garden – Rumwoldstow

Spring, bees and cats

It seems like spring starts earlier every year, it’s the middle of April and the fruit trees are flowering. Damsons, plums and pears have all flowered and are now showing set fruit. The quince is coming into flower. A couple of the apple pippins are flowering; so far only four of the eighty-odd pippins are at that point.

A local cat has started visiting regularly, she’s very friendly and also runs around climbing on everything, chasing everything and generally Being A Cat.

The latest excitement was a swarm of bees, which the local beekeepers have moved into a box and then left the bees to themselves for the rest of the day to settle in. The plan is to move the box up to their permanent home just outside the village this evening, once they’ve all settled in for the night.

Buds

Look carefully at the photo…do you see them? Yes, the first ever flower buds from one of my apple tree seedlings! These were grown from apples collected in 2020 and germinated in 2021, so they are now three years old. I need to do an audit and empty out the pots of those that died over the winter but I must still have a good 50 saplings in pots dotted around the patio.

It’s unlikely that these flowers will produce fruit but it’s still very exciting to see one of the little trees take this step forward!

The leftmost tree is the one with the buds – the one in a terracotta pot. Grown from a seed from a Gala apple

Spring snow and flowers

Helleborus niger; a member of the buttercup family, and poisonous

OMG it’s the end of the first quarter of 923, the equinox is past and here I am writing just after the Feast Day of that most learned and well-travelled princess Saint Hildelith, abbess of Barking. The black hellebore or “Christmas rose” is flowering in fine style. This is a plant of complex character, a winter flower bringing hope of spring, a medicine and a poison. I read that:

Treating intestinal worms lasted into the 18th century. The only drawback was that the patient might end up being killed together with the worms.
https://poisonousplants.ansci.cornell.edu/christmasrose/christmasrose.html

This comes as a surprise to me; I deliberately avoided planting what I knew to be toxic plants such as foxglove and aconite in the Rumwoldstow garden, but hellebore passed me by, partly because the hellebore is such a garden staple. So, erm, whoops! It is out of place in the food-and-flowers garden, and belongs in a medicinal garden with health warnings. It reinforces the message that you should be awfully cautious of eating random plants from the garden…

Moving swiftly on, here are some snaps of the light snowfall we had earlier in March, as viewed on a walk through Rumwoldstow to the end of the orchard and back.

Midsummer’s eve

Madonna lilies in Rumwoldstow garden, somewhat overshadowed by the tansy

I saw several hares on my midsummer’s eve

July jungles

As you can tell from the photos, the garden at Rumwoldstow has got away from me. Where are the energetic nuns and monks when we need them eh? But the plus side is lots of flowers for bees and butterflies.

Al busy working on a spear shaft. Look at the elecampane!

Brother Aethelwine took a turn at digging but it was TOO HOT

The Wyken Pippin to the right has some apples growing for the first year ever, but the Uvedale St Germain pear (left) and Hambledon Deux Ans (middle) did not set fruit, despite having plenty of flowers.

Looking up towards damson, plum, medlar and cherry (left to right)

Alas, very little fruit on the medlar this year

Can you see the plum? In fact there are plenty more lurking in the undergrowth; the Rivers Early Prolific is starting to live up to its name.

The first ever plum from the Rivers Early Prolific! Small but tasty

Rachel’s rowan, self seeded from Kennington in Oxford, is just about keeping pace with the grass. Planted out this year.

I think the quince tree is in there somewhere? No fruit this year, in fact I didn’t see any flowers either. But the tree is growing.

Lots of habitat for white butterflies and small beasts generally

Looking back into Rumwoldstow from the orchard

Returning to the elecampane, it appears to be a plant with many medicinal uses and also an edible potherb known to the Celts and Romans. It was known as ‘elfwort’. The roots can be candied or used as a flavouring; they contain up to 44% inulin, a naturally occurring polysaccharide that humans do not digest well. The leaves are apparently bitter but edible, preferably cooked; I have not yet tried this! Medically, it appears to be extra good for lung function and coughs, which is of particular interest in these days of COVID-19. Of immediate benefit is the fact that the bees are all over it.

I put in the two elecampane plants last year, and this is the first year they have flowered. I had no idea how vast they would be!

Spring cleaning in the garden

A sunny morning tempted me out to tidy up some of the mess that the garden became over the winter. Everything was very shaggy and overgrown, with dead flowerheads and lots of mess.

The northernmost bed was great for growing vegetables, and the authentic herbs which I planted in there too have taken up too much space. So I moved the tansy down into the main garden, in place of a marigold (annual).

To the right of the transplanted tansy you can see the madonna lillies, which I planted as bulbs late last year. They all came up but looked a bit feeble. I’m very pleased to see them looking so stout this year!

You can also see the garlic bulbs, again planted very late and the only one I dug up hadn’t grown much, so I left them all in place. I have no idea whether this will give me a harvest later in the year, but I’m told garlic helps to keep aphids off roses, and it’s a good authentic plant so I’m happy to let them do their thing. The sorrel is up already and I need to start harvesting it asap. I discovered last year just how big it gets when left to itself, and I think I should probably move at least one of the three sorrel plants to a bed in the main garden.

The iris Germanica are all doing well, as is the fennel

Everything looks much better now I’ve done some preliminary cutting back and weeding, but the ‘path’s are in desperate need of more weeding. The northern bed is ready to be raked over and have seeds planted, which is exciting!

February Gala

At the start of December 2020, I put six boxes of apple pips in the fridge to impose a fake winter and encourage them to germinate. Two months later, on the Feast of Saint Wærburh (that’s today), I hoiked them all out and inspected them. They all look fine, a bit of mould but still shiny damp apple seeds. And the galas from the Co-op have started sprouting! This made getting into the old privy where the plant labels live an urgent job, and Al manfully tackled it. Hurray! He opened the door! I thought we wouldn’t see the inside of the privy until spring, given how wet it’s been and how much the door had swelled up. And there were my labels, neatly packed in an old Chinese takeaway box.

Yesterday I enquired of all my friends how best to permanently label plants, given that “permanent marker” faded quite rapidly; I received a number of very interesting suggestions. At one point I thought I’d have to split hazel rods and write on them with lead pencil (not a bad option), suspecting that I wouldn’t realistically get round to collecting and cutting open aluminium cans and then punching letters into them (a cool idea but time-consuming), and feeling that buying paraloid to use as varnish was also not going to happen. So I hunted up an HB pencil from my craft box, before discovering that the plastic labels had come with a soft lead pencil that was far more suitable. I may take the time to go back and scratch the letters in with a compass or leather awl (whatever comes to hand first) as an extra step, but this will do for now. And I’ve stuck labels into the three Braeburns that I planted last summer, now that I have two different types of apple that need to be differentiated.

I’ve put 5 seeds in each pot; I hope that the roots will grow mainly downwards so it won’t be too hard to separate them when they are larger. However, if this germination rate keeps up I could easily find myself with 50 – 100 young apple trees to deal with. We can squeeze a few more into the orchard, and maybe another one in the garden, but 50? Hmm! Really it’s enough to plant a fair-sized wood!

Gala seeds from apples bought at the Kings Sutton Co-op, many starting to sprout

Gala apple seeds in soil, next to the hyacinths that formed part of our rent last year…

Snow and ice for St Tortgyth

On the eve of the Feast of St Tortgyth, winter visited Rumwoldstow.

OMG so much weeding to do…but not today…

Floods, snow and ice together on the meadow.

Last carrots of 2020

I harvested the last few carrots from the Rumwoldstow garden yesterday, as they’re starting to go manky in the ground, plus some beetroots.

The carrots and beets have been surprisingly successful, given the bed was only built this year and the seeds planted in July. The white beetroots are very tasty and the leaves make an excellent spinach substitute. And the fact that they’re providing fresh green veg in November is amazing – even with the mild weather it’s impressive.

Oh, the garden is so full of weeds and overgrown…I have been reluctant to cut back flowers because they feed bees, but I really do need to start tidying things up. Except that right now I have No Time…so it’ll probably be a New Year job.

The orchard is now resting, I guess. The sheep are long gone, all the fruit harvested.

Dog days

There hasn’t been much happening here, and last weekend I scuttled off Oop North to play at Vikings in the lovely Danelaw Village, now happily reopened. A small group of us carved spoons from sycamore wood – though my first spoon cracked overnight and needs some work with polyfilla and sawdust when it’s dried out.

Back at Rumwoldstow, the flowers are nearly over although the cornflowers are still attracting the bees and the yarrow is out. Still nothing but huge leaves from the elecampagne.

The new North bed is doing well – I’ll probably need to move some of the plants in the spring as they are all crowded in and growing fast.
All the late-planted vegetables are coming up at last, with even the second go of dwarf beans finally making a reluctant appearance. I’ve started to harvest salad leaves and am looking forward to cropping the lamb’s lettuce.

The Cripp’s Red apple seedling died, which is not surprising because its root was broken off. However I have two more Braeburn seedlings in action now making three in total. One of them has three seed leaves so it is definitely a mutant! Still 5 – 10 years to go until I find out if any of them produces good apples. With the hot weather, I’m watering them like crazy and today put them in the shade, though it’s still about 32 Celcius out there. Flewf.
I brought some early apples home from the Tudor garden at the Danelaw village, which don’t yet have viable seeds. I’ll keep them and see if the seeds develop.