Some images from Easter spent working the Monster in the Corner…
Author: Dirtdigger
Not afraid to get my hands dirty...
The Shallot cloche hotel… picture courtesy of Janette
As any truly experienced gardener may tell you, the gardening year officially begins on 1st January and officially ends on 31st December. There is always something to do in the garden or on the allotment, regardless of the day, week, month or season.
The days and weeks of early spring are the heart and hub of all frenetic gardening and allotment activity. It is the time of year when the vast bulk of the allotment’s groundwork and preparation is established. All the crop planting and rotation schemes are sketched out; the early seeds are sown; the flower beds and vegetable drills are prepared; the new stock is bought, as are the stakes, supports, nettings and just about anything else which didn’t makes it through the winter months or has become so tatty and time worn as to need replacement anyway. The summer days and months are filled with the aftercare and attention necessary to the spring’s efforts with day after day of weeding and watering and hoeing, thinning out and filling gaps, dead-heading and truss-nipping and pest controlling and, if you’re lucky, hopefully enjoying the sun on your back and breeze on your face while you reap the early benefits of your effort: the strawberries, the early beetroots, the summer turnips, the goose-gob jam making to stave-off potential gluts, the lettuce leaves and the early cabbages with some Sweet Willies, early Zinnias and Lupins to add a splash of early colour to the plot and vase; and not forgetting the daily routines of watering and ventilating, and ventilating and watering in the polytunnel or glasshouse.
The autumn days are busy days, each one filled with its own fruitful promise, and each day seeming to add something new to the larder; all the onions and garlic need to be dug and cured; the tomatoes to be ripened quickly, the pumpkins needing to be turned and the late courgettes to be thinned, with the excess beets to be preserved and the winter kale and cabbages to be netted; the Swedes and Parsnips can be tested and the chutney is to be mixed as the days draw-in and the year’s span foreshortens and if you are fortunate enough to have them perhaps some apples and pears! Autumn is the time of year when every thing in the garden and on the allotment seems to come together and all the effort expended finally pays a dividend; food aplenty and a glorious show of rudbeckias, cosmos, sedums, dahlias and that every allotment must have, towering sunflowers.
Winter arrives and (contrary to misconception) there is still just as much as ever to do on the allotment and in the garden; crops planned to be left subterranean will need plenty of care if they are to survive the deteriorating days; the autumn remnants will need tidying as a matter of urgency to prevent diseases from taking hold in the spring; growing areas and raised beds need to be cleared and more and most importantly have plenty of organic matter added to them or laid on as a mulch, and all beds where practical should be covered with a heavy duty tarpaulin or plastic to prevent too much leach and damage to the soil over the winter months.
Of course every year there is that period, right in the depths of mid winter when the weather, the festivities or the gardener’s bio dynamic says “not today”, and it is easier to remain indoors than to have to venture out into the harsh elements. The trick here is to view this as a passive gardening activity, the gardener actively deciding to allow the garden to rest and the allotment to sleep while nature performs its secret winter ministry. Such days must also be considered gardening days, winter days when you learn to reflect on the garden while happy to indulge the senses in the tastes and scents of the hoarded harvest; days when you are content to simply think about gardening and being thankful for the soil’s bounty; days when the seed of re-imagining is sown in your thinking; days of thought filled germinations which help recharge the spirit before you once more set out to fulfil all the promises of the garden in the New Year.
There are as many differing and diverging ideas on what a garden is and how to garden as there are gardeners who garden, but the one thing they’ll agree on is that the summer’s show and the autumn’s harvest are only ever made possible by the grubbing of hands. With the clocks going forward this weekend the final nail in hammered into the box of winter of 2015-2016.
It’s time to get a move-on: it’s time to take summer out of the packet and sow it in the pots, and it’s time to plant the harvest in the gardens and the plots…
1st ever International Greenfingers Day Saturday 2nd April…
for more information click link below…
https://monsterinthecorner.com/2016/03/16/international-greenfingers-day/
Once again Easter is come upon us. St. Bridget, St. David and St. Patrick have been observed; the daffodils that brightened the early grey February and March days are just about hanging onto bloom; the newborn lambs are acclimatising to life on open pastures, the equinox has come and gone, this coming weekend will see the end of winter light saving with the clocks springing forward by an hour, and though still a long way off as yet British Summer Time (and thus by dint of proximity and associate extension Irish Summer Time) officially begins!
With March’s arrival came a much needed respite from what is officially the wettest winter on record, and although the days have been cooler than average for the time of year, at least that slow moving blocking anticyclone situated over the North Sea for the last 2 weeks has allowed the saturated ground to dry out a good deal. The lower than average temperatures will have slowed if not completely stopped all the early growth, but, with a forecasted return to Atlantic weather patterns from mid-week, there should be a pick up by this weekend and early days of next week.
Of course, the Easter holiday period also heralds the 1st big bonanza of the year for the gardening fraternity with all the major DIY stores and garden centres making their first big push for your attention and potential future custom throughout the coming year. Everything from wheelbarrows to hand trowels and dibbers, Patio tables to BBQ’s, decking, lighting, sheds and paving will be on offer; whole sections with the latest range of gardening power tools to help you to mow and to strim, to rotovate and propagate and power-wash every square inch of your garden, no matter what its size. There will also be a dazzling array of seed packets to peruse and confuse and even still (at this late stage) some summer flowering bulbs which failed to shift over the late winter and will now be cast as the loss leaders, and may only prove worthy of the outlay so long as you get them in the ground before the weekend is out. There will be pots and trays and labels and waterproof pens; kneeling pads and micro-mesh, compost bins and water butts; pond kits, tap kits, hose kits, polytunnel kits, everything to help tie in your roses, tie up your peas and tidy up your act as a gardener.
This Easter weekend will also see the year’s first big displays of potted bedding plants. Of course, with Easter this year being celebrated extremely early in late March (from a gardening perspective that is) a lot of greenstock is already on display and a cursory glance should alert you that a lot of what will be on offer will not have been adequately hardened off.
Worth remembering is, that these big retailers are solely interested in the depth of your pocket and their ability to have you constantly dip into it at their bequest. From the gardener’s viewpoint you must not forget that if you buy early, plant later…at least a week or two later
Chase the bargain by all means; but, if you rush directly from the checkout to the chilly March soil, you will simply be sowing your good money to go bad…
Buy a bargain, sow on time and cultivate it well and bully to the gardener;
buy a bargain, then have to buy the same next month, and the month after that…and …bully to the big boys…
Extremely early is late March! Be thankful and Joyous for what Easter brings. Eat plenty of chocolate if you wish… but, easy as you go when in late March soil you sow!
Wednesday 23rd March is International Meteorological Day, and not forgetting that
Saturday 2nd April is International Greenfingers Day,
https://monsterinthecorner.com/2016/03/16/international-greenfingers-day/
There are many who consider gardening The Gentle Pastime:
a peaceful, unflustered and unhurried personal interaction between man/woman and nature as the year spins its course through the seasons. Pottering about the garden shed, tidying up the spring and summer bedding, weeding herbaceous borders, pruning clematises roses and wisteria, sowing pots of salad leaves and radishes and looking forward to a small bounty from the strawberry plants strategically trailing from ideally positioned wicker baskets bought in Woodies or B&Q at Easter time.
And then there’s the gentle rhythmic see-sawing of push cylinder lawnmowers, the clippity clip snippity snip of the shears, and the waft of fresh cut grass! And if the summer really proves itself, who knows, perhaps the odd glass of slightly chilled prosecco with added splash of elderflower cordial ál fresco whilst idly leafing the Collin’s coffee table Guide to Garden Flora of the British Isles and soaking up the heady scent of night-stock and jasmine, with the promise of home-grown tomatoes from the growbags on the patio should the weather hold through till September.
Gardening is the gentle art, endless with possibilities and countless capabilities. Harmonious and therapeutic gardening is the slightly dirty activity that helps to cultivate the soul. Hopeful and optimistic and limited only by the gardener’s imagination it is a moderate-intensity exercise with the added benefits of fresh air; a stress buster and improver of mental health and (if you happen to grow your own vegetables) your garden can be a source of organically grown pesticide free and no air-miles produce, and all by means of your own effort.
Then of course, there’s the Allotment Garden, where everything aforesaid can be composted immediately and where every single gardening, landscaping and urban farming concept is quite conspicuously and unceremoniously turned on its head.
If gardeners be considered swans, then allotmenteers be the walking waddling swimming quacking blood-thirsty soul-sucking teradactyducktils who’ll readily declare war on their fellow plot holders based on nothing more than a Swiss chard whim or a dislike for the neighbours blue delphiniums, and who all too easily will resort to terror tactics if it is thought someone else’s cabbages and beetroots are performing better than their own. Not all allotmenteers are of this genus, but every plot holder will instantly recognise the classification.
If gardening be the gentle pastime, then allotmenteering is the disreputable underbelly of the gardening world. A great deal of the time allotment sites are promoted as council or civic projects with the misleading façade of a community development initiative, but this all too often turns out to be dubious pitch, and all too often the downright dirty and two-faced side of the horticultural hobby world is easily exposed on the allotment site.
The modern allotment site is where yummy mummy’s get to meet and greet the retired retiring policeman, and mild mannered council workers get to rub shoulders with foreign bank clerks; where lifelong bus driver meets chartered physiotherapist or architect; where Tesco meets Lidl meets Aldi meets Facebook meets Ryan Air, and where everyone is an expert in their own field, but no-one has a clue what to do on their little plot. It’s where throngs of disparate strangers with too much time on their hands and absolutely no ideas about gardening are suddenly thrust into the same demarcated site and expected to…well…garden? It’s boom time for new tool sales in the big outlet stores. And it’s all shiny new wheelbarrows, and Cath Kidston co-ordinated wellies and gloves, it’s hand forged forks and stainless steel dibbers, metric tonne cubic meter bags of compost and soil improver; and Fothergill’s, and Thompson’s and Morgan, and Sutton’s and Mr Middleton’s, and before a single sod is turned it certainly looks the part…Or so it is thought.
Of course, there are those with all the gardening ability of a Terrestrial Gastropod Mollusc who’ll quickly lose interest in the getting the hands dirty aspect of allotment life, but who, in their desire to remain connected with all things allotmenty, will content themselves with the plotted and potted politics of the allotment garden and are slowly and inexorably drawn to life on the allotment site steering committee. And just when you thought life on a city council allotment site couldn’t deteriorate much more, you suddenly learn you have to contend with the small-minded group think willing to invest hundreds of €’s or £’s in printing laminated corrie-board rules on composting whilst forgetting that rocks and stones don’t compost too easily , or who’ll spend months on end devising duty rosters and grass cutting schedules for other plot holders to help maintain council communal areas, or or who send endless group texts advertising pub quizzes and fundraisers to help generate the funds they say are needed to develop future projects and yet somehow fail to invest more than €10.00 in actual green-stock, and this only on seed being sold cheaply in the early season sales mainly because it is past its sow by date…
So, you search for a hat to take off, and you bite your tongue, you watch as all the flower beds are zapped with round-up and replaced with 3rd rate grass seed, and you just wait…
and you bite down, hard. You don’t throw your hat at it yet, but, you find it difficult not to lose the head and to help you hold your tongue you bite down hard…
Monster In The Corner... 