Stempster

Let's start by saying this indisputable fact: I love our new place! I love Stempster! I love the house... and I love the garden. One thing I don't love about it is that it's a money pit. This won't always be the case, I know, but right now, there are a million and one things that need mending, and purchasing. The result is that I don't have as much money to spend on the garden as I would like. I get around this by buying younger plants. While I would love a semi-mature dogwood, it's cheaper to buy a young plant in a 9cm pot and just be patient. It will grow - it will just take a little longer. Cheap plants are beaten by free plants, of course. This weekend, I put in 2 blackcurrant bushes, 2 gooseberry bushes, 1 vigorous mint root, and 1 blackberry plant. I also got 3 young bamboo shoots which is going to save so much money in the long term! How did I get all of this? Well, I dug them up out the garden of no. 53. We're hoping the house sale will go through ve...

We had given ourselves a deadline: by the end of the February long weekend, we had to have planted the garlic. It's a fairly reasonable target. In many places, people have already got their garlic bulbs in the ground, but we're in the tip-top north of Scotland so we've got to take a bit of care. The cloves need cold weather to help them split their bulbs but, in Caithness, we run the risk of frost damaging the upper parts of the plants. We've had it before at the allotment, and all that time and effort can easily be wasted. Before we planted it, though, we had to finish off the area to plant in. The structure of the raised bed had already been created using the flagstones that were already there, and breeze blocks for the other side. Now, it just had to be filled. Several barrowloads of compost was wheeled from the Wild Wood (where the old compost heap was) to the Kitchen Garden at the back of the house. The compost itself seems to have never been turned, meaning some o...