Author: greenbenchramblings

A retired primary school head teacher, I now spend much of my time gardening in our quarter acre plot in rural Shropshire south of Shrewsbury. I share my garden with Jude my wife a newly retired teacher , eight assorted chickens and a plethora of wildlife. Jude does all the heavy work as I have a damaged spine and right leg. We also garden on an allotment nearby. We are interested in all things related to gardens, green issues and wildlife.

First tomatoes

: A few Gardeners Delight ready to pick.

It is a poor year for my tomatoes. The plants look very healthy, deep green leaves free of blemish but few flowers and not all have set fruit. The first to ripen are the Gardeners Delight looking like shining red marbles. Few of the other varieties have any colour on the fruit.

The peppers – sweet, cayenne and chilli – are much better. They have plenty of fruit developing both in the greenhouse and outdoors.

The cucumbers – my usual failures – are also setting fruit better than the tomatoes.

I need to look at my tomato growing technique, as something is letting me down.

The tomatoes, peppers and cucumber are all grown in Vital Earth Organic Peat-free compost and fed with my own comfrey feed with the addition of regular foliar feeds of seaweed liquid.

I underplant them with French Marigold so the plants are free of White Fly.

: The cucumber are just setting fruit behind their golden yellow blooms.

So, where are things going wrong. Perhaps the tomato flowers are simply not being pollinated.

Tags greenhouse, peppers, tomatoes

allotments fruit and veg grow your own

A basket of fruit

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 22, 2011

: All in a day’s picking.

Is fruit picking the most enjoyable part of gardening? It is so satisfying getting sticky and sweet-smelling hands and defying the wasps who are after you. Just look at today’s produce – golden plums with red and green gooseberries. The huge green goosegogs are from a self-seeded bush in a shrub border at home, the tiny red ones from the allotment. How is it that the pampered bush produces berries half the size of the neglected bush? Simply another case of mother Nature knowing best I guess!

The chucks get any bruised or over-ripe fruit. They watch intently as we harvest and get wildly excited if we approach their run, ready for the race to the plum. The Sussex hen usually quiet and reserved becomes a thing possessed, a hen on steroids, the olympic 100m champion of hens. she gets to the plum as it lands and disappears deep into the Buddleia bush growing in the pen. The others see but a streak of white and black plumage and miss out yet again.

Meanwhile, we return to the kitchen for a bowl of ultra-fresh rose-tinted yellow plums topped off with ice-cream and fromage frais. We allow the freezer to look after some for the winter and for jam and chutney brewing.

Tags gooseberries, grow your own, plums

conservation garden wildlife

Cheeky Sparrows

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 22, 2011

What is it with House Sparrows? We all know now of the terrible plight of this “cheeky chappy”, the “cockney sparrer”, or as we called them as kids in Gloucestershire, “spaggies”. Their population has dropped drastically, in town and country. A year ago we were missing their constant chirpy chatter here in our Avocet garden as in the six years we had lived here they all but disappeared. We decided that we might reverse the trend a little by putting up a box for them – the real thing, a sparrow terrace with 3 nesting spaces. They had occasionally in the past pushed a pair of great tits out of one of their boxes so we put one of those metal plates with a small hole over the original hole and nearby nailed up the new “for sparrows only” box. The box was on the fence in the side garden opposite our kitchen window so we could watch for developments.

The old box with its new metal hole was grabbed early in the year by a pair of blue tits who took up residence in January and fought off all other prospective squatters. The house sparrows completely ignored their new box except occasionally using it as a perch or toilet. However we soon discovered a pair evicting great tits from a tit box in the back garden. The fight continued for weeks with nesting material being added in turn by the sparrows and the tits. The sparrows won in the end and have now raised a healthy and noisy brood. They are now sitting on the second batch of eggs.

But no sign of activity in the specially provided sparrow terrace – unless of course you count the blue tit family in residence in the end terrace!

Tags nest boxes, sparrows

climbing plants garden photography gardening ornamental trees and shrubs roses shrubs

Scented Roses

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 20, 2011

A warm humid day brings out the best scent in the garden and roses are often considered the best blooms for sweet scents. But not all roses perform, with many hybrid teas completely without odour. When we began our garden in Plealey we wanted the best and most varied scented blooms so all our roses are New English varieties bred by David Austin. Luckily his nursery and trial grounds are not far away. The display gardens are amazing and give you the chance to fully experience the sight and scent of each variety. So chosing roses for our garden is so easy. We simply take a half hour drive, wander around the roses sniffing the blooms as we go and then make our final choice over a cup of tea served in cups decorated with paintings of roses of course.

We now enjoy here in our patch at Avocet “A Shropshire Lad”, “Falstaff”, “Teasing Georgia”, “Graham Thomas” and “Wenlock”. We grow them close to paths – close enough to enjoy their scents but not so close that we suffer from their thorns.

Tags A Shropshire Lad, allotments, David Austin, gardening, grown your own, New English, New English Roses, roses

grow your own

Crested Chucks

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 19, 2011

: Camera shy Fenton Blue

My flock of chucks is back up to eight with the addition of a Fenton Blue and a Fenton Rose. These are hybrids bred from Cream Legbars which are very flighty birds. My two tend to live in the trees in their run watching their flock comrades below them. They are normally very nosy birds but show them a camera and they disappear. Hence so far this is the one and only photo I have. But I shall keep trying.

We hope to get eggs from them in a month or so. they come into lay a few weeks later than most hybrids but the eggs should be worth waiting for – they lay blue ones!

They are beautiful birds, the blue having a salmon chest contrasting with the blue/grey of the rest of her feathers whereas the rose is a lovely mottled rose red.

Tags chickens, hybrids

allotments community gardening gardening grow your own

National Garden Scheme Open Day

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 19, 2011

On Sunday 17th July we opened our site for the National Garden Scheme, the famous Yellow Book. Allotment holders had worked hard during the previous week cutting grass, tidying borders in the green spaces and sprucing up plots. The site looked wonderful – even in Sunday’s rain! And rain it certainly did! We were pleased though when over 100 visitors came along with brollies braving or perhaps defying the weather. I believe that gardeners get good at defying weather – others merely brave it out. Many of our visitors stayed for several hours, leaving only when they had drunk gallons of tea and consumed masses of cake, and promising to return next year. I had hoped to show how good the site looked with photos of glowing flowers and shining veggies but that will have to wait until the weather improves. These photos though depict the reality of the day.

Tags NGS, open gardens

conservation garden wildlife gardening natural pest control wildlife

Upmarket Insects

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 18, 2011

The essential ingredients for rustling up an insect hotel.

We have built a new insect stack, or insect hotel as they are often called, in our back garden here in Plealey. It is a real upmarket affair – if it were a hotel for humans it would definitely deserve to be called a “boutique hotel”. We hope it becomes a home for beneficial insects – ladybirds, lacewings, beetles and bees, plus maybe the occasional amphibian – one of our resident newts, toads or frogs perhaps. A much friendlier way of dealing with garden pests.

Tags garden insects, insects, pest control

gardening grow your own

New Chucks

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 8, 2011

I have acquired a couple of new hybrids to add to our flock. We are getting fewer eggs these days as our bantams are now rather elderly as bantams go. The Hybrids which we have had now for nearly a year are still laying well but these new girls should boost production as the originals begin to age and slow down their egg laying activities. The new chucks are a Sussex cross, who is mostly white apart from her black tail and hackle and a Bluebell, with strange airforce blue and grey plumage with a contrasting amber chest.

Bluebell - still shy in front of the lens.

Tags chickens, garden livestock

garden photography gardening hardy perennials

Golden Spires

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 7, 2011

The massive forked flower spikes of Verbascum bombyciferum in the Chicken Garden.

Each time the sun momentarily burst through the blackened skies which produced sporadic heavy showers all morning, it lit up the golden spires of verbascum and ligularia.

Ligularia in front of verbascum in our "Hot Border.

Tags ligularia, verbascum

garden wildlife gardening

Sharing my coffee break.

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 4, 2011

During one of my many breaks for coffee whilst gardening I was joined by this little chap. He stayed for a while – long enough in fact for me to fetch my camera and take his portrait. While I enjoyed my coffee he perched on the seat beside me being fed with chewed up Amelanchier berries provided by his mum.