Planting bulbs and beans

Before I start telling you about bulbs and beans I must just say that the heating engineer has been with us this week and has performed miracles! Our house, which is large and Victorian with the usual lovely high ceilings and original sash windows, has always been difficult to heat in the winter. Since the old boiler died it has been pretty grim and we'd dug out a selection of unflattering woollies to wear as we huddled around the cat to keep warm in the evenings. With our new high efficiency rated condensing boiler the cat cuddling has returned to previous levels (the cat is, of course, bewildered by the sudden change) The heating engineer was reassuring that the insulation we use will keep the heat in, so we don't intend to overheat the place. It's just so wonderful to be warm! He says the new boiler is 91% efficient compared to probably less than 50% for the 30 year old one we replaced. After the initial play around with the controls we'll probably stick to a modest 17 or 18 degrees in the evenings. Not tropical anyway.

Anyway, with the advent of some more cold, dry weather I've been messing about under the old apple tree. When we first took over the allotment it was a fine, low branched, (huge) tree of unknown variety that the boys used to climb. Because it was so useful as a climbing tree we though of the apples as a bonus, they came early and didn't keep but the flavour was very good. Over the years, the boys got too big to climb the tree and it managed to acquire all sorts of pests and diseases so after several attempts at pruning and even more poor fruiting years we gave up. We chopped it down as far as we could and I was going to try to take it down even further, put a plank on top and make it into a bench. But, I could never find the right tool to saw through the thick trunk and while we deliberated, it sneakily threw out more and more branches until last year, we realised, it really, really wanted to be tree again. So...I've done some more pruning and today, I've planted bulbs around the base. Welcome back tree. I only chopped you down because I thought you were pretty dead! I'd mulched the grass in a sort of circle around the base so it was easier to dig into it and make holes for the bulbs and I was going to clear the grass away but I was overwhelmed with indecision (it happens a lot, I'm afraid) and I think I'm now going to let the grass grow back. It'll look more natural.

Before I went home I put in another row of broad bean seeds and sat on the hut step admiring the autumn colours. Because we're on a hill you can see down over the city and at the moment every little bit that used to be green is tinged with lovely russets and browns. The sky was clear too, winter clear, which is quite different from a clear sky in summer. Lovely. Maybe I'll make a small stained glass sculpture to hang in the tree. I'm making garden sculptures at the moment, mostly to "plant" in the ground or in a pot, but I could do some hanging ones too. As long as they're wired onto a branch they should stay on ok in the wind. Hmm. I need to go and do some designing.
Happy gardening