How Does Your Garden Grow... Suggestions Please?

As the Spring heralds new life, a new something seems to appear every day in Ash Cottage's garden.  On Thursday I thought I would photograph the emerging surprises that a new garden brings, for Mammasaurus' How Does Your Garden Grow linky.  I'm not sure what many of these plants are, so, if you know please let me in on the secret.   Above is some type of clematis?

I brought cuttings from our old garden, a lot of which didn't survive the transportation and neglect over the winter.  One thing that did was Nana's peony, I'm discovering that the previous owners of Ash Cottage also liked peonies.  The picture on the left is a quite healthy looking specimen in a overgrown bed in the centre of the garden and I think the picture on the right is another one, there are at least 2 more.

When we moved into Ash Cottage the plan for the garden was to clear, sort out the veggie patch, chickens and trees, use up old seeds and then not buy or plant any new ones.  To get ready to start the garden year proper in the Autumn.  This isn't quite what's happened.  I've now got a hexagonal greenhouse full of tomato seedlings, with nowhere to put them.  

We've been here since September and while I know we have a lot of stinging nettles, ivy, dandelion and other weeds, I am now discovering some hidden gems too.  Hidden amongst the comfrey(?) that is rampant all over the western boarder of the garden is the shy head of a frittilaria(?)

I think I almost dug this beautiful flower up when feeding, weeding and re-seeding the lawn.   It is a reminder to go a bit slower in my attempts to clear and tidy the garden as I don't yet know what else may be hidden.

In the same bed is the plant below, which I think is a euphorbia?

I think this might be a euphorbia too?  The ants seem to like it.

I've no idea what these plants are:

Mystery Plant One

Mystery Plant Two

The little pink flower is on a shrub, whilst the other comes straight out of the ground on a single stem.

I'm on safer ground with the picture below.  It's blossom from a fruit tree.  Some kind of plum, damson or greengage maybe?  I've got to wait until late summer when the fruit has set to be sure which one, but from the shrivelled desiccated old fruits still hanging on the tree from last year, I think it is something of that kind.

And finally - Ta Da! - my apple trees are putting out green buds and leaves.

James Grieves April 2015

I'm relieved, after all my faffing around (details here), getting them into the ground I wasn't sure they were alive, that I hadn't just spent a lot of time planting sticks.  James Grieves is doing the best, then Grenadier and then Blenheim Orange, but all have green shoots.  Phew - Proud Mama!

Speaking of which, finally, finally, here are my girls, out in the garden for the first time this/last week.  Haven't they grown.

A is for Apple

In our garden in North London, when I was a child, we had an apple tree.  Its' apples were tastier than any from a store, climbing it was an adventure and reading a book in it's dappled shade a delight.   I knew when we bought Ash Cottage that we would plant apple trees.  I dream of a wild flower meadow with my children climbing in the branches of the trees to sneak early apples from their boughs.  My chickens perched in the low branches.  Bee Hives below, with the bees foraging among the wild flowers.

We have cut down quite a few trees at Ash Cottage in the last few months and I am a little embarrassed by this.  Not to mention concerned that all the birds that I have seen in the garden will not return.  Along with the bird feeders and bird houses now hanging from the remaining trees, I need to do a bit of tree planting.

However, apple trees are not quite as simple to cultivate as I at first thought.  There are pollination groups and root stock to consider, bare root or pot grown saplings to choose from.  Culinary, dessert, cider or dual purpose varieties, early or late fruiting, tree, bush or pollarding to consider.  Position and situation of the orchard to plan.  I don't remember my parents doing anything but picking apples from the apple tree in our garden.  But then it was an established tree by the time we moved in.

So, I've been reading up, and did some research online, and have chosen a group of three heritage trees;
Grenadier
James Grieves
& Blenheim Orange.

The latter was the first to be chosen;

"Blenheim Orange is a large classic English dual-purpose apple, useful for dessert and culinary purposes. It has the characteristic orange flush which is often associated with English apples".   

This last line in the description called to mind the apple tree in my childhood garden, so it was my first choice.  Blenheim Orange is a triploid, this means it needs two other trees to cross pollinate it.
This then dictates the other trees are from within it's pollination group, group 3, or adjacent groups.  I chose another dual purpose apple - James Grieves,

"...raised in Scotland at the end of the 19th century, the height of the Victorian period of apple development in the UK. It is a very juicy apple, producing plenty of sharp-tasting apple juice."

James Grieve is an excellent pollinator for many other apple varieties and is a variety that matures mid-season, while Blenheim Orange is a late variety.  

My final choice was Grenadier, an early season cooking apple, that is apparently "fool-proof" to grow.  I ordered bare root trees.  These are young trees that are dug up whilst the tree is dormant for winter. They can usually be ordered between November and March and need to be in the ground by the end of this month, before the tree comes out of it's dormant period.

They were delivered last Monday by courier, in a box, quite large, bare, twigs with a bit of netting on the bottom.  As they are dormant, they look, well, to be honest, quite dead.  It feels like we have just spent a lot of time planting dead bits of twig in the ground and I keep going out there and gazing at them in the hope of seeing something that looks a bit more alive.  I made the classic error, that I was warned against in my reading, of not preparing the holes before the trees arrived and as my last post details they were delayed going into the ground by a long deeply sunk metal post, or 3.

I ordered the trees on M26 rootstock.  This is a semi-dwarf variety.  Rootstock, and I think I may be becoming an apple tree nerd here, I found fascinating.  Apples trees are made up of 2 parts, the largest part being the scion, which is the fruiting tree of the variety you have chosen, and it's rootstock, which in apple trees is usually another apple tree.  The scion is grafted onto the rootstock primarily to control the size of fruit trees, but also allow trees to grow in local environmental conditions and may provide some disease resistance.   However it is not a straight forward as root-stock = tree size, local conditions, pruning and species of tree all play a part.

I was going for a tree, but not too massive so M26 rootstock is bigger than M9 (which is used in commercial orchards) but smaller than M111.  As apple trees are probably the first trees humans ever intentionally grew for fruit, and have been cultivated for thousands of years in Asia and Europe, we've spent a lot of time messing with them, grafting them onto this, that and the other.

So I know that my M26 rootstock is derived from the M9 (or MIX) rootstock produced in 1917 by the East Malling Research Station in Kent (still up and running; http://www.emr.ac.uk/).  M9 is derived from the Paradise rootstock "Jaune de Metz".  Paradise was the most widely used rootstock in the 19th Century with a wide variety of vigours and no standardisation, until the East Malling Research Station began classifying rootstock and developing new ones for specific purposes in 1912.

I'm sorry, I told you I've become a rootstock nerd.  Anyway I found the whole thing fascinating and it has made me want to plant a mixed fruit orchard.  We have about 6 fruit trees already in the garden; 3 greengage, and 3 damson or plum trees, we think.  There is also a little line of sloe bushes at the end of the garden.  I would like a Quince tree.  Raspberries, gooseberries, black currants and rhubarb are going over in the veggie patch.  And Mum has given me a fig tree, but I think I am going to return that to a plant pot over by the house as it is more sheltered.


READING:

River Cottage Handbook No.9 - Fruit by Mark Diacono
Fork to Fork - Monty & Sarah Don

LINKS:
When I was looking to purchase trees I found both the following nurseries' really helpful and informative both online and in person on the phone.  I only bought from one, but it simply came down to what stock they had available as I was trying to purchase the bare root trees late.

http://www.blackmoor.co.uk/

http://www.orangepippintrees.co.uk/

Joining in with Annie at Mammasaurus for "How Does Your Garden Grow" again this week.

The Garden at Ash Cottage - An Introduction

The mild weather that we had before Christmas, along with keeping the ladybirds out and active, allowed us to get a really good start on the garden.  One of the main attractions of our new home is the garden at Ash Cottage.  It is about an acre in size, with several out-buildings and a 60ft chicken run, loads of BIG trees and incredibly over-grown.  The first thing we had to do when we got in was cut everything back, so that we could see what we have.

What we have are a lot of very large trees that make the house and garden dark and prevent other plants from growing, but with views and hints of how beautiful it could all look once we get to work on it.

So, we went for it with the trees, all the leylandii except 1 were cut down; that's 8 trees (1 felled by the other Mrs Fox & I); plus an 11ft hedge of 7 more leylandii cut down by Neil with his trusty chainsaw; plus the 3 or 4 trees cut down by the electricity board (at our behest) to make safe the power-line that runs across the garden.

Most of the trees had to be climbed to be felled, there was not enough space to allow any of them to go down without them falling on a house, out-building, chicken run, caravan or other trees.  The tree surgeons didn't think any of the trees had been touched for a minimum of 20 years.  We still have tonnes of dead wood that needs to be cut out of the remaining trees to make them healthier and safer.

After all the cutting down we've had huge bonfires to get rid of all of the wood and leaves, that are of little use in wood burners due to all of the oils in their timber.  We are still working our way through this wood, huge long piles of tree limbs have been; trampolines, pirate ships, castles and forests for the children to play in and on for the last 3 months.  They will be sad to see it finally all gone, and we have re-learnt that primeval enjoyment of just gazing at a big bonfire, poking it and stoking it and listening to it crackle and flame.

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Despite all our felling we still have plenty of mature trees in the garden, including a large beech and sycamore tree that are over 100 years each, 4 more young sycamore, 5 silver birch, a willow, field maple, a cherry tree and several damson and greengage trees, 3 more substantial evergreens still standing, numerous hawthorn and elder, and I'm not even mentioning the various large shrubs.

Along with clearing the trees here has also been a vast amount of rubbish; old swings, barbed wire, garden machinery, chairs, wood, oil drums, cabling, concrete, glass, rubble, an old MG engine buried in the compost.  The compost heap itself was about the size of a small urban garden and needed to be moved as it was rotting the neighbours fence it had been leaning against.

All this space in the garden allows us to say "Goodbye" to our allotment (sad day though it was) and incorporate the veg patch into our garden.   Here's the final destination of that compost heap; but it's back breaking work.

And it is the veggie garden that has absorbed most of my attention this week.  At one side of the garden is a hexagonal greenhouse that I have been renovating the last few days, clearing of ivy, cleaning, re-hanging shelves and re-making benches.  Sadly neglected like the rest of the house and garden, it is being returned to it's intended use and now is home to two trays of tomato seeds.

And to make up for my decimation of bird habitat, we have put out feeders and bought nest boxes to go up in the remaining trees.  Yesterday I ordered 3 apple trees and we've a walnut tree waiting to go into the ground too.

Planning the Veggie Garden

I've been collecting lots of inspiration for the veggie garden at Ash Cottage.  Along with a pinterest board bursting with beautiful pictures to inspire, I'm enjoying all the graphics I'm finding.

The above is taken from a US government information brochure explaining how to plant vegetable plots to feed a typical family.  These Victory Gardens were both a practical and moral boosting effort encouraged by all the Allies to attain food security during WWII.

http://modernfarmer.com/2013/04/how-to-turn-your-backyard-into-a-four-season-farm/

A more modern graphical take on the same concept is this crop rotation info-graphic on the Modern Farmer website.