A look around the garden

Things are deceptively quiet in the garden at this time of year.
The cold weather has driven most players underground or indoors.

Most notably, the slugs have quit the field.
If you count the pigs as contributors to a future garden site - and I do - then they are probably the most active workers. Every day they are out there, picking through mud and bare grass. At feeding time, ten to fifteen small birds descend to share the feast, and contribute their mite to fertilizing the future garden.


This is the time of the year when the seed catalogue fiends are most active in their lair – only coming out to commit long lists of gardening catalogue numbers to the postal service.
Those numbers grow in the fiend's imagination...mainly just before drifting off to sleep...into green groves and riots of colours.
The fiends live on very little real food at this time of year. Maybe a little Christmas chocolate or a biscuit or three. Mostly, though, they receive their sustenance from imaginings of a future bounty.
Pumpkins and courgettes, fat with homemade compost. Seven different varieties of tomatoes. Peas and beans climbing to improbable heights in the polytunnel. Pickling cucumbers! Achocha and Amaranth and Mizuba and Kale. Brussels Sprouts and Cauliflower with never a spot or a caterpillar.
For spice, the whole clan of the herbs is a given, occupying all empty space between the veggies. But for a more ethereal flavour, try a bit of this Cornflower blue. Or Gazania red. Or Poppy plum purple.
And for a full burst of sunlight flavour, sample this melon, this strawberry, this grape!

...Meanwhile, back in the real world, I contemplate last years' survivors, here in the bog.
Don't ask me what I did last spring, but it was not sowing seeds.
Some time in early summer, I got around to mounding up some of the peat/dung slurry the pigs had created. As an experiment, I sowed some acid soil tolerant plants into drills which I had filled with a little store-bought compost. There are some few survivors from that experiment, hanging on, even now, but I will give that one a few more years before I report back on what works, and what doesn't.
These plants got an extremely bad start, as they were sowed late, into undecomposed peat soil, just before the only prolonged spell of hot weather we had all summer. What germinated, got attacked by a huge army of slugs later on.
...What NOT to do...

I remember now, I HAD prepared a large bed of bog soil, mixed with some gravelly stuff, in late winter, and sown it with onion sets in spring. They dissapeared, also beaten by the wetness/unpreparedness of the ground, and the slugs, maybe.
Slugs were definitely to blame for the Jerusalem Artichokes' near extermination. These are extremely vigourous tubers, and they sent out sprout after sprout, only to have that eaten off by the slugs, which often even burrowed down to the tubers to eat them hollow.

I have no doubt that I will eventually grow both onions and Jerusalem Artichokes successfully. The way they perished last year is a good example of how neccessary it is to give plants a good start. They need good soil conditions and reasonable weather to get strong enough to defend themselves, until they get big enough to be fairly unnassailable.
When you think about it, no one ever complains of a full-grown tomatoe plant dying for want of water (the roots will have gone deep enough into the ground to find it), or a whole courgette plant being devoured by slugs (individual leaves eaten of such a vigourous plant will not matter).

Now to the only success story of the year: Young trees, which I bought last winter, and didn't have time to plant out in permanent positions, survived quite well, and can look forward to better treatment this coming year.
I had made a bed out of fairly pure peat. The sods were not even that well broken up, probably with air pockets between them in places. Either side of the bed was a drain, so at least things didn't get waterlogged.
Thus I encountered what is probably going to be the most persistent weed on this type of land: Rushes. After one summer season the whole bed, in between the trees, is covered with them.
Rushes are easy to weed out when young, but nearly impossible to get rid off when they have formed established clumps. I have experience whith rushes growing in grassland. I cut them again and again with a strimmer, to little effect. Young rushes will be controlled by grazing animals, but established clumps are not palatable to them, and will grow undisturbed, competing with the grass.
A good use of rushes is to cut them and use them as mulch, or as a cover of cardboard mulch. They are light and provide air spaces, so that worms can work on the soil surface undisturbed.

But the trees did ok, and that can all that can be said. I got a wide selection from Future Forests in Bantry, and also some Cob Nuts from Fruitandnuts in Co. Mayo, and some apple trees form Seedsavers just to see what would do.
Scots pine, Monterey pine, Holm Oak ,Yew and Sweet chestnut (10 of each) are all doing well. Aspen was happy. (I didn't get any other type of Poplar, but will do, in the future. Some German friends told me people used to plant them near houses in order to lower the water table).
I didn't even try alder or birch, as I know they will do fine on our land. I collected seed from those last autumn, and they are germinating in boxes in the polytunnel.)
A lime tree and a ginko and three apple trees, rowan and whitebeam, some wild cherry
I lost one or two of a variety of willow trees, not sure why, but they don't really like poor soil. I also lost the majority of ten Western Red Cedars, which is a bit of a mystery, maybe they didn't like the transplanting process.
I have various soft fruit, which produced the odd berry, even rasberries.
I have eleven blueberries in pots, which have a lot of growing to do yet.
Some comfrey roots I got from Seedsavers had a hard time ever emerging above ground, because of greedy slugs. But once they are strong, comfrey plants are a great asset to any garden.
I got about 13 cob nut trees, and they are looking good, with still some of their beautiful large leaves on the twigs, together with catkins.

Most of the trees are going to be transplanted into raised beds, filled with broken up peat, mixed with any quantities of sand, fine gravel, rock dust and compost that I can manage to scrape together and transport to the various sites. I will mulch around the trees with cardboard to reduce competition for nutrients and water in the first few important years.

I am planning to create some more garden beds. I have not quite decided on the right site, sunshine being at a premium here in the forest.

One of last year's biggest projects consisted of erecting a large polytunnel.
More of that in the next post.