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 ….

Summer colours

At last we’ve had some warmth; good weather, mostly, in late July and early August, with sunny and warm days and only a little rain now and then.  It has benefitted the garden, and the gardener has been able to get out and do some work combatting the weeds!

New bed a couple of weeks ago, with daisies in flower

The garden has more flowers in it this year, thanks partly to the new bed by the patio which is doing well, although the planting will need some editing in the medium term.  In particular the leucanthemum (white daisies) and anthemis (pale yellow daisies), both flowering well, are too similar and too close together.  But overall I’m pleased with it, and it’s been good to see old friends such as Dianthus ‘Mrs Sinkins’, the penstemons and the blue veronica back in the ground and thriving.  The Verbena bonariensis has also done well; it’s a beefier plant than I realised, and none the worse for that.  I need to expand that bed outwards into the lawn, and some of the plants can be moved there in the winter if I get round to clearing space for them.

Self-sown poppies in the new bed

The patio pots, mostly dahlias, are doing well; there are two ‘Sam Hopkins’ pots, one ‘David Howard’ and one ‘Bishop of Canterbury’.  The other, smaller, dahlias haven’t found homes yet; I’ll try to make room for them somewhere so that they can build up their tubers for the winter.

Dahlia 'Sam Hopkins'

Dahlia 'Bishop of Canterbury'

They’re over and gone for this year, but I was pleased with the pots of Allium nigrum, the black allium; I’ve no idea why it’s so called as there’s absolutely nothing black about them.  They were pretty and prolific, and I may plant out some corms in the ground for next year.

Allium nigrum

The orchids are also over, but not yet cut down so that they can set seed.  The one common spotted orchid flowered this year, all the rest being pyramidal orchids.

Pyramidal orchid

Common spotted orchid

The pot containing the ‘Exotic Emperor’ tulips was seeded with the remains of various packets of annual seeds.  What has flowered is mostly cornflowers and blue echium, with a nasturtium or two at the base; it’s a colourful display and worth trying again another year.

Pot of annuals

The oregano and buddleja are in flower, but there have been few butterflies this year – a couple of common/holly blues earlier in the summer, some brimstones, a couple of peacocks and a red admiral, otherwise the usual gatekeepers and meadow browns.  And some weeks ago I found a magpie moth resting near the fig tree.  Otherwise I fear it’s going to be a bad year for butterflies.

Magpie moth

Peacock butterfly on the buddleja

Gatekeeper on the oregano

And a male brimstone on the raspberries

More munching

Two days of sun and heat, and now we’re back to more rain.  And the molluscs are still eating; a row of seedling lettuces in the veg plot, to replace the first planting that is now starting to bolt, disappeared virtually overnight.  I had also cleared out a long plastic trough that contained nothing but weeds, and replanted it with some of the same batch of lettuces; they were munched a bit (I found and evicted two snails and a large slug found hiding under the lip of the trough), but a line of Vaseline laced with salt around the top put paid to that, and they’re now recovering.  The brassica seedlings - broccoli and cabbages - have been planted out under netting, and are mostly surviving so far, although the netting is obviously not slug-proof!

Scrump-able raspberries

The blackbirds have taken the gooseberries (I made no attempt to stop them), but interestingly don’t seem to have made much attempt to steal raspberries.  The raspberry bed is a mess, frankly, and needs overhauling this winter, but usually I have to net the plants to get anything off them.  This year I’ve done nothing, and the rasps are fruiting freely with very little bird damage – although there are slug/snail trails over some of the fruits!  The plants have suckered into the near end of the veg plot and into the blackcurrants (which have no fruit worth mentioning, and also no bird protection), as raspberries tend to do.  Sometimes I think those plants have the best-tasting fruit.  When I was a child, there was a piece of waste ground running along behind some nearby gardens, and raspberry plants had suckered out of the gardens into the edges; I used to enjoy scrumping for raspberries there, which were often small but wonderfully sweet (and, although nobody objected, there was the allure of forbidden fruit).  I still like searching in the long grass and weeds for the unintended fruit, although I really ought to dig the plants out.

Alpine strawberries

On a warm afternoon a couple of days back, I noticed a flock of sparrows quartering the corner of the veg plot.  My first thought was that they were after the alpine strawberries – there had been minor signs of bird damage – and then that they were picking flowers off the row of peas.  But then I noticed a blackbird pecking at the edges of the septic tank in the lawn, and realised that the garden’s ants nests had broken open and the ants were flying out – there’s often one or more nests in the veg patch paths.  The greenhouse was also crawling with them, and the sparrows were sitting on the roof picking them off as they flew out.  Better that than going for my strawberries and peas!

Peas, in flower