I planted a couple of trays of salad seedlings in modules just over two weeks ago. I put them in a heated propagator to get them started and they nearly all sprouted quickly. I used some old seed compost from a bag that had been opened and there were some worms in there. Judging by the timelapse there was also at least one slug (or slug's egg) in there too. Despite that they seem to have survived.

I got the seeds from Chiltern Seeds and I based the mixture on the Salad Leaves for All Seasons book by Charles Dowding to give edible leaves for a couple of months. I just transferred them to the little plastic greenhouse I have outside. I'm hoping some of them survive the slugs and get big enough to be planted out.

After non-stop rain last year I never thought I would be glad to see the rain come back, but after the cold, cold spring and dry weather it's a real relief to see the temperature rise and some rain come to the garden. Everything in the garden is in stasis waiting for the weather to warm up. The only things really growing are the alliums ( garlic, wild garlic and Babbington's leeks) and the rhubarb.

The wild garlic is lovely to watch growing and spreading in the garden. It was planted a few years ago and has self-seeded really nicely. The younger plants are much smaller, but are starting to cover a reasonable area and make a great ground cover in the shady spot they are growing in. The oldest clump was large enough to give a crop of a 100g which, combined with some Babbington's leeks, made some very tasty pesto.

In anticipation of warmer weather I'm growing some seeds for salad this year. I don't normally bother much with annual plants, but I got a copy of Charles Dowding's book Salad Leaves for All Seasons which has inspired me. It has a scheme for growing two trays of forty modules at a time for salad for six months. In the past I've failed spectacularly with seeds, but this year, with the help of a propagator, most of them have sprouted already. Hopefully I can keep them alive long enough to transplant them outside when it gets warmer.

Time seems to have been flying recently. I look forward to pruning the trees and fruit bushes in the garden but all of a sudden it seems like there are only a couple of weekends left before March. I ended up pruning the currant and gooseberry bushes in mid-Feb and then the trees the next weekend. The weather has been cold, but not too cold, so hopefully the plants will be fine. I like to record the pruning process so that I can look back and see what effect it has had.

The worcesterberry grew like mad last year and looks as though it will make a good sized bush. The new whitecurrant had also grown strongly. The other red and whitecurrants had done ok, but some of the growth didn't look terribly healthy so I pruned them back quite hard.

All of the gooseberries in the garden are grown as cordons so they are easy to prune. They haven't been terribly productive so far, but they are starting to develop a decent set of fruit buds. Maybe this year I'll get enough to make a pudding out of.

I take a bit more time over the apple tree pruning. It always makes me nervous as it is such a final process. The Redsleeves apple is being grown as a bush. It has grown really well this year so there was a fair amount of wood to remove to keep it open in the centre.

There are two apple trees in the garden that are being grown as full standards, a Court of Wick and a Tydeman's Late Orange. The Court of Wick is doing ok, but gets a little less light and is on a different rootstock (MM111). The Tydeman's Late Orange isn't shaded at all and is growing on MM106 and is growing more strongly. I'm leaving some of the lower branches on to help thicken the trunk up. When the trunk is thick enough I will remove some or all of these. I had a disaster whilst pruning the upper branches. I pulled down one of the branches to prune the leader and the whole thing snapped at the base! I tidied up as best I could but it will almost certainly change the final shape of the tree. Lesson learnt - don't try to bend branches in cold weather. Hopefully the tree will be fine, although I saw one of my cats climbing the tree today and he looked as though he might do more damage than me. 

The rain over the last two days has melted all the snow at last and it has got much warmer than last week. I ordered a new blackcurrant bush for the front garden and it arrived just as the snow started to fall so I put it temporarily in a pot with some compost. I finally got to plant it in the front garden today to join the other 5 plants I have there. I chose the Ben Connan variety, which is eary fruiting and should complement the others I have - Ben Sarek, Ben Tirran, Ben Lomond. Ebony. I tried a new nursery - Welsh Fruit Stocks as I couldn't find that variety from the places I had used before. The plant I got had a great root system and looked very healthy so hopefully it will do.
Whilst I was at it I planted three rows of Babbington's leeks to fill in the space between the blackcurrants and some sea buckthorn plants. I should probably have planted them a little earlier, but hopefully some will take.

Friday brought 75 - 100 mm of snow. The garden is completely covered under a blanket of it. It looks amazing. Underneath the snow there are garlic shoots coming up from the perennial garlic and Babbington leeks. Even the cardoon is coming up. I'm not sure what they will make of the snow.

I've been working on the front garden recently. I've got some established oregano and lavender and some sea buckthorn. The garden gets a lot of sun so I've got five blackcurrant bushes. I just ordered a final one to fill in the last space. I chose a Ben Connan to complement the others (Ben Tirran, Ben Sarek and Ebony). It will have to wait until the snow melts before I can plant it.

The first planting in the garden started at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, so the forest garden is about four years old now. It doesn't seem long ago when the trees were just whips and time has flown. The trees have developed a great deal since then, putting on a lot of height and filling out. I've been recording the development of the garden photographically and I have now got enough photos to compare this year and last year.

Seeing two years side by side shows up the flowering times of the trees. The tall pear tree to the left of the garden and the cordon to the left of the arch flower more fully in 2012. In contrast the apple trees had fewer flowers in 2012 and gave almost no fruit. The size of the apple trees and the quince tree at the front of the garden is much larger in 2012. The next video zooms in on two apples, the Tydeman's Late Orange standard on the left and the Redsleeves bush on the right.

So the trees have developed fairly well, but how productive has the garden been this year?  The charts below show the amount of output from the garden. The first one shows all of the output over the last three years.

The big peak in September 2011 was made up from a one-off large crop of potatoes in the front garden and more than 10 kg of apples. I grew only a few early potatoes this year and there was only one apple from the whole garden. The peaks in December were from Jerusalem artichokes.
The plot below shows the output without vegetables which tend to dominate.

To be honest the results are disappointing. I was hoping that I would have more fruit than I could eat by now, but this year the top fruit has been very scarce. The weather was very cold in April and very wet in May which seemed to have stopped the apples pollinating. There seemed to be far fewer bees and other insects around at that time of year. The bush fruit has done fine, giving slightly more than last year, but that is swamped out in the plot above. The details of the weights of all the different crops are shown on the right hand side.

On the positive side, the lack of apples will probably help the trees to develop their branches more quickly and get to their final size more quickly. The grafted apple tree is also growing strongly and may start producing next year. The soil of the garden is still developing too. There is still a long way to go before it is really thick and fertile, but each year it is getting better and the type of plants that grow is changing. There are some other parts of the garden that are maturing too. For example, there are now lots of edible alliums (garlic shoots, rocambole and Babbington leeks) for the picking. I'm just hoping that next year we'll have some apples to go with them too.

This year has been a mixed one in the garden. The cold and wet start to the year was bad news for apples. Hardly any of the fruit made it through to maturity. I had high hopes for an increased harvest this year, but got very little in the end. The sweet and sour cherries also did badly. The existing pear tree did better than the apples, but the new Concorde and Onwards cordons failed to deliver.

Although the fruit yield was a real disappointment, the fruit trees themselves seem to be growing well. The Redsleeves and Tydemans Late Orange seem to be growing strongly. The Court of Wick is not as strong, but is in a worse spot. After some strong winds it was looking slightly less than upright. I hadn't staked either of the standards, hoping that they would build a stronger trunk that way. I tied it in to a nearby pole though to make sure it doesn't get blown over. Hopefully as it gets taller and clears some of the shade from the nearby winter jasmine it will thrive a little better.

I had a permanent loss from the trees in the garden earlier in the year. The Crataegus schraderiana came into leaf briefly early in the spring, but then died back completely and never recovered. It had looked pretty healthy last year, but the soil was quite poor where it was growing and I suspect the cold start finished it off before it got fully established. I was sad to see it go, but I consoled myself by thinking that I could do with the extra space anyway.

The hazel trees have grown well though this year. The Nottingham cob has reached about 2 m, about as high as I want it to get. The Kentish cob gave the first few hazelnuts this year. The Red filbert looks beautiful and is becoming more productive. The twisted hazel is very slow growing in its spot in the shade but looks good from the kitchen. They gave a reasonable harvest this year, but slightly down on last year.

Frosts are here now and the green vegetation is dying back. My South American tubers also suffered this year. The mashua that was a huge success last year got slugged before it got going properly and died right back, although my neighbour has some great plants from last year's tubers. I tried my hand at growing some oca too this year. It grew pretty well but the frosts have made it die back. I tried digging some up straight after, but found hardly any tubers. I'm leaving them in the ground a little longer to see if they develop but suspect that the season wasn't long enough this year.

The leaves on the trees have mostly fallen now. There is a great leaf mulch around the mulberry and hazel trees. The quince and Redsleeves apple still have their leaves which are a beautiful yellow now. Soon it will just be the hardy shrubs and evergreen holly to stick it out through the winter while the rest of the plants retreat into the underworld. I'll wish them goodwinter and look forward to seeing them in the spring.

One of the joys of summer is being able to eat fresh soft fruit straight from the garden. The blueberries seem to have enjoyed the wet weather this year and have given a good crop that has been staggered over several weeks. The Japanese wineberry has been productive too this year. The fruit are small and last year I made the mistake of waiting, expecting them to get bigger. This year I picked them as soon as they were ripe. The fruits are beautiful, jewel-like things and stick to the fingers as they are picked. Elsewhere in the garden the alpine strawberries are also ripening. They are small as well but make a nice addition. Together, the three berries make a perfect pancake filling with a little sugar on the top.

The wet summer has not been good for butterflies and other insects so far this year. It has warmed up a little now and all of a sudden the garden is full of life. I got a nice surprise the other day to find a family of speckled bush crickets (Leptophyes punctatissima) on the small Annie Elizabeth apples tree. There were at least three of them and I got photos of a male and female. The tree is very small and they were within about 10 cm of each other. I have seen these in the garden before, but only one at a time.

Back in the garden today they were still on the same tree. Whilst I was taking some photos at the other end of the garden I leant into some plants and when I stepped back found another cricket on my arm. There must be a lot of them in the garden!

There is lots of other wildlife about at the moment. Pairs of butterflies are chasing each other around the garden, bees and hoverflies everywhere as usual and even a giant dragonfly buzzing overhead.

More wet weather. Last month we had about two and a half times the average for that time of year and this month we've exceeded the monthly average in the first week. I'm not sure what it's done to the garden. The soft fruit seem to be a little later than last year, I guess because they are missing the warmer weather and the sun. There is now plenty of soft fruit in the garden. Slugs, snails and woodlice have got most of the strawberries, but the raspberries have done really well. There are coming faster than we can pick, especially with the rain keeping us out of the garden some of the time.

Redcurrants have done well this year too. The first bushes planted are starting to be quite productive. The Junifer redcurrant was the first to ripen and gave a good yield, enough to freeze some for later in the year. I also harvested a few blackcurrants from the Ebony variety I planted last October in the front garden. These were ready by the end of June and were very sweet.

Some of the climbing fruit is ripening now. The tayberries are ready to pick and the loganberries are ripening too. Even the huge Karaka blackberries are turning black and ready to eat. These are supposed to have an eight to nine week season starting in early July, which makes them great for back garden grazing.

Even the gooseberries cordons have finally produced some fruit this year on the first three that were planted. The Invicta variety produced much more than the Hinnomaki Red or Yellow varieties. I had to pick them yesterday as it was so wet that the snails were starting to eat them.

The soft necked garlic growing in a raised bed is about ready to harvest and those and the Babington leeks are looking like the slugs and snails are giving them a hard time now. The soft-necked garlic that I've left to form clumps around the garden and use for the scapes have died back now. The hard-necked rocambole is doing well still and has lots of flowering shoots coming up. The few bulbs that I planted a few years ago around the Annie Elizabeth apple have multiplied and now there is a large belt around the tree. I also planted some of the small bulbils that it produced last year in the front garden and these have grown into new plants. Hopefully they will all produce more bulbils this year.

The wet weather hasn't been much fun for the moths and butterflies. The scarlet tiger moths are back, but mostly seem to be sheltering from the rain. There have also been some unusual insect visitors to the garden. A few nights ago there were some large flying beetles in the garden flying around the top of the large pear tree. Some of them had come into the house and got stuck by the window. I think they were may bugs or cockchafers (Melolontha melolontha). I haven't seen them since.

It has finally stopped raining, I'd better get outside and pick some more raspberries.