One last rose

One last rose, or probably the last, on Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’; there’s also a bud that may or may not come to anything, and a few fading flowers on the R. ‘Blush Noisette’ in the front garden, but this looks like the year’s last presentable rose bloom.  (Although the blackspot on the leaves is definitely not presentable.)

The first proper cold snap of the winter is forecast for this week; although the ever-excitable media have been chattering about an Arctic blast, this far south we should get away with a few days of frosty nights and maybe a short burst of sleet, and then back to more normal November temperatures.  The past week has been mostly dry and often sunny, and there might be a little more of that to come.  But the coming frost is likely to hit the remaining autumn flowers in the garden.

The remains of the window box display

There are only a few of those autumn flowers left anyway, apart from the roses.  There’s the window box, looking rather sad now but still with a very few fuchsia, lobelia and salvia blooms; it will soon be time to replant this for the winter, with the small euonymus and rosemary plants and the Tete-a-tete daffodils, padded out with some ivy and anything else evergreen that I can find.  Perhaps some snowdrops, of which I have plenty in the garden?

Fuchsia 'Hawkshead'

The Fuchsia ‘Hawkshead’ is holding up, but the cold will make the flowers drop.  The nerines are pretty much over in any case (only nine flower stems this year, must feed them more carefully).  There are a few final rudbeckia flowers and two or three penstemon blooms; and a single red chrysanthemum flower.  I repotted the chrysanthemum this year and had hoped for a better show; perhaps it’s one of those flowers that is more successful from new cuttings?  Not that there’s much chance of taking cuttings from such a small plant.  Still, the original was a garden centre rescue job that I nursed back to life, and it wasn’t expensive; maybe time to replace it.

A little red chrysanthemum

One of my Welsh poppy plants (Meconopsis cambrica) is doing well, however.  I originally sowed these using seed from pods picked in the Lake District and they spread themselves around the garden with gay abandon, not always in desirable places; this plant is really in the wrong place, but it’s making a welcome statement as the garden winds down towards winter, so let’s not complain.

Meconopsis cambrica

Other flowers at the moment are the winter stalwarts, gearing up for the colder months: the winter jasmine, Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ and Viburnum tinus ‘Gwenllian’, and most of all Mahonia ‘Winter Beauty’, which lives up to its name every year.  Nothing on the winter honeysuckle so far; I’ve probably hacked it around too much. 

Winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum)

Viburnum 'Gwenllian'

Welcome home

 

Village bonfire event

Back home after a couple of weeks away.  It’s definitely November; the Halloween / Bonfire weekend stayed dry, but this week the weather is mild, foggy and damp.  Anyone who had planned to set off their fireworks on the traditional 5^th wouldn’t have been able to see much.

Whether it’s the weather or just the winter closing in, the birdlife in the garden is noticeably more active and more diverse than when we left.  Some, like us, have come home for the winter: the Scandi-avians – fieldfares and redwings – have arrived, of course, and the number of blackbirds around makes me suspect that several of them are migrants too.  The woodpigeons seem to be flocking rather than fighting for territory as they were doing during the autumn breeding season, and the finches (including a male greenfinch and male bullfinch) are hanging out together as well.  There are the usual sparrows, dunnocks, robins and tits, and a goldcrest was checking out the patio area today; and less desirably, there are magpies, starlings and woodpeckers (great-spots, although a green woodpecker had been in the garden before we left).  We didn’t manage to pick all the eating apples before we went away, and the blackbirds have been feasting on the remains, as well as on the cooking apples left on the table under the dining room window.  There are very few holly berries left on the tree, and I suspect that the redwings have been having a party.

In the vegetable garden, the summer broccoli has done well but has now flowered; I need to protect the purple sprouting plants from the pigeons for the winter, as they’ve grown tall and pushed away the netting that had been covering them.  My ploy of coating the broad bean seeds in chilli to deter the rodents seems to have worked, as it looks as though at least some have germinated, but of course the chilli didn’t protect the new shoots, which have been broken off (by mice or birds, I’m not sure).  No signs of life from the peas, and I haven’t checked the garlic yet.

In the greenhouse, most of the tomatoes have belatedly ripened or are on the way to ripening, and the big ‘Alicante’ tomatoes, which I picked before we left and put in the kitchen to ripen, are mostly looking good.  No green tomato chutney after all.

First frost

A mostly dry end to last week continued over the weekend, and let me do some gardening (after a week of wet weather).  Thursday night was clear, and we had frost on Friday morning – nothing too severe, just a light frosting across the lawn.  The clear skies late on Thursday gave us a sighting of the Northern Lights; unfortunately my attempts at photographing them resulted in nothing more impressive than a slight reddening against a black sky!  All those visits to Norway, and my first sighting was back here in Gloucestershire ….

Peas sown under fleece

The last courgette plant had ground to a halt, and the frost wasn’t going to help matters, so I sent it to the compost bin.  But gardening goes on and moves forward, so other jobs included planting out garlic cloves (from this year’s rather poor crop) and sowing broad beans and – a first for me – some peas to overwinter.  I read somewhere that, with protection, peas can survive the cold, and cultivar ‘Douce Provence’ was recommended; I bought a packet and thought I’d give it a go.  Old gardeners used to sow four times as many seeds as they needed – ‘One for the mouse, one for the crow, One to rot and one to grow’ – and, having lost a lot of peas and beans to the mouse in the past, I tried another recommendation, which was to coat the seeds in chilli powder before sowing.  Rodents don't like the taste, apparently.  We’ll see if that works!  The garlic and peas have been covered in fleece as protection from disturbance by birds as much as against the cold; a new roll of fleece is in readiness for when (if!) the beans germinate.

On the subject of peas, during the wet weather I packaged up the peas that had been drying in the greenhouse - some of both 'Early Onward' and 'Alderman'.  If the mouse gets any of those in the spring, there will be plenty more to replace them with!

The autumn sweet peas have also been sown, in pots in the cold frame; the seeds are a little old, so I haven’t raised my hopes too high.

Insurance

With temperatures and daylight hours on the wane, I’ve started thinking about taking cuttings as insurance against winter losses.  A neighbour was admiring my penstemons but observed that he usually lost his over winter.  In the past I’ve generally kept mine in pots, which could be moved to more sheltered positions or into the cold frame or greenhouse when the temperatures dropped, but this year my dark red and blue-flowered penstemons have been planted out in the new bed and I’m planning to keep them there – weather permitting, of course.  So, just in case, I’ve taken cuttings of both of them.  I’ll also take cuttings of my Penstemon ‘Garnet’ (its real name is ‘Andenken an Friedrich Hahn’, but it’s not often sold under that name in this country, it being a bit of a mouthful); it’s in a large pot, and hasn’t flowered this year, probably because I haven’t repotted it for too long.  I think I read somewhere that penstemons flower best from fresh cuttings rather than from old plants, so that’s a good reason to propagate from it.

I’ve also taken hardwood cuttings from Rose ‘Gertrude Jekyll’; my plant (the sole survivor of three originally planted) is getting woody and a bit long in the tooth, and again, some insurance seems a good idea.

The new bed - mostly purple

The new bed by the patio, although a bit of a rag-bag of plants, has worked surprisingly well from the point of view of colour-theming; it’s mostly blue/purple and yellow, and those plants that have flowers of other colours have fitted in quite well.  Even the self-sown pink poppies haven’t clashed as much as I expected, and one of them – the last to flower, and still going even now – is a near-match for the dark red penstemon.  I’ll try to save some seed from it in the hope of getting more plants next year.

Poppy and penstemon

Insurance against the winter also comes in the form of storable, or at least overwinter-able, crops.  Salad plants haven’t done well this year; apart from the corn salad, a few lettuces early on, and a couple of radicchios, everything has been eaten by slugs and/or snails.  A line of wild rocket, planted out a few weeks ago, is no larger than when it went in the ground, and considerably thinner, and I’m not expecting anything from it.  I also sowed herbs – dill, coriander and chervil – along with some salad onions, and absolutely nothing has come up.  Too late in the year now to grow more.  But the brassicas, well-netted this year, have done well: several cabbages, both spring green-types and Savoys, as well as broccoli and kale.  The courgettes are now winding down and there’s probably nothing more to come from them.  But the apple crop has been good (and one of the cordons is trying to flower ….!).

Flowers on the apple cordon!

In the greenhouse, the tomatoes are ripening very, very slowly.  Green tomato chutney, anyone?

Equinox

A vase of autumn flowers - sedum and rudbeckia

It has been all about the weather, this year.  The autumn equinox usually brings strong winds, but not this time.  A short spell of good weather broke on Friday with a thunderstorm the likes of which I don’t think I’ve seen in this country – hours of thunder and lightning, and rain hammering down all afternoon.  Then further heavy rain for at least part of most days since.  Several roads locally have been closed, and despite our relatively un-floodable position we had a lot of water in our cellar.  It has been worse in Central Europe, with serious flooding (as D, who was there and found himself stranded in Belgrade for a couple of days, can attest).

The equinox has brought all the usual autumnal developments in the garden, both animal and vegetable.  As the birds finish moulting and look to establish winter territories, they’ve been returning to the patio to feed; not just the summer cast of sparrows, dunnocks, robins, tits and blackbirds but also at least a couple of willow warblers/chiffchaffs and the odd blackcap – and, after a few months of absence, Lefty the lame woodpigeon has started coming for breakfast again.  I wonder where he spends his summer holidays?

A less welcome autumnal animal appearance is that of mice in search of warmth and food in the house.  We’ve no idea how they get in – upstairs! – but two have been caught in the humane trap this past week.  One I didn’t find in time, and he had to be buried outside, but the other little fellow was taken a couple of miles away and released in a country hedgerow to live his best life in the wild.

At least the rain has been keeping the plants going, but on the other hand, it hasn’t been good for seed-collection.  One of last year’s radicchio plants apparently survived both harvesting and the winter cold and I left it to flower and set seed; the flowers, bright blue, were splendid but I couldn’t find any seed in the heads afterwards – too wet?  That certainly seems to have been the problem with Cosmos ‘Xanthos’, from which I collected seed last year (and sowed it successfully this spring) but whose spent flowers are just sodden this time round – no viable-looking seed anywhere.  I’ll have to buy a fresh packet for next year.  It’s a useful plant in pots, a good filler and a soft yellow that fits most colour schemes.  I had this year’s plants in the windowbox, along with pink salvia and fuchsia, and in the big pot with Dahlia ‘David Howard’. 

Sodden cosmos in the windowbox

One plant which I hadn’t considered saving seed from is lobelia; it normally needs sowing very early to get it going in time.  However lots of lobelia has appeared from nowhere in the two tubs that hold my miniature daffodils, and I can only assume that it’s self-sown (in the used compost that I used to top-dress the existing contents?); it’s an unexpected but very welcome hit of colour.

Lobelia in the tubs

The first nerine flower buds are up – something to look forward to as the cold weather kicks in, which it is forecast to do at the end of this week.  Autumn is here!

Nerine buds

September chill

September temperatures had not been too bad, for September, until late last week, when they dipped considerably – single-figure temperatures (Celsius) during the day, with a chilly northerly wind, and down to just above a frost at night.  It lasted only a couple of days and has gradually improved since, but this week’s bright sunshine is set to last only a day or two more.  It will then be back to sunshine and showers, with a fair breeze from the east.

Forewarned is forearmed, and I brought out an old bit of fleece to cover the courgette plants during the cold nights.  I’ve also closed the greenhouse vents, but I’ve left the door open; we’ve had a hedgehog snuffling around in there one night (it left its droppings!) and I’d like to encourage its nocturnal cleaning-up of any slugs it can find in there.

The only temperature-sensitive plants in the greenhouse at the moment are the tomatoes.  They haven’t done well this year, and it’s my fault.  When we went away in late April for ten days the plants were still very small; rather than ask a neighbour to care for them, I left them in the greenhouse under a propagator lid, which I reckoned would keep them both damp enough and warm enough.  It did, but the plants looked very unhappy when I got back; the damp warmth seemed to have steamed them.  They recovered with careful nursing, but are very late; the first fruit only turned red this week.  I’ve cut off all the flower trusses that haven’t yet set fruit as I doubt if they will produce anything, and I hope that will speed up ripening of the other trusses.

First ripe tomatoes

In the last post I mentioned the figs; we’ve now had six really good fruits, with a few smaller ones still to come.

The combination of dropping temperatures and ripening nuts and berries has brought more birds to the gardens round here.  A nuthatch was tapping away in the hazel trees the other day, and a garden warbler was feasting on the berries of next door’s cotoneaster.  There have been blackbirds and robins in our cotoneaster too.  Insect life also appears to be abundant, judging by the behaviour of the insect-feeding birds; at least one willow warbler has been about in the garden for a couple of weeks now, flycatching among the shrubs, flocks of house martins are feeding up over the garden prior to migration, and swallows have been swooping across the field behind the house, presumably with the same intent.  Although the buddleja flowers are now fading, the red admiral butterflies are making the most of what’s left, and a couple of speckled woods have been sunbathing down the bottom of the garden.

Speckled wood

Not everything is rosy.  The partridge shooting season has started, and the groups of very trusting partridges that had been trooping through the garden have gone into hiding; they prefer to hide rather than fly away when threatened.  A couple of weeks ago we had one that came up to the summerhouse while we were there and sat contentedly on the step; it then wandered into the neighbouring garden, where their dog found and killed it.  The village dog-owners all have similar stories; partridges just don’t have much sense around danger.  Another danger, although a rarer one, is a goshawk that has been hanging around the vicinity for a few months; it took and dispatched a pigeon in the garden of friends at the other end of the village the other day.

Partridge on the summerhouse steps

Working down in the veg plot yesterday I looked up at the hazels and spotted catkins forming.  Surely catkins belong to late winter?  Is this normal?

Catkins - is this normal for September?

Out of synch

Evening mist down in the valley

We’ve now slipped into autumn, with evenings darkening earlier and temperatures gradually starting to drop.  The mellow fruitfulness is here, along with the mists.  August was a little drier than previous months, and there were some warm days, but there’s no sign of an Indian summer. 

August always throws me off balance.  I've always thought of it as ‘summer’, but increasingly I find it more like ‘autumn’ – the garden starting to wind down, with plenty of produce in the veg plot but the freshness of early summer gone and the greens starting to turn to gold.  It’s also the time when my planning goes out of synch.  I know that the first eating apples will be ready later in the month, but I always buy supermarket ones ‘just in case’, to bridge the gap between the early Discovery apples and the Greensleeves that come along just that bit later; then I end up with too many apples in the kitchen.  Usually there are also plums to eat our way through at the same time, although this year we had hardly any, so that particular problem didn’t arise.  At least there don't seem to be as many wasps this year.

Then there are the blackberries.  Surely they’re September fruit? But the ones in the hedgerow across the lane fruit in August, and I find myself with bought-in blueberries to use up rather than picking the free blackberries.  Out of synch again.

Blackberries across the lane

A good pea (Early Onward) crop this year, but that wasn’t so much out-of-synch as all-at-once.  I must get better at successional sowing.  And my Alderman peas resolutely refused to climb the trellis I built for them, and sprawled across the bed; but at least I’ve managed to save some pods for sowing next year.

The butterflies here are also out of synch.  The Big Butterfly Count run by Butterfly Conservation finishes in the first week of August, but peak butterfly time in this garden is at least a week later.  Not that the peak amounted to much this year, but a few red admirals turned up to bolster the low numbers of peacocks that had been around before; I spotted one painted lady and one tortoiseshell, and we now have a few brimstones (and of course the whites, which have mostly been kept off the brassicas by judicious netting this year).  No commas, yet; they might come along as the apples ripen, as they like overripe fruit.

Speaking of fruit, the fig tree (bush?) has produced several rather nice fruits this year, despite its rather shaded position.  I have good intentions of clearing the weeds around it ….