Green and Gorgeous

To swoe or to hoe?

Ever since working on a large market garden, I have been a staunch fan of the swoe, that golf club of precision and surgical application. I used to do all my veg with it, leaving it standing up and proud at the end of the row, marking where you had got to. The stainless steel and the shape of the blade (thanks to Wilkinson Sword) means that you can use it in wet conditions, when you have no other choice but to tackle those pesky weeds.

 

But a few years ago, neighbours were moving and were dumping a skip full of useful stuff, including a Cultiweeder made by Wolf tools. This has a 3-pronged cultivator part and a small sharp hoe combined into one tool, depending on which end is up. I thought it would be more of a hobbyist tool, but it has survived true field punishment and has proved to be really useful and was a constant companion last summer. You can cut off topgrowth with the hoe and then swivel round and have a go at the roots with the blade. The cultiweeder is useful for ground preparation too and the hoe is good for compacted paths baked hard in the summer.

 

   

 

Of course, if you really want to motor then a wheel hoe can work wonders, as long as the soil is not too compacted, with the added benefit of an amazing workout for your pecs. Great for taking out those flushes of annuals that we'll be getting right now....  

 

 

Ashley Pearson

Anemone crush

I have always been a fan of the anemone, partly because it is one of the first flowers to break the drudgery of our winters. It's jewel-like colours and velvety centre are both a welcome relief and a signal that it is time to step up the pace .

 

They are also extremely productive, unlike the tulip with it's solitary bloom per bulb, the anemone generously produces up to ten flowers over a few weeks from it's strange little corm.

We plant ours in the polytunnel during late September/early October. It helps to soak them overnight and the soil they are going into must be fertile, moist and weed free. They are very hardy, especially the Jerusalem variety which can be planted outside. If so, mulch well and look out for the voles, which love eating the corms.

 

This year their timeliness and productivity has been even more appreciated with a new variety for us called 'Galilee Pastels'. I have been trying to get my hands on these for a few seasons as their soft, muted tones are perfect for our wedding work. Well, they were well worth waiting for: ivory, creamy-green, smokey lilac and pink...exquisite.

 

 

The warm weather over the past few days has them coming thick and fast so now is the time to experience them, have a look at our 'Best of the Bunch'. They have an excellent vase life, giving a good ten days.

 

Fat bottom and a thin neck

                  

As I gave all of my vintage china and glass a spring clean, I thought about what makes the perfect jug. I decided mostly it’s a fat bottom and a narrow neck, just like this one.

                 

 

I have favourites  which don't fall into this category, some are striking, some challenging, elegant or simply….how can I say ?….amiable. But the good all rounders pretty much are of the 'fat bottom narrow neck' type.  Some vases in my collection hardly get used at all, but I'd never part with them. In fact, I don’t think these swans have ever left the studio.

 

                  

 

I am very attached to my vintage china and glass and I can honestly say I don’t think I’ll ever have enough! My favourite shape to arrange into of all time is definitely a fan vase. You can create something with drama and texture very quickly.  

 

                                   

Here are my top ten tips on choosing a good all-rounder jug.

 1.     About 8” tall (for under eye level table centres)

2.     Fat bottom

3.     Narrow neck

4.     Is beautiful in it's own right

5.     A subtle colour. I love working with soft aqua colours best, although I have a lot of turquoise in            my collection too

6.     If decorated, not too overpowering

7.     A good strong handle

8.     Watertight (sounds obvious but you’d be surprised how many aren’t)

9.     Can withstand the dishwasher (very handy)

10.  Hasn’t cost the earth, so you’re not too frightened to use it

 

Jo Wise

                           

Walk the Plank

Everyone has their own way of making the perfect compost heap, and the same applies here at G & G, although the move to more and more flowers has resulted in big changes to the 'Mix'. I have for several years been using enclosed pallets, each heap 3 or 4 pallets square. I have given up turning these large heaps now (phew!), as using a tractor made such a mess without hard standing, and so keep them for 18 months at least.

 

The sheer volume of woody material coming in from the cutting gardens has meant that I have resurrected my old shredder to help. It had a cheap 'Chonda' engine with serious issues and so this winter I gave up trying to fix it and just replaced the entire engine with a new Villiers one. The mechanics of necessity if you like....

 

 

The shredder itself I run without any screens or protectors, so that the material is coarsely shredded and flies out mostly onto the heap itself. This means that rain can penetrate the heap, avoiding large dry areas of intact stems.

 

  

 

I am lucky to have some great materials on hand to add to all this carboniferous forest, such as horse muck, chicken poo, leaves, veg waste and grass clippings. Barrowing up can get a bit hairy at the end of the cycle and in late summer, but you have to resist the temptation to build more and more  heaps (especially when they are a trifle 'shanty chic'). All that material soon subsides!

 

 

The end result is always surprisingly good and has mulched all 600 roses this year. The incredible amount of seed in the compost has not been the problem I feared, there can be a small annual flush after spreading, but it's not a problem at all.

 

Ashley Pearson

To All the Mums

Mother's Day is always rather frustrating, especially when it comes early and the flowers are late. A missed opportunity for British flower growers I think. If only we could change it to a Sunday in June. 

Anyway, I decided to rise to the challenge and create a bouquet with only what is flowering in our cutting gardens, bearing in mind that I am lucky to have an unheated polytunnel for some of our spring bulbs.

 

The bouquet contains a beautiful selection of hellebores with rich, intense colours (specially bred by Hugh Nunn of Harvington Hellebores) these match up well to the jewel-like anemones. For foliage, I had rosemary, arum leaf and pussy willow.

 

 Rachel

My Friend got married in February

My very dear friend Janet told me she was marrying her partner of 16 years Nick (also an old friend from Art school) “Would you like me to arrange the flowers?” I offered, “ I’d love you to!” replied Janet. The slight drawback was the wedding date was set for 9^th February.

I don’t usually do winter weddings due to lack of flowers, but there was no way I wouldn’t have done this one. I didn’t want to let Janet down, particularly as she had asked me to be a ‘best woman’, which was an enormous honour.

I suggested hellebores, anemones, viburnum and pussy willow. Thankfully she loved the sound of all of those. She is a firm believer in British grown and had really set her heart on all the flowers coming from the garden. All I could do was watch and hope. I watched the flooding and the snow. I cringed at the hard frosts and gave weekly reports on their progress.  Finally the weather was kind during the first week of February and all was well. In the end it was only the delicate little viburnum that suffered, as most had gone brown from frost.

 
Photography by Stephanie Rushton

The hellebores were stunning, but they were tricky. Mostly due to it being so early, too early to pick them really. The heads hung down and I knew they wouldn’t be terribly reliable out of water. They worked well in little bud vases and nestled into the bouquet.

 

            

 

                                        

photography by Rachel Siegfried

I also worked them into the buttonholes with pussy willow and rosemary. Janet and the best women all wore them in their hair (apart from me who loves an excuse to wear a hat) I advised all the girls to keep an eye on each others hellebore hair flowers and make sure they remove them at the first signs of wilting. I’d say we got about 3 hours out of them, which isn’t so bad for early February.

 

            

 

            

 

The table centres were quite simple jugs of anemones, hellebores and pussy willow.

 

            

 

The pussy willow was a joy and worked brilliantly with Janet’s fur jacket. I ran it through all of the arrangements. I used tiny sprigs right through to some very long branches which went into an enamel pitcher on the bar. The most important thing was Janet was really thrilled. It was a great day and it gave me a good feeling to make a friend happy, especially on her wedding day.

 

 

Photography by Stephanie Rushton

Jo Wise    

Flowers, Love and Money

Finally, sunshine and two whole days working in the garden! My body needs to catch up with my enthusiasm; as I sit here writing this I am certainly feeling all that weeding and cutting back.

Everyone was out today, including my whippet Violet enjoying the straw I have been putting down to make the paths between the perennials.

 

Also, my chickens, who have been free ranging on the cutting beds throughout the winter. I think it might be time to make an enclosure as they spent the afternoon undoing all the good work I have done, scratching the straw paths all over the beds.

 

 

On Wednesday I met The Duchess of Cornwall when she came to open the latest exhibition at the Garden Museum: Floriculture: Flowers, Love and Money, which is all about the cut flower industry (until the 28th April). I was part of the Magazine Space Exhibition entitled 'Six Growers' by Howard Sooley.

Howard came to photograph me on a very cold day in January with not a flower in sight. I think I do have a bit of a cold-faced expression, as I had to remove many of my favourite winter layers....

 

 He had lots of tips for me on how to photograph flowers, it is something I do want to improve on this year. Anyway, he seemed really inspired by Green and Gorgeous, even in it's winter state of mud and twigs, so hopefully he will be back at the height of summer to take lots of beautiful pictures.

It was a real honour to be included in the exhibition and encouraging to see British flower growers getting some recognition. Here are some scented Narcissi from the Isle of Scilly growers who were one of the six:

 

 

If you are in Oxford on Thursday 7^th March, Christopher Woodward the museum's director will be giving a lecture at the Said business school on The history of floristry and the cut flower trade. 

 

 

We will be introducing our new 'Best of the Bunch' range for mail order next month, which will be kicking off with Anemones. I was able to get hold of a rather special pastel variety this year, here is one just about to open and show it's loveliness.

Rachel Siegfried

 

 

The Walled Garden, coming in from the cold

We have a new addition to Green and Gorgeous, a beautiful Victorian Walled Garden, one acre in size and only 15 minutes away (if you drive fast). I had been dreaming of such a place after losing countless plants to the cold; our frost pocket here is usually a couple of degrees below the coldest place in England. Then out of the blue I got an email from the owner who was looking for a grower to bring some life back into it. It had been in the care of their gardener Jack for, can you believe it... 70 years! He died last year and since then it has been waiting....I am not sure how happy Jack would be to see a flower grower taking over, he was definitely a 'veg only' man. He certainly looked after the soil well, it is the soil of any gardener's dreams and probably double dug for at least 60 years.  

 

 

Before embarking on flower growing I worked in a walled garden so I do have a bit of a soft spot for them and fully appreciate their advantages (shelter and protection from rabbits) and how bloody hot they can get on a decent summer's day. I love their history, all the small signs and indicators of the hours of labour and care that have gone before.

 

 

Anyway, I started digging a week ago instead of getting the rotavator out, as I feel like Jack might still be watching over. I have a long list of plants waiting to go in including: hydrangeas, myrtle, viburnum, choisya, senecio, jasmine, rosemary – shrubs for foliage so far. To inject some colour in between these will be a mix of bulbs, perennials and annuals including foxtail lilies, dahlias, crocosmia, ammi, larkspur, craspedia and probably more that I haven't even dreamt of yet.

 

 

Rachel Siegfried

 

Caterpillar Capers

When I was growing vegetables full time, I looked down on cloches. Too far down, too much bending down and far too much pegging down. All that ground level shenanigans, just way too undignified in order to gain a very small ribbon of protection. And then you can't see whatever bad omens may be hidden beneath the plastic, either weeds, pest or diseases, and a false sense of security was guaranteed.

 

 So I now find that I have spent the autumn and winter thus far wrestling with a caterpillar tunnel, which I now realize is just a really expensive and humongous cloche. I can't even stand up in it, which is the first major design fault you might observe. However, I am limited by the 6m standard sizing of the PVC pipe hoops, resulting in a mildly stooping scenario.

 

     

The idea comes from the USA and has been covered well by the Growing For Market community (NB. They call polytunnels 'hoophouses' over there). There is an introduction to the concept here by Lynn Byczynski. The main features are portability, no footings, hoops that fit over steel rebar 'pegs', and rope lashings (lots and lots!) that produce a segmented appearance and the caterpillar profile. After spending a small fortune reskinning a twin-span polytunnel this year, we thought we'd give it a go, especially since you can move them to fresh ground so easily.

We played it safe however and have only put tulips in it this autumn, just in case. There have been a few hiccups and several improvements along the way, notably bigger and bigger hoops, after the Mark One, pictured below.

It has been keeping me slightly fretful on stormy nights but we'll keep you posted about the spring blooms and whether we can get enough air flow through it. It has seemed to cope with the winter snow so far though, and near flooding, although it may just yet prove to be the ultimate vole hotel....

 

The River Thames coming up to say 'hello' last year.

 

Ashley Pearson

New Year Plans

It has been a long time since I wrote my last blog, I think it was in June when the rain and wind came, after that I was too busy battling with the elements. It certainly tested my resolve as a flower grower as I watched countless flowers rot in the ground or be flattened by the wind.

As we were not able to grow some G&G favourites new flowers were discovered and took centre stage. Many of these were from the group that really saved the season - perennials. These proved to be far more weather resistant than many of the annuals and because of all the rain grew taller and more prolifically than normal and those prone to mildew like Asters, Monarda and Phlox were spared.

 The real stars were the perennials sown from seed in February/March which went on to produce buckets of flowers from June onwards. They included Achillea, Galega and Tanacetum which all proved to have good 'cut and come again' value and a wildflower- look for our natural style bouquets.

 

 

 

 

Our new field of perennials planted mostly as bare root in the autumn of 2011 also grew in very well thanks to all the rain. It was a joy to wander in there one evening when supplies and spirits were low in the cutting garden to discover row upon row of new and exciting things to cut.

So the extreme weather meant different flowers to work with, a new palette with unexpected combinations and some beautiful results.

 

 

After seeing off the most challenging year for growing cut flowers I am full of plans for 2013, which include adding to our mail order range and developing a Pick Your Own cutting garden. More news on that in the coming weeks. 

We have also come up with some new courses:

Jo and I have put our heads together and developed a two day course for DIY brides on how to grow and arrange wedding flowers.

 

  

I am offering an in depth growing guide to three of our favourites – sweet peas, roses and dahlias as half day workshops.

If you would like to find out more have a look at our Courses page on the website.

Rachel Siegfried