Toby Buckland

New Year Digging

Hello!

Digging has been my main job for the last few weeks . Digging-up, digging down and digging over – actions which if put together to some Euro-pop could be a dance-floor sensation!

The ‘digging up’ has been of bare-rooted perennials and roses . I thought that frosts would hinder lifting but we’ve barely had a dusting so digging and dispatch (many thanks to those of you who have ordered and hope your plants are thriving!) hasn’t skipped a beat.

It’s been so mild that the cerinthe are still in flower, the Geranium palmatum are as plump and fresh with foliage as they would be on their Madeiran Island home and I even found a self-sown squirting cucumber which are usually killed by the first frost of autumn. This is no ordinary cucumber, and certainly not one for filling a summer sandwich but a vegetable incendiary which when ripe, squirts its seed on a jet of seed-filled jelly. I’ve had great fun and many a fright from this amusing curio and I have just saved some seed so we will have plants for sale in spring to delight the children and scare the postmen. Here's a pic of the pods and cut-up seed pod 

Digging down has been to make pits for the new figs in the Victorian greenhouses where we will be holding our new, soon-to-be announced gardening courses for 2012. Confining the fig roots stops them growing through the greenhouse roof and brings about early fruiting. In Time-team dig fashion, as just below the top soil, I found a few old broken plates and a fragments of clay pipe that one of the gardeners must have once puffed on. 

Now I’m on to digging over the beds in front of the Victorian Greenhouses exposing root-chewing grubs to the birds and readying the soil for sowing summer cut-flowers, punctuated by the living statues of lovely silver cardoons. When turning soil I use the old-school – ‘single digging’ method - removing a trench of soil at one end of the bed and with a quick chop of the spade and turn of the wrist, flip the soil from the next trench into it. Working neatly is the key to success with identikit trenches . Oh and aim to never touch the soil with your hands - digging is arduous enough without bending low to the ground. Just use the spade.

Happy digging!

Toby x