A monster and some interlopers

Monster courgette and friends

Back home after a week away.  Before we went I carefully checked the courgette plants and we ate all the fruits of usable size, but I wasn’t surprised to find a couple more ready for use when we returned.  What did surprise me was the monster found lurking at the base of one of the plants! – I can only assume I missed it before, although it must already have been of a fair size before our departure; hidden by the leaves, I expect.  A big lot of courgette parmigiana is being prepared for the freezer.  It was the biggest courgette I’ve ever produced, over a foot long; the small round thing on the right of the photo is a £1 coin for size comparison.

Meanwhile, down in the veg plot interlopers have been digging in my no-dig beds.  A small patch where some salad onion seed had been sown seems to have been used as a litter tray by the neighbour’s cat (yuk); the seed was old and unlikely to germinate, so I’m not too disappointed.  Other digging is probably the work of the local squirrel, who has been busily preparing for winter by burying hazelnuts in the lawn and anywhere else he can find; he started early, excavating one of my potato plants in the summer (the potatoes were ready for lifting and didn’t suffer unduly from the disruption), and he seems to have been scratching at the edges of some of the beds with fleece coverings but fortunately not getting underneath.  The only damage has been to a few asters and antirrhinums that were bedded out for cutting and were uprooted by the digging; since then, the remaining asters have been badly damaged by the heavy rain that seems to have fallen last week (and is going to fall for much of this coming week) and probably aren’t going to provide any more cutting material, though the antirrhinums and little salvias are still going strong.  And something, probably slugs, has eaten my oriental mustard seedlings on the Hill; I thought that the mustard was too strongly flavoured for them, but obviously not!

Painted lady on the buddleja

Two small tortoiseshells, chilling out on the woodpile

Other more welcome wildlife has been about.  A hedgehog was found snuffling around some windfall apples left outside our back door one evening, and I disturbed a slow worm while weeding by the apple cordons.  The birds are currently in their ‘shy’ period, probably moulting and dispersing to winter territories; the sparrows and robin, and occasional blue tits, are coming to take food but in much smaller quantities than previously.  There are three robins in various parts of the garden, sometimes tolerating one another and sometimes not, and a blackbird occasionally appears under the big cotoneaster, presumably picking up berries, but we’re mostly seeing the sparrows and woodpigeons.  One pigeon was feeding three youngsters in the plum tree yesterday.  The buddleja had been attracting lots of butterflies until the flowers petered out mid-month; up to 9 red admirals, and good numbers of painted ladies (it's a record year for them apparently) and small tortoiseshells, as well as the whites of course.  There was a comma and one peacock, but one only; in the past we’ve regularly seen half-a-dozen at any one time.  The best butterfly sightings this summer have been the marbled white and a fritillary.  We also had an emperor dragonfly which got trapped in the greenhouse for a while, and a hummingbird hawk-moth was also around the buddleja for a few days, but now that the weather is cooling down it is presumably off to hibernate somewhere.

Emperor dragonfly in the greenhouse

Dahlia 'Cafe au lait'

The wet and windy weather has knocked the sweet peas about, but they did provide a posy for this week; I’m now stopping the dead-heading in the hope of collecting some seed from them.  I’m very pleased with their performance this year; the idea of growing them in pots seems to have worked really well, as I’ve never had such good flowering so late in the year from them.  The 'Cafe au lait' dahlias have done well, 'Ambition' and 'Bishop of Auckland' less so but satisfactorily; 'Sam Hopkins' produced one flower only, and the newly purchased 'Dark Butterfly' disappeared.  The seed-sown 'Bishop's Children' flowered quite well, and the bees really liked them, so they will be overwintered for next year.

Of the other plants, the aubergines and two small peppers were harvested before we went away, and the tomato plants left to their own devices.  The aubergine plants were grown in larger pots this year but probably not large enough; the plants only produced a single fruit each, none very large.  The tomatoes, as previously reported, haven’t done well and I gave up on them at an early stage; the remaining fruits are now ripe, and the plants will be discarded once I’ve picked everything.  They’re not going to produce anything more.  The one grown in an outdoor pot did surprisingly well, and I might try that again; even though it lost its growing tip, possibly pinched off by a visiting bird, a side-shoot was pressed into service to replace it, and that seemed to do the trick.  Worth remembering.

The Disorganised Gardener gets a grip

A kind friend in the US – you know who you are, thank you! – recently sent me a copy of a fascinating magazine article about the restoration of a garden Stateside.  The lady who had originally created the garden had what can only be described as a very clear vision for what she wanted, to the extent of having trees pruned so that the branches were in the exact position she had in mind.  She was definitely an Organised Gardener.  Much as I admire such perseverance, focus and commitment, I have to admit that I am a Disorganised Gardener.  I am, however, attempting to remedy this.

The area I’ve been concentrating on most these past weeks is the veg plot.  It hasn’t been all that productive in recent years, for a number of reasons, including the unavailability of some of the beds (weeds or too much shade – the plum and big apple tree, and next door’s ash tree, have grown much bigger and shadier since I first created the veg patch), poor, worn-out soil and my failure to get properly to grips with crop rotation.

Crop rotation sounds easy in principle.  You have areas for beans/peas; onions and their kind; brassicas; and potatoes/roots; and each year you move each group to a new area so that any group only occupies the same patch once every four years.  I have 12 veg beds, plus two little ones, so this ought to be straightforward – three for each group.  However it presupposes that you want to grow similar quantities of each group, and it also gets complicated by the fact that not all crops go in and come out of the ground at the same time.  Some crops are autumn-planted, most go in in spring and some in summer; some are there for only a few weeks (the summer beans, for example), most for a few months and the brassicas are there for not far short of a year.  Leeks are sown in spring, are transplanted elsewhere in summer and stay there until late winter or early spring, so really need two beds at least.  Trying to match up all of these comings and goings is a bit beyond me; this year I snuck my leek transplants into the place where the broad beans had been, but that was really leaving it too late.  Then there’s the question of where to fit in the salads (anywhere you can, is the usual advice), crops like courgettes and interlopers such as flowers for cutting.  

I do keep records of what I’ve planted where, and I try hard to move each group to a new place each year, but I’m not good with succession and often find that my veg beds sit empty for long periods of time while I decide what to do with them.  When I have seedlings to plant out – I don’t sow much in situ as that never seems very successful (slugs?) – I’m reluctant to commit them to any particular place in case I find, some months down the line, that I really needed that bed as a home for the garlic or the runner beans.  It doesn’t help that not all of my little veg beds (I can’t really call them raised beds, although that was the intention; they’re not raised very much!) have been usable.  A couple – the shadiest ones – have been used in recent years as a (supposedly) temporary holding bed for plants that need to be moved elsewhere; they haven’t been properly worked, for example by adding organic matter, for quite some time and the soil is very poor as a result.  A couple of the others were very seriously overrun with weeds, mostly couch grass and big clumps of Deschampsia cespitosa, a desirable and decorative grass in itself but allowed to seed much too freely (the original plant was put there for want of a proper home and never taken out).  These two beds were part of the central area given over to four L-shaped beds grouped around a small central bed (the latter marked by the post on the right-hand side of the photos below), but however nice this looked on paper, on the ground maintenance involved a lot of zigzagging about, and I started turning them into four square beds (and removing the central one).  One of the four is the Hill (not very productive this year; sowing seeds into a steep-sided mound didn’t work too well, and the slugs seem to have discovered how to climb it), and one other bed had been successfully squared off to accommodate the garlic; but the other two sat in weedy, grassy splendour while I contemplated how to shift the gravel laid down for the path and put in some soil to turn the Ls into squares.

Step 1: weeds dug out, but corner of the L still to be filled in

Step 2: squared off, cardboard and mulch laid down

Then I got interested in no-dig.  A fellow villager uses the no-dig regime very successfully, and I thought I would give it a go, particularly for these two weedy beds.  Basically no-dig involves disturbing the soil as little as possible (so as not to upset the balance of underground microlife and to minimise weeding), instead working the ground by mulching heavily in early winter and planting directly into that; and clearing weedy ground by mulching the weeds out over winter (see https://charlesdowding.co.uk/start-here/ ).  The very tussocky grass, however, presented a bit of a problem; it would have taken a huge volume of mulch to bury it effectively (you’re supposed to use a strimmer, but I don’t have one), so I confess that I started my no-dig regime by, er, digging the weeds out.  I also needed to restore where the paths were meant to be, move as much gravel as reasonably possible there and shift soil from the little central bed into the missing corners of the two squares.  Even after the digging, I know from experience that there will still be couch grass roots in there, so the full no-dig ground-clearing process was followed: cardboard or thick paper on the two beds and their surrounding paths, then a layer of mulch (grass clippings and bought-in mushroom compost) over the cardboard on the beds, topped with black polythene (re-used from other long-ago gardening experiments).  All now tucked up until spring or summer, with occasional spots of minimal-disturbance weeding where the grass tries to poke through.

Step 3: black plastic on top - all tucked up!

I’ve started no-digging the other beds too; the one where the garlic had been has been raked over, mulched with leaf mould and bought-in compost, and spinach and the like sown for some winter/spring greens.  Another bed had a thinner layer of leaf mould (this bed had compost put on it last winter, so is in better shape anyway) and land cress, corn salad and turnips sown.  Some of these seeds are old, but if they don’t come up nothing is lost, and if they do, it’s all to the good.  I'm getting strict with myself about not hoarding old seed packets.  Likewise, to provide some more greens some late-sown brassica seedlings went in under netting – a few that had been in the cold frame already had to have cabbage white butterfly eggs and caterpillars removed from them!; they can have some mushroom compost packed around them once they’re big enough to cope.  Things are starting to look tidier, and dare I say, more organised; I hope it’s a first step on the road to better productivity!

Looking tidier

The greenhouse also needs some organisation; it's cluttered with plastic tubs (ex-fatball containers) and old compost sacks, which are very useful but perhaps not in quite the quantities I keep.  On a recent visit to Bourton House gardens I couldn't help but admire their potting shed - a model of organisation!

Bourton House's very organised potting shed

Four seedings and a funeral

Our lame pigeon Lefty has lost his mate, the victim of a hit-and-run accident.  They used to sit in our big holly tree, and it looks as though she swooped down to the (normally very quiet) lane; unluckily there was a lot of rat-running traffic that afternoon, and she seems to have been hit by a passing vehicle.  D moved her remains on to the verge opposite, and Lefty took to sitting on the overhead electricity wire nearby, calling to her.  We buried her when we were sure he wasn’t around to see; D insisted that she go under her holly tree, so after a bit of ground elder removal a place was found next to the little blackbird who was buried back in the early summer, by the front wall where the soil is deep enough to get a pigeon carcass decently buried.  I planted the white form of Geranium phaeum, the ‘mourning widow’ geranium, next to her; the plant had been destined for this area anyway, and it seemed appropriate.  Will Lefty find another mate?  It took him some years to find Mrs Lefty, possibly because his disability makes him an unattractive proposition.  I see from old blog posts that we first spotted him in 2013, and a bit of research suggests that six is an advanced age for a woodpigeon; so he may now be too venerable to pair up again.  Perhaps I ought to reserve a burial plot for him now, given his age; there’s space on the other side of the geranium.

There’s another pair of pigeons who are often about on the lawn; they don’t seem to mind our presence too much, and in fact one of them regularly comes down to the area round the summerhouse in the evenings, even when we’re sitting out there.  It seems quite trusting, as long as we don’t pay too much attention or make any alarming movements.  On one occasion when I was sitting inside the summerhouse with the door open, it trotted up, stood quite boldly on the step and watched me with great interest for a couple of minutes.

As for the seedings, let’s start with a big success:

I’ve never had much success with germinating seed of Bupleurum rotundifolium.  It’s a fancy filler for flower arrangements, with yellow flowers and good foliage, but I just couldn’t get the seeds to do anything, despite a few attempts.  Then I read an article about someone’s garden where it grows, and the owner commented that it self-seeds “if we get a cold winter”.  Ahhh.  So it’s one of those plants whose seed needs to be chilled before sowing.  I popped some seeds, mixed with a little sand, into the freezer for a couple of days, then gave them a spell in the fridge, before sowing them on the surface of a leafmould-and-sand mix (my current sowing compost) – and they’ve come up like mustard and cress.  Result!  Now I have to prick them out, carefully (they don’t like disturbance), and find them a good place to grow.  I’m thinking that under the ash tree by the drive might suit them.  That place is horribly rooty, with very shallow soil, and used to be barren except for ground elder, but in recent years I’ve taken to sowing all sorts of seed there to naturalise.  In early summer it’s full of nigella; that has now died back and the plants removed (enough seed will have dropped for next year), and the current main ingredient is parsley, which has also self-sown.  It’s a bit of an anything-goes area, but it can look good when in full flower.  It might be a little shady for the bupleurum, but it does get fairly good sun in summer, so we’ll see.

The 'anything goes' patch - mostly parsley

My homemade sowing compost seems fairly successful, but it does contain some weed seeds which can make things tricky.  I’ve managed to get some radicchio to germinate – I think.  There are seeds coming up in the seedtray, but they are of at least two different species, and I’m not sure whether either of them are actually radicchio!  One definitely is not, and I’ll try pricking out the others and see what happens.  Let’s hope I’m not nurturing some noxious weed!

Salvia 'Pink Sunday' - after weeks in a vase

Salvia, pinks and knautia

My third seeding is one that has been successful, but about which I’ve had my doubts – the little pink salvia.  I owe it two apologies.  I’ve been calling it ‘Pink Saturday’, but I see that it is actually ‘Pink Sunday’ – but hey, what’s a day one way or the other?  It’s also a better plant than I’ve been giving it credit for.  Now that the sideshoots have developed it has filled out and made a better showing than earlier; I probably planted the plants out too far apart (though I followed the guidance on the packet).  It works very well as a cut flower; I've had some with pinks and Knautia 'Red Cherries, and a few weeks ago some stems were paired with Dahlia ‘Ambition’ then, when that faded, I put the same stems with some purple sage.  When that also turned up its toes I just put the salvia by itself, and the bracts are only now starting to look a bit faded.  That’s pretty good value.  I saw a purple version of the same thing recently in the Rococo Garden at Painswick, and am having plant envy over that too!  Now that I’ve seen ‘Pink Sunday’ actually growing, another year I would happily put it in a pot with some other plants to provide a pink accent.  

Purple salvia at Painswick

Sick tomato plant

To end on a bit of a failure: my tomatoes have not done at all well this year, with the leaves turning yellow and very few fruits setting.  I think they may have contracted some sort of virus, or possibly a mineral deficiency, although since they are planted in commercial potting compost the latter shouldn’t be the case.  For a while I wondered if there were herbicide residues in the compost, or some other nasty, but the new growth looks healthy.  One of the ‘Harzfeuer’ tomatoes is growing in a big pot (and different compost) outdoors on the patio, and it has been less affected, although at some point it lost its growing tip; I’ve tried to train a sideshoot to take the place of the leader, but that hasn’t produced any flowers.  Once the few fruits on the greenhouse plants have been picked I’m going to pull the plants up – I’ve learnt from experience that late flowers rarely produce much in the way of fruit, and it’s not worth persevering with them.  Although my seed-grown plants have mostly been quite successful this year, the tomatoes have bucked the trend!

One of my seed successes - a posy of sweet peas

And another - Pansy 'Cool Summer Breeze'