Gardening

One of the things that journalists seem to enjoy these days is writing a headline for an extreme weather event. But they don't stop there. No matter whether it is a dry spell, heavy rain or a strong wind these things are invariably placed in the context of the way the world climate is changing from what we consider 'normal' to something else. A weather event that in the past we might have thought of simply as a rare phenomenon is then thrown back at us by the news media who will bombard us with images of floods in India, drought in Africa, melting glaciers in Greenland (easily done because of the way our world is forever connected through the internet) and all this happens so quickly that our own perception of the weather event changes.

As I write this, for the last week or so our country has been sitting under a static high pressure system which has brought us light winds, dull dreary days with little or no direct sunshine but no rain, none at all. This is unusual. In all the time we have been living in Scotland we cannot recall anything like this occurring. The 'normal' pattern where we live is for constant change, a few days of wind, rain coming and going, sunshine off and on, a world where the next day will always be different. What outdoor jobs you can't do today can be done the next or the one after. Multiple days of identical weather are rare but this particular high pressure system hovered over us all week, the barometer needle stuck in one position. The absence of wind meant that it felt quite warm outside and as a result we attacked the garden with everything we had, forks, spades, rakes and strimmers. Nothing was safe. The end result was a compost bonanza for each of our raised beds, the creation of a couple more, and most exciting of all, we built a toad house!

For anyone that might be confused by this you should note that the toad way of life involves waddling about on land just as much as splashing about in water. They like cool damp places with water somewhere within reach and in winter they will seek out such a dark place under a pile of stones, somewhere they know they will be safe from anything that might see them as a good meal. Generally they do not tend to waddle about in daylight so the fact that we have not seen any since we dug the pond in our garden does not necessarily mean they are not around. So just in case one should feel inclined to visit we have provided a home, free of charge. A pile of rocks covered by some turfs which will grow into a shapely roof. The only question is whether we need a sign over the entrance explaining what it is for.

Moving on and reading up on garden chores appropriate for autumn we learn that this is the right time to be turning over the compost that we have in our unsightly plastic bins. The process first involves digging out the material that is at the bottom since this is where the fully rotted stuff is normally found. The rest is 'partly cooked' and will need more time to decompose so this is transferred to an empty bin to start another season of rotting. One of my favourite tools is a compost stirrer, a device that spins on the end of a drill and bores into the compost, mixing the pile vertically and letting air into the lower layers. This is supposed to accelerate the decomposition process and as such I find it quite satisfying.

Which brings us very neatly to the 'Hugelkultur' experiment.

This is a mad idea that came to us via some random social media post. It is (allegedly) a way of creating a vegetable planting bed using layers of material all lying on top of some bits of old wood. The idea is that the roots from what is planted on top will dive down and feed on what is released from the wood underneath as it rots away. Our version still awaits some planting and we scattered sawdust on it to make it look like a Christmas cake, not part of the recommendations.

Elsewhere we decided that the garden needed some trees. I should perhaps explain that our garden slopes down quite steeply from the back fence towards the house and the presence of old tree stumps close to the back boundary tells us that some quite large trees once grew here, maybe before the house itself was built. There is also some exposed rock which, we have discovered, is solid bedrock that extends beneath the top third of our land as well as beneath the house. In the light of this you could say we are lucky to have anything in which to grow our own plants. But we have, and it turns out that the soil we have is dark and rich. It is also invariably moist as the underlying rock only allows rainwater to filter slowly away through its cracks and crevices. The patches of heather and the thick moss covering so much of the garden are other indicators that it was once a woodland so planting trees of our own seemed like a logical step. One side of the garden is particularly damp, runoff always ensuring our pond is never short of water and this overflows into an area where reeds and damp loving grasses thrive. Our choice of tree here is the alder, generally found growing with water close by. Elsewhere in the garden we dig holes for two aspen trees, hoping they will survive long enough to display their fluttering leaves for us. It was whilst digging the holes for these that we discovered the extent of the solid rock which lies less than a spade depth below ground level, prompting us to choose a spot just beyond the line of bedrock.

Our trees arrived by post having been ordered online (the modern way) and arrived in a slim cardboard box. Each one consisted of a single stalk rising from a tiny bundle of roots, hardly meeting the definition of 'tree'. The aspen stems each had just a single leaf right at the tip although the alder proudly displayed several healthy looking green ones along its thin stalk, the word 'trunk' hardly seeming appropriate, but we planted them in the ground then immediately wrapped the delicate things in insulating foam tubes to keep them safe. Given our climate here they are unlikely ever to need watering but they will need protection from the deer that wander into the garden from time to time. It will be several years before these tiny twigs have grown tall enough to be beyond their reach.