Saturday 16 January 2010

The Jardin in Winter

At the moment we are having trouble remembering how hot it was in summer, and how much hard work goes into keeping cool in July and August. Yesterday did get into the positives, it was a whole 2°C. Not as balmy as Thursday, which was 6°C and feeling positively warm, but nowhere as cold as it has been for most of the past 3 weeks.

Earlier this week we went down to the potager and took this photo. All the trees appear to be setting new growth already (isn't it too early?), but as I am no expert on the weather, trees or gardening, I will make no predictions.

In another 4 months it will look like this again.

Simon

4 comments:

Howard C said...

Isn't this a verger rather than a potager - orchard than a kitchen garden? Maybe I can't see the raised beds behind the camera. Hope that stove is keeping you snug - it is a relief that the cold has departed old blighty too. It was feeezing.

Susan said...

Howard: the photo was taken from halfway up the orchard, looking down to the potager beyond the fence running from left to right at the front of the block.

The stove is great, thank you :-)

The cold may have departed, but now we are wet. I got saturated this afternoon marking yet more orchids in the orchard.

Tim said...

I'd better not let you loose on our front lawn Susan... Pauline keeps ticking me off as it means that the grass won't be mown!
However, I've successfully moved a lot of them [all Lizard] to the sides where they flourish... but as the lawn is not very close, YIPPEE, we get loads more!! I'll be hand mowing round the ones at the side once I've finished the wiring... unless it is still drowning weather!

Susan said...

Tim: moving terrestrial orchids is a tricky business, and best practice is not to do so at all, but sometimes its that or lose them for some other reason. You can't move them very far and you need to take out a nice big lump of soil with them to ensure they have a supply of the right mycorrhizal fungi. Without that they will die. They don't take kindly to physical disturbance and may die anyway.

The other thing you need to consider is the law. You need to know which species are protected and where, and what your land use designation is. You can't sell wild sourced native orchids under any circumstances, or even collect seed without a licence in many cases.

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