Kitchen Garden Forum

Hard frost this morning, missed the Aurora last night as there was too much cloud up till midnight, we just had a green sky.

What a lovely start to the morning, the return of one of our long standing forum members and a very nice one at that...

Welcome back Chantal.

I second OH's comments. Nice to see a familiar name on the forum again.

Out in the garden at home today, it's got a bit lost in places this year due to family commitments and time spent on the garden at work.

I got a failed loganberry frame post sorted in our back garden last weekend and the old canes cut out and new tied in...so followed that today with hand weeding along this line....much much more needing sorting..

...also, I've been listening to test transmissions on 648Khz in the medium wave, from Radio Caroline


Clive.

Had to walk through part of our village today and was looking at the various different hedges people had planted to define their boundaries. There were laurel, yew, mixed shrub like hawthorn and pyracantha, and beech. I couldn,t help thinking of all the hedges beech is the most gloriously colourful at this time of year with its varying yellow and golden leaves, and then it’s lovely fresh geeen leaves In spring. Years ago privet hedges were to be seen everywhere but seem have now gone totally out of fashion - no bad thing in my view as the flowers stink to high heaven !

Bees love privet flowers and the honey is good but doesn't smell like the flowers.

I think privet flowers smell lovely. It's just a bit strong. I once saw a wild privet bush in full flower covered with hundreds of Painted Lady butterflies. It was wonderful.

I inherited a 2 metre high privet hedge, lots of birds have nested in it and the sparrow roost in it too. I put in a Beech one on the other side, our village is like a wind tunnel, that too will be 2 metres high, I also have a chunk with Ash, Holly and Sycamore, they get pollarded and the sticks get used.

Our main hedge on three sides of the garden is rosa rugosa 'Dagmar Hartopp' (occasionally spelt differently) and that looks lovely when flowering and then with yellow autumn foliage and large red hips. Blackbirds have just started to eat the hips - they eat the flesh and finches eat the pips. But the drawback is that the hedge needs vicious cutting back every spring.

We also have a shorter pyracantha hedge, about 6' high, which needs much less maintenance but is less 'exciting' than the roses.

All this hedge talk got me going, so I've been out with the loppers and the shredder and set about the front garden hedges, look a lot neater now, but the Sparrows look grumpy as half their roost is now mulch under the new Beech hedge in the back.

When we were at our son's wedding in Galway, most of the hedging was Fusia's red and yellow very small flowers.

An hour ago I was up a ladder getting Ivy off a house wall, in beautiful sunshine and my shirtsleeves rolled up....now it is chucking it down, windy and not very warm!!! I'm now glad I didn't stop for dinner and got the job finished.

I'm cutting the most wonderful Cauliflowers at the moment and even more pleased as I only sowed them about 12 weeks ago.....just bunged them in, chucked a few cans of water at them and there you have em....

oldherbaceous wrote:

I'm cutting the most wonderful Cauliflowers at the moment and even more pleased as I only sowed them about 12 weeks ago.....just bunged them in, chucked a few cans of water at them and there you have em....

OH Did you make a note of the distance you 'chucked' the water from because that was the vital decisive part.

I am very envious of your cauliflowers. The only one I grew this year which survived was so pathetic it looked like a large Brussels Sprout !

Blimey OH! That's a great result! Mine look healthy but no where near ready to give me anything, but I have my eye on a pointed cabbage that might be ready this weekend!