So long Berryfields...

GW moves to new location

I never did take to Berryfields - it always looked a bit uninviting. Oddly cold and gloomy. Too big and too many problems to solve. The garden effectively dominated the agenda. With a new location the producers should be able to shape the programme exactly as they wish. Let's see...

New season, new term

A dry, frost-free week meant we are finally making real headway on the 'to-do' list. Although there is time left before we open, walking past endless outstanding jobs leaves me in an almost continuous state of low-level stress.

So, a good week takes the pressure off a bit. Janet and Tracey have all but finished cleaning up the plants outside and last week's 1000 bare root plant delivery is potted up and labelled. Jools finished the first clearance of the new veg plot - we're now ready to start marking out and making beds. Peter tackled the painstaking task of clearing the scree garden - the worst job is tidying up the huge and lethal Agave. Jools and I dug up the old herb bed and re-designed it and on Thursday Marilyn and I dug up and divided Geraniums from last year's new beds. My new signs have arrived too, looking very fresh and bright. So wonderful progress all round.

In the garden the Petasites are in flower (pics tomorrow) and each evening a flock of greenfinches flits across the garden, all a twitter, ending up in the huge birch tree that straddles the boundary with next door.

Just as well I had a good week as Friday's return to college for the dreaded Module G on Genetics, plant breeding and physiology was a shock to the system. Though there's been plenty to learn in the other modules I've not found the content academically difficult. But this stuff is properly challenging. Interesting and revealing, but hard. I don't think I'll be doodling on the back row this term.

No GW till April!?!? Protest here....

It is simply incomprehensible that we will get no proper weekly GW on the Beeb till April 10th (Good Friday). By then the GW garden at Berryfields will be full of produce growing away merrily, having been sown weeks before in ground prepared over winter when the programme was off air. How dispiriting for people to tune in, only to find out that they are already behind on the action.

Is GW for gardeners, or for people who wake up on Good Friday morning, realise the sun is shining and gingerly step on their patch of mud for the first time that year? What are they supposed to do - rush out on Easter Saturday, join the long queues to buy plants and compost and transform their gardens in one weekend? Gardening is for life, not just for Easter.

Anyway, my friends and fellow boarders on the BBC GW message board have set about putting matters right with our own virtual Friday night programme. Plan is to run it every Friday at 8pm. Do join in - it's a fully interactive programme.

Virtual GW. Join us here

And if you think that a proper weekly topical Gardener's World should be on from at least the beginning of March, please leave a comment. Well, you never know...

Potting, planting and mulling

My first plant delivery of the year is potted up, labelled and laid out in smart rows in the back tunnel. Outside, the big spring clear up is under way with plants being weeded, potted on and relabelled. I do like it when the nursery looks so neat and new.

Pete and I have redesigned some of the borders between us, widening and rounding with hoses snaking down the garden as the inclination took us. There were too many straight lines before for my liking. Here's the before and after.... Green Thumb aerated and scarified the lawn last week too, which is why the lawn looks a bit sparse. I badly need a good downpour now to kick it into life - we've had no real rain for two weeks.





So, business matters aside, I get a lot of thinking time when the nursery is closed. And I've found myself thinking about Jade Goody a lot this week. I don't watch Big Brother, or buy the tabloids. And in general I think that living your life through the media is a skim-thin way of living. But who is truly not touched? There but for a throw of the dice go I - and many friends too. We all skip smear tests if we can justify it to ourselves, repelled by the process, subliminally angry at being in the 50% of the population at risk of this nasty disease and at being statutorily expected to submit to this five-yearly ordeal.

And then this brash, complex, ill-educated, media-centric woman steps forward and shows the world her bald head, bed-stricken pain and uncomprehending children as she tries to find a way to do the right thing with her last few weeks on the planet. I simply can't sort it out in my own mind in any truly meaningful way. Except that she has as much right to tell her story in her way as Ruth Picardie, Dina Rabinowicz, Miles Kington or so many other middle-class broadsheet writers who have done so in their ways. She is more fluorescent light strip than candle in the wind but her story will no doubt burn bright in the study of popular culture and modern media for years.

Chicken wars

The chickens did a great job in winter picking out the bugs and slugs from the borders around the garden and very prettily they did it too.

Eating the tasty new shoots on my herbaceous plants is a tolerance too far though, so our formerly very free range hens are now slightly less free range than they were. Their new, more moderate accommodation is a huge 25m x 5m outdoor pen, surrounding their magnificent hen house, which includes the old compost heaps rich with worms and woodlice - chicken heaven by any definition.



But our chooks have been spoilt with grand living, and their new two-up, two-down lodging has left them peevish, stroppy and impressively determined to escape. Nick Parks clearly did his homework on 'Chicken Run'. Pete and I spent two days raising fences, burying wire under the hedges and blocking up channels through the compost before I finally gave in to the inevitable and clipped their wings. It's no harm to the chickens - just like cutting fingernails if you don't cut too close, but it seemed a shame to mar their beauty.

Still, it gave me an excuse to pick them up, and I am partial to a bit of hen-cuddling. Picking them up is a battle of wits though, a trade off between their greed for corn and their skills of evasion. Only the Rhode Island Red evaded me all day, never turning her back to me, no matter how great the temptation. But there is no escape - if she flies the coop tomorrow, I'll simply pick her off the perch at night when she's dopey and docile.

The first big plant delivery of the year arrived yesterday, always a moment of real excitement. Reading down the delivery list is almost a bit of a 'soft porn' moment as plant names fire off mental images of beauty forgotten about since last summer. It'll take days to pot them up, but I don't rush it. I want to still enjoy actually doing this in 10 years time, not dread it as a chore.

Mother's cast offs

I love gardening books. I've no idea how many I've got because they've never lived together - they huddle in corners of bookshelfs, under piles of college papers, under the desk or in the nursery tea room. But there's always room for a couple more good ones and when my mum had a clear out I couldn't resist a rummage.

(can't get this picture to display landscape - bizarre!)
This is the first gardening book I ever read. I'd completely forgotten about it, but as I flipped the pages it all came back - the pencil drawings of a weathered pair of hands sowing seeds or gently teasing roots apart. And the occasional page of simple colour sketches. It's dated 1968 and is organised by month. No great beauty of a book, but a pleasing general gardening book, written in a easy, cogent style.





The other book that I fell on was Beth Chatto's Garden Notebook and it didn't disappoint. Not only is Beth Chatto a wonderful writer, as we know, but to read first hand her everyday experiences running her nursery, re-designing the garden and fitting in family life was heartwarmingly reassuring. She talks about visiting other nurseries and swapping plant samples and the feeling of inadequacy comparing her simple operation with their sophisticated set ups. Yet by the time she wrote the book she'd been running the nursery for years and was a regular gold medal winner at Chelsea. I'll dip into this book whenever I feel in need of a pep talk.


So thanks Mum, just like the ironing board (now in it's 30th year with me) your book cast offs will have a good new home!

Exams over, and winter too?

Two RHS Diploma exams in two days have left my head spinning with ecosystems, business finance, garden restoration and hard landscaping techniques. All good stuff, but a lot to cram into consecutive days.

With the academic stuff out of the way, it's boots back on tomorrow and getting stuck into digging over the proposed new veg plot, which is still overrun with Geraniums and grass. And time is tight with just 7 weeks to go until 'Veg Week' and so much more to do in the nursery and garden as well.

The weather might be turning in my favour though as the forecast is for the cold snap to fade away tomorrow, sliding up to a comparatively sub-tropical 6C. Hopefully that was our last long cold snap of the winter. I am ever an optimist.

On the domestic front the wood burning stove is heating half the house each night, saving us a fortune on oil, and a tonne or so a year of CO2. We have a huge stack of wood thanks to Pete's new 'horse' and supreme proficiency with a bow saw. We almost have a kitchen too - all units and no appliances yet, but by tomorrow night we should be live. More walls have been insulated and I've ordered the solar hot water system, so we're finally heading for some 'free' heat and hot water in years to come. It's all coming together at last.

Calling Gemma....

Calling Gemma Burrows - are you out there somewhere?

Do get in touch if you are. The new season beckons....

Life in the fridge...

This endless winter is eating away at the days, leaving me less and less time to get ready for the coming season. Work on the garden is at a standstill for the third significant spell this winter. The sharp frosts are slowly playing havoc in the greenhouse too - it's hard to keep botrytis at bay with everything barely above zero.

But the garden always has a moment of joy waiting for me, somewhere. Last year I collected loads of Tulipa sprengeri seeds, put them in a small bag with damp vermiculite in the greenhouse for a few weeks to bake, then moved them to the fridge in November. Every single one has germinated - in the fridge, in the dark.

Actually they've partly germinated - just the radicle, or baby root is showing. I'll find out soon whether it will produce a shoot in the first year too, or lie dormant with just a root till next year, like a Trillium.



So I've sown them today, some in single plugs, some spread with the vermiculite onto pots of compost. Some are in the greenhouse and others are in the 'Alpine House' (the little greenhouse with missing panes of glass). It would be fantastic if these grow - it's one of the most beautiful species tulips imaginable.



I was going to mention 'green shoots' showing in the garden, but can I still say that or is it banned? I still can't quite get over a BBC interviewer asking Baroness Vadera if she understood that her comments about 'green shoots' had been 'deeply offensive'. Misjudged and thoughtless, yes. But deeply offensive? Don't be silly. Shame is, that it's rather spoilt the idea of 'green shoots' in my garden as just a simple visual pleasure....

Chickens prefer cages to snow? Tosh

According to my OH who's an early morning soul, on Farming Today this morning, a battery egg producer defended his practices by arguing that hens are from SE Asia and hate the cold, so they'd prefer living 4 hens to a 18" x 18" heated cage than to be free range in the snow.

Well, I've only been keeping hens for a few months, but that is a complete load of first rate tosh. Our hens live in an unheated shed, with thick woodshavings on the floor. The shed is open all day and they can go in and out as they please. Guess what they prefer?
















And we've had between 6 and 8 eggs a day from 8 hens all through January - here's this morning's production. So productivity at least as good as his, I'm certain.















What is the true is that it takes more land to keep hens free range and we've had an mad economic world in which land costs more than fossil fuel, per egg. So it's cheaper to cram them in and warm their poor almost featherless bodies with oil or gas than to keep hardier varieties, fully feathered and outdoors. But don't give me the happy battery hen story.

Heat. Blissful, free, carbon-neutral, guilt-free heat

With near-perfect timing we lit the new woodburning stove for the first time as the snow fell outside. On any other frosty night we'd be lucky to get the house above 15C. But tonight we hit the dizzy heights of 19.5C in the new living room - and I'd turned all the radiators off.

Joy and happiness, joy and happiness. Especially since the wood came from our own little bit of woodland and I chopped it into logs myself this afternoon. It's lovely to enjoy a complete sense of entitlement to comfort, instead of the familiar disturbing sense that someone else somewhere will pay for my self-indulgence.

oi

We've had open log fires before, but this little baby is in another league. Even the twin-skinned chimney is too hot to touch and it's only a little 5Kw thing. It's pretty though, charcoal grey and shiny with just enough detail, but not too fussy. As you can tell, I'm just a little bit smitten. We'll build a surround for it one day, when/if we get round to it.

On the zeitgeist? Moi?

It seems that keeping chickens, growing veg and having a woodburning stove are collectively the new black. Or the new scarlet or bling or whatever was previously in vogue. Well, what do you know? For once I am right on the button. The chickens are laying more eggs than we can eat, the veg plot is being extended next week and the woodburning stove is being installed tomorrow. I think I'm more excited about this than anything else we've had done to the house and cannot wait to light it, especially with snow forecast this week.













Otherwise, fashion passes me by in a blur of incomprehension. My 'wardrobe' is pitiful. Let me be frank. In the past month I have worn two pairs of shoes - my working boots for working - obviously - and a natty pair of grey boots for absolutely everything else. I have two pairs of jeans for work which I usually wear until they look seriously grubby and one pair of green chinos to change into if I need to be a bit smarter. I have a drawer full of brown/green/orange/mud coloured plain cotton t-shirts which get worn in various combinations until they all seem a bit fusty, then all go in the wash together. On top go various fleeces - green for grubby work, red, orange or cream for clean. And that's it - my entire wardrobe for the past month. (Since you ask, I do wear clean underwear everyday - what do you take me for!)

When the need arises, I do scrub up quite well. Despite my advancing years and rugged lifestyle I still have decent skin, a surprisingly flat stomach and can slide into a size 10 frock, if bribed to. I can even do heels, if I practice a bit. And I agree that how we dress affects how we feel and influences the perception of others. But, quite simply, I can't be bothered. I'd rather muck out the chickens, dig the veg plot or chop wood, and I don't give a monkeys if it's fashionable or not.

Talking of monkeys, the Garden Monkey has hung up his acerbic pen. Shame - I rather enjoyed his/(her?) withering insights. Still, there's no TV gardening to mock right now is there? How come we get Masterchef four nights out of five and no gardening? I firmly believe there are more gardeners than there are real cooks (who cook from scratch). Harrumph.