Sun and Solace in the Garden

The political weather has been stormy of late, and as the sun has come out to play at last, the garden seems the safest place to be. There’s a lot to be done to get it ready for the growing season, so time spent outside is never wasted. A lot of what I’m doing at the moment could best be termed ungardening, clearing out the contents from last year’s containers, and reusing the potting compost in the bottom of new pots, or as a soil improving mulch.

The Chinese artichokes are gone – we never ate any of them – and the Jerusalem artichokes are too, because they’re just too darned wind-inducing. The oca that I grew in containers had done a disappearing act and saved me the trouble of throwing it out, too; space is reserved for properly productive vegetables this year!

After the trauma of having the fence replaced, I cheered myself up by ordering two new fruit plants. The first is another Japanese wineberry; I brutally pruned mine back to make life easier for the workmen, and then regretted it because they fruit on year-old canes. Buying a new plant probably still won’t mean we’ll get fruit this year, but it will mean a bumper harvest in 2020, and they were one of our garden favourites last year. The new wineberry is replacing the Morello cherry that we removed from the garden and guerilla planted in the hedge, because it was basically only feeding the birds anyway.

The wineberry is on the back garden side of the fence. On the front garden side, I’ve planted a new ‘Czar’ plum. My original thought was that I’d fan train it on the fence, but it has arrived looking rather robust and established, so I will just let it bush out over the rhubarb instead. We like plums, and hopefully the birds will be happy with the hedge cherries and