December in the Gardens: Double-digging, Elven Deliveries and Detective-work.
With the short, dark days and the bustle of Christmas, not much gardening tends to happen in December and this winter's heavy rain hasn't helped matters. But there are honourable exceptions. A few gardeners have been valiantly double-digging their plots between downpours and Keith and Bruce have managed to rotavate their whole garden!
Although produce is now thin on the ground, customers have still been stopping by to pick up bundles of apple-wood kindling from our honesty-box stall.
Their generosity enabled Santa's elf to deliver bags of sunflower hearts as a seasonal treat for the Waterfurlong song-birds. We are particularly keen to give a helping hand to our bullfinches - once commonplace in orchards but now in serious decline across the country.
We hope dog-walkers slipping and sliding along the muddy lanes have been cheered by Christmas greetings and wreaths on garden gates.
And have sometimes been lucky enough to catch the delicious, spicy scent of viburnum bodnantense wafting over the hedges - a welcome reminder that spring is not so very far away.
Meanwhile, as fair-weather gardeners we've mostly been curled up indoors poring over the tempting new seed catalogues and immersed in detective work.
The Phillips Room in Stamford Town Hall has yielded a marvellous find - the hand-written memoirs of Victorian Waterfurlong gardener, Thomas Sandall. Transcribing this long account is proving a labour of love, as the author's wonderful copperplate handwriting quickly deteriorates after the first few pages.
We've also had our first meeting with renowned authority on medieval Stamford, Professor Alan Rogers, to discuss researching the lost village of Bradcroft or Bredcroft, on which Waterfurlong now stands. Watch this space!
Finally, we'd like to thank each and every one of The Plot Thickens's readers and subscribers for their interest and support in the six months since we launched the blog and we wish everyone a very:
Copyright © Karen Meadows 2019