mrsgarnettsgardendotcom

-3 Centigrade at 7am this morning when I set out for London and Comic Relief, and I had to scrape ice off the windscreen before driving to the railway station in Chesterfield.  The clocks having gone forward, there were vestiges of subtle spring dawn all across the sky.  (As my mother would say for the next ten days, “It was really 6 am”)  The sun was an immense orange ball within layers of grey mist which rolled over the peaks and set the shapes of trees into sharp relief.  One of those undeserved and unexpected visual luxuries of an early start. 

 We have some loyal birds to bring in the morning up our little lane, but one, probably a starling, has learned to do an exact imitation of our house phone ringtone. Just as you reach the car outside, you are always lured back by the ring-ring.  Quite funny, if annoying.

The effects of dry weather was evident all down the country from the train. The fields are turning green but the grass is very short and there were dozens of bored looking horses in paddocks virtually denuded of grass. I know that there has been a great shortage of hay all winter, so I really worry about the welfare of some of those animals, whose owners must be hard up and having to cut corners.

Anyway, rain is promised by Wednesday, so after today warmed up so well, and I returned from London by 6pm I took the chance and planted  two rows of seed potatoes this evening in time to take advantage of the easy digging conditions and the wet weather ahead . David pinched a few of the Maris Peer (second earlies) and Duke of York (red first earlies) for his dustbin production of show potatoes.  (Well we did win at Chatsworth horti. show last year with my few decent Charlottes and the Red Nadines!!) Last year the potatoes had poor crops but I put that partly down to lack of spring rain, so am determined not to let it happen again.    I have just planted a short row of Rocket, hoping they might produce better than Swift did in 2009, and filled out with  eight each of the other two mentioned above.

Good news! All the brassica seeds have germinated in the greenhouse, the red pak-choi were the first to pop out. This is the first time I have tried pak-choi, so I will be very interested to see how fast they grow. 

As I turned to go home, the phone call starling gave another misleading trill.  The end of a busy day!

This week has been full of warmth and sunshine, and blue skies, but everywhere still needs rain. We have had less than a centimetre all month and last year’s pattern of over-dry Springs moving into too wet summers might repeat.  Stuart said the local average for March is supposed to be 24cms!    The  dry soil on the allotment has been perfect for working, and I have been pulling the last of the weeds and sprinkling an organic version of grow-more over the soil and raking it in.   The bottom half of my first compost bin is ready for digging into trenches for beans and peas, and the comfrey corner has started to sprout encouragingly. I want to water it to encourage enough growth to harvest leaves for under the seed potatoes.  All the shallots and inions are now installed, covered with a variety of cloches, and plastic to keep the birds from tugging them out, but the root growth was so vigorous in just a few days of prep in the greenhouse that they should all be secure within a week at the most.

On Wednesday I saw three heralds of summer, one brave honey bee, one bumble-bee and a tortoiseshell butterfly flying over the plot.   I also turned over a little sleeping toad, hibernating by burying itself six inches down in the soil by the wall.   I put it back under the ground gently  and it waved its little arm and then went back into a torpor.  I shall look out for it later in the Spring. Unlike toads, our local frogs have been making merry and there is frog spawn in some of the ponds already.

This year, particularly with the bee project about to start, I have set a wide range of flower seeds. Sarah Raven writes that they prefer wide open flowers with single circles of petals to large complicated double ones, which is interesting.  The herb bed has survived in part but our bay trees have sadly died in the frosts, as have the rosemary bushes. The lavenders, on the other hand have come through intact.  I found three more self rooted gooseberry bushes while clearing up Julia’s garden, so we have eight now, on “the hill”.  They need copious amounts of water. I have tried to prune them back into the inverted cone shape that experts recommend, but they won’t do much this year. It will be fun to weigh how much fruit we get.

All is kerfuffle at Dave and Julia’s as they try to pack up, sell, and sort all their possessions. We have been given many garden blessings in the shape of lots of plant pots , trellising and a lovely old rose bush called “Shropshire Lad”, which I have to water copiously to help it get over the shock of being transplated at the wrong time of year.

Water needs are obviously a bit of a theme in this post.  But I will end with a bit of good news. The gold finches have discovered my gold-finch niger seeds at last and are tucking in.  They always go round in a little gang, and make a bright contrast to my dependency culture sparrow flock.

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In time for the Spring Equinox, that fantastic moment when the day and night hours are equal, I planted out the shallots and most of the onion sets I had prepared in  trays of compost in the greenhouse. They had all developed good fringes of roots, so I eased them gently into prepared little holes in the raked soil of the main allotment bed. This year I have two sorts of shallots, and yellow, red and white onions, more than two hundred altogether. You can’t have too many onions!  I’ve covered them with fleece and a cloche tunnel to stop the birds digging them up. My friendly little robin stood about a foot away as I did this and then flew up to the damson tree to have a burst of song.

I also sowed the cabbage, cale, cauliflowers and broccoli seeds in trays in the green house and, and gave my new gooseberry and currant bushes a few gallons of water from the water butts.  It has been very dry this month and I think this is holding back a lot of the buds.

Julia and Dave, who have run the Edensor tea rooms for the last six years had their last day of  trading today. They are moving south.  Julia has been a good mate who has supplied me with loads (literally) of good vegetable peelings and salad leftovers etc for my compost heap, and I’ll miss her. She has promised me the archways and some other garden hardware from their garden which will be great for sweet peas.   

Last night I talked to Chris on Skype in Uruguay and he put his computer up to the window so I could see his full moon. But we have a full moon here too, and so do they in California. My astronomical understanding fails to comprehend how we can all have the same view in such different places. Chris says the moon is closer to the earth tonight than it has been for fifty years. Again, this is beyond my understanding. But the moon is a wonderful thing. I just wish it wouldn’t shine so brightly through my bedroom windows all night though.  I am not at all sure if I should be planting things with roots, while it is waxing, but I think that’s the right idea.  It’s a bit woo-woo, but makes sense.

Pip had a 4th birthday party last Monday. Twelve people and six dogs came and we all had a great time. He had some very nice presents, including a tennisball monkey, which he has played with a lot. He’s never had a proper toy before. The party was only for an hour over lunch, but we had hotdogs, little pies, ginger beer, and of course birthday cake with candles. I gave the visiting dogs party bags of treats to go home with after they had played rumbustuous games of chasing in the garden.  Pip like any four year old became overexcited, but avoided bursting into tears and being sent to bed. The friends who came, mainly our neighbours and those who have dog- sat our dogs and know them, humoured me, and enjoyed themselves. Something to break up these dreary grey days of March.  But the English weather hasn’t been as bad as Minnesota and places round there. I have been told that it hasn’t risen above 40F for the last thirty days in the Mid West.   We have had a few days where the air temp has been just nudging 50F, but nothing to get excited about. It will be a week or two yet before I put out the seed potatoes.

Finally, – where are the hens laying astray?  That is the mystery David is trying to solve, as they should be producing far more eggs than they are.  But they are looking good, and the two cockerals are very handsome. All the hybrid rescue hens are having such a great time with their little social interactions all day, one doesn’t like to mention their egg laying lack of achievement, though to be honest they are much more reliable than the Welsummers who form the majority of David’s breeding flock.   There was a newspaper article about the psychology of hens this week. Certainly when released from the batteries ours developed distinct personalities very quickly. 

Tomorrow, Spring officially begins. Hooray.

It was an indulgence but I did it anyway- bought an entire allotment’s worth of seeds from Brown’s for £20, at half price it promises a year’s worth of food, filling the average allotment with wonderful plants.  I know I have some duplicates, but watch this space. The large packet is fat with promise, but it presents an even larger than usual challenge to my chronic carelessness with labelling. That should be partially solved by my father sending me printed out strip labels made with his little gadget. He’s already done it for twenty flower seed packets. Now all I have to do is to copy out 100 or more vegetable names onto an email!

The shallots and onions I planted a few days ago have already rooted. Yesterday I raked the plot to what they call a fine tilth, and have prepared the ground to receive them. We had such severe winds last Thursday that I came home to discover my plastic sheeting had been torn off and flung over the back fence.

The world is watching Japan , aghast at the scale of the disaster from the earthquake and tsunami. Little cameos of individual stories and grief reduce it to a manageable thing to absorb.  Not a happening to even try to explain away. We live on a strangely unstable and volatile planet.  Nuclear disaster seems to be the next not unlikely development. The Japanese seem so meticulous and tidy , – poor poor people faced with such filth and brokenness.

One cannot help but think of the Hardy poem, “At the breaking of nations.”  In the face of disaster all I do is to carry on harrowing clods.

March 7th

The Cost of Living  Monday March 7th 

Bright, very frosty start to the day. – I caught the 7.55 train to London from Chesterfield for a meeting , and for once had time to queue for five minutes to rescue my prebooked tickets from the machine  without hopping from one leg to another in anxiety about missing the train!  The car park charge at BR has gone up to £9 from £8!  Whatever that increase is, it’s more than the cost of inflation!

Watched the programme on I-player last night about Lenny Henry and Angela Rippon, and two other young well-knowns (whose names I forget!) staying in Kibera for a week. Kibera has the distinction of being the largest slum in Africa. This was extremely moving, despite the obvious fantasy of it all. I felt the same enormous sadness sweep over me that I had felt when I did the same in 1995, visiting Christian Aid supported projects there.  Then I almost trod on a newborn child born to a little twelve year old rape victim, lying on the floor of a 12ft cabin wrapped in a dirty tea towel .  If she has survived, that baby could well be one of the young single mothers in Kibera forced to have sex with a man for £1.50 to feed her children.  16 years seems only to have increased the size and intensity of the place.  My Car pays six times as much per day to sit in a carpark than these people earn from eight hours grinding labour or physical violation. Part 2 of this documentary is next Thursday- well worth watching.

But London was full of spring sunshine, and the Thames looked wonderful. After the meeting with Helen, in which we talked through the street children’s programmes, and settled on the dates when I am covering her sabbatical, I set off on an exploration across Spring Gardens to see if I could locate anywhere to stay.  These are on part of the site of the old Vauxhall pleasure gardens which at one time spread all down as far as Battersea.  Hemmed in by council flats it is still a nice little green space, with, oh wonders, Vauxhall City Farm at the far end.  I cannot tell you how happy that makes me feel.  Just hope they don’t get the chop under spending cuts.  I  asked  for the  angels to find me a guest house, and one came forth in the shape of a little ancient Chinese man collecting his pension from the PO/tobacconist.   “Go down Lambeth Walk, “ he said, “They’ve turned an old pub into a hostel with rooms.”

So I followed his advice and my nose, and discovered the famous Lambeth walk is now a humble little lane, inhabited with run down precinct shops and housing association homes, little village of working people only a quarter of a mile south of the river.  The London Eyebackpackers hostel  said if I booked on line I could probably have a bed for £12 a night, including breakfast and free Wi-Fi. The only trouble is that the women only room is a true black hole of Calcutta, without windows, but I could probably bunk down in a mixed ward. – like who would molest me!!   When I chatted to Chris about this later on Facebook, I asked if he thought I was too old for such things and he said, “Mum, I’m too old for such things, let alone you!”  – But £12 a night for central London and walking distance to Comic Relief- and the city farm. Hmm very tempting!

My grown up self did prevail however and  I walked over Lambeth Bridge, passing the Novatel hotel, room rate without breakfast from £150 upwards)  and found St Matthews guest house on Gt Peter St, recommended by the MU where you can have privacy and comfort in an Anglican grown-up way for £35 a night, and still walk down to the Albert Embankment in 15 minutes. Haven’t booked anything yet. If I took the cheaper option it would save me £300 over 13 weeks of one night a week.  That would keep a family of 8 for six months in Kibera, Kenya.  –So watch this space for future calculations!  Funny old world.

Filey    March  10th  am

Looking out across the ocean, sparkling in the sunlight.  The jug full of daffodils in my face, with their scent of Spring. The old catchphrase- there may not be a heaven but somewhere there is a San Francisco- equally applies to Filey.  We have had flats here for 34 years, and this one is as perfect as any, with double French windows and a little balcony from which one can peruse the passing scene and across the Bay. The dogs love it here, – out walking with David now.  South Riding has been televised in recent weeks, bit squashed into three episodes, but catches the atmosphere of this coast. I remember reading from Vera Brittain about Winifred Holtby, that she had the kindest nature imaginable, and this anecdote in particular. They could never understand why she chose what she did from any restaurant menu, until in dawned on Vera that it was always whichever meal was the cheapest! Winifred had a natural gift for living frugally and giving away any extra.  Good role model for Lent.

We had out Ash Wednesday service at Edensor yesterday followed by the traditional coffee and home-made biscuits at Gladys’s. ( Not very frugal!) Her husband was head gardener at Chatsworth, working there for fifty years, her uncle was the previous HG, also working for fifty years, and Jim Link, her first cousin took over from her husband, also working for fifty years!  In many ways I think the staff histories attached to Chatsworth are as interesting, if not more, than the Cavendish Dukes.  Gladys is the world expert on melting moments, those little NZ biscuits with oats.

In the garden I have collected seven bags of horse manure from Gloria, stored four and put two round the soft fruit. Julia gave me two big gooseberry bushes which produce large dessert gooseberries so I will transplant them over a pit of pony-poo.  I have 160 onion sets sitting in a warm bed of potting compost waiting for the earth to receive them, and have covered up as much as I could with plastic sheeting to warm the soil.  As we drove over here across the Vale of York I saw that the agribusinesses have done the same, – on a slightly larger scale. (well like x 10,000!) but I must be on the right lines.

Late again, but here in Derbyshire, we can reckon to be 4 weeks behind the south of England, so I have just completed the February jobs of sowing the sweet-peas and setting out the shallots in trays of compost. Daphne Ledward gave this tip, of helping them develop root systems before plunging their bottoms into the hard cold soil.

On Thursday, Stuart and Jan came over  to the little allotment with their shiny spades and pick-up and finished clearing the top corner and bottom wild bit under the damson trees. I still feel rather like Margot Leadbetter as Tim called me, getting other gardeners in to do my heavy work, but they are so quick and a strong team. The garden is now fit for planting all over. This was a left-over piece of work. The first day’s labour had been a Christmas present for me from David. 

  I worked through the green compost bin, turning out really good manure, but thinking about the copious amounts of egg shell  am pondering if it has the same effect as lime.- ie don’t spread it at the same time as compost or manure!  good for mineralising but maybe not to be included in general compost heaps- need to find out more on this!  Anyway I dug a deep trench , sprinkled the  compost  all along and set out the bean poles for french and runners, and borlotti beans. I also did a similar trench for broad beans and planted the bag of Hurstfields. Borlotti beans did so well for me last summer I shall certainly repeat this year, also french beans.

Jane and I met for a picnic lunch on Friday in the hut. I took orange and rum and she brought hot chocolate.  – not a bad mix!    Jane is going to start a beehive next month, and has just bought a bee suit on Ebay for £50 – half price, so she is pleased.  The hive has to be sited, and then the swarm will come around May.

I went to the doctor’s surgery this evening to collect the second half of an antibiotic prescription, and while I was waiting I looked through the books for sale in aid of Artability, a local initiative to provide art classes for the housebound etc.  As well as a packet of pills I came home with two new treasures, Laurence Hills original 1977  classic “Organic Gardening”, and ” The Secret Life of Bees”, not an apiarist’s manual, but fiction I read from beginning to end at the tea table,  as usual and mentioned above, a book I should have read five years ago.

It  is one of those classic southern novels about growing up in racist S Carolina in the early 1960s. Shades of Carson McCullers, Harper Lee,  Alice Walker etc – you can tell what books she read as a youngster- but very good nevertheless. You feel the heat, the beauty of strong black women, the awkwardness of adolescence , and the creativity of bee keeping. Honey drips in a soothing way, healing the violence of grim anger shown by the racists and the nasty father.

The book by LH makes you realise that all the big industry of grow your own organic vegs. go back to him, highly readable and scientific in a very commonsense and informative way . Inspired me to relayer my two newest compost heaps with some more poultry manure and organise a new pile of stable droppings from horsekeeping friends.

Unpleasant parents were given a great outing in this week’s series of book discussion programmes on BBC this week. Jeanette Winterson, who is one of the most intelligent women writing today, recounted a hilarious black comic tale about her notoriously monstrous adoptive mother. Uncharacteristically this lady read her a novel when she was a child, – normally it was only the Bible which was read aloud every evening.  But for some reason she read Jane Eyre to the little girl. – “But it was only years later when I read the book myself that I discovered she had rewritten the end and changed the entire outcome of the story, making Jane marry St John Rivers, and go off to India as a missionary. ” As Jeanette said, a new twist of post modern deconstruction!

The character of Mrs Winterson is so sadly true to life of the genuine fundamentalist.  never letting the facts get in the way of ABSURD BELIEF.    Old Gaddafi still holding out in Libya, claiming blithely “My people love me,” as he slaughters them by the thousand. Our neighbour, the DDD, or DDDD, (Debo, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire) was on the same programme on BBC this evening. I’d heard most of her funny stories but the one about Eveleyn Waugh sending her a completely blank book, whcih she actually produced for the camera, is still very amusing. She has a strong sense of self, and of humour.  Whenever David has visited people really ill in hospital from the estate, the only other constant visitor was usually DDDD. 

I love the British national health service with a passion.  I have a friend in California who broke her hip during a walk in the park  last month. A big friendly dog leaped up, put his paws on her shoulders and knocked her over onto a pile of concrete.  Strangers, (not the dog owner) carried her to her car, drove her home, from where she had to call an ambulance by dialling 911. She chose her own destination hospital. – the ambulance crew didn’t mind, but demanded $100 before they loaded her onto the vehicle, – in agony of course.  This can be every day life in the USA.

Julia and I had one of her exciting coffees in the little house in the allotment and I felt it should have a more radical edgey title than just our little house in the allotment. It’s a cafe philosophique, a feminist space, a free-thinking cabin – a dear little shamba hut for tea and sympathy.  Jane found a sunflower clock for £2.  I now know when it’s time to go home, but am not sure if this is altogether an asset.  Listening for the church clock once an hour had its own rather monastic and medieval charm.

Great programme with Jamie Oliver on about setting up his dream school.  I was tickled to see David Starkey installed and quickly uninstalled as history teacher. – very abusive to the kids.  When he taught me Tudor History as a supervisor at Cambridge he was equally un-charming. He had the novel idea, which he may have trimmed in recent years, that Henry V lll was in fact gay, and had a passion for the Duke of Suffolk,  Charles Brandon, which was why he was so furious he eloped with his sister Mary.  I think H8, like Gaddafi, was a homicidal maniac, probably enhanced by syphilis.

Hey ho , something elese which antibiotics can deal with today!

The air itself could feel it, there was a lightness, a new warmth and an energy in the sky. We have finally kicked February into touch and it can’t come back for a whole year, even if it wants to.  There are buds and little blossoms on the current bushes by the back door, and even the honeysuckle is sprouting.  The pots of hyacinths and tulips are growing taller by the day and the hens are laying, the sparrows are starting to build nests. I feel renewed. 

I met Jane on the allotment. I have transferred the strawberries from my first bed to join the others from last year which the birds ate altogether at the bottom. I can cover these all up hopefully. I dug over the strawberry bed 1 and pulled out the last of the pernicious buttercups from the bed.  Then we had a little bonfire of the old stalks and stems and debris from the angelica and lovage plants and the thorns from the berry bushes,.

I had spent the morning with my mother as we are going to sell her house and had the agent and the energy efficiency inspector in. A buzzard was circling slowly over the town, rising higher and higher until it disappeared into the blue. Mum, unfortunately can no longer look upwards, so missed this glorious simple pleasure.

I have started to set sweetpea seeds, late this year, but experimenting. Repotted a lot of greenhouse little pansies etc which have survived the winter but not grown much. I popped next door to deliver a misplaced piece of post and could see the DDD’s garden was full of really well grown wall flowers and sweet little iris plants. Her gardeners do everything so beautifully. 

Julia gave me some useful packets of seeds, including some exhibition peas and a big bag of daffs she had not yet planted. I have planted a few in the allotment in the middle of the herb bed, It will be a miracle if they get going this year but you never know.

You see, this post is actually mainly about gardening!

Last night I watched Michael Morpungo give the Dimbleby lecture, a passionate, romatic man talking very eloquently about the fate of children he had encountered across the world, shot as target practice as they tried to collect building debris near the Great Wall of Palestine, banged up in detention centres, restricted by the ever tightening neurosis of western notions of safety and attainment from enjoying a real childhood, etc.  So many images of little children came through my mind as I followed his slightly rambling but goodhearted call to see children as our seed corn. – the little boy cleaning shoes in La Paz for a farthing, the child begging my cold chips off a discarded lunch plate, the little baby I nearly trod on once in a Nairobi slum who had just been born to the 12 year old raped daughter of a widow, trying to raise children in a tiny shack. each enough to set heaven in a rage, as he said. – which is why I have been encouraged by the campaign by the Pachamama Foundation for Fouryears Go. a great little video promotion produced it seems by a “seen the light” big advertising agency.   They want to raise the notion that we realistically have four years to tilt the world in a new better way, a way more worthy of human hearts, minds and history. Chase up Lynne Twist on You Tube for more details – great name for a great person!

Still not allowed out, and voiceless!  I have just read, in line with my five year delay on catching up with stuff, “A short History of tractors in Ukrainian” (??). Here pain and pleasure are combined in this brilliant novel, characters ringing loud and true off the page, that enhanced realism which has touches of South American craziness in it, but also speaks clearly of the chaotic pain of 20th century eastern Europe. Reminded me of “The Long Way Home.”, by Rose Tremayne, but full of natural joy as well.

 In the last week I have also read two books by Dervla Murphy on Siberian travels, and she too, though not with the irony of the tractors book, intersperses narrative with very dense analysis of recent Russian/Ukraine etc. history.  Terrible times, like people’s school days, promote larger than life characters and stories. These often turn out to be quite true though. Reality all around us is almost four dimensional, rather than three. The fourth diminsion is enhanced reality caused by pain.

My big enthusiasm at the moment, which has great synergy with Michael Morpungo is KIDSLIBS Trust, www.kidslibstrust a kenya initiative through an inspired children’s librarian from the UK to set up community owned and managed libraries which act as a catylist for new information, empowerment and learning spaces for children and their accompanying adults. amazing what a success the seven existing libraries have been, but KLT managing on half a wing, – well a few feathers really, and a bit of a prayer.Check them out!

The garden – I should tell you about, is mainly my “little allotment”, shared with the beautiful and kind Jane, who shares the secret garden with me in a corner of our village here on the great Chatsworth Estate, high in the Derbyshire Peak District.  I will tell you more later, and take you there. 

One hidden gem is KUSC which broadcasts classical music all day with no adverts! – They are based at the University of Southern California, five thousand miles from me, but I listen every day.  They are having a supporter drive at the moment. How do I support from the UK?  www.kusc.org

bye for now,

Susanne