A Fenland Garden by Francis Pryor

Author:Francis Pryor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781801101622
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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Every winter, there are two key routine jobs that I have to get completed quite early in the season: digging the Vegetable Garden and pruning the pleached lime trees. Lime trees are fully dormant in the early new year, which means there is no likelihood that the scars left after pleaching will bleed sap. Apart from looking unsightly, bleeding sap weakens the plant and can be a source of infection. Digging the Vegetable Garden is the most urgent of the early winter tasks, as I want the freshly dug-over ground to be frosted a few times. There are two types of frost: air frost and ground frost. Air frosts happen when the temperature of the air drops below freezing point (0 °C; 32 °F); ground, grass or radiation frosts are the result of heat loss from the ground and they start to happen when the air temperature is three or four degrees above freezing. Light ground frosts show up as hoar frost on lawns or well-grazed paddocks for a few hours in the early morning, but they don’t have much effect on the soil itself. On the other hand, a sharp air frost causes leaves to wilt and will penetrate lumps of heavy clay; these will start to crumble when they thaw. Each time the process is repeated, the air frost penetrates a little deeper. Harder air frosts usually happen in early and mid-January; so I try to have the digging finished as early as possible in January.

Normally, I aim to start the digging before Christmas, but often the weather has its own views and persistent rainfall will cause me to start pruning the limes first. So far, the winter of 2021–22 hasn’t been too wet and, as I write (it’s now 30 December), I’ve managed to get about a fifth of the digging done. Over Christmas, the weather was pretty horrible – lots of drizzle, fog and cold easterly winds – and those people at Head of Zeus seemed to think that this book’s deadline was important, so I didn’t get out and dig as much as I would have liked (to be honest, it was so horribly damp I was grateful for any excuse to stay indoors). I think I speak for most experienced gardeners when I say that regular, seasonal tasks, such as digging or pleaching, make long-term changes in the weather – and possibly even the climate too – much easier to identify and define. These days, hard air frosts occur later in the winter and are less common or severe than they were even twenty years ago. I’m in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that our climate is changing.

I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to our vegetable garden. I learnt my vegetable-growing from a very knowledgeable gardener called Joe Aylott when I was growing up in our house in Weston, near Hitchin in north Hertfordshire. Weston was then a quiet rural village in the rolling chalk hills that overlook Stevenage and Baldock. You

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