January

January is obviously not the premier month for gardening. Instead, it appears to be a month for spending money on preparing for the year ahead.
The garden and allotment stink of death at this time of year - what wasn’t chopped down in Autumn lies either as bare wood or a decaying mush on the ground. Some like this time of year, filled with the possibilities of what can be done with this ground, but I find it faintly depressing. You know that turning what it looks like now into what you’d like it to look like in July is going to take a lot of work.
And there has been a lot of work.

I spent last weekend digging out a new fruit bed, mainly for strawberries. But, the strawberries will have to share this new bed with the raspberries that lived there beforehand. Digging out the soil, grass, the dead apple tree and other unidentified tree that lived there without damaging the raspberries was a nightmare. It took me about 4 hours just to dig out a 3m by 1m bed. I felt like I was having a heart attack the day after because all the muscles in my chest had been damaged by digging around trying to pull out the roots of an apple tree and trying to separate rye grass from the roots of a raspberry.

But all this effort was actually more enjoyable to the other jobs I’ve done on the allotment so far this year. Pulling out damp, decaying plants from last year isn’t particularly pleasant, especially as the trunks of the broccoli had grown so thick that I had to use tree loppers to chop them up. Maybe I’ll be filled with this excitement of the possibilities of an empty plot in a few weeks from now, but as you pull green slime from your fingers or lose your footing on the mud all I could think was that January is the shittest of the months.

There is a lot to do in February, by the end of which I’ll probably have reclassified January as being the second shittest month in the calendar.
And this is where the expense will kick in. I need to buy the wood required for this new bed and to replace the wood round where we grew potatoes last year. I’m not looking forward to removing the old wood from the potato bed either, as it’s a collection of about a dozen wooden boards nailed into almost as many wooden posts. I’ll have to dig out the posts and try and smash the wood. It’ll probably end up with me impaled on a broken piece of rotten chipboard.
And then after that Operation New Shed will begin.
Look at the shed, look at it. It is falling apart. I want a new shed. Somewhere I can sit reading while it rains outside, Somewhere where I can have jars of plant labels, a barometer on the wall and shelves of plant food. And nik-naks, lots and lots of nik-naks. So I’ll have to buy a new shed and replace the old knackered one.
The thing stopping me doing this straight away is that the shed is slowly being enveloped by the neighbouring blackberry bush. I could butcher the bush but then we won’t get that many blackberries this year. So, I’m waiting for Hannah to get the time to tidy the blackberries up. She’s more likely to avoid being ripped to bits by it too, whereas I’m impatient and would end up hanging off it, like a Tommy hanging off barbed wire on the Somme.
That’s pretty much it for the allotment right now, though there are other areas that need tidying up to maximise the area we have to grown things. I’m probably going to end up digging out a rhubarb bed in the corner. I may leave that till March when I’ve got over what a pain in the arse the raspberry bed was.

There is more expense at home. I’ve had to buy a new mini greenhouse, because the old wood one was starting to fall apart. I can partly understand the old one only lasting 2/3 years because the winters have been pretty bad, but it was made of cheap wood and knocked together pretty shoddily. The new one is aluminium so may last a lot longer.
I’ve also bought three new cat stunners for the garden. These seem to be doing a grand job so far, even the beast pictured below, which omits a noise audible to human beings and which made me feel ill when it went off in the house. No wonder cats hate it, it makes a horrible noise. I suspect it’s just a converted torture device.
The true gardening highlight of January though, and probably the reason why, really, it isn’t the worst month of the year is that January is the time when we stock up on all seeds for the year.
I spent almost £100 on seeds and have now finished a planting plan showing when each seed will be planted and where (inside, garden/allotment greenhouse or direct into ground). And the first sowing is this weekend, with some sweet peas sowed in toilet rolls in the kitchen. I’ll put a picture up of this monumental construction next week. I’ll also include February’s planting plan. Boy, who can wait for that?

Shit, I forgot about the tree butchery in the front garden. More on that next time.

What's This Then?

For the last two or three years I've wanted to create a blog dedicated to gardening, and maybe crafts.
I spend a lot of time in the garden and on the allotment and wanted somewhere to document what I get up to, partly because I enjoy writing but also because I wanted to record everything I'd done. Every year I forget when and how I'd planted certain veg/flowers and therefore don't learn from my mistakes. By recording everything and noting successes and failures then next year maybe I won't start chillies too early, or put a plant into a shady spot that it can't handle.

I also want to expand it to discuss side projects from the garden: recipes for the veg, discussions on eco-living, and maybe branching into crafts. I can share some of my soap recipes here...of interest to probably nobody at all.

Let's start with what happened in January...