MAKING A GOOD MIX

Some of us start off with perfect garden soil. Mine is hard yellow Kent clay that may have had lorries driving over it when the house at the bottom of the garden was built – at least it seems so. So every year helped by my friend Martin, as the soil begins to warm up, I mix up barrow-loads of compost and distribute it on every bed, top up every pot and mulch wherever I can.

First, we lay a piece of plastic left by the builders to mix on, and then dismantle last year’s garden compost bay: very good this year, thanks I think to more chicken manure and a top dressing of Sacred Earth Biochar Soil Booster from a community owned organization in East Sussex: sacredearthland.co.uk.

Then we add the lower contents of my Hotbin that has taken all my kitchen waste (including the odd bit of meat and fish) layered with wood shavings from my son’s carpentry workshop. We mix this with leafmould packed into an old builder’s bag that comfortably fits an autumn’s worth of the oak tree leaves, plus a couple of bags of woodchip left by the tree surgeon, particularly good for lightening heavy soils.

The mixture is then scanned for non-compostable bits and pieces that slip in: that old kitchen knife I used to weed the paving, bits of J-cloth that take more than a year, my grandsons’ toys and the inevitable bits of plastic that slip into the wrong bin or seem to form part of plants from nurseries.

We decant this elixir into large pots and Martin manoeuvres them around the garden so I can decant them at my leisure as I tidy and cut back the plants, with help from the hens. Exhausted we sit with a cuppa and discuss the merits of this year’s mix. This has been an epic vintage with compost like cake mix. Thanks to all who contributed.

INDOOR GARDENS

After the usual bout of post festivity illness and general feebleness, I want some joy from the garden in the house without actually shivering out in the grey cold. The potted bulbs have come and gone, my dried seedheads no longer hold any charm, so I’m planting a tiny indoor garden.

Hunting for a good shallow container, I’ve selected an enamel roasting tray. I don’t want to spoil it with holes, so I’ve half filled it with coarse gravel – if it had drainage holes then gritty compost would be suitable – and briefly foraged the garden for raked moss as a basis for my landscape.

Hummocks of moss form on the east side of my slate roof and then get blown down or dislodged by the birds: these make perfect hills and dales. I’ve spotted a potted Chamaecyparis obtuse ‘Nana Gracilis’ that I loved for its texture on the outside table and plonked it in on one side.

Under the oak tree a piece of log is covered with a blanket of moss, so I’ve used it as a background. I want to keep this garden lush and green, unlike the small alpine gravel and beach gardens next to my porch (see July 2017’s blog), but some of the plants used like raoulias, sagina, hebes and mind-your-own-business are useful. Have a look at dwarf and miniature conifers too – kenwithconifernursery.co.uk have a good selection.

I suppose one could go the whole hog and include bonsai, but it’s a step too far for me. I’ve been experimenting with seedheads and pieces of shrub, like wild rose branches for extra interest. My indoor garden will be happy for a while in a light, cool spot, with daily spraying, but can then be moved outside on a terrace table, and replaced with garden flowers and foliage as spring is sprung.

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

Start celebrating Christmas here with an eclectic mix of passionate people selling tasty treats, stocking fillers, decorations and special presents to suit every pocket.

* Mighty Fine Things including locally sourced fruit liqueurs & seasonal tastes.

* Norse Vintage sources decorations to bring a Scandi twist to your celebrations.

* Hiroko Aono-Bilson makes kimonos, scarves & addictive handmade soft toys.

* Cranbrook Iron forges bespoke ironwork from firebowls to Christmas decs.

* For irresistible jewellery: see silversmith Jayne Ayres of Summerhouse Designs.

* Tobi from Slow Bread will be selling his delicious stollen and spiced biscuits.

* The usual mix from The Kitchen Garden: vintage garden & kitchen odds & ends.

I’ll also be selling hardly-used gardening books I’ve reviewed at reduced prices. Funds will go to help the Whitstable Calais Solidarity Group, as will proceeds from refreshments: glasses of mulled wine and homemade cakes and biscuits.

AND ACROSS THE ROAD AT 48 JOY LANE

* Milou Mazou’s handcrafted wooden decorations – future family heirlooms.

* A wide range of unusual vintage for home and garden from Stuuff.

* Exotic pots, bags and pouches, presents from faraway Morocco by Pascale.

TUCKED UP SAFE

Dodging the showers and carefully negotiating the slippery paths, I’m moving my tender plants undercover. I’m fed up with the nightly Russian roulette, relying on Whitstable’s famed mild climate, not knowing every time the celsius drops whether my precious succulents, leonitis, plectranthus and salvias will last the night, and of course, last winter/spring, the temperature really did plummet.

The garage is no longer a safe haven – my son tut tuts if I bring any plantlife within a whisker of his precious sportscar, the shed is full of garden paraphernalia and the spare bedroom is still a repository of other people’s flotsam and jetsum. I’d love a greenhouse (see this weekend’s Telegraph on Glasshouses), but I’m short of the right sort of sunny sheltered space, to say nothing of cash.

So, I tidy the shed and set up shelves under the window using folding garden chairs as a base. The pans of tender succulents (sedum and houseleeks live happily outside) need to be picked over to remove any fallen leaves that might rot and encourage others to decompose too, then put somewhere light, dry and frost-free. Tender perennials in pots also need to be free of rotting leaves, but must not dry out, so remember to visit them occasionally with a drink.

To take their place in spring, I’ve planted my bulbs in containers, layering compost with grit to keep their feet dry, and topping with netting to keep the squirrels from disinterring and replacing with acorns. We open for the NGS on May 19th 2019 so have planted late tulips (from Gee Tee bulbs), and added a layer of favourite Narcissus Thalia for early spring. Hyacinths and N. Cheerfulness are potted safely in the dark for a perfumed January.

POST DROUGHT BLUES

It has been ages since I last posted on this journal. Despite the drought, the flowers have bloomed and all the buds have turned to fruit, in record time. I’ve raced through gooseberries, freezing the early cooked crop and eating the later, larger dessert berries straight from the bush, shared with the hens; picked daily handfuls of jostaberries for my breakfast; luxuriated in the greengages, especially slightly caramelized on tarts; and am now daily retrieving damsons.

Much of my blond, dessicated garden has been left to take its chances, I can’t justify watering, but my lighter pots get plonked in the overflow rainwater butt or ones I can’t lift get doused with washing up water. I have watered the salads in the veg beds, but have raced to keep up before they bolt. Every day, I thank the gods for my produce, especially as the daily egg nestles comfortably in my hand, thanks to the Speckled Sussex. I’m waiting with bated breath for her pullets to start to lay, but am sure one is a cockerel…..(Update: he most definitely is, and has luckily found a home at Doddington Place). 

In the welcome cool of the house, I watch Gardener’s World (a damp world in the South West) where everything is a month behind flowering prettily, or else is regularly watered, and seems more than a world away. All gardening programs are made at BBC Bristol and telegardeners tend to live in that part of the country, so seem remote to me – heaven knows how Scottish viewers must feel. 

A chance to visit us here comes with The Whitstable Food Festival (whitfood.co.uk) on October 6th& 7th, with a tour of the garden, a word about produce past and still to come, some seasonal nibbles and a cocktail from Katy at Mighty Fine Foods. Would love to welcome you.

BUSY TIMES AHEAD

May has rolled round again with its usual abundance: green sprouting from every corner of the garden and new life in the chicken run at last. A week ago, the Speckled Sussex hatched three tiny bantam Orpingtons, like little songbirds, sharp and lively. She is teaching them how to destroy my garden already, scratching and pecking, skills they’re picking up with alacrity.

I’m part of the flock, like a clumsy cockerel who facilitates food delivery and help to climb the long ramp to bed every evening, and keeps them all dry when it rains cats and dogs. And talking of cats, I’ve taken on two kittens – part of a litter my daughter-in-law adopted from the shelter – only to find that three cats were too much in a small house and garden. So Jet and Olive, lithe and lovely have come to live with me.

In among these caring duties I’m opening my garden again as part of Whitstable Open Gardens on Sunday June 10th, so much work needed on that front. We have two new gardens opening with us: a tiny rose and climber decked oasis behind Westgate Terrace and a large garden that surrounds one of the first grand houses to be built along Joy Lane. All the details are on the NGS website ngs.org.uk and it would be wonderful to see you all again.

I’m also giving a talk at the Wealden Times Fair on Friday June 8that 11am at Hole Park near Rolvenden (wealdentimes.co.uk/events), and at the Hens and Gardens event at Great Comp on June 16thwith lots of lovely chickens. Do come and say hello. 

FRUITFUL BLOSSOM

This year all the blossom here has flowered in one gorgeous go: greengage and damson followed apricot, and then without drawing breath, were swiftly followed by cherry, pear, apple and quince. The pollinating insects have had a field day. We gardeners are pollinators most important defenders, especially if we fill our gardens with nectar and pollen-rich flowers throughout the year.

If we want to grow our own fruit and veg on any scale, we all need beneficial insects to fertilize our plants to produce fruit and seeds. The past half century has seen a decline in the number of insects that visit our garden plants, feeding on pollen and nectar, especially bumblebees (so useful to kickstart early fruit blossom), solitary bees, hoverflies, butterflies, moths and pollen beetles.

Keeping honeybees may be one solution to this problem, but encouraging insects generally is another option. People often worry that a wildlife garden may be an untidy one. Not so: virtually any garden can be turned into a haven by providing just three elements – water, food and shelter. It’s well worth the effort to think about beneficial insects when you’re planning and planting every year.

Friends of the Earth are doing a Great British Bee Count from May 17th - June 30th. Register on www.greatbritishbeecount.co.uk and count the bees in your garden.

SPRING BULBS

Now’s not the time to plant spring bulbs, or even buy them, but it’s a great moment to appreciate them and spot ones you might like to grow next year. Here are one or two tips worth bearing in mind.

If you’re planting in containers, you don’t need to worry how the foliage dies, but in beds, it’s quite an important point: spent foliage can look depressing, can kill the next layer of plants, and of course, you can’t just cut it off because it needs to die naturally and feed next year’s bulbs.

Hide the dying foliage under other perennial leaves or grasses as they grow up. Alliums grow well planted in amongst herbs and like the same soil.

If you’re naturalizing bulbs in a meadow or grass, you won’t be able to mow until all the foliage has died down naturally.

I plant bulbs in pots to add to borders where they’re needed, and whisk them away as they pass their best.

I love blue in spring, so plant Scilla siberica in boxes to grow in shady spots; Scilla peruviana in pots for long-lasting colour; and muscari everywhere. My favourite daff is N. Thalia; favourite early bulb is Leucojum vernum, the snowflake; and the meadow bulb I love best is Gladiolus communis, a fuschia pink spire that flowers in May.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

I’m a pessimistic gardener. Throughout winter, I wander around, deep in gloom wondering if anything will ever grow again. I convince myself that all is lost. But then in February, hope is restored as buds fatten and burst, and shoots make their way through the soil. My mood lifts and I can see a future for the garden.

Next, I have a love affair with buds: gasping with pleasure at crimson rhubarb shoots under their cosy cloche and endlessly photographing the fat Japanese quince buds up tight against the fence. I stroke the pussy willow; bring blossom prunings into the house to force them; and carefully skirt nascent bulbs. I wonder at the glories of nature – only to be disappointed again when they burst into flower. Bulbs especially are more interesting just before they explode into bloom for their few days of theatre, and then you have to watch as they die unattractively for ages in their shroud of sappy leaves.

Of course, a garden in full fig is a glorious place: blowsy flowers, gorgeous colours and heady scents, but I soon long for the mellow productive days of autumn (and after our usual dry summers – rain), and then for the structural shapes and seedheads of winter, when my certifiably volatile moods and the garden rigmarole starts again.

COMPOSTING

We all need a period of venalization to bed down and take heart during winter months, and although I leave the garden fallow till late February, I always look forward to demolishing my compost heaps, mixing them with leaf mould and the contents of my Hotbin, then barrowing this dark brown mixture around the beds in the garden in late January.

I pick a sunny day and set off to the bottom of the garden under the oak tree. My collection of cobnuts is covered with chrome yellow catkins and the ground full of stinking iris and its mate the stinking hellebore, distracting the eye from the bank of compost bays, builders’ bags of rotting leaves, piles of cardboard, boxes of woodchip and my Hotbin, not the prettiest of sights, but the heart of the garden, and what gardening is all about.

I dismantle the main garden heap on to a large sheet (and find this year’s cache of lost tools), then add leaf mould, a little rotted woodchip and then the cake mix contents of my Hotbin and rake them together, decanting them into the wheelbarrow to plonk in all my raised beds. I carefully tuck and pat the compost round the base of shrubs, bushes and fruit trees, covering perennials and sprouting bulbs.

I sleep well at night, snug after a good day’s work and smug in the knowledge that I and my garden’s insect, bacteria and fungi cohorts, combined with ideal warmth and moisture have created the best feed and conditioner for my soil and hopefully the heart of next year’s bounteous crop.

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

Start celebrating Christmas here with an eclectic mix of passionate people selling tasty treats, stocking fillers, decorations and special presents to suit every pocket.

• Katy Cox’s Mighty Fine Things include locally sourced homemade fruit liqueurs, preserves and Christmas goodies. Lots of seasonal tastes and ideal presents.

• Rune, The Norse Baker bakes fab biscuits and sources vintage goodies to bring a Scandi twist to your celebrations. 

• Hiroko Aono-Bilson is textile artist using antique fabrics to make kimonos and scarves. And an addictive collection of handmade soft toys.

• Cranbrook Iron make bespoke ironwork for home and garden, from firebowls to Christmas tree decorations, with lots to tempt avid gardeners.

• Elizabeth Harbour is Country Living Magazine’s craft’s ideas person. She’ll be bringing handpainted wooden decorations and handprinted cards and wrapping paper.

• Kate-Beth March is a beekeeper who’ll be selling her wax products, plus delicious chocolates, Christmas puds and cakes. Also Tobi Schwenn’s stolen and biscuits.

• Odds and ends I think you’ll like from The Kitchen Garden. The usual eclectic mix: vintage, garden and kitchen stuff, plus books at rock-bottom prices .    

I’ll also be selling hardly- used gardening books I’ve reviewed at reduced prices. 

Funds will go to help the Whitstable Calais Solidarity Group, as will proceeds from refreshments: glasses of mulled wine and homemade cakes and biscuits.

    Email me at francine@kitchen-garden-hens.co.uk if you need to know more.

    PASCALE WILL ALSO BE OPENING HER HOUSE AT 48 JOY LANE

HARVEST

This is my favourite time of the year, and a bright October is a bonus. The summer’s drought has broken, plants have a brief new lease of life before the frosts and we all bask in that mellow low light that increases endorphins and shows the garden off at its best.

Try and brave the spiders’ webs every morning to pick what’s ripe and ready, and warn your friends you’ll be a pop-up greengrocer for the next few weeks, even if it’s only endless bags of cooking apples. No eggs though, my hens are moulting their pretty plumage and eating me out of house and home as they hoover up extra protein to feather up in time for the colder weather.

I’ve started collecting leaves and seedheads and we have a date for this year’s Christmas Shopping day: Sunday December 3 rd . I also have a publication date for my new book The Garden Farmer (Square Peg) on December 7 th . I’m really looking forward to both. Keep in touch via twitter and my new instagram posts.

WE DO LIKE TO BE BESIDE THE SEASIDE

There’s nothing more irritating, when you’ve struggled unsuccessfully to grow a plant in your garden, to find it growing happily in the most unwelcoming places. Check out the beach, where howling gales, salty winds and the poorest of soils are home to some gorgeous plants. Of course, they are specially adapted to these conditions so enjoy them where they are, and bear these conditions in mind when you adapt their habitat to your own garden.

From the Lizard to the Shetland Isles, our coast is peppered with treasure troves of seaside flowers (see http://www.plantlife.org.uk for a list of the best) and here on the south coast, beaches like Dungeness are home to a world of wild plants including rare spider and lizard orchids; Shoreham-by- Sea’s vegetated shingle is packed with over 90 different wild flowers; and a visit Sandwich Bay will offer dunes scattered with pretty blue sea holly and mauve sea asters. These beaches may not be miles of gleaming golden sands, but they’re much loved by locals, visitors and the wildlife that teems along these shores.

As I cross the groins to reach Seasalter beach, a sea of pink and white valerian (cent ranthus ruber) proliferates in the well-drained soil, sometimes growing in the cracks of walls or in among the decking of the gardens that line the beach. These plots have been mulched with pebbles, seashells and seaside ephemera and edged with driftwood, rope and tidal flotsam and jetsam to stop the wind blowing away the soil, because it’s the winter’s gales, salt laden mists and tidal surges will decide ultimately whether these drought resistant plants are long term successes or just temporary glories.

GROWING BEACHSIDE PLANTS

In windy areas, plant a shelterbelt of tough salt tolerant shrubs and trees, including alder, hawthorn and holm oak.

Grow suitable plants for sandy soils, for a full list visit www.rhs.org.uk.

Incorporate organic matter, loam and fertilizers like blood, fish and bone in spring to improve soil and increase nutrients.

Mulch, then top with pebbles and shells in spring to improve water retention and stop soil from being blown away.

Collect rainwater from your roof to water plants in summer.

The brighter light is more forgiving of bold colour combinations, so experiment.

The photos in this blog are by Vic Spofforth from my book Flying the Coop, charting my move to Whitstable. Available here for the knockdown price of just £5.00.

Walking from Whitstable to Seasalter, I’ve spotted cerise mallow plants (malva neglecta) growing happily in the beach huts’ rubble foundations. Driftwood artist and beachcomber Martin Pamment (http://www.kentbeachart.com) builds these cabins on the shoreline and says when he digs down through the foot or so of shingle, there’s a layer of sandy loam that beds on local clay. Further towards the high waterline, there are mounds of grey-green sea-kale (crambe maritime) that burst into clouds of tiny white flowers in June and July. The young leaves are edible steamed with butter, and popular with foragers. Seeds are available from www.suttons.co.uk.

Next to them grow exotic-looking yellow horned poppies (Glaucium flavum) with silvery-grey crinkled leaves, bright yellow flowers and sickle-shaped seedpods, some 30cm long. A protected species that must not be picked from the wild, you can buy seeds from http://www.plant-world-seeds.com, scatter them on top of compost after a month in the fridge, (but you’ll have to be patient, it can take them up to a year to germinate). They look spectacular next to the pale blue sea hollies and royal blue flowers of Viper’s-bugloss (echium vulgare) that are covered in bees and insects – not so good for humans though, their leaves can irritate skin. Each year brings different plants: the blue grasses are new and the tidal surges this spring eradicated the horned poppies in front of my beach hut and exposed a meadow of sea-pea seedlings.

TINY GARDENS

If things get out of hand and you find high summer overtakes your garden, try these small gardens. Alpines grow imperceptively slowly, creeping across their containers, round shells, driftwood and pebbles, creating tiny landscapes, like the first gardens children make at nursery school. I buy or scavenge old metal filing drawers, troughs or sinks, anything low and shallow, fill them full of plants and beachcombings, and keep them in the rain shadow of a fence slightly on the tilt so they don’t get waterlogged.

Although you’ll probably start with the search for an attractive container, for the plants, the most important element is the soil. Make sure you have plenty of drainage holes then scatter the base with crocks. Half fill with John Innes soil-based compost no 3 mixed with grit (I like silver Cornish grit) to keep it open and free draining. Pop in your plants and populate the spaces in between with favourite shells, fossils and driftwood.

I prefer the textured foliage plants, like mossy raoulias, cushions of sagina, ferny Leptinella squalida ‘Platt’s Black’ – a chocolate brown carpeting alpine; saxifrage ‘Bob Hawkins’, sedums acre elegans and spatheulifolium; sempervivums and thymes, the ones with tiny leaves and minute flowers, like T. ‘Hartington Silver’ and ‘Bertram Anderson’.

Once settled, these tiny delights need little care or comfort, just shelter from winter rains. A small pitched roof will keep the showers off, but still allow plenty of ventilation – imagine Swiss alpine conditions.

POTS OF STYLE

Container gardening isn’t easy. You have to look after your plants, feed them weekly and water them regularly, because they’re entirely at your mercy and won’t flourish if you don’t keep a close eye on them.

Getting down to basics, the compost nurseries use works well getting the plants to sale, but is used to being regularly misted, sprayed and kept constantly moist. The minute it dries out it sets into a waterproof brick that can only be re-constituted by plunging the whole plant into a bucket overnight. So I shake the plant out of its pot and re-pot in a more open peat-free compost with added grit.

I usually line the base of the pot with a square of weed control fabric to discourage ants, then add crocks for extra drainage. If the container is really enormous, I’ll put in chunks of polystyrene packaging before adding my new compost. After planting, I usually sprinkle the surface with horticultural grit to discourage vine weevils.

Watering early morning with a cup of tea or late in the evening with a glass of wine (for me, not the plants) is a relaxing way to start or end the day, and a weekly water with diluted plant feed should encourage your flowers to bloom. Make sure you position your pots to their best advantage and keep plants that enjoy shade out of sunlight.

I collect containers for fun. Metal, wood, clay, terracotta or even plastic. Every car boot sale, junk shop, skip and yard sale is my hunting ground, and matching them with their plant inhabitant is one of the most pleasurable aspects of container gardening. First make sure you can make drainage holes if you intend to plant straight into them, rather than use as a cache-pot and put a plastic pot inside them. Place your container on the lawn to cushion it, then using a mallet and a Phillips head screw driver, bash a couple of drainage holes in the bottom. An electric drill works too.

Apart from succulents (see my blog for September 2016), I love grasses in pots, salvias, astelias, agapanthus, cordylines, bulbs and herbs in pots. Anything in pots virtually, and the great thing is, the minute they’re past their best you can move them out of the way and bring something else centre stage.

PS. A big thank you to the 1000 or so visitors who came to our Whitstable Open Gardens for the NGS.

We raised about £4500 for the NGS and £1000 for our local community garden. Thank you to the ten participating gardeners, cake bakers and the Yellow Balloon gardens.

GARDENS OPEN FOR CHARITY

PLEASE PARK CAREFULLY ALONG JOY LANE

NO PARKING AT JOY LANE SCHOOL DUE TO BUILDING WORKS

COLOUR IN THE GARDEN

I’m not a great fan of pastels. Of course the garden looks pretty in the spring frothy with blossom and pale bulbs, but as the year moves on, I need a punchier hit of colour. That’s why the backbone of my spring garden is euphorbia with its acid green bracts and strong shapes: wulfennii and mellifera in the border, robbiae in the woodland and myrsinitis in pots. And acid green looks good with the strong maroons and burnt oranges of wallflowers, with dark tulips and purple/black elder foliage.

Wandering round my garden (a regular occurrence with pre-NGS nerves), I’ve noticed how much strong colour comes from foliage: caramel Rhus cotinus, lime or flame spirea, dark lysimachia ciliate, cut elderflower and the pretty heart-shaped leaves of the Judas tree, sprinkled with fuschia buds. Even some of the dreaded multi-coloured heucheras are acceptable as ground cover, though bugle (Ajuga reptans) now comes in a good range of leaf colour with bright blue spires.

In the flower department I love my dark velvet iris with chance honesty seedlings; wallflowers with spirea foliage and sedum rosettes; and bright blue forget-me-nots with ‘Black Parrot ‘ tulips. And they all look good in vases in the kitchen too. My bantam hens fit in perfectly with this colour scheme and are enjoying their new-found freedom in the garden after their four months’ imprisonment in the run.

Ten gardens are opening for the NGS in Whitstable this year on May 21st, including three new ones: a beachcomber’s garden, a seaside roof garden and a plantsperson’s garden in an ex-pub. We’re opening three weeks earlier this year to give another picture of the gardens, but the vagaries of the weather may mean that they look pretty similar.

BLOSSOM GALORE

March is charted by the bursting of buds. From the earliest flowering cherries to the last fruitful trees to blossom, the garden is a kaleidoscope of fluffy shades of white and pink, fit for a Disney princess. First to flower in my garden is the winter flowering cherry plum Prunus cerasifera with reddish leafbuds and palest pink blossom, beaten in the wild by the white wild bird cherry – P. avium.

None of the above needs special treatment, but I’m keeping an eagle eye on my apricot, watching to see how many bees are awake, and out and about in the pale spring sunshine. Bumble bees in their furry overcoats are usually the first to pollinate, so if they’re still hibernating from the bad weather, I’ll be out with my tiny artist’s paintbrush, transferring pollen from flower to flower so I’ll get lots of delicious apricots in summer.

In colder areas, it’s worth keeping an eye on weather forecasts too, so you’re ready to cover fragile blossom at night if there’s a nip in the air. Take the fleece off in the morning though so insects can do their job. Now’s a good time to make sure you have plenty of other early flowering plants around to attract your pollinators. Hellebores, pulmonaria, rosemary, bugle, crocus, and all the pussy willows look gorgeous and will tempt them into your garden.

Whatever you’re growing, think of the insects: the bees, moths, butterflies, caterpillars, hoverflies and beetles that eat pollen and nectar and will turn our garden into productive havens. Offer them year-round food, shelter and habitat, and somewhere they can safely drink.

Next to perform, hugging tight against my east-facing hedge are a trio of Japanese quinces (Chaenomeles) with big cup shaped pure white or terracotta flowers, turning later into large yellow fruits that are just as good for jelly as the glorious felty leaved standard quinces – Cydonia. My tree is just about to burst into leaf with big furry leaf buds and art deco flower buds that’ll open into saucer shaped palest blush flowers.

The apples, crabs and pears are still dormant, and I bring in any pruned branches so they can burst open on the kitchen table, but cherries shouldn’t be cut during winter or you’ll encourage disease in the cuts, You can snip away a few stems as the leaves start to open, but leave the rest till June. The plums, damsons and greengages will burst their buds in April, but some of my semi-wild damsons have become biennial croppers, having a rest between heavy fruiting years.

Valentine Flowers

The garden is coming to life.  Wandering round, I can see buds about to burst, catkins and pussy willow already in flower and hellebores flowering their socks off.  More or less safe in the knowledge that I won’t get a bouquet from elsewhere, I’m going to pick a bunch from the garden to cheer me up and believe the promise that spring really is just around the corner.

Just before Christmas I found a silvery punch bowl at the boot fair which despite having spent the intervening month or two out in the garden is still resolutely shiny. So I’ve bought a spray can of matt black metal car paint from Halfords – from a wide range of colours including Rover green and Fiesta yellow, and roughly sprayed the offending bling to make it look tarnished.

A really big bunch of twigs would need a stone in the base of its vase to stop it toppling over. I filled the interior with a ball of scrunched up chicken wire so I could safely position my stems and went off into the garden, armed with secateurs to see what I could pick.

From memory of my mother’s Constance Spry flower arrangements – you need a framework of tall stems, then texture, a little scent, colour and trailers. I picked in threes, cutting woody stems at an angle. Flowering cherry in neat tight bud, pussy willow and hazel catkins for the framework; fern leaves and euphorbia for texture; rosemary and Viburnum bodnantense for scent and colour; hellebores and Arum italicum pictum for interest and trailing Clematis cirrhosa, the season’s most lovely flower.

I filled the bowl with water (ideally it should be refreshed every day) and covered the chicken wire with a handful of moss from the bottom of the garden. I’m looking forward to seeing all the buds come to life and watching the season come and go on my kitchen table. Will tweet as the bunch develops.

UNDERCOVER HENS

What a rotten start to the year for poultry. With Defra extending their ban on free-range till the end of February, what can we do to make life a little better for our flocks, keep them healthy and less likely to catch diseases?

Wild birds carry bird flu and the current strain H5N8, so we need to keep our hens, ducks, geese and other poultry away from them, especially food and drink. It’s easy enough to make a covered area and keep feeders and drinkers underneath it. I’ve put a small garden table in the run and topped it with a sheet of plywood so my small flock can dine safely.

Covering the run to keep wild birds out is more difficult, especially if your run supports are a bit rickety. Horticultural fruit cage netting (I got mine from harrodhorticultural.com) is light, stretchy, cheap to buy and comes in large dimensions. Importantly it won’t weigh down your run’s roof, get blown off by the wind or put under stress by snow. Incidentally, it makes reasonable fox protection too – foxes are unhappy on unstable surfaces.

I’ve made a small extra run out of weldmesh panels topped with netting so I can let my flock out on to grass for a few minutes everyday to eat – short grass is full of protein. Feed wild birds well away from your run.

In the meantime, how can we make life a bit more fun for our flock and keep them de-stressed and healthy?

• Make sure you give them bunches of greenery to make up for their lack of foraging. Hang it just above head height so the leaves don’t get trampled underfoot. A whole lettuce or cabbage is good too.
• Add a straw bale or two into the run. They’ll offer extra shelter from the wind and somewhere new to hop and jump.
• Fat balls and toys from your petshop will make life a little more interesting. There is a poultry swing available from omlet.co.uk though my sedate flock regarded it with suspicion.
• If your hens get their grit from the garden, make sure you buy some from your feed merchant and offer it to them in their run.
• Cover the run surface with hardwood chippings (see flytesofancy.co.uk or bark-uk.co.uk for 2000 litre bags) and de-sanitize it with powder regularly.

Obviously, we need to keep up hygiene standards (use Virkon to disinfect equipment), we should wash hands after contact with birds, not visit other gardens with poultry without disinfecting footwear, and not move, sell or bring in new members of your flock.

If you are worried about your birds’ health, (flu symptoms vary from “very mild signs like seeming off colour to the severity of death”) – contact your vet. Anyone with suspicions of the disease in their flocks or in wild birds should get in touch with Defra on 03459 335577 or the Animal Plant and Health Agency on 0300 303 8268.