Little Green Space
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Little Green Space |
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LITTLE GREEN SPACE Originally published in the Peak Advertiser on 22 March 2010
It’s hard to choose a favourite time of
year when you grow your own vegetables. Early spring is full of
anticipation, as the first shoots of garlic push their noses up out of the
soil and windowsills are groaning under the weight of trays packed with
seedlings. Then there is early summer, with the
excitement of the first harvests, and the sheer abundance of autumn, when
crops are plentiful and the kitchen goes into overdrive to process the
harvest. The weather’s still cold, but my
windowsills are already at the groaning stage, which makes it feel as
though spring is just around the corner. The greenhouse effect I’m
lucky to be gardening with a greenhouse for the first time this year,
which means there are a few jobs I can get on with even though it’s
still freezing outside. My
new greenhouse – which I treated myself to last spring – sat in the
shed for months before eventually being erected by a team of three
strapping young men. It took them about 18 hours. “It
must be enormous!” I hear you cry. But in fact, at four foot square, it
is quite possibly the smallest greenhouse around. But
I am very excited about the things I’ll be able to grow this year. Last
year my entire tomato crop – which I grew outside – got destroyed by
blight, so top of my list of greenhouse crops has to be tomatoes. I’m
trying several different varieties this year: gardener’s delight and
garden pearl will bear cherry tomatoes, while roma will produce plum
tomatoes, and costoluto fiorentino should produce larger fruits for
slicing. I’m
also growing a range of peppers and chillies, as well as aubergines and
cucumbers: all crops which will not fare well outdoors unless we have a
long, hot, dry summer. And what are the chances of that? Early sowing Having
the greenhouse has also allowed me to get a bit of a head start on some of
the vegetables I would normally plant outside. I often sow a few peas,
beans and salad leaves into pots on a windowsill, but in a small cottage
without that many windowsills, the amount of food I can start off this way
is limited. So
with the windowsills in the house already packed to the gills, I’m
really pleased that this year I will be able to transfer some of the
tougher seedlings – such as leeks – out to the greenhouse. Sowing
the pea seeds at the weekend made me think about how I will support them
this year. I’d usually stock up on bamboo canes from the garden centre,
but this isn’t the most environmentally-friendly option. To
begin with, bamboo canes have to be imported. And when there is a locally
available, fully sustainable alternative available, it seems sensible to
give that a try. With
National Beanpole Week starting on It’s
important to support our traditionally-managed coppiced woodlands (as well
our Coppiced
woodland, like other forms of woodland, is in decline. So by choosing
coppiced wood products you can really help. And
if you have a hazel tree in your garden – or the space to plant one –
you could have your own constant source of beanpoles. Hazel is the tree
traditionally used for beanpoles: it produces straight, sturdy stems which
peas and beans find easier to cling to than bamboo canes. For
more information about beanpole week and where to source locally-grown
coppiced poles, visit www.beanpoles.org.uk. Pondlife One
of my favourite places in the garden in March is the pond. We have the
wildlife, rather than ornamental, kind. Around this time each year the
frogs start to re-emerge after their long winter’s hibernation. Frogs
return to the same pond – often the one they were themselves born in –
each year to begin breeding. We’ve seen as many as 20 frogs in our pond
at a time, which makes me wonder where they all used to go before it was
built. By
the end of the month we should have some frogspawn. It’s usually there
by early March, but with the relentlessly cold weather we’ve had, and
the water freezing over almost nightly, the frogs are holding back until
things warm up a bit. Talking
of ponds freezing over, there has been some debate recently as to whether
ice on wildlife ponds should be broken or left alone. Wildlife groups used
to recommend that the ice be broken, to allow oxygen to reach the
creatures within. But the
latest advice from Pond Conservation (www.pondconservation.org.uk)
is to leave your wildlife pond alone. The creatures living there, such as
dragonflies, water beetles and hibernating frogs, should all have enough
oxygen to survive. The exception to this rule is if you have fish in your
pond – then you will need to break the ice.
Often
considered to be slimy, and featuring unfavourably in many fairy tales,
frogs and toads are probably not at the top of many people’s list of
favourite garden wildlife. But
I love frogs and toads and am happy to have them sharing my patch. They
are fascinating to study, and best of all one of their favourite foods is
the gardener’s worst enemy: slugs! And
some allotment associations – such as
Wellfield Allotments in Matlock – have
even gone to the trouble of creating a wildlife pond on their allotments.
This encourages beneficial creatures to gobble up garden pests, as well as
providing a lovely, peaceful place to sit and relax after a hard stint of
digging. And with wildlife ponds being yet another of the Penny at Little Green
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