The turn of the year

 

Mahonia 'Winter Sun', brightening up the garden

It’s been a funny old year in several ways, and not a great one in this garden – but I’ve said a lot about that in recent posts, so I won’t repeat it here.  Suffice to say that my gardening New Year resolution is to get back to basics and sort out the important stuff first and foremost.  There have been a couple of sunny afternoons this week which have got me outdoors again and making a start on the overdue clearing-up jobs in the greenhouse and garden: cutting up and composting plants such as the tomato plants (which had been surviving – just – on the damp atmosphere in the greenhouse without watering), unusable brassica plants (there are still a couple of usable cabbages and developing broccoli spears) and the fallen climbing beans, and spreading the used tomato-bag compost on one of the veg beds. 

The weather this year wasn’t great either; nothing extremely dramatic, but there were long periods of static weather systems that were either not at all typical for the time of year or not at all helpful to the gardener.  The year started cold and, except for a couple of unseasonably warm weeks in February and again at the end of March, it remained mostly cold through to near the end of May, April being very dry and May being very wet.  The summer brought a spell of heat in July, but also some chilly weather, and there was little sun in August; the autumn gave us some very wet and windy weather in October, although September wasn’t too bad and November was overall milder and less damp than usual.  There was wind and snow at the end of November, then December has been mostly misty, murky and mizzly, unusually mild but with very little sun, and in the last few days quite windy. 

Some plants have been enjoying the recent mild weather and a few are putting out new shoots, and the winter shrubs are all flowering well. The forecast is for rather colder but a little drier weather in early January, which might make it easier to tackle more jobs in the garden.  Happy 2022!

... and the ornamentals

My last post looked at my 2021 veg successes (few), failures (many) and plans (probably over-optimistic).  It wasn’t a great year for the ornamentals either, in fact they were probably even less successful than the veg.  Some of the reasons were the same as for the edibles, especially the general inattentiveness to feeding and watering, and the cold spring that caused a delay in planting out; but my indecisiveness about what to plant with what was also a factor.

Re-using compost, I think, may be to blame for some of my failures, combined with my not feeding the plants growing in it.  This would affect my ornamentals particularly, since most of them were destined for containers, but also the courgettes in the plastic tubs and those veg seedlings grown on for later planting out.  One thing I’ve learnt (from a magazine article) about peat-free composts is that they have lower levels of nutrients and they get used up more quickly than those in peat-based ones.  I have had a container of comfrey tea steeping away for fertiliser for over a year now, down in the dump corner, but failed to do anything with it; that’s another job to do before the growing season gets going.  Lack of feeding would explain why the courgettes in the tubs started off quite well and then fizzled out, presumably as the nutrients were used up.  Most of my other containers also used old compost with a little 6X fertiliser added, and the plants did very poorly.  I had been fired up by my success in 2020 with old potting compost; when, in the spring 2020 lockdown, I ran out of compost, I scavenged any old compost I could find or re-use, with some 6X added, which seemed reasonably successful.  Peat-free compost doesn’t ‘slump’ like peat-based ones, and when it all looked to be in good condition at the end of the year, I thought I might get away with another year of doing the same thing; which might have worked, if I’d sorted out my comfrey tea and made use of it.

The sweet peas, though, had the same treatment but were a big success. The 2020 sweet peas had been planted in two large pots up against the house wall, with some violas at their feet, and at the end of the season I pulled up the sweet peas but left the violas, and compost, in place.  In spring of this year I just planted the new sweet pea seedlings – both those overwintered and those sown in late winter – where the old ones had been, also adding a few seeds to germinate in situ in the hope of getting a good succession of flowers.  This worked well, and I was able to cut a posy of sweet pea flowers pretty much all through the summer.  Why did it work with the sweet peas and not with other plants?  The sweet pea pots, being just outside the back door, benefited from having the teapot leaves and coffee grounds emptied into them occasionally, but I doubt if that would have had such a big effect.  The re-used compost, of course, came from a wide variety of sources, and perhaps that in the sweet pea pots was better in the first place.  Anyway, I don’t think I should push my luck for a third year!  The sweet peas this year were so successful that I can’t resist another sowing in modules this winter/spring; the colours are lovely and the scent (I only buy seeds of scented varieties) wonderful.  I’m sticking with ‘Fragrant Skies’ and ‘White Leamington’, plus my own saved seed of ‘Matucana’.

One of my sweet pea posies

Old favourites that did well, and that I’ll sow again next year, are Lobelia ‘Cambridge Blue’ (a light blue, non-trailing lobelia that makes a good filler in pots and that was one of the few successful annuals this year) and pale yellow Cosmos ‘Xanthos’ (ditto).  My problem with planting up the pots, apart from the quality of the compost, is that I find it difficult to decide what to pair with what.  If I put three seedlings of this variety in this pot (or will I need five to make a good enough show?), will there be enough left over to put in another pot?  Will the colours work together?  Do I have enough compost for another potful?  And then I dither and don’t plant any of them.

I’ve decided that I don’t need to sow so many varieties as pot fillers.  I have a number of small perennial plants, mostly grown from cuttings or divisions, which can fulfil that role.  These include various penstemons, the Erysimum ‘Bowles’ Mauve’ which needs to be kept propagated from cuttings as it’s quite short-lived, and the white osteospermum which is descended (via cuttings) from a plant that grew for some years in the front garden with no protection, even though it’s supposed to be half-hardy.  This year I also tried a couple of cuttings from my variegated pelargonium, which proved surprisingly tough for a house-plant.

Some seedlings didn’t do well at all – the mesembryanthemums were an example.  Maybe I’ll give them a miss next time.  But you can never tell: the nicotiana barely germinated, but then in October a plant appeared, almost from nowhere, in the big pot by the summerhouse.  Will it survive the winter?  More to the point, will the pot survive? – it is badly cracked after last winter’s frosts.

There are a few plants that I’ve decided to give up on.  I still have some didiscus seed, but won’t bother sowing it.  The photos in the catalogues look enticing, as is its name of Blue Lace Flower, but really it’s not blue at all but a pale lavender, and the flower heads are small and sparse; the seedlings need to be pinched out so that they branch and produce more flowers, but I always forget and only get one bloom per plant, which looks pitiful.  Another no-no is tithonia, the Mexican Torch Flower.  I once saw a splendid plant in a sheltered walled garden in Worcestershire and thought it would be wonderful in one of my pots, but I have failed to persuade my seedlings that a cold and windy patio on top of the Cotswolds bears any resemblance to its Mexican homeland, and realistically there is not much chance of my getting a decent show from them.

Didiscus (in 2020), with barely-flowering tithonia behind

As mentioned in a previous post, I gave up on some of my 2021 seedlings when I realised that I had enough self-sown seedlings in the garden.  The Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus), self-sown from the large patch in the veg plot, did particularly well; I planted some of them out down under the hazel trees to grow on for next year, and had a good show of cut flowers from the more mature plants.  There are now rather too many of them, so I ought to steel myself to pull some of the older plants up!  The antirrhinums also self-seeded, admittedly producing a more limited colour range than I might have hoped for, but one can’t be too fussy with plants for free.  I ought to be able to keep some of them, and their progeny, for next year, perhaps supplementing with a few newly-sown seedlings if the remaining seed is still viable.  A third annual that I won’t bother sowing next year, but will rely on self-sowing instead, is the panicum grass which produces a lovely frothy effect in a border.  It’s supposed to be half-hardy, but there are so many seedlings that I doubt if that’s actually the case.

A vase of self-seeded Sweet William

If my plan to cut back on vegetable sowing works, there ought to be a little more space in the veg plot for flowers, especially those for cutting: the Sweet William, antirrhinums and panicum would fall into that category, as well as the dahlias.  And I might sow some amaranth if there’s room; I sowed some (for baby salad leaves) in 2020 but it ran to seed early, and instead I got quite striking flower heads for cutting.  I didn’t get round to sowing any this year, but I’d be tempted to try again with the remaining seed if it’s not too old.

A vase of red amaranth, with statice, 2020

Underoccupied veg beds might also be the solution to all the little pots cluttering up the path outside the back door.  These are cuttings etc awaiting a permanent home, which of course I haven’t got round to finding for them; meanwhile they dry out in summer and freeze in winter, labels get lost, some of them die off ….. They would do better plunged in soil where I can better attend to them.  I have several penstemon cuttings that would benefit from this; tellingly, the only penstemon flowers I had this year were on a plant that was popped into the edge of the veg plot, whereas some planted in the pots as foils for dahlias did nothing at all.  I also have two small cuttings of the big cistus that grew by the driveway, taken in autumn 2020 (after a couple of failed attempts: cuttings need to be taken after flowering, not earlier, it seems) as replacement plants for the original which needed removing as part of a total renovation plan for that area.  In fact the big cistus almost died in the winter of 2020-21, and looked so miserable that I dug it out anyway.  I need to keep those two little cuttings going so that I can replace the original – the veg plot is the ideal interim home for them!

Miserable-looking cistus

I’ve already covered my dahlia failure in a previous post.  The poor dahlias are still sitting outdoors in their pots, and I fear that some of the tubers will have rotted in this wet weather.

As for the larger perennials, the appearance of the cream-coloured camassias in late spring made me realise that the blue ones, which always flower earlier, had been a no-show.  I’m hoping they might make a reappearance next spring!

A long hard look at the veg seeds

The seed order for 2022 has arrived, and the packets have been sorted by sowing date, along with the (many) packets, opened and unopened, left over from last year (and years before that).  As promised in my post earlier this month, I have cut back on varieties ordered, with a view to only growing what I need to (plus a very few ‘can’t live withouts’); and some of the oldest seeds that I’d been keeping have been thrown out, along with a few that I've decided I'm really not going to use.  In this post I’m going to review the edibles, leaving the ornamentals for another day.

I took a long, hard look at what has been successful and what not, and what got eaten and what didn’t.  And what never got sown at all, and whether I actually needed them. Admittedly it wasn’t the best growing year weather-wise; a cold spring, right to the end of May, delayed sowing and growing, and the rest of the year was mostly indifferent at best.  And I have to admit that I let too many other things distract me from looking after the garden.  So for next year, my plan is to stick to as much as I can manage and very little more.

First, the greenhouse crops.  The tomatoes did reasonably well this year, not as well as last year but quite a good crop.  I tried a new (to me) variety, ‘Apero’, a mini plum tomato, which was good to grow and eat, plus ‘Harzfeuer’ and 'Cherrola', both of which were less productive than last year, and of which few seeds are left.  I thought I’d add another full-sized fruit variety, ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’, to my sowing to ensure a reasonable range of types next year.  I can only accommodate 6-7 plants in the greenhouse so shall have to be rigorous as to how many seedlings I keep.  Much of this summer’s crop had to be picked green before we went away for an autumn break, but they ripened nicely in the kitchen and were very welcome come November.

Tomatoes ripening in the kitchen

The other greenhouse crops, aubergines and red peppers, were less successful and less useful in the kitchen, and I’ve decided not to bother with them for a year or two at least.  The aubergine crop was small; this was probably my lack of attention to their needs, as I gave some of my surplus seedlings to neighbours who grew them quite successfully.  The peppers produced fruits so small that they were pretty but not actually worth bothering with.  And the chilli pepper plants died on me; again, almost certainly my fault.  I still have lots of dried chillies from the year before anyway, so no pressure to grow more.

Aubergine 'Slim Jim'

I grow my courgettes outdoors, after sowing and bringing the plants on inside the house. Mixed results this year.  I ended up with three viable seedlings, two of which I planted on the patio in the brown plastic tubs which I’ve used before; this time, though, I didn’t bother to remove the miniature daffodil bulbs that occupy those tubs in the winter.  The old compost was left in there and only a little fertiliser added.  Whether this wasn’t enough feed, or whether I didn’t water them enough, I don’t know, but they didn't grow well and produced no usable fruit.  (The daffs are still in there, and it will be interesting to see what they do, if anything, in spring.)  Peat-free compost retains its structure well enough for re-use, but I need to remember that it’s low in fertiliser and I ought to feed, feed, feed.  The third plant eventually went out into the veg plot, where it did fairly well; two squash plants planted nearby were totally unproductive, and I won’t be trying them again for a while (the 2020 ones produced several fruits which rotted off on the plant, and the two survivors lasted just long enough to serve as Christmas decorations before suffering the same fate).

Courgette in the daffodil tub - it never got any bigger

For a few years now I’ve grown my garlic and shallots from bulbs saved from the year before, but my pathetic 2020 crop made me think of buying new sets.  My chosen varieties were unobtainable, however (a result of Brexit, I think; they’re European varieties), so I made do with my own old bulbs again.  The 2021 garlic crop was, once again, dismal; admittedly the plants were seriously overshadowed by the parsley and probably suffered from lack of water in the dry spring; but the shallots did surprisingly well.  So this autumn I bought new garlic bulbs (they come in packs of two, and I’ll share with a neighbour) but will plant my own shallots again – and take care to water them.

Shallots, drying off in the greenhouse

Leeks: total failure.  Probably my fault for sowing them in relatively unimproved soil and not watering sufficiently; but they only reached transplanting size (just) in late autumn.  They’re still sitting out there.  I might try transplanting them in spring and seeing what they do, if anything.  Usually I’m fairly successful with leeks, but this was a wake-up call to pay them more attention.  I’ve bought new seed for next year, anyway, so have a fall-back if transplanting this year’s runts doesn’t work.

I’ve become disinclined to plant potatoes, which don’t seem to do too well in my shallow and dry soil and which are cheap enough in the shops.  However in 2021 I found myself with half-a-dozen ‘Pentland Javelin’ seed potatoes hanging around in the greenhouse well beyond the usual planting time.  I tried a ‘no-dig’ method with them, planting them shallowly with a pile of old compost on top of each, which I added to once the stems started to come up, thinking that I had nothing to lose and that I might get a few new potatoes for Christmas.  In fact they grew very well, and I pulled them up in late summer (to my surprise, they came up easily when I pulled on the stem; very few tubers left in the soil, and those were easy to remove).  The result was a nice little crop of tiny new potatoes, the sort that are relatively expensive in the supermarkets.  I might do that again.  In contrast, a few ‘Belle de Fontenay’ tubers grown in the normal way did nothing at all.

Every year I buy carrot seed – it doesn’t seem to store well – and fail to sow it.  Must Do Better.

My 2020 brassicas, while not a great success, at least produced three quite usable Savoy cabbages, which encouraged me to persevere this year.  I learnt two lessons: pick broccoli heads as soon as they become usable, because they run to seed very quickly; and be meticulous about protection from butterflies and pigeons.  The cabbage white butterflies got in under the netting and their caterpillars turned most of my plants to lace curtains – at least there ought to be plenty of butterflies next year.  At least one broccoli plant produced a lovely head, but I left it too long on the plant and it flowered (I ought to have cut it off anyway to encourage sideshoots).  I shall try to be more attentive next year.  Some of the new varieties did better than traditional old Purple Sprouting, just as the new types of kale seemed to be doing better than ‘Nero di Toscana’ (at least until the pigeons ate them – another lesson for next year).  I never got round to sowing any Cima di Rapa (a multi-head brassica for cropping young as stir-fry leaves); my 2020 crop ran to seed very quickly, and I guessed that it does better sown later in the year, but, as with so much else in the veg plot, late summer sowing didn’t really happen.  I did sow a couple of kale and cabbage varieties in modules in autumn, and they're still in the cold frame; I'll try planting them out in late winter, under protection.

Broccoli - just before it flowered!

Broad beans didn’t do too badly.  Last winter I ordered a pack of ‘Superaguadulce’ for winter sowing, but it turned out to be out of stock; it eventually arrived in summer, much too late for 2021 cropping.  Instead I sowed the last of my old seeds – not a bad germination rate considering their age – and some of the remaining ‘Luz di Otono’ ones; both lots were reasonably productive, although the latter had fewer beans in the pod.  ‘Luz de Otono’ is touted as good for summer sowing/autumn cropping; I tried this but the plants succumbed to rust (a common problem with late-sown broad beans, apparently) and I won’t be bothering with that variety again.  I don't need broad beans in autumn, when there are still French beans to be eaten.  Instead I’ve got seeds of ‘The Sutton’ for normal spring sowing – a low-growing variety, good in windy sites apparently, so let’s see.

Being away in late May (and early May still being cold), I sowed my summer beans in situ in early June, rather than under cover for May planting out.  The non-climbing French beans didn’t do too badly, especially ‘Rocquencourt’ (from which I managed to save some beans for sowing next year), but the climbers took some time to get going.  I harvested a few of the latter, but their support blew over in early autumn and I didn’t manage to get it upright again.  Ah well, the wildlife will have enjoyed the beans.  Fortunately they aren’t hardy so won’t self-seed, and I still have seed from 2020 for use next year.  Reminder to self: need firmer bean poles!

The summer beans (and a row of peas in front) - before the supports fell over!

Given my experience with the climbing beans’ support, perhaps I’m being too optimistic in having bought in seed of the traditional old pea ‘Alderman’, which climbs to 6ft (just under 2 metres).  This year I got round to sowing some maincrop peas late, and managed a small but decent crop.  I also sowed some rather old seed of pea ‘Early Onward’, with the intention of using the pea shoots in salad assuming any of them germinated; in fact they germinated well, and quickly, so I planted them outside and ended up with some actual peas as a welcome result.

Lettuces – several varieties – did well, but as usual I didn’t get the succession right and had a gap in the middle of the year when the first sowing had run to seed and there were no new plants ready for eating.  Apart from a small amount of rocket, I didn’t manage any other salad leaves; a matter of finding time and a suitable place to sow them in.  I particularly missed not having any radicchio, which did well last year.  I’ve stopped trying to grow salad leaf mixes, as I find that the different varieties germinate at different rates and some don’t germinate at all.  The 2020 leaf beet plants overwintered and I got a few leaves from them early in the year, but then they ran to seed; a little of this has germinated in situ, and I’m hoping that the seedlings will survive into 2022, though I still have seed in the packet for a few more plants. 

A lettuce head ('Bronze Beauty'), about to flower but very prettily

I notice that I haven’t kept much of a record of my veg seed sowing in my blog posts this year; perhaps an indication of how little attention I had paid to it, although in fairness I had spent some time over the year sorting out the layout, the paths and the weeding – the sort of basics that I’m wanting to focus on in the coming months - rather than the sowing.  Maybe once I get that in a better state, I’ll be able to concentrate more on actually growing food.

Ashes to ashes, part III: A sad day

 

Goodbye, old friend - one last sunny day

It has been the dominant feature in the garden for the 30 or so years that we have been here, and presumably for long before that; it has provided shade in summer, some protection from easterly winds, autumn leaves for leaf mould and a perch for innumerable birds of many species – but the big ash tree in the field just beyond our bottom boundary is now gone, as of yesterday.  For some years now it has been slowly dying, presumably of ash dieback, and we had been advised by two different tree surgeons that it needed to be removed before it was brought down by the winter gales.  Now done.

The tree, and the field, belongs to the Big House.  They have had a forestry company in to deal with all the sick trees on their land, and the forestry guys agreed that this one had to go.  For a couple of weeks they’ve been working over near the church, and this week have got round to felling the three affected trees in the field – ‘ours’ (it wasn’t really ours, but we felt responsible for it, it was so much a part of our garden view), a slightly smaller ash a few yards along, by our neighbours’ boundary, and an even smaller one at the far side of the field.  Interestingly, a large ash next to the latter tree appears to be healthy.  We had expected that the tree would be dismantled bit by bit, but basically they tied ropes to the main branches, tied the other ends to a tractor, cut almost completely through the trunk and drove the tractor across the field (fast) so that the whole thing went in one go. 

The final cut

"Timber ...".

A shoulder-high stump has been left standing, and the main part of the trunk and a few of the larger branches are being left to lie in the field to rot down, so there will still be some benefit to wildlife, which is a comfort - better than turning it into firewood.  But sadly the pigeons, flock of goldfinches and other birds that sat in the upper branches in the late afternoon to catch the last of the sun’s warmth are going to have to find somewhere else to sit; the highest remaining trees, the hawthorn and maple behind the summerhouse, and the plum tree, are fairly high but still don’t catch the sun in the same way.  And their trunks are slimmer and less attractive to the woodpeckers, nuthatches etc that like to poke around in the crevices.

Talking of birds, the tree-cutting and subsequent wood-moving over by the church may not have been to the liking of the waterfowl on the small lakes nearby; one of the moorhens took to visiting our garden (for a bit of peace and quiet?) on several days. 

A moorhen visits

Big empty space

There’s now a big empty space down on the boundary; a better view, certainly, but it will take time for us to get used to it.  We intend in due course to plant something big (an oak?) to take its place, but the soil is shallow and I need to be sure first that we can prepare a big enough planting hole.  Maybe next winter, once our period of mourning for the ash tree is over.

A dose of reality

At this time of year, the magazines are full of ‘cut out and keep’ recipes for Christmas entertaining.  I’m a bit of a sucker for doing just that, but this year I’m being much more realistic about it.  I know by now that I will never look at most of these recipes again, let alone cook them.  And really, there is no point keeping a recipe for dishes that we’re not going to eat, no point in keeping a recipe that caters for ten when we will have no more than six, maximum, at any one time round the table, and no point in having instructions as to how to decorate your Christmas cake, however prettily, when we never have a Christmas cake.

Likewise, I’m intending to take a realistic view of the garden next year (and maybe the year after that, depending on how things go).  For the past couple of years at least I’ve been guilty of growing plants from seed, especially ornamentals, and then having to throw them away because I haven’t watered them, got round to growing them on or planting them out.  Or even sowing the seeds at all.  And then there are all the cuttings etc, tiny plants in small pots that freeze in winter and dry out in summer because I don’t have the time or energy to look after them.  There are just too many things to do at some times of year, even those times of year when I’m at home and able to spend time gardening.  One issue is that the garden has reached a stage where the basic framework needs an overhaul – large shrubs needing to be cut back or removed, borders where invasive weeds have got out of hand, half-finished (or barely started) plans for establishing a definite structure on parts of the garden.  I need to spend time getting all of that sorted before I start giving my attention to new planting.  It’s the old gardening story: we’re always told to get the structure in first before filling it with colour, but of course most of us start acquiring desirable plants and need somewhere to put them, and the basics get ignored until too late.  And there is only so much time in which to do all of this.

As it is, the garden work is several weeks behind schedule, and it’s now too late to do some jobs for this winter.  Some of this is bad planning on my part and some of it is my being temporarily incapacitated and limited as to what I can do in the garden for a few weeks yet.  The long hedge is only very partly trimmed, a lot of fallen leaves haven’t been swept up, and the dahlias are still waiting to be dug up and dried off.  Other tender plants are also still outside, waiting to be saved from the cold, such as my big pot of gazanias; these are perennial by nature but are grown here as annuals, but last winter I took a potful of them into the greenhouse and kept them alive until spring, since when they provided a splendid show of cheerful flowers all summer and autumn, one of my few successes this year – but is it too late to save them for another year? 

The gazanias in their prime

I had already decided to cut back severely on the less essential gardening tasks so that I could concentrate on the big stuff; for example, I haven’t bought any tulips this year (and the few bulbs that I saved from last spring’s display were eaten by the greenhouse mouse), so that’s one planting job that I won’t have to do this winter.  Just now I’m looking at the seed catalogue, with a view to deciding which seeds I really need to buy this year and which I can do without.  The idea is that I will take the same approach to my seed-buying as to my recipe-keeping – that ‘s the plan at the moment …..