The recent snow and stuff has slowed work in the garden, pruning has come to a complete standstill and we have to be careful were we walk so as not to tread on the snowdrops and other bulbs as they come up through it. So a few miscellaneous shots taken over the last few days.
This was the by-product of my 5-week bonfire, the orangey-pinkish stuff is the soil that went through the fire with huge forkfuls of wet leaves and the stuff I raked out from under the shrubs and boarders. It makes the ash 'heavy' so that it doesn't blow away and can be spread more easily on the land. So far, twenty barrow-loads have come out of this heap and have gone on all the roses, the veg garden and the tomato trench in the greenhouse. The raspberries have also had a bucket load or two, as have the currants.
The Tomato trench has also been half-filled with home made compost, after which it was topped-up with new soil, taken from a path-straitening project elsewhere on the grounds. Here you see last years compost on the left and this years ready to be covered on the right. I have put a lot of peaty leaf-mould on top to speed up the process and prevent a dry layer of half-composted stuff needing removing from the top when we uncover it next autumn. There is no Laylandii, Yew or similar fir/evergreen cuttings as they take forever to rot and tend to puddle an oily slime like Amoco-crude! Not many shrub cuttings get in either, but lots of grass mowing's, moss and weeds, shrub-bed raking and the scrapings from the kitchens. No meat or fish, no bread (only because it all goes on the bird-tables) and no fat (same reason), finally a couple of layers of old carpet are thrown on, fur side down, and the whole left to sweat through the year.
A couple of trees I photographed up on the Ridgeway path above Wantage the other day, it was bitterly cold, and we found a monument to the 'Barron Wantage' who seem to have got a VC in the Crimean war, but having been without a computer for a week I haven't managed to look him up on Google yet!
The first bunch of Snowdrops to poke up, taken a couple of weeks ago, we now have loads of them but they are all under snow at the moment.
This was the by-product of my 5-week bonfire, the orangey-pinkish stuff is the soil that went through the fire with huge forkfuls of wet leaves and the stuff I raked out from under the shrubs and boarders. It makes the ash 'heavy' so that it doesn't blow away and can be spread more easily on the land. So far, twenty barrow-loads have come out of this heap and have gone on all the roses, the veg garden and the tomato trench in the greenhouse. The raspberries have also had a bucket load or two, as have the currants.
The Tomato trench has also been half-filled with home made compost, after which it was topped-up with new soil, taken from a path-straitening project elsewhere on the grounds. Here you see last years compost on the left and this years ready to be covered on the right. I have put a lot of peaty leaf-mould on top to speed up the process and prevent a dry layer of half-composted stuff needing removing from the top when we uncover it next autumn. There is no Laylandii, Yew or similar fir/evergreen cuttings as they take forever to rot and tend to puddle an oily slime like Amoco-crude! Not many shrub cuttings get in either, but lots of grass mowing's, moss and weeds, shrub-bed raking and the scrapings from the kitchens. No meat or fish, no bread (only because it all goes on the bird-tables) and no fat (same reason), finally a couple of layers of old carpet are thrown on, fur side down, and the whole left to sweat through the year.
A couple of trees I photographed up on the Ridgeway path above Wantage the other day, it was bitterly cold, and we found a monument to the 'Barron Wantage' who seem to have got a VC in the Crimean war, but having been without a computer for a week I haven't managed to look him up on Google yet!
The first bunch of Snowdrops to poke up, taken a couple of weeks ago, we now have loads of them but they are all under snow at the moment.
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