A Wet Winter

A snakeshead fritillary growing in the grass

This clay garden always gets soggy in winter. Over the years I have been slowly mulching and adding compost to raise the beds and in some cases have created special raised areas for certain plants (eg. the  fruit  cordons  and the new blueberries).  This has worked well and now I am able to grow all the Mediterranean plants that used to die in winter. But we are told that climate change is going to bring us wetter winters and I can vouch for the fact that it already is. The last two winters have seen the lawn and un-raised parts of this garden completely inundated, far worse than ever before. Some of the plants I rely on a lot have suffered - this year's echiums, for example have withered  away and the brachyglottis that props up a clematis is slowly dying. 

                           

                              Soggy ground inundating plants and a drowned echium 

The path undulating up to the compost heap has been a complete mud slide for the last two winters (on which I did indeed slide and topple over a couple of times). I am bit by bit introducing slate chippings to cover the mud. The chippings are expensive and extremely heavy so I am buying them by degrees  and gradually working my way up the path. They do seem to do the trick and they look great. My grandson comes to carry them through the house and spread them for me.

The beginnings of my slate chippings path

 I don't know how the wild flowers I plugged into the lawn last summer will fare. The snake's head  fritillaries, which are happy growing in water meadows have come up no problem, but there's no sign of the yellow rattle I sowed and I still wait to see whether the other wildflower plugs have survived.  

There was another odd happening that I think was made worse by the wet: many of the flowers of my early bulbs, specially the snowdrops, daffodils and scillas  were eaten to destruction by something - pigeons, squirrels, slugs? Who knows. Now that things are drying out, the present bulbs are not being attacked.  

                                 

                                                             Two very eaten daffodils

                                                           Pushkinia  is similar to a scilla - here the petals have been eaten away

Meanwhile this cold week I attended an online event hosted by the Soil Association, "Agroecology: farming for the future",  in which three farmers/growers described their experiences in changing to an ecological way of treating their land. I found their experiences fascinating and hopeful. 

I also learned about an organisation called Ecological Land Cooperative whose aims are to help would-be ecological smallholders acquire agricultural land near others so they can work in clusters with shared assets such as barns, on-site renewable electricity generation, rainwater harvesting and bore holes as well as a year's business monitoring. Their website is informative.