January love, more bulb planting, satisfactory weeding and joining the 5am club 🤓
Hello friends!
I'm a January lover. A lover of all things new, and fresh, and full of hope. I'm a lover of blank pages and clean slates, of goals and resolutions, of looking back with nostalgia and looking forward with excitement. I'm a fan of learning from my mistakes and of making sure I don't make them again. In short, January (and it's soul sister September) are my two favourite months of the year.
January means reflection and planning for me in the garden. I don't do much active gardening - I chop a bit, and I tidy and sweep a bit, but most of my energy is spent in dreaming up grand plans, and then having a word with myself and tailoring them to my budget and abilities.
Before I begin, a big WELCOME to everyone new here - our little group has grown somewhat over the Christmas period (when I sent no newsletters at all....not sure what to think about that!) so we'll see what happens to everyone once they start getting this nonsense in their inbox! 😂
Here are my five minute forays for this week
Monday
It is deliciously mild. Still. Very odd, but shhhh! let's just keep quiet and perhaps nobody'll notice. Mondays are for a general spruce up (I generally follow this routine in the garden over the week, (loosely, I should say) to keep me focused but also to prevent me from getting stuck on any one thing). The beds look a bit sad. That's okay. It's January and things are still sleeping. I turn away from all that, and pick a spot that needs my immediate attention; a raised bed full of the soggy brown remains of lots of iris sibirica and gladiolus callianthus. I'm doing an experiment with the gladioli and leaving them in the ground...see what happens...because well, you just never know do you?! Anyway, all the brown soggy leaves get chopped with my kitchen scissors, and I also weed out a load of sneaky green alkanet (pentaglottis) which, although quite lovely in some respects, is a real pest in my garden and needs controlling. It has a huge, brittle tap root which comes out fairly easily at this time of year, so in I go with my Hori hori knife. I also yank out a couple of very stealthy brambles - NAUGHTY THINGS! They are deeply rooted and I have to saw at them below the ground to remove them as they won't budge. Better than nothing. Needless to say, I go in with pink cheeks. I'm saving all these pernicious weeds for a little bonfire at some point this week.
Tuesday
It's chopping day, and I run out to get at my clematis, which is totally brown and crispy. I cut it carefully, about a foot above the ground, just above two fat buds. Satisfying. I'm about to chop more stuff when I look up and realise that there are no leaves left on the trees - hurrah! This means that sweeping will take a back seat from now on, and I can put my leaf-mould bags away to start rotting down. I venture into my lean-to potting shed (complete with holes in the roof) to find leaf-mould I prepared two years ago. I'm thrilled to see it has rotted down into a delightful crumbly cake mix and that there is more of it than I had remembered. I pull the bags out, ready to use, and sweep the place before putting the new bags of dampened leaves to languish for the next twenty four months or so. This is my kind of gardening. Zero effort.
Wednesday
I remove the last of the gladiolus callianthus from their pots on the terrace, brush off the earth and put the largest corms in a box for planting again later this year. The rest go in the compost bin. I'll be going gladioli-bananas again this year (they are my FAVE after all), but I'm experimenting with re-using last year's bulbs in one pot, and new in some others, in addition to the ones I've left in the raised bed (see above). If I can remember which one is which I'll know if there's any point in keeping bulbs over winter. The pots look inviting with nothing in them but I resist the urge to buy plants for them. Instead I pop in some left-over tulips and hope the squirrels don't have a feast. A very satisfactory five minutes which turned into forty.
Thursday
It's time to fuss around a bit. I deadhead the cyclamen with a hot cup of tea, and I tidy the terrace, and I make a bonfire. The thursday fuss is my favourite day of the week. It's my day for doing all the tiny weeny little things that can wait, but which, if you do them, seem to lift everything up out of the doldrums, especially in winter. I also snip off all the brown crispy leaves from my alchemilla mollis and prune my mophead hydrangea which I didn't get around to on Tuesday. I start a bonfire but I don't have enough kindling and the crispy iris sibirica leaves I was going to use are also a bit damp, so I end up stinking of smoke and don't burn very much at all. It was fun though, and again, pink cheeks etc.
Friday
I've been getting up at 5am every morning this week (except for Monday...Monday didn't happen because well, frankly, I was hung-over.) But Tuesday to Friday I've been using the early hours to get some book editing in before my middle child comes down (at around 6.30am) and demands hot porridge. Sadly he is not yet at an age where he can make his own bloody porridge, nor is he content with anything ELSE. His porridge has frozen raspberries on the bottom and a blob of strawberry jam. It also has chia seeds (how West London can I possibly GET?). Anyway, the reason I tell you this is that, having always been an early riser, my mornings have at last become my own again and I can work without being disturbed by anyone until this small child demands his porridge. It's been a revelation and actually, now that the winter solstice has passed, it's been surprisingly UN-difficult. In the space of four mornings, I have almost completed the entire first edit of my new book...which is a boring job and one I don't relish, but which nevertheless has to be done REALLY WELL. It does mean though, that by the the afternoon I'm basically ready for bed. Zombie-like, I go out and start going through my shed for things I can donate or throw. Yes, I to have been gripped in the charming, but vice-like snare of KonMari. I wish to god I hadn't thrown away any shoeboxes, like, EVER, because I need them to PUT THINGS IN!!! All of this to say, No gardening.
Here are a few blog posts I wrote over Christmas:
Spark Joy in the Garden: KonMari for your outside space!
How to sow micro-greens
A gentle reminder ... Is your garden SERVING YOU?
My tiny front garden - complete!
I did a series of vids with the RHS, all of which you can find here.
I hope you all had a wonderful festive season (whatever that entailed...it does seem like rather a long time ago now doesn't it?) and that you'll continue to hit reply here, or get in touch with me via instagram or twitter. At the moment I am having a love affair with Pinterest. Can't stop, won't stop... Does anyone here do Tailwind? It's an app that helps you to schedule pins, and they have things called 'tribes' where you find like-minded pinners. I want to join a tribe - it's a deep-seated human thing isn't it? We all want to be part of a tribe 😆..If anyone can give me any pointers I'd be grateful! ...and if this is all gobbledegook for you I'm SORRY...disregard!!
All the good things,
x Laetitia
Daily posts on instagram
You can find my books here and here (Sweet Peas for Summer is a bargain right now at only £2.99!)
Do you Pinterest? Is that even a verb? Anyway, I love it and you can find me here
I'm also on Twitter if you tweet