumpkin Becki at Chelsea Physic Gardens, London

1 Move frost tender plants

Living in the South East of England, I don't worry about lifting Dahlia tubers once the first frost has blackened them in the Autumn, I just prune off the dead top and add a good 8-10cm mulch over the soil. I do take the time to wrap tree ferns up in fleece.

Further up country you're going to want to make space in a frost-free place to keep half hardy and tender perennials, including Banana Ensete, Cannas and Fuchsia.

I would also add Banana Musa to that list, as I've never been able to keep one in the garden over-winter, even really wrapped up well. It's so disappointing to find a dead plant when you peel back the fleece in Spring.

2 Clean paths and greenhouses

Algae growth goes into overdrive in October/November while it's still mild, and mornings are misty. Paths can become treacherous to walk on, so take some time now to scrub or jet-wash paths, decks and steps.

3 Aerate Lawns

Over the summer months our lawns take a real battering. We mow them to within an inch of their lives, they get parched and then drowned, we walk on them, pets do their business on them, and in my case the guinea pigs and chickens spend large chunks of time there too. I have two patches that get particularly compacted and in the winter water sits on the surface for hours after a good downpour. Early in the Autumn the ground is usually too dry to be able to improve drainage or relieve compaction, so once there has been a bit of rain and it's soaked in it's worth going over the lawn with a large garden fork at 10-15cm intervals, inserting it down through the turf into the soil (right up to the point where the tines meet the fork's shoulder if you can) and give it a good firm wiggle back and forth to expand the holes as much as possible without actually lifting the turf. Then you can dress the holes with a free-draining mixture of topsoil and sharp sand (aka top dressing), sweeping any excess in with a beesom broom afterwards.

The grass will also appreciate having fallen leaves raked off regularly with a springtine rake, and this will also scarify (scratch) the dead grass and moss out, making the lawn healthier and less springy.

Ladybirds over-wintering in sweetcorn plants
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

4 Don't be too tidy

Wildlife needs somewhere to live over the winter and spring, so make sure you have safe places for them in your garden. Log piles, bundles of canes and hedgerows are idea for insects and birds. Leave stalks and seedheads on plants over winter, they'll look pretty touched by frost and wildlife will make good use of them too.

For even more luxury why not add bug hotels, frog boxes and hedgehog hides in secluded corners. Dragonfli sell a huge range of habitats and identification guides for wildlife, as will your local garden centre and many other online retailers. Or if you're feeling practical, why not have ago at building your own

Hedgehog hibernating

5 Always check bonfires for hedgehogs!

I can't reiterate this one too much. This innocent looking pile of leaves behind my Hebe is in fact a hedgehog nest. He's set up home to hibernate over winter, and I discovered him while I was mulching the bed under the front window of my house.

I checked he was okay, and piled some extra leaves on top.

And Special Secret Tip Number 6

Take time to enjoy the changing season and all the delights it brings, the blazing colours, delicate frost patterns on windows, wild birds visiting garden feeders, pumpkins ripening, picking apples from the tree, and pouring over seed catalogues with a cheeky hot chocolate, deciding what to grow next year.

Pumpkin Becki xx

Time for a Change - Growing my blog and changing focus

In the blog beginning

Since I started this blog, so many things have changed in my life that I realised the blog no longer fitted it very well. Things that were important to me back then have gone, some have blossomed and grown.

"Pumpkin Becki's Little Allotment and Garden" was a way of recording all my successes and failures as I took on a brand new, never-before-cultivated allotment, in the village where we were also self-building a house on a 0.1 acre of land...yes, 0.1 acres.

Well, it's now 9 years since we poured the foundations, and our self-build project has become our perfect home. We were careful to begin work on the garden as soon as the mucky building site stage was over; we had a 'dream' list of things we wanted from our garden, and I think we've managed to achieve them:

• A greenhouse - check
• A Potting Shed - check
• Chickens in a fox-proof run - check
• A working kitchen garden - check
• A hive of honey bees
• A pretty, ornamental garden - it's a constant work in progress, but who's garden isn't!

Now, that's quite a lot to expect from such a small plot of land, especially when a large chunk of that is taken over by the dwelling. The biggest boon was removing the Leylandii trees, which by doing a deal with our lovely neighbours, gained us a couple more metres on the length of the back garden and so much more light and rainfall. The garden has thrived!

Successes and Failures

The success of the garden has lead to the downfall of the allotment though. I'm sad about that, and I still haven't officially given it back to the landowner, but I know that it has served it's purpose, helping me meet people in our new village, and giving me a wonderful grounding in growing edibles when I didn't have a suitable space at home.

Once the house was complete and the garden well underway, we allowed pets back into our lives. My husband Paul had grown up with cats, but I've always had small animals, especially guinea pigs and hamsters, and they don't mix terribly well with puss cats, neither does the busy main road on the other side of our fence. We also desperately wanted to keep chickens, ever since watching the Channel 4 'Escape to River Cottage' series with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, so cats weren't really an option.

Positive changes

In the space of 9 years, we have had 7 guinea pigs, 4 hamsters, 3 chickens, some tropical fish and thousands of honey bees, and as we stand now, we have 10 pets in total.

So I started thinking about my blog, and why I struggled to keep it up to date. That's when I realised that it's because it doesn't fit our life anymore. We aren't aspiring allotmenteers now, I'm not trying to win tonnes of prizes at Garden Society shows with my flowers, veg and fruit. Huge chunks of time are now taken up caring for and spending time with our family of pets.

What do I do about that?

Well the gardening and allotmenting lessons I've learned are still very important to me, so I didn't want to end this blog, but I thought that with a slight name change, a freshening face-lift and development of subject matter, I could encourage my little blog to grow with me.

So welcome to "Pumpkin Becki - The story of our garden, built from nothing; and the ever growing collection of pets we share our lives with"

Rebecca xxx

Garden and Life Progress - Three years later - Mind the gap please!

It's almost 3 years since my last post, but so much has happened in that space of time.

Health:

I am not surprised I was feeling a little 'blah' about gardening when I wrote my last post. It turns out I was quite ill. I had been diagnosed with Endometriosis, but later I found out I also had Folate Deficiency Anaemia and Adenomyosis! Aren't I greedy! I was in constant, agonising pain, feeling dizzy and faint, and in a hormonal nightmare.

I'm 41 now, and never had any intention of having children, so after evaluating the risk factors, having a lot of discussion and a lot of soul searching I went into hospital in February this year, and had a total abdominal hysterectomy. It has taken a long time to recover, my 15cm scar can be quite sore at times and oddly numb, but I've pushed myself a little more each day, and six months later I can honestly say I have never felt so well. I don't need horribly strong painkillers or constant hot water bottles anymore. I'm on Hormone Replacement Therapy, and take a minute Folic Acid tablet to keep my Folate level up. No more pain, no more bleeding, no more fainting! Whoohoo!

Gardener's Society:

I decided to withdraw from the Gardener's Society in it's entirety. As my crafting and jewellery making flourished, and my involvement with the Society increased, my gardening time reduced and it became such a chore - that surely isn't the point of being a gardening society member. I get too involved in things too quickly and this was just the same. As a Committee member I felt obligated to go to every talk, every excursion, every meeting. It just wasn't for me. I'm delighted that my resignation had no detrimental affect on the Society and it continues without me.

The wall of green from our upstairs window

Garden:

Having repeatedly discussed the monumental Leylandii hedge, which was in our neighbour's garden, forming part of the boundary between our garden and theirs, both parties agreed that if we took responsibility for removing the trees, then we could have the land that they stood on. It was the full width of our garden, approximately 13 metres, and would add about 3 metres to the length. That may not sound much, but the trees overhung our garden so far and so densely that only half the garden would get wet when it rained. The trees constantly shed dead 'needles', turning the lovely soil mix in the raised beds into inhospitable acid, and the grass was parched and yellowing.

Leylandii half felled

Getting the trees taken down by a tree surgeon was the easy part, taking one man a week and a half. The next challenge was getting the stump and roots out, so that we could drop the soil level down by about a metre to match our finished garden level. The stumps and roots were enormous! The fibres were so dense that they seemed to be fossilised. The trees had been planted on a spoil heap containing bricks, tiles, broken asbestos sheets and goodness knows what. It was impossible to get a stump grinder up to the top of the stump, the roots would not yield to encouragement from mechanical diggers, and chainsaws were instantly blunted by the detritus embedded in the roots. The tree surgeon, a second tree surgeon and our builder Fred (from Just Patios) all scratched their heads.

We'd started, so we had to finish! In desperation we went out and bought a jet washer and a chainsaw of our own.

This remaining stump was below the original ground level

They WILL come out!!

We  washed those stumps 'til the bark peeled off, the clay soil turned to pudding and I looked like I'd been dumped head first into a First World War trench. Every now and again we'd attack the mud with spades and hand trowels. The chainsaw and reciprocating saw nearly disassembled themselves trying to cut through the soaking wet, fibrous timber. Finally, after about 2 weeks of constant battle after work and at weekends, aided during the day by our builder and his brother Mark, the first stump fell! The sense of relief was enormous. During that week the builder, spurred on by our physical endeavour, managed to remove all the stumps - it was a hard-fought victory.

Fred begins the final stage of hard landscaping

Where the Leylandii tree stumps were

Fred progressed with the rest of the landscaping very quickly. Retaining walls, fences and patio were completed at the end of the garden, where the Leylandii had once stood. Fred took a little rest from us (probably in a darkened room!).


A note about Fred - He is awesome! He is fast, thorough, is very accurate with his time estimations for jobs, arrives when he says he will and works like a demon. Fred landscaped our first garden, front and back, and then we broke it to him that we had bought a plot of land to self-build on. He demolished the old building that stood on the plot, laid out and dug all the footings, unofficially project managed, sourced tradesmen, helped us lay out the under floor heating, fitted plasterboard throughout and landscaped the garden front and back - he is a machine! I'm sad that we've run out of jobs for him to do, because he is a brilliant, trust-worthy, devilishly witty contractor, and we miss him.

Perimeter fencing and raised beds done

When Fred returned, he built me two long raised brick beds and one taller square one. We bought in cubic metre bags of 20mm gravel, sand, compost and course-grade vermiculite. Weed suppressing membrane was laid at the bottom of each bed, a layer of gravel, then sand, and then a mix of compost and vermiculite were added. The square bed became home to a small apple tree on M27 rootstock, variety 'Scrumptious' from The Potted Garden, Bearsted. We then created a hedge around it in lavender 'Munstead' from Stone Green Nurseries, Pluckley.

 The two long raised beds became Square Foot Gardening beds, with the addition of wooden grids laid on the surface. Once Fred had completed the paving between the Square Foot beds, we took the opportunity to buy a beautiful Swallow Greenhouse and potting shed.

Square Foot veg beds planted up

I purchased some excellent vegetable plug plants from Victoriana Nursery, Challock for Autumn, mostly brassicas. All performed very well, and in fact, some are still in the ground. I also purchased Asparagus plants, Strawberry plants and over-wintering peas. The peas were not successful, but I put that down to me and the manky weather. The Asparagus and Strawberries are doing superbly well. The Asparagus may not crop for a year or two, but the strawberries have been delicious, even the little mouse that lives in the tree ivy thinks so!

That just left two major life goals to achieve...bees and chickens!

Swallow Potting Shed

Swallow Greenhouse