The Green Year (06/04) 'Day One'

[Beth Pavell]

Some users may remember last year I wrote a nature blog, from May Day to May Day, following my observations of the natural world each day. I had planned to write about growing and foraging instead this year, but one thing led to another and the idea died on the vine, as it were.

But I'm not entirely giving up. Instead of writing from Spring to Spring, this time I'll be writing from now, the cusp of Autumn, and seeing where it goes

There is a reason behind all this. Call it mindfulness; call it getting back to the earth; call it a love of things that green and grow. I spent half my week in a spot-lit cave masquerading as a shop, among stress, sensory overload, and corporate claptrap. I don't have as much time as I used to for wandering the woods or strolling along the canals. So I shall bring the green back to my own house, right outside my window.

I so want to get started.

 

[Beth Pavell]

26 January - Where to start?

The one thing that narrows the field down considerably is the geography of the garden. As gardens go, it's a decent size, but we have two dogs in the household, neither of which I would trust near loose, nicely aerated soil. Not to mention Bailey the labrador ate an entire crop of gooseberries one year as soon as they were ripe.

So really I have two potential spaces to grow. On the patio right in front of the window, provided I raise the planters up on a table (And probably grow something uninteresting even to a labrador). And possibly on the roofs of the sheds, depending on whether I feel they're strong enough to take the weight of the planters. This being the case, I also narrow down what is sensible to grow. The back garden faces West, but it gets a reasonable amount of light from the middle of Spring right through to the early Autumn. In the Summer the patio will be very warm, what with sun bouncing off the bricks and flagstones all afternoon. The roof of the sheds will get more light, possibly less heat. The downside is that we get North winds rattling across the garden, with negligible shelter. And, as far as the roof is concerned, cats.

My immediate feeling is that growing Mediterranean plants that don't require much height would be best, and perhaps reserve the worst growing spot for a weed patch to help feed the tortoise. Partly this depends on what kind of Summer we have. A warm one like the previous two years would be conducive to this plan; but if we have something mild, cloudy, intermittently rainy I suspect I'll end up wishing I'd grown vegetables instead

 

[Beth Pavell]

28th January - So Much Equipment!

Another good reason to start early is the amount of stuff I'll need to get this garden started. Pots and potting soil, obviously, a decent trowel, fork, gloves, plant feed, possibly chickenwire, copper ... so the first task is to look round the local garden centres to see what's on offer. The B&M hasn't opened the garden centre yet, but they've got cheap pots and soil - also a mini plastic greenhouse that would be useful for nurturing seedlings.

Tomorrow I think I shall go down to Ashwood Nurseries. It's going to be expensive, of course, but I want to see what specialist equipment they have ... and whether the staff know enough to give decent advice.

 

[Beth Pavell]

30 January - Ashwood Nurseries

I used to like going to Ashwood when I was a kid. It always seemed to be bathed in sun, because we never went any other time, and to me, the smells of warm earth and stone were a smell of summer, associated with hay and blue skies, the Stourbridge canal and strawberry picking. The magic wears off somewhat when you visit on a cold, rainy day in January. But I also remember fantasising about the sorts of plants I would grow if I had the money and sovereignty over the garden. Now I have money, and at least sovereignty over the head of the patio - so there is a certain kid in a candy shop feeling involved.

The good news is that it's not as expensive as I thought. I still won't buy plastic pots there, or tools, given that this is my first foray into the garden. But as far as growing is concerned, I have a huge range to select from. I was tempted by some snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), but to me, the joy of Spring flowers is in not quite knowing just where or when they will bloom. Daffodils (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) are one thing, but snowdrops need to be discovered.

I might just grow some forget-me-nots (Mysotis sylvatica) just because they're cute, in any case. The damn things are so common they're neither really natural nor cultivated. Perhaps they've have the benefit of attracting pollinators to my plot

 

[Beth Pavell]

02 February - Diaries

When it comes to foraging I don't really need to write anything down. Experience and keeping your eyes open is more or less enough to tell you when things are beginning to grow and ripen. Actively cultivating plants is obviously somewhat different, so to that end I've decided to keep a diary to keep track of it all, along with what the weather's doing from day-to-day.

I'm pretty sure I've got my equipment list down. I think I can make do with buying:

• A trowel, fork, and gardening gloves
• Sticky labels, etc
• Multipurpose compost, possibly seed compost
• Stones, gravel, possibly vermiculite
• A mini greenhouse
• Outdoor containers

In the spirit of thriftiness many of my containers are going to be reused from something. Instead of buying small seed containers I'm going to plant into empty Lush cosmetics pots - I can get them from work for free anyway, and the larger kind should be big enough to avoid transplanting seedlings two or three times. If I grow herbs and/or salad leaves I can use some empty tins I seem to have accumulated over several Christmases (Heroes, Quality Street, Roses, all the typical Christmas clichés). Bang a few holes in the bottom for drainage and they're ready for use.

 

[Beth Pavell]

04 February - Cold Earth

February is not when I expect to see much growing. In the early months of Winter you might conceivably find something that's managed to cling on despite the shortening days, but by February the frost has usually put a stop to that. This year we haven't had a blanket of snow to flatten and freeze everything, and relatively few frosts. There's a few rare dandelions (Taraxacum officinalis) blooming where the council lawnmowers neglected to do a last September mow; in sheltered spots a few short nettles (Urtica dioica) represent the genesis of the next year's stinglebanks. They'll be competing with the goosegrass (Gallium aparine), which at present are feathering the sides of the paths but will grow like maniacs once the weather warms up a little.

As far as edibles are concerned, it's the same old story. The only plants really growing are sprouting daffodils (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) and snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) blooming for what will likely be a few short weeks.

 

[Beth Pavell]

Apropos of nothing in particular, a little patch of snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), brightening up an otherwise dismal stretch of pathway on the nature reserve

 

[Juliko]

Those are cute flowers!

 

[Beth Pavell]

11 February - The Elusive Spring

An English Winter can play tricks on you; more than once we've been served a false Spring. These past few days have been mild as March, the ground somewhat soggy but noon temperatures easily hovering around 9 degrees Celsius. It would be tempting to interpret this an indicator of early Spring, but halfway through February nothing is certain.

The question is, therefore, when to start planting? Even March can have a nasty sting in the tail. More often recently that means decidedly hibernal weather when Spring ought to be peeking out. My feeling is that I ought to be prepared for the second half of March, at least, though I won't trust the final frosts to be over till the third week. If we do get cold weather after that, there's not really anything I can do but replant

 

[Beth Pavell]

27 February - Daffodils Point

​

There you see the daffodils rather helpfully pointing out just where the sun will be in the garden. Or rather, their leaning shows where the sun is first, because as you can see, half the garden is currently shadowed. This will change in a month or two - despite the high afternoon temperatures, this is still the tail end of Winter, and the sun is still relatively low in the sky.

But even so, this is telling me most of what I need to know about where to plant and where the hottest part of the garden will be

 

[Beth Pavell]

01 March - Oh Joy, For the Sweet Green Spring!

How sweet it is, the certainty that the day is the first of Spring. The air is still chilly, the skies grey, but there is a feeling of life seeping from the ground. The long dark of Winter is over - this year, it comes early, on the very first day of March. The snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) have fallen, but the goosegrass (Gallium aparine) is making an early bid for dominance. Over these past two years it's been steadily conquering the woodland floor. The first celandines (Ficaria verna) are peeping out. I would have taken a photo, but in typical fashion I can't find one now I look for them. I wonder if the windflowers (Anemone nemorosa) will appear soon?

But its the early hawthorn (Crataegus species) that have the stage. Some hawthorn flowers and buds at the first sign of Spring, well before their May flowering cousins. Theirs is a simple beauty, where the little cinquefoils star the branches in a frosting of white

 

[Beth Pavell]

03 September - The Cusp of Autumn

The end of Summer is always bittersweet. The first couple of weeks of September is where Summer merges, almost unnoticed, into Autumn. The sun shines much as it always does, the days appear to be as long as ever, but there's a subtle drop in temperature that brings the sweaters back out of the cupboard.

And indeed, for foraging it's a debatable time. At present there is still fruit on the branches - the second ripening of blackberries, the hawberries, rowans, elder, probably even some sloes somewhere. Some of the blackberries (Rubus species) will never ripen, but many others will, depending upon how much sun September will have. When the Autumn rains appear the fruit will rot on the vine, so when best to harvest them?

Likewise, in my garden I have to make a decision on what to plant. I may be able to eke out another crop of beetroot at this point - I have the seeds, so it's a case of plant and see. It might be wise soon to plant some assorted weeds as winter forage for my tortoise.

 

[Beth Pavell]

17th September - The Arrival of Autumn

Autumn is here, almost unnoticed. When the days are clear, the afternoons are warm enough to make one think it could still be Summer, but the clear nights tell a different story. Some of the trees know the season is changing. Many of the poplars (Populus nigra), especially the old or ill, are already turning bronze. Rowans (Sorbus acauparia) are beginning to blush red, the oaks (Quercus species) dropping acorns. Blackberrying with a friend the other day shows that most of them are overripe if not downright rotten. I expected that, to be honest. Oddly I found some berries still hale and hearty despite being almost in full sun, though they must be a lucky few. Some of the rowan berries are falling, along with the elders (Sambucus nigra).

 

[Beth Pavell]

18th September - Taking the Time

I had a list of things to do when I woke up this morning. I still have that list now. Because having a job and a car and all the rest of it has a way of picking away at free time, till all of a sudden it's the deep winter and you realise you spent all those other days on stressful bullshit that never really goes away.

So I went for a walk down the canal. It's been another warm day, the breeze bringing a crisp sharpness to it that seems nostalgic, in some indefinable kind of way. A few late dragonflies still patrol the slower stretches of the canal, particularly those weedy, lilypad-strewn branches. Mostly they're common darters (Sympetrum striolatum), spending as much time trying to run one another off their territory as they do ambushing prey. I did spot a southern hawker (Aeshna cyanea) as well, somewhat unusually for this year. Fewer butterflies are about even compared to last week, too - cabbage whites (Pieris rapae) as usual, and still some big red admirals (Vanessa atalanta).

The towpaths are simply bursting with lamb's tongue (Plantago lanceolata), for some reason. Blackberry vines groping madly over the razor wire surrounding the few active factories, with a lot of mauve berries that I'm quite sure will never ripen this late in the season. If you look closely you can see the subtle ripples of fish nosing at the surface - roach (Rutilus rutilus), or possibly rudd (Sarcidinus erythrophthalamus) ... I'm not good at fish identification.

It is increasingly quiet on the canals. Most of the geese (Branta canadensis) seem to have moved elsewhere, leaving just a few mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), a swan or two (Cynus olor) and a fair few moorhens (Gallinula chloropus).

 

[Beth Pavell]

03 October - The Wind Changes

If you hadn't been looking for it, the sudden change in the weather might have come as a surprise. Almost overnight the Autumn rains turned up, and when the sunshine returned, it was with that crisp chill that demands knitwear is brought out again. With that change you can see more obviously the trees winding down, the poplars (Populus nigra) and the silver birches (Betula pendula) especially.

The days are still reasonably bright, less than a fortnight after the equinox, though the insects seem to have disappeared. I haven't seen a butterfly in well over a week now. This doesn't mean they're dead or hibernating, necessarily. I've seen a red admiral (Atalanta vanessa) on a frosty December morning before now.

 

[Beth Pavell]

07 October - Mostly Damp

They say we're in for a cold winter - the coldest in 40 years, but they always say things like that. For some reason we never seem to get the kind of weather the rest of the country does, in terms of extremity. Maybe it's because the Black Country is quite hilly. Probably the canals have something to do with it, being designed with water control in mind. As far as I'm concerned, it's merely been damp in the finest British tradition of dampness.

Looking at some of the summer plants dying back, tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) most notably, I always forget how resilient nettles (Urtica species) are. If anything, a bit of dark and damp and cold is good for them. Too much sun tends to encourage them to get leggy and woody before the first frost. Invariably they remain the greenest, most vibrant plants of the Autumn, indeed of the Winter.

 

[Beth Pavell]

11 October - Somewhere On the North Wind

A few weeks ago I was sitting out in the last of the September sunshine, working my way down a cup of coffee and reading a book (The Fabled Coast, exhaustive if a little repetitive). As is the way of days like that I was really half-reading. After a while I noticed a tiny spider, no more than three millimetres long, marching back and forth across the table. Every now and then it would raise its abdomen optimistically.

Spiderlings are so small, so light, that a few streamers of silk loosed from their spinnerets are enough to lift them on a breeze, sending them flying miles to a new home. Evidently this little fellow was having trouble catching a strong enough breeze, though it managed it in the end. No doubt it was assisted by the spider's other trick. Spider gossamer is negatively charged. The strands repel one another, preventing them from tangling, but they also attract to the positively-charged atmosphere, creating a second kind of lift.

Who knows where that little speck of life is now. Probably not far, but perhaps many, many miles away from me and my coffee cup

 

[Beth Pavell]

02 December - First Frosts

The sky barely stopped raining through the whole of November, which doesn't inspire much desire to write about it. But on the tail end of the month, and for the first two days of December, the morning brought a hard, white frost, sparkling on every surface.

In truth there were one or two frosts in November as well, but these have managed to hang around all day in the shadows where the sun doesn't rise high enough to reach them. That in itself means that Midwinter isn't too far away. It's also finally been the end of the chives I didn't bother digging up from the Summer. It seems they can take cold and put up with excessive rain, but multiple frosts are inclement weather too far.

 

[Beth Pavell]

31 December - The Rainiest Winter

I don't know if the statistics bear this out (Probably they don't), but certainly this has been the wettest winter I can recall for a while. It's been mild enough that wearing my Winter coat has really been a matter of habit than necessity. So much for first frosts, because there have been hardly any throughout this whole month. The nature reserve has been pretty consistently soggy. The worst of it has been around Foots Hole - not merely muddy, but trodden into such a quagmire that even my boots have sometimes struggled to cope.

It's never wise to predict too much of the Winter's weather from the first couple of months. Mild or not, it's not unusual for February to bring a sudden cold snap. And a proper cold snap at that, with repeated hard frosts and ice on windscreens, as opposed to the many slight dips in temperature excitedly proclaimed as cold snaps by new sites trying to fill space. My gut feeling nevertheless is that the Spring flowers will be rising in a few week's time. Perhaps by mid-February it may actually be time to nail down the routine for the Spring planting.

 

[Beth Pavell]

01 January - Worm Bribes

Insect pests didn't seem to be a huge problem last year. I wonder whether that was at least partly to do with strategic planting of basil and marigolds to discourage certain pests. I think nevertheless I'd like to encourage more birds to the garden, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because these gardens were never designed to be wildlife-friendly in the least. Lawns, patios, and wooden fences do little to encourage anything other than cats to turn up. Secondly, to try and encourage the birds to do pest control for me.

I'm toying with an idea of putting out mealworms in the garden sometime soon. My theory is that in the deep Winter, birds such as blackbirds (Turdus merula) and starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) will be more likely to venture into the garden in search of food. Perhaps if I put out food consistently enough, come the Spring those same birds will be more likely to come back in search of something to eat - i.e: garden pests. I have no idea if it will work. Blackbirds were a more common sight in the garden at one point. Starlings occasionally like to sit on the older houses to the south-west of us, though I've never seen them in the garden before. But the upside is that mealworms are cheap, so worst comes to the worst it'll be a failed experiment.