Volunteering at Chanticleer

 

It has been a fast and furious week volunteering at Chanticleer. Days and evenings were packed with work, garden tours, lectures, and meeting other gardeners. I have jumped into the gardening season full throttle, brimming over with new ideas, new plant knowledge, excitement and inspiration. I worked alongside Emma each day, as this was something we both hoped for- and we got a lot accomplished. She is now nearly ready to plant! Emma has been very ambitious in her first six months, digging up her gardens, amending soils and growing lots and lots of plants. I have included a highlight reel of some of the projects I helped her with this week.

Above: A picture of the gravel garden looking glorious during one of the sunny spells. Everyone who worked at Chanticleer, from the office to the seasonal gardeners, were so welcoming and wonderful. I wish I could have been there a month and worked in every section of the garden. There is a lot of individuality, creativity and autonomy among the gardeners, and yet the whole place flows so beautifully. Each section blends into the next, seamlessly, though each area offers something new.

 

Emma was trained at Great Dixter for a year and half so many of her methods and plant material derive from that great garden.  Like Great Dixter, Emma (and many other gardeners at Chanticleer),  is growing a great deal of her own plant material from seed, which means this time of year there is constant sowing, pricking out (moving tiny seedlings into plug trays), and potting on (moving seedlings from plug trays into 4" pots). It was happily reminiscent to work together again at these tasks we shared at Great Dixter a year ago.

Above: Sowing Orlaya grandiflora seeds, spiny sea creature looking things! In the background you can see Emma's wooden, hand made soil tamper. This is used to gently flatten the surface of the soil before sowing.

 

Benches in the warm and humid propagation house with seeds and seedlings at various stages.

Wee Nicotiana 'Lime Green' seedlings being pricked out...

                          

...and carefully transplanted into plug trays. We used very skinny stakes cut to a point to make a little hole in the plug for the long, wispy roots of the seedlings. At this stage, we only handle the buggers by their leaves- counting on the fact that these leaves are readily replaced, unlike stems and roots that can be easily damaged, making the plant suffer all the more during this delicate transition.

 Cold frames, already tight with material. This time of year, all frost-free zones are highly coveted.  This is the last step before life in the real world, so being brave and kicking the kids out into the cold can be hard! The pots of spring bulbs growing on in the cold frame are almost ready to go out, which will clear up a great deal of space for young, tender plants.

In conjunction with finicky greenhouse work, we hauled, dug, moved, raked, rototilled, wheelbarrowed a great deal of soil around. Here is the after picture of the vegetable garden, which was weedy and full of old vegetables from the previous season. We turned the thing over and added 30 wheelbarrows of mushroom compost. Next, Emma will rototill again and dig and place her paths.

Just in case you thought I shoveled and filled all of those wheelbarrows... I did not. Emma would dump a load into the barrows and I would wheel them to the appropriate places. The next day we did the same treatment to the long lines of asparagus running parallel to the cutting garden.

 

 

We dug, divided, and saved-for-later the lovely Carex 'Bowles Golden,' which gave the tulips a little breathing room.

All cleaned up with a little mushroom compost added and lightly turned in.

And then we made a soil mix. Emma uses Chanticleer compost with a little decomposed bark mulch, a large bucket of grit, and a few handfuls of Osmocote, a slow release pellet fertilizer. She hand mixes the ingredients first by trowing it into a pile (two times). Then she runs the rototiller over the mix multiple passes. Lastly, she screens it; creating a fine, loamy, nutritious mix. She uses this soil to transplant her seedlings from plug trays into 4" pots. The plants at this state don't need a sterilized mix and will benefit from becoming acclimated to the garden soils in which they will eventually land.

Dramatic light on the Sporobolus heterolepsis planting.

 

Iris reticulata

This is an incredible garden and I am honored to have spent a week here. Thank you to everyone at Chanticleer for making my visit so spectacular!

Starting From Seed

 

 Great Dixter has an incredible plant nursery. Not only do they sell top notch plants, most of these plants are grown in the gardens at Dixter or started from seed (and often the seed is collected from the garden). Of course this is the way most nurseries operated, but as with most of the good things in life, this down to earth way of doing things became less and less cost effective.  

At Great Dixter the gardening and nursery staff work in tandem and often there is much overlap; gardeners will dig and divide plants, bring the divisions to the nursery to be potted up for sale. Perennials are divided, trees and shrubs are propagated, and seeds are sown- all from the Great Dixter gardens. This same type of work is also put into growing on plants to use in the garden. The gardeners seed thousands of seeds, prick them out, pot them on, etc. to eventually be planted out as annual or biennial bedding. This is the real secret to the glorious self-seed biennial show seen at Great Dixter! Seed is collected (or seedlings), brought to the nursery to be sown or potted. They will be transplanted and nurtured, sometimes for over a year, before they are planted out in the garden again. 

There is a lot that goes into this process. First of all is the soil mixture. Yesterday Emma and I mixed two new experimental batches of soil mix, one with some sort of fiber added and the other with charcoal, as alternatives to using peat. Then we pricked out Nicotiana mutabalis into four plug trays (that is 384 nearly microscopic seedlings), two with regular potting mix, one with the fibrous mix and the last with the charcoal mix.

Above: The Long Shed potting bench where the students and I sowed seeds all Saturday afternoon

 

Students James and Yannic sowing seeds

 

After the seeds are sown, places are found to put them. Here they sit in the hot house, waiting to germinate.

 

A few days later....

Each day everyone eagerly checks in on how the seeds they sowed are doing. Starting from seed really helps you learn your plants, you just have so much contact and interaction with the plant from the very beginning.

The hot house is coveted real estate so more often than not seedlings are placed in one of these double frame cold frames.

After the seedlings are big enough they are potted on to plug trays, once they have out grown this size, they move on to bigger pots.