I’m experiencing some success growing salad leaves in pots in the greenhouse. Land cress and winter purslane sown in August are providing us with regular tasty leaves. Sowings in September are coming along more slowly, but they are growing. I’ll try some more sowings on a monthly basis and see how they go.
I have some spinach started, to grow as much as it can before it is too cold for it, and then to be consumed as a cut-and-come-again crop in early spring next year.
Some herbs have been moved in and more will be, to keep a few fresh leaves available through the winter. The French tarragon pot has a meal’s worth of new growth at the moment (although it will not like it once it’s really cold); parsley is happy at the moment. Chives and mint can also apparently be kept going.
So I’m hopeful that the greenhouse will be able to provide a few fresh leaves, and the pleasure of harvesting them, throughout the winter.
winter garden
Sagging Lonicera hedging in the snow – a solution
We woke to our first snowfall for years, and it has snowed (damply) all day. A shortcoming of our Lonicera nitida front hedge is again exposed, and I can look forward to a year or two or three of remedial activity. Before the snow, the top of that hedge was as level as three painstaking cuttings in the year could make it. Although it looks quite pretty, the compressed shoots won’t recover their previous height even if I knock the snow off now.
This old front hedge seems to be only a single line of (very) mature plants (I speculate that they date from the 1930s), with all of depth of the hedge provided by about 60cm of tangled, densely packed, old, dry stems. I have reduced the width a lot (I thought) already, putting up with a couple of years of brown patches in the side of the hedge as the old shoots woke up to the idea of sprouting again.
However a newer, double-planted Lonicera nitida hedge that has been regularly cut since planting has stood up to the snow much better. And thus I realise (1) I need to keep up the cutting of this new hedge, and not let it get too thick and (2) in early spring I need to grit my teeth and even-more-drastically cut back the old hedge to a width of about 20cm, and maybe plant a second row of new plants, and feed and water it, and hope for the best.
The contrast between the two hedges is quite obvious and I thought it might be of interest to anyone else contemplating a saggy, snow-covered Lonicera hedge.
Limestone Garden 