You Are Gardening Crazy When...

 Why take 1 cutting when you can take 1000?

I’ve spent the best part of this year trailing mud into the house. 

It’s just a bit too much trouble to untie my boot laces when I come in from a bit of gardening work, so I don’t generally bother. I do have a bit of an end of the day run round with a cloth to clean the white floor tiles we have (Why on earth did we buy white bathroom tiles?) so I can start a new day clean and fresh. I also always wear a shopkeepers coat now. If you’ve ever seen episodes of ‘Open all Hours’ you’ll know the style of it. I actually wear it to the shops now too as I think it makes me look like I’m busy in the same way people walk around workplaces with a sheet of A4 paper in their hand to look like they are doing something or going somewhere. Most people think I am a mechanic in our local shop. I have the coat on permanently and always have muddy boots but what else can turn us into local gardening characters? 

Maybe there are certain traits we should be looking out for to see if we are going garden crazy.

You know you are garden crazy when you…

Feel uncomfortable in some-one else's house if there's a badly placed houseplant and desperately resist the urge to move it to a more suitable spot.

Find it difficult resisting dead-heading in some-one else's garden.

Buy weak straggly, reduced price plants because you think you can bring them back to life but generally end up in the compost bin – which is OK as it’ll feed other plants.

Read the labels on plants at the garden centre and disagree with what it says as well as not having enough information on the label for people not as knowledgeable as you.

Look at neglected gardens as a challenge.

Name your children and pets after flowers.

Think £50 is a lot of money for a pair of trousers, but a great price for a particularly wonderful plant.

Can give local directions based on particularly fine hedges and specimen trees as landmarks without mentioning roads, post offices or pubs.

Stop talking mid-sentence when you see a plant you don't recognize.

Wake up in the middle of a cold night and wonder if you should go out and cover your succulents and tender perennials.

Water other people's plants when out for a walk from your own water bottle if they look thirsty.

Only watch football matches on the TV to assess the pitch quality and percentage of artificial grass added.

Taking cuttings from peoples gardens

Always have a pair of secateurs in your pocket in case you see overhanging plant hazards.

Have a mountain of plastic pots and sheeting squirrelled away as it’ll always come in useful.

Give courgettes to friends and co-workers (and sometimes the postie)

Proudly show your compost pile to visitors.

Have more pictures of your plants than your children/grandchildren.

Are pleased when some nettles grow in your garden because they're great for the compost heap, and they show that the soil is rich in that area.

Forever trying to give away plants to friends and neighbours because you propagated far too many. Why take one cutting when you can take 100?

Feel that seed catalogues are one the year's most anticipated thing posted through your letterbox and you have the bookmark tab full of links to online catalogues.

Garden looks better than your house.

There is no item of footwear you own that hasn't at some time had soil on them and all your clothes are gardening clothes.

Car has so much soil on the carpet you could germinate seeds in it.

Ensure every annual holiday has a nursery and /or botanic garden included.

Find that most people share all their plant problems with you.

Have plants in pots at the back door waiting to be added to your garden at some stage when you have either the time or room.

Spend a lot of your free time just watching your garden grow.

Making Pots and Soap- Things to do when the grass doesn't need cutting

The grass didn’t need cutting this week. Yay!

The whole process from start to finish only takes me around ten minutes so I don’t really know what the exclamation mark is all about, but there is a feeling of calm knowing I’ll only need to give it a trim once every few weeks now. I like to keep a bit of length to the grass as the growing season ends as I think it gives a bit more protection from really wet weather.

I’ve also stopped mowing the chamomile lawn. I only started trimming it back this year as a lot of regular grass is creeping in so I run the mower over the area to stop the grass going to seed and speeding up the time when I need to dig the whole area up, clear it of weeds and start planting new chamomiles again. I think I’ll get away with not doing it for another year.

The chamomile selling season has slowed down now and this has given me a bit more time to catch up on a few creative jobs that needed doing. 

Clay

The first job to do was make a few stoneware clay pots. My lad’s mates have opened up a vintage clothes shop called The Storefront in the Glassworks in Derry and I said I’d do a few small glazed key bowls with their logo on it as a promotional item.  I wanted to keep my identity anonymous so they suggested I come up with a pseudonym and seeing as ‘Banksy’ is taken I had a think and came up with a few. Dan Dale or Mantis Toboggan was nearly top of the list but I have decided to go with ‘Arthur Sixpence’ I think that has a cool retro vibe the youth are looking for. I can use that name and still keep my anonymity when walking around town.

I also made a few small tea cups for myself made from plaster cast molds of my vintage Carley’s Bridge Pottery plant pots which I think came out quite well. They don’t have handles which is probably a good thing as they will be used in the garden. 

I don’t know about you but I always tend to put my cups of tea in the most unsuitable places without thinking, on the top of fence posts, balancing on a wall or in the wheelbarrow. I often find an old, cold cuppa on top of the wheelie bin days after losing it.  You can guarantee wherever the cup is left there’s a dead fly floating in it within seconds.

I was thinking of mass producing the plant pot cups and selling them to people who wanted ‘that something special’ for the gardener in their life at Christmas but like most things I make I don’t think they have the mass appeal. I have created a spoon rest though which I think might be the next big thing. One side is a spoon rest but turn it over and it magically turns into a used teabag holder.

It sounded better in my head at the design stage.

Soap

I’m also making some soap for the lads to sell or give away as a promotional item in their shop. It’s my first attempt and I used around 4 types of oil (there are hundreds you can use) and lye which is caustic soda. The whole process was like a chemistry class and very enjoyable. I have embossed the cut soap with their shop logo and will wrap them with thin strips of my wax cotton wraps which I made last year and tie them off with some jute string. They are scented with orange and ylang ylang and are currently smelling out the house for six weeks until they have cured.  I haven’t used any colouring in the soap as I wanted to keep it natural but I did cut the heads off around 50 calendula flowers growing in the front garden. I dried the leaves, scrunched them up and sprinkled them into the mix. They are one of only a few flowers which keep their colour in the chemical reactions that go on in soap making. They have made the soap look a really vibrant orange colour which complements the orangey smell from the soap. So far I’ve done twelve bars but I’m sure there will be more to come as it’s a very satisfying process.

Making soap is definitely more enjoyable than producing sauerkraut. Those jars are still sitting on my garage floor and only get the odd sniff from the dogs as they walk past. 

More future fill for the compost bin.

Make Your Own Sauerkraut

I generally have a supper. Just to clarify, this isn’t a late dinner; it’s merely a light snack before retiring for the evening. According to my lad ‘suppers’ as such don’t really exist anymore (only in my head) and he claims the word supper has been declining since the beginning of the 1900s, while the use of ‘lunch’ has been increasing. 

I was confused for years when people ate Fish Suppers in the afternoon and just what time of day do you turn up for something like dinner, anytime between just after noon to eight in the evening? I’ve never been able to fathom it out. 

My supper is at a pretty constant time though and I always been partial to anything pickled. I have in the past made my own beetroot, onions, and gherkins (baby cucumbers in my case as I didn’t grow the smaller West Indian Burr kind) 

They were all very successful so I have decided to rekindle my enthusiasm by making something similar this time to have as an accompaniment to a lump of cheese. I made some sauerkraut from both green and red cabbage. Sauerkraut or "sour cabbage” isn’t in vinegar though, it’s a fermented liquid made from sugars, salt and bacteria and lactic acid, just the stuff to be digesting before bed (maybe not).

This finely cut raw fermented cabbage has been cultivated for longer than almost any other vegetable on record. Although sauerkraut - German for "sour cabbage" - is thought of as a German invention, Chinese labourers building the Great Wall of China over 2,000 years ago ate it. Their cabbage was fermented in rice wine though, which sounds more fun. It’s said that the idea was brought to Europe 1000 years later by Gengis Kahn after plundering China. The Dutch, who were great sea-fearing traders, used sauerkraut on their ships as it did not need refrigeration and helped prevent scurvy.

Eastern European families prepared for winter by putting up several barrels of sauerkraut. Depending on the size of the family and the size of the cabbages, a clan might ferment as many as 300 whole heads of cabbage in wooden barrels. Occasionally, along with the salt, spices like caraway seeds, wine, or other vegetables were added.

By the late 1800s, the cabbage was shredded before being placed in covered crocks. If the family couldn't afford their own shredding tool, a peddler went door-to-door and performed this service for a fee in much the same way people would come around and sharpen your knives.

There are other vegetables that have been preserved by a similar process. Also, silage, a feed for cattle, can be made the same way.

Sauerkraut is said to have a raft of health benefits and there are the usual ‘cure all’ claims. Done right it’s is packed with B and C vitamins and minerals, works as an immune booster and balances the bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract.

Here’s my recipe for basic no-claims attached sauerkraut. There are loads of recipes online, but like most things in my life, I like to keep simple.

Recipe for Sauerkraut 

    2kg very firm, pale green or white cabbage (any leathery outer leaves removed), cored and finely chopped (think coleslaw)

    3 tbsp coarse crystal sea salt (or 6 tbsp flaky sea salt)

    1 tsp caraway seeds ideally but I used fennel seeds as they were in the cupboard

    1 tsp peppercorns

Other things to consider would be use clean containers. I’ve used glass jars but you can use stoneware and glazed pots too.

My first batch wasn’t quite covered completely with the brine juice so the shredded pieces above the waterline went mouldy and I had to compost it.

Check it daily and also release the gasses. My second batch of red cabbage leaked all over the worktop one night as the pressure got too much inside the jar. I’m now looking at effective methods to clean off red cabbage stains from kitchen worktops. The jars are not sitting on the garage floor out of the way until they are ready to put into the fridge. It can be ready in a week and the longer the leave it at room temperature the sourer and bitter it gets. Yum.

One teaspoon a night of my “fermented cabbage” will be enough for me and I hopefully won’t be looking to cure anything apart from my inability to understand when dinner is.

Restless Legs and Wall Falling Down

Our neighbour’s garden wall came down this week. One second the 10 metre long wall was there then the next it was gone. 

The whole thing was very dramatic and was caught on ccvt cameras which showed the ground shaking like a mini earthquake as it tumbled in a cloud of dust. Imagine looking at a Fred Dibner demolition of a block of flats but on a smaller scale and you’ll have a good idea of the spectacle.

The six foot high wall was built in the 1950’s from old concrete blocks and had a suitable foundation so even though it was a single block thick there shouldn’t have been an issue with stability. There were two problems that we could see for why the wall and fence came down in such a dramatic way.

Attached to the wall was another 4 feet of vertical wooden fencing with the posts only fitted to the blocks by bolts and not dug into the ground which was covered in huge amounts of ivy. Over the years the pressure on one side got greater and greater until everything collapsed. 

If extra height is needed for a block wall by adding a fence it’s a good idea to secure the vertical posts into the ground and having the fence free standing from the way. That way it won’t put pressure on it.

It’s a cautionary tale about fixing extra things onto walls. Sometimes they are just designed to hold themselves up and not another fence or heavy climbers. 

The growing season is slowing down now but I am still sowing seeds and taking no notice of the sowing times on packets. This week I planted some catnip, mimosa sensitive plants and a new ground cover called Herniaria glabra or rupturewort. It’s a really hardy little known perennial known to be nearly indestructible.  It’s an excellent choice for growing between flagstones or growing as a lawn substitute. The tiny leaves create a dense evergreen carpet, becoming bronze in winter. I’m hopefully going to be adding it to my list of groundcover plants for sale next year.

Reflecting and Restless

I’m in a reflective mood about my career choice in horticulture.  I have always loved growing things. I don’t know may people who had over 70 types of houseplants in their home as a teenager and it was the thing that gave me the most pleasure, distraction and comfort. But I was always a restless child and my family refused to sit with me on the settee as I couldn’t stop moving my legs, jiggling them up and down and getting up every ten minutes to walk around. As an adult my own family still won’t sit with me. I used to have the same issues at school and couldn’t sit still for more than a minute.

It turns out that the issue with my legs affects up to one in ten people so at least one of you reading this might have something called “Restless Legs Syndrome” This is why after leaving school I couldn’t sit in an office and relished the fact of a horticultural course that had at least 90% practical work outside. It wasn’t until recently that I realised RLS was a thing but when I found out I had it,  it was like a lightbulb going on in my brain.

Restless Legs Syndrome

Restless legs syndrome, also known as Willis-Ekbom disease, is a common condition of the nervous system that causes an overwhelming, irresistible urge to move the legs. Some people have the symptoms of restless legs syndrome occasionally, while others have them every day. The symptoms can vary from mild to severe. In severe cases, restless legs syndrome can be very distressing and disrupt daily activities; thankfully mine doesn’t get that bad although it is worse at night which can mess up sleep patterns. Some people fall into a depression with it too.

What causes restless legs syndrome?

In the majority of cases, there's no obvious cause of restless legs syndrome but it can run in families.

Some neurologists believe the symptoms of restless legs syndrome may have something to do with how the body handles a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is involved in controlling muscle movement. There could be other factors like kidneys and iron deficiency but as I have had it since I was a child I’m quite sure that’s not the case.  Smoking drinking and stress can agitate the condition as well. 

So many people go down the medication route for RLS and social media is awash with suggestions about what prescriptions to take but all I can see is that nothing really works. All we can do is lead a stress free life, do a bit of stretching and keep active.

Next time you see a dedicated gardener spare a thought for them being on the go all the time. It might be the only time they feel relaxed and at ease with the world.

UPDATE

The wall has been replaced with a sturdy fence