Love (and a garden) in a Warm Climate

Our daughter Elizabeth has a garden at Lyttleton on the South Island of New Zealand.

It is an overused word, but her garden really is ' lovely'

 

Lyttleton is a quirky village ....lots of old characterful wooden houses, arranged around the slopes of a volcanic harbour.  At the bottom of the hill is the port for Christchurch.
The busy Port and the comings and goings of container ships and ferries make Lyttelton a real lively place.

Lizzy's garden is a real cottage garden in all senses, though without livestock as yet.

She has bowers of roses and native plants side by side, and beds of annuals and old fashioned flowers like columbines next to lush rows of potatoes and beds of silver beet and kale.  Leeks and many coloured lettuce and fruit bushes backing up and filling border gaps.

 

If Lizzy has learnt anything from her nurserymen parents, it is to feed and to make compost, both of which she does.

 

New Zealand is blessed with warm summers and mild winters, but with enough of a chill in the winter to ensure the plants have a real rest season and know where they are.

Elizabeth has also learnt our love of annuals and the garden is hence ensured of pots of summer colour - cornflowers, pot marigold, cosmos, and lots of sweet peas.

 

And here and there are the native plants, flax, southern beech, ake-ake.  All happy and thriving and full of birds in the early morning and late afternoon. You have to love the liquid notes of the bell birds and the fantails, along side naturalised European birds, the yellowhammers and goldfinches and black birds.

She has to water a lot with the dry New Zealand winds and strong strong sunlight. This will become less as she builds up the humus and fertility in the soil.
 

Whilst deadheading in Lizzy's garden today, It struck me that it is the job of every gardener to pass on their soil in better condition than they found it.  Viva la compost!
 

MD Lyttelton.  January 2013

Sweet Peas - The Sweet Smell of a Mammoth

The sweet peas are coming to an end.
The stems are getting shorter and there is more than a little late infestation of green fly, but they have been magnificent and as they say “owe us nothing".
I have always loved sweet peas. They have been an annual highlight and the first few blooms are always eagerly awaited and their scent inhaled with a pleasure and nostalgia.

Mammoth Mixed

We are the only nursery I know that sells sweet pea plants in individual sweet pea tubes and in individual colours.
Until this year we have always planted the left overs. By that I mean that after we have sold some thousands of sweet peas, the ones left are those that have lost a label, taken a knock or are an unfashionable colour, and so, in they go, supported by a few hazel branches.

This year Donald experimented with a variety bred especially for poly-tunnels and they were planted in an orderly row and wired up. As reported, they have been wonderful.
The variety is called Mammoth - not a pretty name. The plants are vigorous, the stems have been long and straight, the flowers have been huge and have kept coming, but the most wonderful thing has been the wonderful, pleasurable fragrance. The scent of these sweet peas meets you at the door and is a rare pleasure as you cut the blooms.
In water the flowers have lasted almost a week, a long spell for sweet peas , and we have had a big enough crop that we have been sending bunches to market. We will certainly be growing them again next year.

Honeymoon

Mammoth is, as I said, especially bred for indoor, poly tunnel cropping. Outdoors we are still recommending the old Spencer varieties as they are the hardiest and have the best colour range that we know.
My favourites have to be the lovely white Honeymoon, and the deep crimson Winston Churchill.
In addition to the Spencers we grow Old Spice mixed, smaller flowers, with a heady, almost tropical, spicy scent. We also grow a single old variety called Matucana. This has deep purple and red flushed flowers and the most remarkable scent of all.


Winston Churchill

Most folks in the north of the United Kingdom plant their Sweet Pea seed early spring. We often get them in late February/ March ..... but you can plant in autumn on the hope of an early start and early flowers. Always keep your seedlings up and away from mice; they seem to smell them a thousand yards away. Early spring means the day ends with a patrol of many mouse traps.

The seedlings are very hardy and do not need cosseting. However this past spring was so cold in April that it certainly put them back and they were looking very pinched for a while, before they grew away strongly.

Matacuna

Sweet peas love a rich soil and if you are organised enough to know where you will be planting them next year, then this an excellent time to dig a trench and fill it with as much homemade compost and animal manure as you can get your hands on. They will love the rich diet and will reward you with months of undiluted pleasure.

Making leaf mould & a recipe for potting compost

Leaf mould is a lovely old fashioned term, and brings to mind old Estate gardens and poorly paid, overworked garden boys.  It often appeared as a magic ingredient alongside weathered soot and wood ash and ground up toe nails!

But for us it is a natural plentiful resource and a vital ingredient in our potting composts. Over the years we have steadily reduced the amount of peat in our mixes and leaf mould is really useful.

The native trees that shed their leaves for us are Hazel, Birch and Oak, and of course we are a garden and we also have lots of Maples, Cercidiphyllum , Chestnut and Larch.

The leaves fall onto beds and along the paths.
This make for easy pickings and any dry day from late October onwards, there is often someone out there, with a bucket, a rake and a collection old compost bags.

Rebecca hard at work with the rake

The leaves are poured out into compost bins constructed from wooden pallets and when we have a bumper year, we make wire netting cages to take them all.  

There they sit for 2 years, slowly mouldering.
Each leaf has its own characteristics.
Oak is tough and takes 2 years to rot down.
Hazel is much softer and takes a year to 18 months.

Inevitably there is the odd holly leaf in the mould. They are a pain, literally.  They are always a surprise, and take forever to rot so they retain all of their prickles. Again natures wee joke.

Leaf mould is also a great mulch, in fact it is nature’s mulch in our woodlands
We like to return some to the beds every year.

Here’s our recipe for general purpose potting compost

Sieved Leaf Mould 1/3^rd
John Innes No3 1/3^rd
Grit/Gravel 1/6^th depending on the plants to use it
Fibrous Compost 1/6^th to 1/3^rd (You could use peat, but there are now many more sustainable alternatives available)

^{Happy gathering,  M}

^{For more advice about the benefits of leaves read Donald's Autumn Blog from 2009}

^{Love Your Leaves}

Taming the Sneaky Weed - Ground Elder

So it is now routine.
I rise around 7am and make my way to the kitchen to prepare coffee. I dress, still layers and wool, the early mornings are cool, and taking the hot coffee, go out to greet the day.

The days have been wonderful this spring. Dry, not freezing and bright, though often with a linger of mist on the Loch. The birds are of course so busy that they scarcely notice my passing. The dog is much slower getting up nowadays so they do not have to avoid his untargeted bounds and his nose poking through into bushes.

Most mornings I weed, I weed and weed and weed.

Ground elder is the target of my attention and there is something very satisfying, freeing a patch of ground from its encroaching spread. But is it is triumph of hope over experience. I know it will be back and I know I will miss some, but it still gives a glow of satisfaction as I drag another bag of weeds back towards the compost area. Yes we do compost it, but it needs to be in the centre of a heap and it needs to get Hot, so careful composting is the order of the day.

The other alterative is to leaves it to rot down in the bag. We turn all compost bags inside out so they are black side out, that means they not only look better they warm up better and so help composting start faster.

Of course you must be sure there are no holes in the bag…or it escapes. This is my secret fear, that ground elder will take over the entire woodland and strangle out all the bluebells and lady’s smock …this is the stuff of nightmares.

Hence I walk through the garden with my eyes downcast. I need to remind myself to breath and take in the fresh foliage and view, and I do, but I can’t afford to let the ground elder (or dandelions) slip.

Time for breakfast and as it is a bank holiday I will have some time to do some of that other most pleasurable part of gardening, planting.