Into the New Year 2020

 Saved succulent offsets

A ‘Gift Free’ Christmas has always been popular with me. I’ve been practising it since the 1970’s and have no intention of stopping. The problem is that most people have now caught on to my methods and I didn’t even find a pair of socks, jar of pickled onions or lump of coal in my stocking from anyone last week. Whatever happened to “It’s better to give than receive?” Still, what can you get for the man who has everything?

Now the Festive fuss and fun has died down we can look forward to ringing in the New Year. After that it’s time make and break our resolutions. Mine this year is to avoid any stress and unnecessary pressure. I’ll give myself a week. 

The first job of the New Year for a lot of us will be to take the tree to the recycling centres dotted around the peninsula. We have until the 5^th or 6^th of January to get the decorations down so there’s no rush. 

Composting

There are plenty of things produced over the holiday you can compost. A majority of leftover trimmings can go in the bin as well as non-plastic wrapping paper and uneaten food (as long as you have a lid and base to keep the mice out). You can even put old Quality St wrappers in the compost as these are apparently made from biodegradable cellulose. I generally find the best use for the wrappers is covering broken tail lights on cars. I was thinking of putting different colours on each glasses lens, casting some Kool & The Gang and pretending I’m at a disco. I’m easily entertained.

Neglecting

I’ve neglected a couple of things in the garden this year. My asparagus was coming along really well after growing it on from seed for three years. This year was supposed to be the harvesting year but I inadvertently covered the plants with a few barrow loads of soil. I managed to dig up the roots and transplant them in the polytunnel but these soft juicy treats proved to be too tempting for Chips the dog. She managed to dig the roots up and eat them in one of her bored spells.

The other is an annual neglect. I forgot to get most of my established succulents in before the frost came and now they are just mounds of slimy grey brown mush. I have a few large plants that survived and also saw this scenario coming so took loads of offsets and planted them up under protection in cell trays before the frost came so all is not lost. My cacti are all doing well as I put those in the house just at the end of summer.

Protecting

It might be an idea to protect alpines if you have them in the garden. These plants are really sturdy and hardy to frost, coming from high up in the mountains. It’s the wet that kills them though so if you can cover the really vulnerable ones up with a bit of glass or Perspex this might help to keep them from rotting. Having a well-drained sandy soil is good too as well as having small gravel around the plant so they are not sitting on wet ground.

Planting

Bare root fruit trees and bushes are now available. Raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrant bushes can go in as well as apple, pear and cherry trees. You might like to try putting in a plum tree too.

When planting trees it’s been well documented that we should backfill the planting hole with the original soil without any embellishments like manure or compost as this doesn’t give the tree roots any incentive to spread out into poorer soil away from the planting hole. This is called the ‘container effect’. 

It turns out that digging a round hole for the tree to be planted in also gives the roots a poor start. The roots have a tendency to get to the perimeter of the loosely filled soil in the hole and then spiral around the edge where it meets the regular un-dug soil instead of branching out.

There is a solution. Dig a square hole. 

Research has found that roots aren’t very good at going around 90 degree corners so when they hit the edge of the square they carry on in a straight line making inroads into the soil further away which helps support and feed the tree. I see an experiment coming on.