Wishing you all a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year

April 2014, catching up by the old shed

It has been an eventful year for Empty Common Community Garden, which celebrated its first birthday in the autumn. Although it's getting a bit bare in gardens everywhere, there are still splashes of colour with red berries, variegated ivy, heather and a few flowering plants and bushes that provide winter interest.

The weather is milder than expected and this week I found a blewitt mushroom. I also had a go at making my own wreath, with greenery from my own garden.

I am planning to make something interesting with pine cones I have collected around Cambridge rather than just spraying them gold. Today I found this fun seasonal make online:

These are pine cone turkeys, courtesy of San Jose' Library. I am hoping to make a couple for our mantelpiece, one for me and one for my daughter. We are heading for a festive break and blogging will resume in January 2015.

We have ambitious plans for next year, so watch this space to see how Empty Common Garden will evolve. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Pruning time!

Vine pruning lessons, State Library of South
Australia, Wikimedia Commons

Many trees are pruned in winter, when it's really cold. We are hoping to run a pruning workshop at some point, but in the meantime, here are a few quick tips. We are not exactly pruning vines, but I couldn't resist this vintage photo where a man wearing a kind of colonial outfit is giving lessons to adoring females in smart work clothes. Everybody looks so stylish, not exactly our modern-day, casual gardening gear! If you have any pruning tips to share, feel free to leave a comment. 

• Pruning starts in the first or second winter of the tree's life, this is formative pruning, which is followed by maintenance and renewal pruning after about five years. Be careful of what you do in the formative pruning stage, the tree might not be as 'forgiving' as later on.
• Buds on branches can produce fruit or shoots. Vegetative buds are small, triangular or pointed and they lie flat against the stem. Fruit buds store carbohydrates and become larger, fatter and may appear furry. For apples and pears, flower buds only develop on two-year-old wood and flower the following year to produce fruit. 
• Branches tend to grow upwards towards the sky and sun, but vertical branches do not fruit well. You need to control the height, as it will also make it more difficult to harvest the fruit. If you inherit a big apple tree, you might have to reduce its height and if you are quite harsh, you might not see any fruit for two years. [This happened to me, the cooking apple tree didn't mind too much and produced less apples, but the eating apple tree sulked and we didn't get any apple the following season.]
• The harder you prune, the more growth you get. It's best to prune weak shoots to half of the annual growth, stronger shoots only up to a third of the year's growth.
• Remove dead, diseased and damaged wood. Remove crossing branches.

These are just a few tips to get you started courtesy of our garden's members, watch this space for our very own workshop and/or check out the BBC's online guide to pruning.

The one about the exploding cucumber

Many of us at the Empty Common Garden love the Real Seed Catalogue company. Their seeds are special because they preserve varieties of fruit and veg that are disappearing from the stores. Commercial seed providers are narrowing the varieties we can grow and we are missing out on many interesting plants, especially British ones. Whenever I see a packet of seeds to grow Italian tomatoes I am a bit annoyed. I am Italian but having lived in Britain for two decades, I know they are not going to do well, unless you have a heated greenhouse or a blistering hot, south-facing wall. I keep trying and changing varieties, but my tomatoes get the blight every single year and the crop is disappointing. 

This year, we had glorious tomatoes at the Empty Common Garden but guess what... they got the blight. I am told there are resistant varieties and perhaps we should all shop more often at 

because they have seeds that can do well in this country. By the way, this is a genuine endorsement from myself and Charlotte, we are not receiving sponsorship from the company. We also buy seeds from local garden centres, but when Seedy Sunday comes, I hope to get some seeds from them.

Meet the exploding cucumber

One of the fun buys from The Real Seed Catalogue is 'Fat Baby', a climbing vine that produces spiky cucumbers. They taste like sweet peppers when cooked but have an intriguing way of propagating... they explode, with the seeds spreading all over the garden. I like picking them when small as they taste more like a cucumber, this way you don't need to cook them and you can use them raw in salads. When bigger you get less 'flesh' and have to remove the seeds. When big, you also need to cook them as they won't taste good raw. If you want to keep the seeds to plant the vine again next year, you can artificially pop them, just before the cucumber is ready to do it by itself. The website has also this H&S warning:

"HEALTH WARNING. DANGER OF EYE INJURY! HARD SEED IS EJECTED AT GREAT
SPEED. DO NOT HOLD RIPE FRUIT NEAR FACE. HARVEST FRUIT AFTER IT HAS OPENED. DO NOT ALLOW CHILDREN TO PLAY WITH FRUIT. We know this sounds silly, but we recommend that YOU WEAR EYE PROTECTION WHILE HARVESTING AND PROCESSING FRUIT."