Secrets Of Redesign

Thursday Tips & Techniques: Crevice Gardening

As gardeners its sometimes difficult to resist the urge to place plants in every available space in the garden. But when youve done that, whats left? Crevices! Avid rock gardeners probably can guess what Im referring to: Crevice Gardening. For the rest of us, its a chance to expand our gardening skills. If you have a large rocky outcrop on your property, stone patio, stone wall, or even a concrete patio with a few cracks in it then a crevice garden might be a good option for you.

Technically crevice gardening, perfected by the English, refers to growing plants in the vertical crevices or spaces between the rocks in a stone wall, however, horizontal crevices in stone outcrops can also be planted of course. Planting on a newer stone wall can help age the wall making it look like its been there for a while. If you want a pristine, clean wall, then youre better off not planting it.

Most crevice gardens use the same woodland or alpine-type plants (e.g. sweet alyssum, miniature phlox, basket of gold) as rock gardens, provided there is enough sun. You can also plant diminutive spring bulbs like scilla or snowdrops. Shady moss covered stone walls or patios can be planted with smaller maidenhair ferns and trailing arbutus–or even try growing moss!

Gardening for bats

It’s easy to consider bees and birds when gardening – we see plenty of them if we grow the right plants – but what about bats? Emerging from their roosts at dusk and returning by dawn, they can often go unnoticed.

My partner is a huge fan of bats. On warm, summer evenings we take our bat detector and a bag of chips to the canal and sit on a bench, waiting for pipistrelles and Daubenton’s to emerge from their roosts. We’ve also been on guided bat walks and taken part in surveys, picking up the different sound frequencies emitted by noctules, Leisler’s and lesser horseshoe bats. If you’re in Cornwall this summer, I can recommend the bat walks at the Lost Gardens of Heligan. When I was there I felt quite separated from my hectic city life, standing at the edge of the water in total darkness with bats swirling around me.

Like so much of our wildlife, bats are having a hard time. This is mostly due to the widespread use of pesticides in agriculture. British bats feed exclusively on insects, so spraying crops to kill ‘pests’ dramatically reduces the amount of food available to them.

Luckily, there’s a lot gardeners can do to help. If you garden for amphibians, birds, bees and butterflies, you will have already created a fantastic bat habitat. You can boost local insect populations by not using bug sprays and being less tidy in autumn (providing insects with somewhere to shelter over winter will ensure they survive to breed in spring). Planting native trees and shrubs will also provide food and shelter for insects.

Many bat species eat moths, so grow nectar-rich plants, including honeysuckle, night-scented stock and evening primrose, to attract them. Crane flies are also an important food source. (This pleases me. I have loads of crane flies in my garden, and am looking forward to lots more after watching one laying eggs in my lawn last week.)

Bats typically roost in caves, tall trees, roofs of houses and barns, but they will choose anywhere they deem suitable. My cousin often has bats roosting in his outdoor fuse box, while one used to sleep in the folds of curtains hanging in the classroom my mum used to teach in. Erecting a bat box and growing trees may encourage them to roost in your garden. Females will choose warm ‘maternity’ roosts to birth and raise their young, while cooler sites are used for hibernation. They navigate around using echolocation, so need linear corridors along which to travel. If you have the space, why not a plant long, straight hedge for them?

If you do have bats roosting in your home or garden, remember that bats and their roosts are protected whether occupied or not, so if you want to get rid of that conifer blocking all the light to your veg patch, but you think there are bats roosting in it, make sure you call the National Bat Helpline first for advice on 0845 1300 228.

Harvesting Shallots

I dug up my Shallots a few days ago and dried them out in the sun (before the rain came). They are now happily weathering the wet weather in the potting shed. If the sun comes out again I’ll pop them out to dry some more.

I planted them back in March from some saved Shallots from last season. I wasn’t sure that the bulbs would be okay since I’ve never saved Shallots before but hey… they worked out fine!

I like Shallots. They’re smaller and more usable for our small needs (maybe that will change when my two boys start consuming their own body weight in food everyday, but for now they are fine.)

They tend to be sweeter than Onions with a more sophisticated flavour and are great for caramalising.

And… I can’t help feeling just a little bit smug that the first stored harvest is in the shed!

This Years Lettuce

Here are my smart new Lettuce varieties that I’m growing for the first time this year. Above is Reine de Glaces, an iceberg type, crispy sort with spiky leaves. Very fresh.

This one is called Really Red and is not quite big enough to cut yet as it needs to heart up a bit more. But when it does…

This one is my favourite, it’s called Flashy Butter Oak. What a great name? I particularly like the red flecks that look great against the one-colour Lettuces.

I also tried another new variety called Red Iceberg, but unfortunately all of the seedlings succumbed to damping off and keeled over. I’ve resowed in the open ground but the plants are still very small. But hopefully I’ll get to taste one this year.