"Jeeves, throw another faggot onto the fire, it's gone perishin' cold outside"
...to misquote Bertie Wooster and with apologies to PG Wodehouse.
First of all may I say a happy new year to all of you out there in the great wide world. Those of you who live in the southern hemisphere can have no idea how horrible the weather is and has been over this new year. Here in Orkney it’s hopefully gone away for a blink but today the poor folk down south are getting a nasty taste of it just now.
Imagine my great joy when I woke up to a cold house on New Year’s Eve morning. The heat pump had turned against me and had gone into defrost mode, deciding that its heating coils were more important than my well being and it had warmed up the machine and not me. After a fraught morning it changed its mind and started warming up the radiators in the house, but forgot to heat the water. I have overcome the difficulty for now as there are two immersion heaters inside the tank so a sort of normality has returned to the Furrigarth household. I’m sure all the problems will go away with a little help from my bank account. A great start for the new year, I don’t think.
Having watched the track outside turn from solid ice since the 1st of January, yesterday, it has turned into a river, with the two ruts gushing with runoff from the fields and hills just above me where the water cistern is located.
The cistern supplies most of Dykeside and other lower parts of the village with treated water under pressure (gravity) that has been pumped up there from the waterworks down near the bay. Once upon a time, if there had once been a ditch above the track to divert the run-off water, it has now long disappeared and all the water from there, plus from the public road too, rushes down and lands in my car park on its circuitous journey into the Loch of Burness below here, to be seen above the greenhouse roof on the right in the picture below.
I just have to live with it but it’s nice to have a bit of a moan too, to a captive audience. Sorry. I knew what I was getting into when I bought the property thirty years ago so I can’t really complain.
Never fear… IT’S GETTING BETTER NOW.
The good news is that of course, things are beginning to grow (it’s only the fifth of January). I looked out the spare bedroom window short ago and saw new green shoots emerging from the mat of dead dianthus that had delighted me all summer and autumn. Tiny pink and purple flowers in abundance to brighten the path on the way to the grassy bit that I think of as my lawn. When I first moved here it was not a lawn, just wild tall grass hiding a couple of chicken coops so consequently I managed to kill two new petrol mowers in two weeks, knocking it into shape, but that’s another story.
Searching further into the garden just now I found the montbretia plants that now proliferate, showing signs of new growth. Good grief, the damned stuff just doesn’t know when to take a break, it’s far too early to start growing, we have two to three more cold months to go before anything should think of braving the spring air. I can almost guarantee that there will be one week in early March when the snow will come and block me in, just for devilment. If it doesn’t happen then that’s counted as a bonus. I’m really looking forward to a couple of weeks of hard slog in early April, using the wheeled brushcutter to tackle the remaining third of an acre of rough grass in what I like to call the bottom paddock. That name makes local folk laugh…what’s a paddock?
The really good news is in the greenhouse. It is unheated but it certainly keeps off most off the frost, Here I have raspberry canes, freshly planted last year, along with three or four blackberry bushes. The raspberry canes were planted early in spring in tubs, as primocane, meaning that I would have a crop the same year, which I did. There weren’t many berries but enough to keep me happy for a couple of weeks. Not so the blackberries, they just grew to establish their roots ready for this coming year. Fine that!
I am partial to the black cabbage, cavolo nero, and chard, part of the beetroot family. Outside in the netted cage, I have wildflower seeds, foxgloves, chard and cavolo nero. Well the wildflowers were fine as were the foxgloves but the chard and cavolo nero were a waste of time and effort being planted outside, so to my great delight they are now growing in the greenhouse all ready to pick as and when I want them, in fact I’m having chard for lunch today. The leeks (below) are just biding their time waiting for better weather in spring, to start getting bigger and fatter ready for eating.
Meanwhile, outside the perpetual rhubarb is still showing signs of life, though as it tastes horrible I have elected not to eat it. I can’t bring myself to chuck it out though as the plant was a gift. This year I shall be hunting round and begging for a couple of new plants from my neighbours. Everyone has rhubarb here except me. I accidentally sprayed it with Roundup. Oops. Idiot!
To end on a high note, pictured above are my strawberry plants. I spent a lot of time last spring planting these in growing back and covering the area with fine micromesh to protect them from bugs. What I didn’t do, however, is check the state of the drainage. The water gets into the trough but it stays there as I forgot to drill holes in the low retaining wall. As a result I had very few strawberries to pick in the summer, and the remaining ones are LEARNING TO SWIM.
Nobody’s perfect.
I make no apologies for the weather and plant related content of this posting, I have spent the Christmas period doing as little as possible, but hopefully I will have amused you. Please put a tick in the heart icon below to give me a bit of encouragement. The results from my request to do this on my last post were very gratifying. I’m off for lunch now and to listen to Gardeners’ Question Time to see how it really should be done.
Happy New Year to you too Peter!