In your FACE bad summer!

Think you can beat us down with your rain and your cloud and your rain and your total lack of anything resembling summer? do you??

Well you can't, and despite it being THE WORST SUMMER EVER ON RECORD IN THE HISTORY OF EVERYTHING here's some ripe (YES RIPE) tomatoes grown OUTSIDE to prove it.

Sorry about the caps. I'm a bit excited.

Tiger Tiger burning bright

I saw this lovely fella tonight on my nightly check of the garden having a little drink from our Joe Pye Weed. It was so spectacular I got a bit obsessed trying to work out what it was. It  had the most gorgeous ochre colouring under it's wings, and when it opened it's wings out fully it looked more like a butterfly.

 

Eventually I think I found it. It looks like a Jersey Tiger Moth. It's a 'scarce' moth apparently - it only lives in the South West and weirdly here in London too.

I put a lot of effort trying to  grow plants that insects like, and I love it when it pays off!

Fence part 2

I know that you've all been on tenterhooks to find out how the fence turned out. Well wait no more.

We painted it with a dark grey decking paint, then ran wires across from the top of the fence to the house in a sort of loose canopy or pergola, using sailing turnbuckles to tighten the wire. Honeysuckle, and kiwi should eventually scramble over it.

The wiring took a few hours but couldn't have been easier.

Well it's been a while since I last updated this - I've had my hands full finishing a TV project. But now I'm back - with a garden that, despite this weird summer is actually not looking that bad.

More to come, but for the moment here's a picture of something I really didn't expect to find in a London garden with no water anywhere near it. Isn't he a stunner?

Cliveden House

Last weekend I visited Cliveden House - a National Trust property with a very racy history. Built in 1666 by the Duke of Buckingham as a hunting lodge, it ended up housing his mistress, and many years later played a key role in the very British sixties scandal the Profumo Affair.

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But I wasn't interested in any of that - I was interested in the gardens. They are enormous, and even on a long walk I wasn't able to see them all. The ultra formal parterre (above) was very impressive, but not really my cup of tea. There was lots more to see though; I watched a heron gulp a large carp down in one go in the middle of the Japanese water gardens (no photo sadly - I was too busy watching); their herbaceous borders are massive, and doubtless will be great later in the year, but it was their secret garden that really appealed to me. An enclosed area with statues, and very modern planting - swathes of grasses, poppies, bronze fennel and other perennials that look good now, but will look even better later in the year.

I did come away feeling thankful that I don't have to look after that much lawn though.

Pictures below the break!

An accidental extra bed

View from above showing the weird irregularly shaped patch of lawn on the top right.

I got a bit carried away with this. I wanted to move some of our perennials around - mostly to give one of my favourite plants - Selinum Wallichianum - a better chance of survival than in a desert-dry border underneath our silver birches. But before I knew it I'd run out of space. So on the spur of the moment I decided to add another flower bed, and turn our patch of lawn on the right into more of a circle. 

The circle looks a bit more balanced I think, and of course it give us even more room for plants. For the moment I've filled it with some drought tolerant Sedums, loads of annual seeds (Californian Poppies, normal poppies, and Ammi Majus) and and the giant Echinops Sphaerocephalus, as well as a globe artichoke. The planting will change, but it's a start, and echoes some of the other plantings in the garden.

Give me a few more years and the lawn will totally disappear. And good riddance to it. I hate mowing anyway.

The new border is on the left, and another enlarged section is on the right making the lawn more circular.

Beautiful Brassicas

Cabbages: not just good for greens.

For two years in a row now we've left our overwintered cabbages (Cavolo Nero since you ask) to shoot and flower in the spring. What once were humble greens throw up these huge plumes of bright yellow flowers, and when the sun's out they absolutely hum with bees.

Foxy friends

Fox fur - perfect camouflage for a patch of strawberries... if they're ripe.

This handsome guy is in our garden almost every day. Sometimes he curls up in the herb bed, but this is his favourite spot - in the strawberry patch. We've grown very fond of him, but at some point we'll have to try and persuade him to sleep somewhere else. He leaves behind a distinct smell, and I don't really fancy fox flavoured strawberries.

And off he goes...

I'm going to send my sighting in to Channel 4's new Foxes Live project (and not just because the company I work for are making the series - I'd love to know more about what our urban foxes get up to).

A new fence - before and after

Last year we did a lot of work to the inside of our little council flat, and having done that, we're finally starting to do a bit more in the garden. First up a brand new fence/screen for our little area of decking.

This is what it looked like originally:

The Old Fence. Scruffy.

I'd cobbled it together from old scraps of wood and a scaffolding pole. It had it's charm, but the honeysuckle was getting way too big for it, and it didn't really give us any privacy from the block of flats behind us.

So we bought three sturdy 2x3 inch wood poles, and sunk them into the ground, using postcrete at the bottom to give them more stability. I'd never used postcrete before, but it seemed pretty simple - just pour it in the hole the pole sits in and add water. The first pole is a little wobbly - but the other two are steady as a rock. I only put them down about a foot, as I didn't want to disturb the border behind them too much.

Old fence still there, posts concreted in position.

Next I cut to length lots of very rough 2x1 inch strips, and screwed them into the posts on either side alternately. I left them slightly more than 2 inches apart so you can see a bit through the screen. This is the first side going up:

Rear side on - with the old fence still in place.

And then the rear side, and a beam at the top:

The (nearly) finished fence. The old honeysuckle is still there - just draped on the border in front.

The real labour of love was cutting off the honeysuckle from the old screen. I was all for hacking it to the ground, but the other gardener has a lot more patience than me, so it survived.

Now all we have to do is paint the whole thing with protective wood stain to protect the wood, and then add wires across from the top to the side of the house to make a sort of pergola. It was pretty easy to put up - but took me three weekends in total.

From the other side it looks enormous. Means we're totally hidden though now - which is exactly what we wanted.

2011 Roundup

Before we get too far into 2012 I thought I'd share last season's veg-growing successes and failures in one giant wordy post. 

On the whole the summer crops weren't a huge success, but we did better at planting winter crops this year, and made better use of our confined space by making sure as soon as one crop finished, we put another one in its place. It wasn't all roses though...