long time no post

It's been a long time since we last posted. Time just seems to gallop on. Further clearing work has happened on one of the vegatable quarters but the main focus has been on this years christmas tree sales therefore little progress has been made in the walled garden.

It has been frozen solid and under several inches of snow for over a month now but we are hoping to make more progress in the new year.

Every year we sell top quality fresh christmas trees, holly wreaths and natural decorations. This particular job is all time consuming throughout November and December.

The weather this month has made all work including christmas sales very difficult has we have been rcording tempratures as low as minus 13 degrees C.

We now have some new additions to the menagerie in the form of tropical fish. We now have a selection of moonlight, kissing and pearl gouramis. platy's and neon tetras a schoal of zebra danio's a rather large angel fish and the stars of the show, three catfish. with all of the hundreds of TV channels available with nothing to watch the fish are far more facinating and entertaining.

Succesful crops

Broad Beans

The broad beans are now cropping heavily despite their late sowing.

Climbing Peas

We are now seeing the fruits of a struggle against pigeon and rabbit damage and are now getting a reasonable result from the pea crop.

The new rhubarb beds

The new rhubarb beds planted at the end of April are growing fantastically well. No doubt due to a more than liberal dressing of manure.

The Melon House

The photo's show cucumbers, melons and Achocha growing away happily. the melons are approaching the pollination stage.

Kale and Broccoli

Although it tried to run to seed earlier in the season the Black Kale is now almost ready for harvest and the White sprouting broccoli is growing away well.

The replacement for the old greenhouse

The strange construction in the last post, incidentally named the "bus shelter" has now been replaced with a small aluminium greenhouse, salvaged from a property that we own. Although not of a suitable design at least it will be useful as a propagating house and it is better than the greenhouse being scrapped.

The photo's show the frame constructed and ready for glazing.

The work continues

The following piccies are of a old greenhouse construction, cobbled together a few years ago from some of the parts from one of the original Victorian glasshouses that were on site.

As you can see it had deteriorated into a dangerous mess.

The demolition took quite some time as the glass in the panels is at least a quarter of an inch thick and care was taken to keep as many of the frames as intact as possible to use as templates for any future restoration.

Another one of the menagerie guarding the wheelbarrow.

History of the gardens

we have been requested to publish a post about the history of our gardens. The available info is a bit sketchy so here goes:-

Ashfurlong Hall started life as a medieval / Tudor farm, it was developed into a typical classical regency country residence in 1804 for Thomas Vaughton, High Sheriff of Warwickshire
who had six daughters all born in Sutton Coldfield between 1801 and 1817.

The house has had many owners and occupiers including in 1841 Henry Grimes a Warden of the town 1838-40, in the 1850s Joseph Webster of Penns Mill also Warden, and Thomas Colmore a Birmingham solicitor, also a Warden 1864-66. When Colmore died in 1870 the estate included some 118 acres.
The property was briefly used by a school associated with Trinity College but by 1891 had reverted to residential status when Arthur T Beck was in residence.

A later occupant of Ashfurlong Hall was Colonel J H Wilkinson. He was a wealthy philanthropist who established a Hospital in the town and bought Barr Beacon at the western end of Sutton Chase as a perpetual public memorial for the soldiers of the Staffordshire and Warwickshire regiments who had been killed in World War 1. The dome on Barr Beacon was erected in Wilkinson's memory in 1933.

The latest occupant's prior to its recent sale when the estate was split were EH Moore and his wife he was High Sheriff of the West Midlands county and grandson of ES Moore who established the famous HP sauce company.

The history of the gardens is even more obscure although there is plenty of archaeological evidence and memories dating from the 1960's. The walls surrounding the garden appear to date from the 18th century period although there are what are obviously later Victorian additions. There was an extensive Victorian range of glass houses on the outside of the walls with heating powered by the ubiquitous Robin Hood solid fuel boilers. in addition outside the walls there was a frame yard opposite the glass houses. A summer house and what was presumably the show house was located against the west facing wall. Sadly most of these buildings had reached the state of no return by the 1970's and were demolished. We do have an intriguing building that is not large enough for a potting shed that has a chimney built into the outer wall and we have always wondered what its purpose would have been.

Following world war 2 the gardens became a private nursery and no longer serviced the estate, over recent years the gardens have decayed somewhat and hopefully our project will do the previous gardeners justice.

Back Again

Following a long period of the real world getting in the way of the project, work has resumed again. There have been a few surprises and disappointments.

The old gooseberries that we pruned to within an inch of their lives and cordon trained have performed superbly and are producing some decent sized fruit.

The late spring and cold nights during April and early May have delayed things somewhat, but things are moving along at a pace now. The tall Victorian pea varieties and onions and shallots are growing quite happily and the brassicas and broad beans are looking good apart from being bent by rain of biblical proportions.

The biggest dissapointment so far has been the mystery creature that ate a whole bed of Fennel on Friday night / Saturday morning. It is definately not rabbits as there were no tracks or droppings. Pigeon has been ruled out as the plants were quite large and were eaten off in one bite. We know Muntjac deer have been seen locally and maybe it was one of those, its a great pity the venison steak would be to small.

Busy week continues

Some of the planting stations for the tall heritage pea varieties are now completed and only require planting out. If the resultant crop is as good as the last time we grew them it will be worth looking forward to the wonderful taste of these peas which make modern varieties seem very bland indeed.

The Guard Cat

One of the menagerie on the lookout for the pesky pigeons, chance would be a fine thing.

Busy week

This week has been a very busy week on the veggie growing quarter. The chameacyparis elwoodii are now reduced to a manageable size although they will probably need removing entirely next year.

After an awful lot of very deep digging, a painstaking task because the area was infested with a lot of perennial weed such as dock and horsetail the new rhubarb beds are now planted and mulched down with a thick layer of well rotted manure and straw. The plants were a mixture of old existing plants that we have divided and some new stock that we grew from seed a couple of years ago. All we now need are some Victorian rhubarb forcers (dream on).

Hopefully this will produce a good crop of rhubarb next spring.








The Morello cherry that we planted last year is now training nicely against the cooler wall, eventually we hope to have a row of trained wall fruit here.

Its also been a big sowing week, the season being so late this year following the harsh winter. Soil temprature is now ok for outdoor sowings and so far we have sown broad beans, parsnips, radish, salad greens. To fill the space in the border against the wall we have planted the first of the cauliflower, sprouting broccoli and lettuce.

The axe falls

Clearing work continues and the old chaemacyparis elwoodii are now reduced in height.

This will hopefully allow far more light to reach the back of the veggie quarter. Fingers crossed there will be some regrowth and they can then be clipped into a dividing hedge.

The big problem now is removing all of the resultant rubbish. Clearing work will continue this week removing self set trees and cutting down some extremely tall laurels.

ultra cheap hedge fund

We have now started replacing the box hedging around the open quarter that is going to be used for this years veg crop. The box plants were aquired from Freecycle and have covered a considerable length.

We will leave the plants to establish through the summer and start to trim and shape them next year. Not bad for free.

The first of the digging has started on this quarter although it is very slow and painstaking work due to an infestation of dock and horsetail. All we can do this season is to fork out as much as possible and treat with a stump / deep root killer where there are no crops.