Tutti frutti

Ripening plums

It’s fruit time.  Although the blackcurrants (very few this year) are long gone, and the gooseberries are past, it’s peak season for the raspberries and the little alpine strawberries that pop up in various places around the veg and fruit patch, and the plums are just starting.  After that it’ll be the apples (no pears this year).  The raspberries are easy to deal with; they need picking over twice a day, as they’ve been ripening very fast in the warm weather we’ve had recently, but, apart from one pot of jam, they are either being eaten for pudding or going straight into the freezer; they can be frozen as they are and then popped into freezer bags for storage.  Those plums that aren’t being eaten straightaway, however, need some sort of cooking: lightly simmered with spices, or made into tarts, before being frozen.  That means time spent in the kitchen when there’s so much to do in the garden! – but, after all, that’s the point of growing things, and we can then enjoy something of our garden in the winter months.

We are not the only ones enjoying our fruit.  A family of little blackbirds was brought up on the gooseberries, and are now helping themselves to the raspberries before moving on to the plums.  I pick and throw down for them the berries that aren’t of eating quality; I don’t mind as I like their company in the garden.  They have also been visiting the greenhouse to forage for ants, which I’m happy to encourage as the ants are a bit of a nuisance; most recently they (the ants) tried to nest in a pot of dianthus cuttings that I left sitting on the gravel floor, and made quite a mess of it.  There’s plenty of insect life in the garden – bees of various sorts, an increasing number of butterflies, and lots of smaller flies and spiders – which has been attracting other birds (and bats, in the evening).  A goldcrest has been feeding regularly in the trees, collecting insects and taking them up into the tree canopy for its (invisible but very audible) family of little goldcrests, and likewise a family of young long-tailed tits has been feeding nearby.  Other youngsters include blue- and great tits (one of the latter had to be rescued after finding its way into the summerhouse but not finding its way out), robins, starlings and greater spotted woodpeckers (two families of the latter, with at least three juveniles).  During the hottest weather our birdbaths were very popular, with a song thrush coming to bathe regularly.

Cinnabar moth

The weather has mostly continued dry, with a couple of days (today was one) of very heavy rain, and one quite spectacular thunderstorm with almost non-stop lightning.  Some days have been hot; last week the UK had its hottest day on record (38C), and even here we had 30C in the shade.  This has brought out the butterflies, with red admirals and peacocks starting to appear alongside the whites, gatekeepers, meadow browns and ringlets; a comma has been about, and a couple of weeks ago we had a beautiful marbled white.  Last week I found a cinnabar moth resting on the path; it stayed long enough for a photo op, then fluttered off.

Lily 'Pink Perfection'

There have been some tutti frutti colours in the garden, too.  Increasingly I’m putting plants singly in pots so that they can be grouped together, then moved aside as they die back; it also allows me to experiment with colour combinations.  The blue echeveria with its red and yellow flowers, blue-flowered penstemon and cerise-pink dianthus wasn’t a combination I would previously have countenanced, but it worked very well.  Other strong colours have come from the opium poppies, Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, Knautia macedonica ‘Red Cherries’ and lily ‘Pink Perfection’.  I’ve even found a use for Salvia ‘Pink Saturday’, reviled in my last post, as filler in a small vase with pink-and-white dianthus and the knautia.  

Dianthus, knautia 'Red Cherries' and salvia 'Pink Saturday'

Sow far sow good - mostly

July is the last month for sowing many seeds for a crop this year, and I have a pile of seed packets waiting to be sown before the deadline.  This has been an up-and-down year for seed-sowing.  I started with good intentions – and a new, more pragmatic, regime – but not everything has gone to plan.  

I do like to get full value from my seed packets, usually hanging on to part-used ones well past the date when any sensible gardener would realise that the contents were no longer going to germinate.  The difficulty is telling when that is; some seeds are useless a year after the packet is opened, while others (tomato seeds, lettuce, most of the cabbage tribe) seem to go on for years.

My seed-sowing in the past has tended to go a bit like this.  I have a nice new packet, and I sow lots of seeds in a seed-tray.  They germinate, thickly, and I don’t get round to pricking them out until their roots are inextricably tangled, so that the surviving seedlings make weak plants.  Or I try to prick them all out, and don’t have the time, or the space, to grow them on properly.  Or I give up on the seed-trayful, aware that I can’t do anything with them and guiltily ignoring them, and eventually they all die and I throw the whole lot away.  Then the following year, I still have lots of seed in the packet, but I’m not sure how viable it is, so to make sure that I get enough plants I sow lots of that seed in a seed-tray – and the same thing happens.  Not all of my seed is treated so badly, and in recent years I’ve got better at only sowing a very few lettuce and cabbage seeds (for example) at a time, thinly enough to prick them out properly.  But I still haven’t been good at throwing away surplus seedlings, or unused seed; and because I still have a half-packetful but can’t be sure that the seeds will germinate, I buy another packet of the same thing, and then can’t decide whether to try the old seed or the new packet (and then I have two open packets, both old.  Hmmm).

Pricking out

So this year I have (mostly) been more sensible about it, sowing a few seeds, thinly, and pricking them out early.  And being prepared to discard surplus seedlings.  Let’s face it: if a seed packet contains 500 seeds, and they often do, what would I do with 500 plants?  How long would it take to prick them out, and how much space would it take to grow them on?  Where would I even plant 500 annuals?  So I was ruthless, for example, with the antirrhinums, a plant I’ve never grown before; tempted by the seed catalogues, I bought seed of three varieties, sowed them thinly and limited myself to pricking out a dozen of each.  The rest went to the compost bin.  A dozen plants for the price of a packet of seeds is still a very good deal, however much I might like a bargain.  (But I still have some seed left over to try next year …..!)

Where things started to go a bit wrong was when the cold weather hit in June.  I was still hardening the seedlings off at that stage, and I felt that it was too cold to keep putting them outside; that meant holding everything back and starting again with the hardening off when the weather warmed up.  A lot of plants don’t like sitting around waiting to be grown on, and a number of them have sulked and failed to make good growth thus far.  A particular problem was with those seedlings that had been pricked out into 'root-trainers' made from toilet-roll inners (a no-plastic solution); this works fine until the roots poke out of the bottom, at which point the contents need to be planted out, otherwise the roots end up in a tangle at the bottom of the container in which they're sitting.  Then for the past few weeks we’ve had very dry weather, and I’ve had the challenge of keeping seedlings watered until I can get them in larger pots or in the ground.  I haven’t really got my veg patch rotation working this year (that’s a subject for another post), and a lot of brassica seedlings just haven’t made it because I didn’t have a good home ready for them in time.

Lettuce edging

There are also some seeds that just haven’t done well for me this year.  I did a second sowing of courgettes since the first lot did so poorly, the nicotiana didn't get past the seed-leaf stage and radicchio has refused to germinate (even though it’s a new packet).  However the seedlings that have been grown on are starting to produce results.  Starting off carrots and peas in guttering has worked fairly well.  There’s a nice little row of lettuces which, for want of any other good home, are forming an edging to a flower-bed; a number of flower seedlings (including the antirrhinums) are in the veg patch; the mesembryanthemums were pricked out straight into the little terracotta troughs for the windowsills; and others are acting as fillers in the big pots.  Most of the sweet peas have gone into two large pots against the house wall with trellis and makeshift string supports; this seems to be successful so far, even though it’s an east-facing wall.  I’ve also had success this year with pansies, ‘Cool Summer Breeze’, which are in nice shades of blue and pale yellow; in recent years I’ve found it difficult to get pansies to grow for me from seed, but these have done well.  Another first has been to get nemophila to grow; I'm hoping I can get it to naturalise under the ash tree by the drive.

Sweet pea pots

Nemophila

Cheerful mesembryanthemums

Salvia 'Pink Saturday'

This is also the time of year when bulb and seed catalogues for next year start turning up, and this year (I promise myself) I’m going to be more ruthless about what seeds I buy.  It’s too easy to be seduced by pretty pictures and sales blurb.  For example, this year I grew seeds of Salvia ‘Pink Saturday’, a nice little trayful of them, and then couldn’t think what to do with them.  Why did I buy them?  What had I been planning to do with them?  Was it a culinary salvia (probably not, as I have both the green and purple sages), or a bedding plant?  How tall?  Consulting the seed packet and the seed company’s website, I discovered that it had coloured bracts.  Many years ago I grew a nice annual, I forget its name, with coloured bracts and I’ve been hankering after the same effect ever since; but ‘Pink Saturday’ is rather an odd little thing, with tiny pink flowers up the stem and a tuft of pink bracts at the top.  It’s a curiosity rather than an impactful contribution to the garden.  Although I still have some seeds left over, I don’t think I’ll be using them next year, and there are a few other seeds that I won’t be going back to, no matter how much value I want to get from the half-used packet.  So this winter I intend to make myself write down not only what I’m buying, but why, where I want to grow it or what I want to grow it alongside.  That should concentrate my mind!

In anticipation of the new seed collections, the local garden centre is selling this year’s seeds half-price.  I bought a few packets – couldn’t resist! – but only of varieties that I could justify growing.  Honestly.