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| Nerine bowdenii |
The hiatus since the last post is partly due to a holiday (in the UK), partly due to time spent doing other things (cooking and freezing the tomato glut, among other jobs) and partly due to inactivity on my part. I haven’t been very busy in the garden this year; must do better over the winter. The successes, such as the excellent show of nerines, which have been keeping us in cut flowers over recent weeks, don’t feel well deserved.
Actually not much has been happening on the plot over the
past few weeks apart from autumn closing in.
The weather has been mostly mild (apart from a couple of frosty nights),
with some lovely pleasant, sunny days and some wet ones – nothing too
dramatic. Despite the heat earlier in
the year, there has been no Indian summer.
The autumn colours are turning nicely and leaves are starting to fall;
the autumn sedums and the winter-flowering viburnums are blooming and there are
a few cyclamen under the holly tree, whose berries are colouring up well. It’s only a matter of time before the
fieldfares and redwings fly in from northern parts and start feeding on them
and the apples.
It's time to get the autumn jobs done but, as always, I’m
behind with those. The overwintering
broad bean seeds only arrived in the post today, likewise the sweet pea seeds, but
I already have garlic cloves saved from this year’s crop and seed of winter
lettuces left over, and they could have been sown (but haven’t been). Part of the reason is that this summer’s crop
needs to be cleared away first; but the frost hasn’t yet polished off the courgette
plants and summer beans, and I’m loath to cut them down prematurely. There are lettuce and radicchio still going
great guns. And my lax gardening regime
this year has resulted in quite a few weeds that need to be removed so that the
beds can be mulched ready for the new crop.
Much space in the greenhouse is taken up with the tomato plants, most of
which only have a few green fruits still on them, but the ‘Gardener’s Delight’
still has huge trusses of unripe fruits and isn’t ready to be pulled out.
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| Tomato 'Gardener's Delight' |
On the subject of fruit, the apples are still ripening on the cordons but we’ve started picking the earlier varieties to store them away from insect and bird attack. (Finding somewhere to store them safe from mouse attack is another problem.) The crop is enormous, as are some of the individual apples; ‘Blenheim Orange’ has produced some of the biggest eating apples we’ve seen.
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| Giant 'Blenheim Orange' apples |
Earlier in the month we took advantage of a few dry and windy days to get the lawnmower out and tackle the grass that had been left to grow long this year. We don’t usually cut it after September but it really needed taking in hand. Despite the weather it was still quite damp so it only got a rough and fairly high cut, to a height that should keep it manageable over the winter. Having taken quite a relaxed attitude to it this summer, we didn’t feel the need to attempt to produce the ‘perfect English lawn’ effect (not that our lawn ever comes even remotely close to that ideal).
In a recent post I mentioned that it has been a good year
for hummingbird hawkmoths. It’s not long
since they were thought not to breed in the UK, but warmer summers have
encouraged them to stay, and only a couple of weeks ago I saw one in a garden deep
in the Lake District, well beyond its previous range. Very welcome foreign visitors.
