And We're Back!

Happy New Year from all at Windmill Community Gardens!

Today was our first session of the New Year, and we got straight back into the swing of things. After all the stormy weather, and with more forecast, we were lucky to get a mostly dry and sunny day, which made everyone feel more cheerful as the day went on.

Currantly, I'm being pruned...

January is a good time to prune the soft fruit, so that was the main focus of the day. We are hopefully getting fairly good at this now, but because it's not a good idea to prune away more than 1/3 of the wood on any one bush at a time, some of the bushes are only now starting to have the shape we want. A few suffered a lot in the first year because we got too busy to weed the fruit cage and they had a lot of branches bend down to the ground because the weight of bindweed pulled them down. This has been annoying as good fruit was lying on the ground, but has also had the effect of layering several of the bushes. This means that the branches in contact with the mulch below have rooted into it, creating new plants. It's a useful way to increase your stock of most soft fruit. If you have the room to pull a low branch down and fix it into the ground, it's worth a go. Mark is getting quite good at the method now, and is becoming a dab-hand at pruning gooseberries without getting prickled (or maybe he's just being stoic).

We showed Ellie and Andrea the basics and they had a go, though Andrea is enjoying weeding out the bindweed and ground elder roots, so we didn't argue too much when she said she preferred that job and went back to it! We also had a visitor - Hollie, who hopes to volunteer with us soon, and she was also interested to have a try.

A cuttings bed in one of our builder's bag planters

The other way of increasing the stock of plants is to use the prunings for cuttings. We usually do some each year, though the success can be variable depending on the weather and if we remember to water them enough. We find they are quite vulnerable to early dry spells, presumably when they are just getting their roots going and their first leaf growth starts to pull up water. We have now laid out a bed of red currant cuttings, another of gooseberries and also a tyre bed of blackcurrants. It all looks wonderfully neat now, but we will need to keep on top of the weeding with plenty of mulch.

Ellie vs. a vine

We also dug up some of the successful cuttings from last year. Ellie was impressed by how well rooted the grape vine cuttings were, and then less impressed when she got the job of digging them up. It's obvious why Hassan says that they root like weeds!

It may look small, but it's like an iceberg -
not much on the surface but masses underneath

Getting ready for Winter, or not.

Winter may or may not be around the corner. There are lots of confused plants all around us at Windmill. The hazel saplings that we have in pots have put out next year's leaves already, and we have poppies and marigolds in April and May mode springing up all over the place. We aren't seeing many flying insects (apart from the whitefly!), so some things may be getting the idea, but there are healthy populations of aphids appearing in some of our Winter brassicas.

Hassan and friend discuss the unseasonably mild weather

Squirrels seem to be making preparations - we keep finding big juicy hazelnuts when we are digging, and we find various frogs have staked out nice cosy hollows around the grounds. We're hoping the birds don't get confused - a few years ago a pair of robins nested really early and there was a freeze, so we know it can happen. Hopefully the reducing day length will be a sufficient hint to them.

Guy, Mark and Michael take the lid off the fruit cage

We decided we would start to make Winter changes anyway, and took off the net from the fruit cage. It's a fiddly job, but fortunately we had enough help to make it easy, and the net is now safely stashed away for next year. With any luck, as we dig over and mulch the area, we'll be helped to get rid of pests by the birds that can now get into the fruit bushes. We also took the time to cut off the old growth on the blackberry / raspberry cross and thornless blackberry plants that we have planted around the edge of the fruit cage. We then tied in the new growth so it won't be damaged by winter storms and we will hopefully get a good crop next year. We also layered some of the stems - pegging their ends down into the ground. This should hopefully create a rooted plant that we can pot up next year.

Ellie tying in new stems on one of the blackberries

Lunch was a just reward for hard work - savoury gram-flour pancakes with a lentil dahl - filling in just small portions, though the crispy and yummy pancakes meant that everyone had seconds of those.

Chickpea pancake in preparation

New volunteers Dan and Danny lifted some of the vine cuttings taken from Hassan's black grapes on Monday, and Ellie helped to pot up the ones from the bottle bed. They have rooted mightily! The roots are so deep that we had to abandon digging some of them out. We'll have another go next week, as we know some people would love to have them, and we have some ideas about where we want to plant them ourselves.

The few vines we managed to pot up.

Chris showing an idea for a gardener's coat of arms...?!