A Simple Life of Luxury

Coastal Gardening

All gardens have a unique set of parameters that will determine whether or not a particular plant will thrive, merely survive or perish. Most of these, such as the amount of sunlight, soil type and drainage are fairly obvious and well documented. Other equally important parameters include the amount of time, energy and money you have to spend on your plot.

Living our ‘Simple Life of Luxury‘ here on the west Wales coast means we are affected by all of these parameters. Whilst I don’t want to sound hard done by (as I wouldn’t change it for the world) we do seem to experience some extremes that make gardening here very challenging.

Over the next few weeks I shall be publishing articles here looking inn a little more detail at some of the issues affecting gardening on the coast and offering some potential solutions, for now though a brief overview.

First up, the socio-economic side of things. As a young working family, money and time can be a little tight. Again, I’m not complaining as it is all a matter of priority but at this stage, for us, family and work tend to come before gardening when it comes to use of our resources. I shall be looking at ways around this in a future article.

Climate: Frosts are fairly rare here but can catch us out. Wind is common. In fact it is ALWAYS an issue and I shall be looking at wind resistant plants and ways to minimise wind damage and frost damage too.

Soil and Drainage: Our soil is sand. No, not sandy, just sand. Pure, simple beach sand! Drainage is therefore extremely good, too good in fact and it may actually be affected by the height of the tide!

Salt-laden air is also an issue, and in case you missed it earlier, it is also very windy here all of the time.

Most gardeners will have to pick plants suited to the individual parameters in their garden, but usually these will be slight variations from a fairly standard mid point. This means that the choice of plants is wide and often, even if a plant isn’t perfectly suited to the conditions it will still survive. Here, the conditions are extreme, right at the edge of the scale as far as the various parameters are concerned so choice of plants that will actually survive is limited. Finding a variety of readily available plants is difficult and achieving your perfect garden near impossible. However, it is possible to mould the environment to a certain extent and with a few compromises here and there lots of patience surprising results can be attained.

I don’t claim to have achieved this goal yet, but I’m working on it. Progress is gradual (This isn’t Ground Force as I’m not Alan Titchmarsh and Anna certainly isn’t Charlie Dimmock!) but progress is being made and the coming articles will chart this progress highlight the successes and the failures and hopefully give inspiration.

At least we had a blank canvas to work with

Seaside Gardening

Related Articles

Articles in this series on coastal gardening:
Coastal Gardening - Wind

Believe it or not, our sleepy seaside town of Borth is home to a music festival. Complete with 6 stages, 60 bands and up to 3000 people. If that many people do attend, than could more than triple the population for a day or two.

The Square Festival as its known is on the 26th and 27th July at Ynys Fergi Farm in the middle of Borth. As well as the  stages with a wide range of music there will of course be plenty of arts and crafts stalls, food stalls and plenty of cider too!

I’ve taken a look at the line-up and have to admit that I haven’t heard of a single one of the bands. I’m not sure if thats a reflection on the line-up itself or (as is more likely) a reflection of the fact that I’m not as young and ‘with it’ as I used to be. The big names are ‘Pendulum’ on the 26th and ‘Alabama 3′ on the 27th.

I won’t go into the hows and whys, but I’ve just got myself a couple of free tickets.

Lets hope it all runs smoothly, everyone has a good time and the locals aren’t disturbed too much.

I keep saying that it is all too easy to take what you have around you for granted and not make the most of it. So, to make sure didn’t fall into this trap we joined the holiday-makers and had a nice day out at the beach last weekend.

Actually we beat them to it really as Morgan and I loaded the car up with all the tourist trappings; beach towels, beach shelter, swimming stuff, wetsuits etc etc first thing in the morning. Slapped on the suntan lotion and headed off in the car. Less than a minute later we were on the beach at Ynyslas which was virtually deserted. We could have walked of course but we also had our canoe with use which is a little heavy to carry.

I started setting up our little beach campsite for the day when along came one of the wardens from the nature Reserve. We got chatting as they were organising some kids activities at the visitor centre all about the weather. I therefore told her about my weather station and offered to arrange a data feed to the visitor centre if they wanted one.

Once the beach shelter was set up and Morgan and I were in our wetsuits, I pumped up our inflatable canoe and we headed off on an adventure on the waters of the Dyfi Estuary. The tide was low so we explored the channels and went up the River Leri a little bit. We then stopped for a picnic on one of the sandbanks before slowly making our way back to the car. The water was really calm which was good as our first attempt in the canoe with Morgan was a little rough, but he enjoyed it this time.

Back at the beach and Anna was there so we played in the sand for a bit before going across to look at the displays in the visitor centre and getting an ice-cream. By now the place was pretty busy with holiday-makers so we headed back home and spent the rest of the day in the garden.

It was however nice to spend the day on the beach and make the most of the things on our doorstep.

As regular readers will know we have been having a pragmatic approach to saving some electricity recently. We’re still using the electricity monitor and have been keeping the usage down which is good. It is summer of course so we shouldn’t be using much anyway, but hopefully come winter we’ll be careful with our energy consumption too.

Despite living in a brand new, energy efficient house though quite a few of our windows have large gaps around them which let in draughts and sand and obviously let out heat in the winter so I’ve started sealing these off which will hopefully help the energy consumption too.

Of course living at the end of the line means that we get plenty of power cuts too. A quick search through this blog and there are quite a few reports of loss of power and such like so this can on occasion help is save electricity too! We had a quick power cut on Friday afternoon with the power going off for a minute or so… Still enough to shut down all of the computers too abrubtly for my liking and of course reset all of the clocks etc. And then it went off for about an hour around dinner time. According to the electricity company a bird flew into the line earlier in the day when the power first went off and then they switched it off at dinner time to repair it… I’m not sure how a bird manages to cause such disruption but it did!

It did mean that our energy consumption for the day was a little lower than normal though, just 4Kwh

Our final stop of the day on our anniversary was The Frame House in Borth.

Instead of buying each other anniversary cards and presents we had decided to treat ourselves to a nice picture for the wall. We didn’t really know what we wanted so we stopped off to have a look for something suitable. The Frame House was looking good with its new coffee shop and we saw quite a few paintings and photos that we liked, but then we spotted a really nice one of the beach opposite our house with a few kites in it.

It was an original by a local artist called Eve Smith so was a little more money than we had intended to spend, but after a little bit of decision making we decided it was better to spend a little more on something special rather than just buy something suitable. Lets just hope Eve makes name for herself and it ends up being worth even more!

Continuing our anniversary day out we headed off to Llanerchaeron House near Aberaeron. This is a National Trust property so it isn’t cheap to get in but we decided that it was our anniversary so we may as well treat ourselves and have a look round, especially seeing as I’m into gardens at the moment anyway.

We wandered around the gardens and the lake and then had a look round the house. The house itself isn’t huge but it was interesting. We were actually more interested in the service areas out the back of the house rather than the luxurious living areas.

The gardens were nice too, if only we had a little more protection from the wind here. Of course, being a National Trust property they did try to get us to join. We would if there were more National Trust properties in the area, but a family membership is quite expensive and with nothing else to visit around here it just wouldn’t be worth it for us.

At least I remembered to take some photos for a change!

All in all a nice day out together.

Llanerchaeron Walled Gardens

Lake at Llanerchaeron

Formal Rose Garden

It was our wedding anniversary on Thursday so although we felt a little guilty about it we sent Morgan off to nursery as usual and had a day out together.

Typically I had come down with the dreaded lurgy the night before so wasn’t feeling great and the weather didn’t look too good to start with either. First we drove to Aberaeron but as it was pouring with rain decided to continue down the coast towards New Quay. We stopped off at a little garden centre in Llanart and had a wander round then dodged the showers in New Quay before heading off to the nearby Honey Farm for some lunch.

We hadn’t been to the honey farm before and although small it was a pleasant place to stop. We had a cream tea here and a little look around. They have a nice little picnic area, a tea room, an exhibition and a meadery. I discovered that the term ‘Honeymoon’ comes from the fact that honey was considered an aphrodisiac and was given to newlyweds for a lunar month after their wedding, hence the term honeymoon… Quite an appropriate thing to learn on our anniversary.

The weather had brightened up by now and it was actually a lovely day. The wind had picked up too so had I been feeling well enough I would have been dying to get out for a windsurf but as it was we headed back towards Aberaeron and off to Llanerchaeron House.

As I mentioned a while back, the Ceredigion Coastal Path is due to open soon. First Minister Rhodri Morgan will be joining in on the activities to launch the path between July 4th and July 9th. To mark the opening of the path Ceredigion Ramblers have organised a six-day festival that will see the whole 60 miles of the new coastal path from Cardigan to the Dyfi Estuary walked.

Most of the festival days are divided into morning and afternoon walks and the public are welcome to join either session or to make a whole day of it. Each walk will be led by members of the Ramblers’ in Ceredigion.

Click here for full details of the timetable, personal safety issues and transport arrangements for the Ceredigion Coastal Path Celebration Event 4-9th July 2008.

The  path has taken five years to create with the help of the Ceredigion Ramblers who working as volunteers have helped by builidng bridges and walls, excavating paths etc. It is expected to be popular with walkers far and wide, and will hopefully provide a real and lasting boost to the local economy. It may also encourage a few more people to find the geocaches that I and others have hidden along the path.

The path will form part of the 800 mile all-Wales Coastal Path which is being completed over the next four years.

Geocaching seems to have turned me into a media hound! Maybe not, but I did do an interview and spend a morning geocaching with BBC Radio Wales the other day.

This was completely unrelated to my recent article that was published on the BBC Isle of Man website, but I was approached by the producer of Country Focus that airs on BBC Radio Wales and asked if I would mind doing a half hour programme all about Geocaching. I got together a few other aber-cachers and we met up last week to take the shows presenter out caching for the morning.

After a quick introduction in my office explaining the concept and showing them how to get the cache details from the web an into my GPSr and iPod we jumped in the car and headed into Aberyswyth where we went in search of the Yellow cache from the Rainbow series. Red Kite (the owner of the cache) and Sarah from Idle Rocks were with me along with the shows present (Mel Doel) and producer (Pauline Smith) We gave Mel and Pauline the GPSr and let them find the cache themselves which they did easily. Sarah hadn;t foudn this one either so after signing the logbook, and leaving a BBC Radio Wales calling card it was back into the car and up to the Forestry at pendam for a search for one of my caches.

The Pendam Cache had gone missing a week or so before so I quickly restored it with a new one. We then met Gareth from Forestry Commission, and Peter Hewlett from Llyn Peninsula and had a little interview with them about eco-tourism and gecoaching. We then headed off to allow them to find the Pendam cache.

The Country Focus people had brought a Travel Bug with them so they dropped that off in the cache and will be monitoring its progress on the programme. The programme airs at 7.30am on a Sunday so not many people that know me will hear it (probably a good thing!), and we’re not sure when exactly it will go out, but I’m sure I’ll let you know here oncer I have some more info.

Overall it was a nice morning out. I wanted to stress that geocaching for me was really about the walk and the countryside rather than the finding of the cache, and a way to go to places that you might otherwise not have gone to, but I’m not sure how it will come out once they edit it all. I have a feeling they were trying to portray me as a mad geocacher who spends his time searching for plastic boxes and getting excited about the contents! I know that is what some people do and I also wanted to express the fact that geocaching is really varied and can be whatever you want it to be, but again we’ll have to see if that makes it into the show.

We’ve had some fun at the beach recently. Nothing unusual there, but its good to make the most of it and all too easy to take it for granted when it is so close.

Morgan and I built a huge sandcastle one morning and watched the tide destroy it. We also tried out Morgans new wetsuit and let Morgan have a go on a body-board. I’m not sure what he thought of it really as he soon got cold but he seemed really excited beforehand and did talk about catching the waves later, once he had warmed up.

We also tried to go out in the new inflatable canoe the other day, but the waves were a little too big and Morgan wasn’t too keen so Anna and Morgan played in a pool on the beach whilst I tried to surf in the canoe. We shall have to have another go soon either in the estuary or on a dead flat day on the sea.

I also got out windsurfing yesterday in conditions that were as good as they get here in West Wales. 30 knots of wind, huge waves and best of all, glorious sunshine. I even plucked up the courage to attempt a forward loop, but only the one!