galadhir

Today I feel as though I’m making some sort of progress on the ‘novice gardener attempts to plant food forest’ front.

This morning I went out and picked myself a pot of tea. I took a few flowering heads of lavender, two peppermint leaves and two lemon-balm leaves, put them in one of those individual tea-pots that comes with a cup and had three cups of tea out of it. Very fragrant and lovely it was too!


It hadn’t occurred to me that I could grow my own tea before reading Martin Crawford’s Creating a Forest Garden about a month ago. But I had space for more plants, so as soon as I did, I ordered a chocolate mint and an anise hyssop plant. And on Monday I was in town at the bulk buy shop and discovered a very bedraggled, unhappy lemon balm plant in their ‘please take these away because they’re dying’ bin, so I brought that home in my bike pannier too.

The lavender and the peppermint were already in place.

Having tried for a couple of days now, I discover that there is something very special about being able to start the day by picking your own tea blend from the garden. It’s a revelation almost on a par with how much difference fresh herbs make to the taste of your cooking. They give much more satisfaction and pleasure than it seems like they ought to.

Other successes–there are slugs in the slug trap. The little bastards have been chomping their way through three quarters of the tender baby plants I put in. I fully intend to let thrushes and toads deal with them later on when things are established, but for now I have neither of those things, so drowning in beer it is.

I had a bit of a paradigm shifting moment as regards the lawn this time last month. I had very much been of the 'lawns are a waste of space’ persuasion previously. But we have one. We may not always have one, but while we have one, it finally occurred to me to treat it as an area of soil covered with a ground covering plant.

Namely–not as a waste of space, but as an area of soil that also needed its soil carbon levels building up via nurturing and encouraging the soil lifeforms.

So, two weeks ago, I raised the cutting height on the lawnmower to 6.5 cm and put on it one of those plug in things that cuts up the grass cuttings and scatters them on the lawn behind you. I’m no longer removing the nutrients from the soil by taking the cuttings away to go in the compost bin–I’m letting them accumulate and feed the soil.

I also scattered some chicken manure over the whole garden, and watered it in with some powdered mycorrhizal fungi in solution. If I’m improving the soil, it doesn’t really matter so much what’s growing on top of it, right? It’s still drawing down carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen like a tree.

And I’ve got to say, two weeks and two cuts later it’s noticeably thicker and lusher. It’s still full of wild flowers and weeds, of course, but that’s a bonus imo–I have a prairie.

I also have clouds, absolute effing hoards of hoverflies, bumblebees and ladybirds. I like to think it’s a sign that the biodiversity is improving. As is the fact that there’s a frog in the pond, and that five of the golden-rod sticks, two of the skirret sticks, and one of the perennial kale sticks seem to have taken and sprouted.

Ugh, I'm going to stop weeding the garden. Or at least, I'm going to make sure what the weeds are before I pull them up.

I pulled a plant out from underneath the comfrey this morning, thinking "Well, you are definitely not something I planted!" And then I thought, "let's check to see what it is." So I turned my plant identifying app on it. Lo and behold, it was Wood Avens, aka Herb Bennet, which I have been trying to grow from seed for two years without success.

Wood Avens, aka Herb Bennet, aka Cloveroot has edible leaves and a root that smells like cloves, which can be dried and used to keep the moths off your clothes - while also giving them a spicy scent. And we have such a problem with moths!

I fished it out of the compost bin and replanted it asap.

I'm really beginning to think that there is no such thing as a useless plant. And if it has uses, why would I not want it in the garden?

Admittedly, this is from the perspective of someone whose garden has a lot of bare soil that I need covering asap. I may feel different when the Wood Avens is fighting with the strawberries for dominance. At that point it may need to watch itself. But rn I'm definitely going to check everything before I run rampant with the hoe.

I've had the first salad of the year out of the garden 😀 The tomatoes aren't ours yet, but all the green stuff is. These are all from perennial plants, so I didn't have to plant anything new this year, but I did have to wait until the plants were growing again--the sweet cicely and wild garlic only recently re-emerged from underground, and everything else was focussed on just hanging on through the winter until it began to leaf out again this month.

In this bowl, wild garlic, perennial onion leaves, wasabi leaves, sweet cicely, perennial kale, wild rocket, sorrel, fennel, salad burnet, chard, mint and marjoram.

No more plastic wrapped salads that go off before you're half way through them!

Last year we stopped harvesting salad stuff at the end of November, but I only have one of each type of plant at present, so I bet I can close that gap a bit as I add this year's crop of seedlings.

One thing I love about gardening is getting new plants, putting them in the garden and going out the next day to find that they have breathed a sigh of relief. They're looking healthier and glossier, more spread out and/or more upright. Most of the time, you didn't realize that they were in distress in their pot, but it's a delight to look at them in the ground and think oh, little buddy, you're so much happier here.

On Monday I was in town, doing my usual grocery shop, and the place where I get my refills had a shelf of plants you could buy. I have a garden where at least half of it is in full shade (it gets about an hour of sunlight a day tops,) and I want to get the soil covered by plants asap. Ideally, I want that ground cover to also be edible, or useful for medicine/scent/pollinator food etc. This is a difficult ask.

So when I saw they had an English violet (edible in salads and sweets, makes a healthy sweet tea, full of vitamin C, grows in full shade, vigorous spreader,) I thought that's the plant for me! But oh, the poor little thing was on its last legs, absolutely flat in its pot and turning yellow.

I took it to the counter and said "Could you please give it a dribble of water, just so it survives until I get it home?" So the guy held it under the tap for a moment and sold it to me for £1. (Which was a bargain because not only did I get the plant but also the nice terracotta pot it was in.)

It had already started to recover by the time I got it home, so this was not at its worst:



but after rehydrating it properly overnight, and planting it out yesterday, this is what it looks like today:



It is genuinely a joy to see a suffering creature suffering slightly less.

I don't think I'd make a good potion maker. I've only just realized that it makes a big difference which ingredient you add to which in what order.

To give context, I was making some kitchen-cleaning liquid. In the process of trying to use (and then throw away) less plastic, I stopped buying those neon-coloured spray bottles of kitchen cleaner and started making my own, which I put into a glass spray bottle which I then re-use continually.

This cleaning liquid is genuinely WAY better than the stuff I used to buy, and smells nicer. This is the recipe:

100mls castille liquid soap
2 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
400mls boiled water
Essential oils of choice (I use 3 drops each of lavender, tea-tree, citronella and peppermint, because they're supposed to have disinfectant qualities, and also they smell nice together.)

Previously I'd been adding the ingredients in the order given here, and I'd had a problem with undissolved bicarb clogging up the spray nozzle. This time I dissolved the bicarb in the hot water first, and only then added the soap and oils. Much better! It's amazing watching the misty clear of the dissolved bicarb water and the clear yellow of the soap turn solid white like milk when combined.

Anyway, I can't speak highly enough of this cleaning solution. It lifts dirt like the best 'activated oxygen' spray you can get from the supermarket, without smelling all throat-chokingly chemical. It does leave a white residue if you don't wipe it off thoroughly enough - but that helps you make sure you have wiped it off. And it means I don't buy plastic bottles any more.

(I did buy a 5L jug of liquid castille soap, but (a) it's lasted me a year and a half so far, and there's about 2L still to go, and (b) when it's finished it will be turned into a place to put a plant on my vertical wall in the garden.)