Badger Shenanigans

After much mud, sweat and tea (rs), the 2012 plant catalogue is off to the printers.
This years front cover shows the local badgers cavorting on the beehive during one of their midnight raids. 
Does anyone else have badgers making themselves at home in your garden?

Cat

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}

The Polytunnel Saga

At around 11.30 on New Year's Eve over ten years ago, while I rugging up in preparation for going out first footing on the Abriachan hill, Dad was in the bottom polytunnel tucking in some of the more delicate plants with fleece.

There was a hell of a gale blowing and the wind was roaring down the Loch and through the trees, whipping up the snow and slamming into the house. We have several huge fir trees that grow tight together in the wee Kilianan graveyard that nestles at the bottom of our garden, and they were being whipped back and forth by huge gusts of chilling wind until one huge breath caught one of the firs of guard and snapped the huge trunk sending the whole top half of over 30ft crashing down right on top of the tunnel where Dad stood.

He avoided being squashed like a pancake by only a few feet, the branches tore through the plastic of the tunnel and crushed the metal struts all around him, leaving him unharmed but a little surprised in the remains.

Years on, and the tunnel had been well patched up and repaired, though it was never quite the same again. This year, the hard wearing plastic was once more full of holes, though this time from age and weather more than sudden storm damage. So instead of replacing the plastic once again, Dad has decided to relocate the tunnel up the hill to a fresh sunny spot where he will be able to fill it with plants that require a little more light and warmth.

The trees in the graveyard now have a gaping hole where the tree fell, though as you can see in the lovely photograph above, it still looks rather grand.

So, for the last week, my fabulous Australian boyfriend and Dad have been flattening out a fresh spot, digging the required trenches and then rejigging the whole shebang to fit into the new spot.