Rhubarb rhubarb

Back in November, I posted a list of jobs I wanted to get done before the real cold kicked in.  The weather continues to be mild, but very wet and windy most of the time, and there have been few days recently that have offered decent gardening conditions.  Boxing Day was dry, however, and allowed me to work outside.  Of the jobs on my list, I’ve managed the really essential ones, which is something.  There are still weeds in the veg patch and it still needs mulching, but that can be done in the New Year.  And there are still bits of the long hedge that need cutting back, and it’s too late now to finish that (although I can do some of it in March as things warm up, weather permitting); I’ve decided that I need a taller stepladder to be able to reach the top safely (it will be a belated Christmas present to myself).  It will also be useful when pruning the apple tree.

All the bulbs are now planted, including the tulips ‘Angelique’ and ‘World Friendship’ lifted from last spring’s pot plantings.  They’ve gone into the bed by the terrace.  It was a task precipitated by my finding the corpse of a poor little vole in the greenhouse – it seemed to have climbed, or fallen, into a deep jug that was left on the floor and had been unable to climb out again.  It was tipped out into the planting hole dug for ‘Angelique’, with the bulbs on top.  Some natural fertiliser.

Starting work on rhubarb no 1

I’ve also tackled the maincrop rhubarb plant that was in need of dividing.  If I thought that the osteospermums were hard to dig up, that was nothing compared to the rhubarb.  It has been in place for many years and was very large (bigger than it looks in the photo), but its productivity was falling off and it definitely needed splitting.  Easier said than done.  The roots were enormous, and deep, and I’m not sure I’ve actually got all of them out.  Fortunately the clump proved to be part rotten, and I was able to chip a couple of pieces with the beginnings of buds from the outside of the clump for planting further back in the bed (it produces huge leaves that are prone to covering up the path), and I managed to dig out some of the tough grasses there to make room for them.  The rest of the plant, or as much of it as I could tackle, was unceremoniously ripped up and left on the side for the robin to check over for worms.  Tidying them up is a job still to be completed, but the main task is done.

Rhubarb no 2 - 'Timperley Early', already in growth

The early rhubarb plant alongside, ‘Timperley Early’, true to its name, is already showing new growth!  And down in the undergrowth by the pond, I see that the first snowdrops (Galanthus elwesii) are out – a good week or two earlier than I would have expected.

Galanthus elwesii

Happy New Year!

Deck the halls

Although temperatures have been mild, it has been very windy recently, and occasionally a bit wet; not good gardening weather.  But it’s Christmas, and the halls have to be decked with boughs of holly (and ivy, and yew, in this house at least).

The wreath that I created in 2020 has been hanging, dry and dusty, in the greenhouse since its previous outing three years ago.  I pulled out the bits of greenery (brownery, by now) that remained, and quite a lot of the dry moss; there’s plenty more where that came from, in the lawn!  So: much scratching in the lawn, to produce a good amount of wet moss, which was tied in with garden twine.  I used yew as the base this time – the leylandii that I used in 2020 produced too much of a ‘bad hair day’ effect, and the yew is a little more tidy-looking.  A few bits of variegated euonymus and some Iris foetidissima berries for colour, and a bow made from silver ribbon, and the job was done.  There are no good hanging points on the outer doors, so it’s suspended from the garden gate (the basis is an old wire coathanger, and the hook goes over the top bar), where it is withstanding the gales remarkably well.

By mid-December the birds have usually stripped the holly tree, but every year we try to preserve some of the berries for decoration.  We cut a few sprigs and put them in water in the summerhouse, away from birds and mice, which works fairly well except that the leaves tend to drop off.  This year I fixed my two CherryAids – white sleeves with Velcro fastenings along their length, and tie ends, designed to protect cherries from the birds (I’ve used them successfully on the blackcurrants in the past) – over a few holly twigs on the tree; a number of the berries fell off, but when I came to remove the sleeves the other day, there were quite a few twigs with berries inside – I must do that again next year.  The berried twigs have been used to decorate the paintings in the hall and dining room.

Mantlepiece

Instead of a Christmas tree, I decorate the library mantlepiece with ivy and little gold decorations, and make a fake swag down the stairs; the greenery is real, but there’s no moss or other water-holding material in there – it’s all held together with garden twine, a wing and a prayer, and decorated with a few small decorations and red bows, which have twist ties at the back that serve to hold things in place and cover up bald patches and sticking-out ends.  It’s all very Heath Robinson, but it works well enough!

Merry Christmas!

Sitting tenants

 

Roots all the way down

It should have been a straightforward job.  Lift osteospermums from the big pot, and re-pot them; remove compost (or most of it) from the big pot; plant tulip bulbs in big pot; top up with fresh compost.  The osteospermums, however, had other ideas.

They were the progeny of a plant bought many years ago and left in place in the front garden (during a previous phase of the front garden’s design) for several years.  When that area was redeveloped, into a mostly gravelled area, the plant was lifted and cuttings taken, which became a staple of planting in various pots.  The flowers are white daisies with a dark ‘eye’ which open in sun, and very adaptable; they go with most other plants and this plant at least is, as osteospermums go, pretty hardy.  They are also easy to propagate, as the stems produce new roots where they touch the soil or compost.  And that, it seems, was the problem.

These ones had been put in the big pot at least two years ago, along with a previous set of tulip bulbs.  The bulbs had not survived, as tends to be the case with tulip bulbs, and last year I left the pot otherwise empty, with only the osteos in place.  And, after two years in the pot, with no competition, they had made themselves very much at home.

I tried to move them just by hand, unsuccessfully, then got the small hand fork out.  They still didn’t move.  I tried a trowel, but couldn’t get it into the mat of roots.  Normally as a last resort I would try upending the pot so that the contents, plant, compost and all, would fall out, but this pot is just too big.  In the end I had to rip the top growth out, and chip away at the matted compost below with the little fork.  The roots had gone right down to the bottom of the pot – who would have thought that such a small plant could make so much root?

Fortunately a lot of what I pulled up had roots attached, so I potted up four pieces and put them in the greenhouse to recover.  As much old compost as I could shake out went on to the new bed, to the robin’s delight; the tulips went in, and were covered with fresh compost – job done.

Job done

Mesembryanthemums are not as hardy as the osteos, and the sharp frost a couple of weeks back has seen off those sown in the gravel of one of the camellia pots; a pity, as they were just getting going.  I might try sowing direct into these pots again, either with more mesembryanthemums or another low-growing annual, but getting the seeds in earlier.  It’s a good place for a bit of colour!

Remains of the mesembryanthemums (and a few weeds)

The weather since the last post has been milder and damp (or downright wet) on the whole; there has been wind, but the worst of the weather passed us by.  Nothing very dramatic in the forecast, at the moment at least.

First bite of winter

December is officially the beginning of winter, and the weather certainly feels like it.  Over the past couple of days we’ve had temperatures down to minus 8C – minus 4C in the greenhouse – and not much above freezing during the day; there are some forecasts predicting snow over the next day or so, which may – or may not – come to pass.

One last 'Sam Hopkins'

We had our first big frost in late November, with minus 3C or so overnight.  The previous day I noticed that Dahlia ‘Sam Hopkins’ had put out one final flower, so I cut it to put in a vase with some nerines.  By the next morning, the dahlias were well frosted, so were dug up and the tubers put in the garage to dry off, for storage over the winter.  The frost has also finished off the last nerine flowers, but the plants will be fine where they are.  There was one last bud on rose ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, but it too has been frosted.  In contrast, Camellia ‘Donation’ already has buds!

Last 'Gertrude Jekyll'

The end of the nerines

Buds on Camellia 'Donation'

Ahead of the cold, I managed to cut the remaining three radicchio heads for storage in the summerhouse; we’ll see if they survive there.  The last two lettuces ‘Merveille de Quatre Saisons’ were also cut so that the hearts could be kept in the fridge, and a rather makeshift cover put over the ‘Salad Bowl’ heads in situ, consisting of some wire netting and a piece of tattered fleece.  I doubt if that will have been enough to save the lettuces, but it was worth a try.

Makeshift covering

Even in cold weather, the garden jobs continue.  Most of the tulip bulbs have now been planted in pots.  I had planned to put ‘Orange Emperor’ in the pot that contained its white cousin ‘Exotic Emperor’ this past year, but when I started to remove the compost I realised that ‘E E’ was sprouting again.  Past experience suggests that they may not flower too well, but I topped them with fresh compost and left them in place, and the orange bulbs went into a different pot.  ‘Ballerina’ and ‘Doll’s Minuet’ also went into (separate) pots.  A mix of blackcurrant-purple ‘Havran’, red ‘National Velvet’ and pink ‘Dreamer’ were packed into the smaller of the patio large pots.  ‘Dreamer’ is a new variety, only six bulbs and quite expensive, but allegedly producing two or more flowers per bulb, so I’m hoping that it will balance the other colours effectively.  I still have to plant ‘Black Hero’, red ‘Uncle Tom’ and orange (flushed purple – aptly described as ‘sunset shades’) ‘Prinses Irene’, which are destined for the big patio pot (once I’ve removed the white osteospermums that are in there currently). 

Some of the seeds in the greenhouse are showing signs of germination – the cornflowers, and even a very few tiny seedlings of ammi.  Nothing as yet from the nigella – even though this is fresh seed – or calendula.  They are all covered, for protection from mice rather than the cold, but they won’t like the very low temperatures; I hope the seedlings just sit it out and eventually grow on rather than damping off.

The garden birdlife isn’t caring too much for the cold either.  The berries on either side of the drive – cotoneaster, hawthorn and firethorn – are in much demand from the sparrows, robins and blackbirds, and the food put out on the patio is attracting those birds as well as Lefty the woodpigeon, starlings, dunnocks and blue and great tits.  The cooking apples are still on the bench and table on the terrace, and there’s usually a blackbird or two and a robin pecking busily at them; further down the garden, those apples still on the tree are being eaten by tits, more blackbirds and the Scandi-avians.  There are at least three robins scrapping over ownership of the territorial rights to the food, and, remarkably, a dunnock that is prepared to chase the patio robin away; normally it’s the other way around, with the dunnock just shrugging its metaphorical shoulders and coming back once the robin has gone, but this character not only stands up for him or herself but is asserting its dominance of the patio.

Even before the cold started, my gardening work was almost always accompanied by an inquisitive robin.  But one day I was watched at close quarters by a goldcrest; it was aware of me, but was too busy checking out the osmanthus for insects to be much interested in my doings.

A thing of shreds and patches

No, not W S Gilbert’s Wandering Minstrel, but my gardening trousers.  Or, to be precise, my ex-gardening trousers.

Having been brought up to make do and mend, I’ve always gardened in clothing that has reached the point of being no longer fit for other purposes.  Scruffy clothes that will no longer do for polite company but are ‘fine for the garden’.  So it goes against the grain actually to spend money on something to wear in the garden, to put on just to get wet and muddy.  But last year I had to ditch my gardening jacket, an old grey puffer jacket that did a good enough job at keeping the cold at bay even after it parted company from its lining; finally the outer fabric ripped, and the padding started to fall out, making it really no longer practicable as gardening kit.  I had no other comparable garment ready to be downgraded to replace it, and a local outdoor-wear shop was doing a deal on cheap padded jackets, so I spent a whole £30 on a new outer layer – and I have to say that it does the job really well.  I’m trying to remember to put it in the washing machine from time to time to stop the fabric from deteriorating; too easy just to hang it up again after every spell in the garden!

I dallied for a while with the idea of using the old jacket to create an old-clothes scarecrow, perhaps one that could have planting pockets inserted in it (I’ve seen it done), but decided that it was going to be too complicated and would probably fall apart.  Instead, the old jacket was washed and sent to recycling, where I hope it was shredded and turned into something practical.

End of the road

My trousers have also now reached the end of the road.  Originally a very respectable pair of soft denim jeans, eventually their zip started to split and, needing something to take over from my previous gardening trousers (a black cotton pair from Gap), I demoted them to garden use.  They were roomy enough to allow me to wear a pair of black cotton leggings underneath when I needed extra insulation; the elastic waistband of the leggings is sagging but the jeans held them up, and the leggings provided suitable modesty when the jeans’ zip finally gave up completely.  However, the fabric of the jeans has now started to split across the leg and, while ripped jeans may be a valid fashion statement in some quarters, in a damp and dirty garden they’re just not a good idea.  So I’ve gone (online) shopping.

The new trousers, specially designed for gardening, cost considerably more than the £30 jacket, but they’re warmer and more practical than the jeans, they come highly recommended and first impressions are good – I just need to remember to keep them washed so that they last longer than my jeans!

Pushing the envelope

November continues with a mix of rain, wind and occasional sunny days; the wet keeps it feeling damp and cool, but we’ve only had two light frosts so far this autumn, and when the sun is out it still has traces of warmth in it.  Enough to encourage me to push the envelope a bit.

More seeds

The tray of mustard leaves sown last week is starting to show signs of germination, which is encouraging; it’s a crop that will grow, albeit slowly, over winter if kept under cover.  I was browsing through some old gardening magazines the other day and came across an article about autumn sowing of hardy annuals; it said that this could be done, in a greenhouse or cold frame, as late as mid-November, which prompted me to take a look through my seed box for suitable candidates.  I’ve now sown a few more ornamentals: nigella (home-saved seed), calendula (from a rather old seed packet) and cornflower (a more recent packet).  These are all good-natured plants that germinate readily (unless the seed is too old!), so I’m waiting to see what happens.  The plan is to prick them out into cells and put them in the cold frame for the winter, for planting out in spring.  If they don’t come up, I have more seed of all of them to sow when the weather is a bit warmer next year; and it's all part of learning about gardening.

I've also been getting on with the November jobs.  I'm pushing the envelope here too; it's a little late in the year to be finishing clipping the hedge, but I'm hoping that the relatively mild weather will let me get away with it.  The ivy poking out of the top has finished flowering, and cutting it now will deprive the birds of the berries, but it's getting in the way of maintaining the hedge and there are more berrying ivy plants elsewhere in the garden.  I've also started clearing the weeds round and next to the rhubarb to allow me to divide it - a very satisfying job!

It's not just the seed-sowing and hedge-trimming that is pushing the envelope.  While I was in the greenhouse, I noticed a small cluster of raspberries ripening on one of the canes in the fruit patch.  Not the sweetest berries I’ve ever tasted, but hey, it’s November, so let’s not complain!

November raspberries!

There’s no real cold in the forecast yet.  I wonder if we’re in for a mild month – or will winter come and surprise us? 

Ere the winter storms begin

Although the worst of the autumn weather has passed us by so far – we had another storm, Storm Ciaran, which caused some havoc along the south coast and more widely around Europe – November is shaping up to be just unsettled, with a few sunny days but, more often than not, rainy.  An opportunity to sit by the fire and make a few plans.

A vase of nerines

Not that the garden is completely devoid of interest; the nerines, with their wonderfully unseasonably pink frilly blooms, are providing good cut flower material, and the yellow antirrhinum in the greenhouse, which has flowered profusely and continuously even when the tomatoes were pushing it up to the glass, has also given me a vaseful today.  Here and there are splashes of colour, like the normally dark corner of the house by the electricity meter box, where the firethorn berries, red berberis leaves and winter jasmine flowers have been joined unexpectedly by a show of blue campanula blooms, and the Mahonia ‘Winter Sun’ is gearing up to brighten the even darker days to come.

Yellow antirrhinums

Leaves, berries, flowers - a colourful corner

Mahonia 'Winter Sun' - gearing up for the season ahead

Meanwhile, indoors, the seed catalogue beckons.  I’ve rifled through the old seed packets to see what might continue to germinate next year, and am taking a slightly new approach this time.  Normally I order all my seeds in one go, around this time of year, usually ordering duplicates of the older seed packets in case these turn out to be too old to germinate; this year, however, I took the advice of Charles Dowding the No-Dig expert and held off sowing my brassica seeds (and some others) until midsummer, to prevent the plants from running to seed.  So my new plan is to top up on the spring-sown seeds now, then to test the summer seeds for viability next year and put in a second order as necessary.  I hope this will mean that I won’t end up with so many unused (and ageing) seed packets!

I’ve just sown a few salad seeds in the greenhouse, in the covered trays (protection against the mice); these are mostly rather old seeds, but if they don’t germinate, I won’t have lost out.  They are Lettuce ‘All Year Round’, which didn’t germinate at all earlier in the year despite the packet being ‘within date’, so I’ve sown it thickly and can use it as a cut-and-come-again crop if it produces anything; some mixed winter salad seeds, from an old packet; and Mustard ‘Red Frills’, which is fairly fresh seed and is usually a good do-er, so might liven up some winter salads.  I’ve also sown all my old Ammi majus seeds in a tray; it’s a plant I haven’t had any success with in the past, the seeds are very old and it’s not an ideal time of year to sow them, but in theory they could germinate in the greenhouse and be pricked out, and again, if they don’t come up, nothing lost (and I can ditch the packet).

I’m also drawing up a mental list of jobs to be done before the winter kicks in.  In no particular order these are:

-          Finish cutting the hedge (this ought to have been done by now, but …);

-          Finish weeding the veg patch, or at least the main bits;

-          Mulch the veg beds;

-          Clear some ground near the rhubarb plants, and dig up, divide and replant the maincrop plant, which hasn’t done well this year and is honestly too big and sprawly and needs a refresh ('Timperley Early' can wait until next year);

-          After the first frosts, dig up the dahlia plants and dry them off, and in their place plant out the perennials sitting around in pots;

-          Plant the tulip bulbs.  There’s no big hurry for this, it can be done in December if necessary, although I’ve salvaged a few ‘World Friendship’ and ‘Angelique’ bulbs from this year’s pots and plan to tuck them in among the perennials, if I can stop them from drying out in the meantime.

All of which should keep me busy ….

Seeking the sun

At this time of year, a little sun goes a long way.  We’ve had no further frosts since the last post; there was one major storm which mostly passed us by, although it rained heavily here for a couple of days and caused serious flooding in other parts of the country, but otherwise we’ve had enough dry, and occasionally sunny, days to get on with things in the garden.  When the sun is out, it’s lovely, but in the shade and after sunset it’s another story. 

The wildlife has been enjoying the sun.  Now that the ivy flowers are over, the red admiral butterflies have been sunning themselves on and around the cooking apple tree; I counted nine at one point, and there was a comma as well.  Red admirals don’t generally overwinter in this country, so once the cold weather comes, their days will be numbered; but they’re making the most of the sun while they can.

Red admirals on the fallen apples ...

... and sunning themselves on the tree trunk

Comma butterfly

... and other insects were enjoying the sun too

We’ve also seen woodpigeons enjoying a nice sit down in the sun on the lawn, one of them stretching its wings to catch as much of the warmth as possible.  Lefty has been coming back daily, for a drink on the patio, a quick peck around at whatever crumbs have been left by the sparrows, or a spot of sunbathing on the grass, though he’s still wary of us.  It’s not clear whether his lady is still ‘his’ or not; we haven’t seen them together.

The first of the Scandi-avians were spotted at the weekend, here in search of (slightly) warmer weather; just a few fieldfares and a couple of redwings, high in the hawthorn tree, but as autumn progresses we’ll be seeing more of them.  And there are suddenly four blackbirds, which may or may not be migrants, visiting us (after weeks of seeing hardly any); some blackbirds also come to the UK for the winter.

The big attraction for all of these is the abundance of fruit in this garden.  There’s the usual enormous quantity of apples; the cooking apple tree has produced a whopping harvest again, and the fallen fruit is attracting the butterflies and birds.  There has also been a good crop of eating apples, nearly all of which have now been picked and stored, and the remainder checked daily for bird or insect damage (there have been a lot of wasps this year, plus a large wasp-like insect which I take to be a hornet).  Surprisingly, we’ve had the biggest pear crop ever: eleven pears, which we picked to keep them from the insects (some had already been attacked).

the pear crop (one was already in the kitchen)

Jobs done this past few days in the garden: the windowbox replanted for winter (the little euonymus and the two rosemaries, that were in there last winter, have been put back, with the ‘Tete-a-tete’ daffodils and ‘Blue Pearl’ crocuses); the newly purchased ‘Elka’ daffodils and Crocus angustifolius planted up in a pot (and protected to stop the squirrel and blackbirds from rooting around in the compost); the last tomato plants in the greenhouse cut down; ditto the lettuces that had run to seed, and the summer beans; the broad bean seedlings from the cold frame planted out; and the garlic cloves put in the ground. 

And the nerine count is now thirteen.

Full winter kit

 

September spiders' webs

Full winter kit for gardening today; the weather has turned suddenly chilly. 

In some countries temperatures are more predictable, moving gradually from cold in winter, through a warm spring, to a hot summer, and a cool autumn; but British weather can go up and down like a yo-yo.  It’s not at all unknown for midsummer’s day to be colder than New Year’s day.  After our dismal July and August, it suddenly turned warm in early September, falling back to cool, wet and windy; then a fairly sunny and dry spell in early October was followed by heavy rain and, on 14^th October, the first frost of the winter.  The past couple of nights haven’t been quite so cold, but there’s a breeze from the east which is keeping things feeling bitter.  The forecast is for slightly higher temperatures in days to come, but with a storm sweeping in, bringing wind and rain. 

Dahlias: 'Sam Hopkins' (left) and 'Bishop of Canterbury' (right)

Before the cold snap, I cut a vase of ‘Sam Hopkins’ dahlias for the house; Sam has been particularly prolific this year.  So far, the dahlias haven’t succumbed to the cold, and I’m hoping that they might keep flowering for a few weeks yet.  The nerines, sheltered by the overhanging wisteria, are also still looking good, and throwing up more flower spikes than I had realised (nine at the last count).  The sweet peas are still just about in flower but well past their best; only a few (all ‘Fragrant Skies’) survived the seedling stage and I planted them at the end of the row of beans, where they actually did quite well. 

In the dry weather last week, we managed what will probably be the last cut of the lawn before winter.  The longer grass has benefited the wildlife; not only butterflies and other flying insects, but when we’ve been mowing the lawn we’ve seen a number of little frogs and a grasshopper.  One day we found a most impressive-looking caterpillar on the summerhouse wall; the insect book tells me it’s probably the caterpillar of the pale tussock moth.  Very striking; but what was it doing on the summerhouse?

Pale tussock moth caterpillar

The cold probably means that the fieldfares and redwings will be with us soon.  We’ve had several sightings of a couple of little warblers (probably chiffchaffs) around the garden, but otherwise the birds have been our regulars: lots of sparrows, a couple of robins (no longer a pair!), dunnocks, blue tits, occasional blackbirds, collared doves and woodpigeons.  Lefty has been down for a drink a couple of times, but not staying.  His fledgelings, sadly, seem to have been killed (I had to bury at least one of them), but there are a couple of youngsters that might be the offspring of the friendly pigeon pair at the bottom of the garden.  And the pheasants and partridges are back, with small groups of them visiting the garden looking for sanctuary from the shooting.  The partridges in particular seem quite laid back about our presence.

Sparrow flock on the fatballs

Sheltering partridges

... and the flowers

Having reviewed the summer’s vegetable harvest, it’s only fair to consider at least some of the flowers.

Not a bad show this summer, all in all.  I grew very few flowers from seed this year, deliberately cutting back on my usual over-enthusiasm, knowing full well how few I actually manage to do anything with.  There were precisely two varieties sown for planting out, Cosmos ‘Xanthos’, which I like for pots, and lobelia – and the lobelia failed to thrive, so was thrown out.  ‘Xanthos’ has been in the windowbox, where it was only intermittently watered and is looking very sad as a result, and also with Dahlia ‘David Howard’ in a large pot on the patio.  The combination of the soft yellow cosmos and the soft orange dahlia has worked well, although the latter only started flowering in September, by which time the cosmos was very much past its best and the other companion in that pot, lobelia (from the garden centre), was pretty much dead and gone.  It’s the first year that I’ve got ‘David Howard’ to flower properly, and it’s a splendid dahlia, with good dark foliage. 

Dahlia 'David Howard'

The other dahlias are ‘Sam Hopkins’, a nice dark red, and the single-flowered ‘Bishop of Auckland’ (scarlet) and ‘Bishop of Canterbury’ (pink); all a bit late this year, but doing nicely now.  I’ve lost ‘Ambition’, sadly; it was never the strongest grower.  The dahlias are in the new bed in the angle of the patio and the rear terrace, which I carved out of the lawn and which has been covered in cardboard, compost and black plastic for over a year to kill the grass (mostly successfully, although the edges of the bed are still a contested area between the soil and the grass, and need digging out).  The long-term intention is to expand this bed further, but one step at a time ….  The dahlias were put in there as a temporary measure (they will be dug up and stored in the greenhouse for the winter), and once they’ve been lifted I will plant up the bed with more permanent inhabitants.  It will be a good place to plant out some of the cuttings etc that I’ve been keeping in pots, but also I have several plants acquired from village plant sales this year. 

The soil in the new bed is shallow; it’s on top of what I think was intended as a soakaway for the house downpipes, and the base is very stony.  As the terrace and patio are at a slightly higher level, there’s scope to add a lot more compost to bring the soil up to the same height.  Fortunately I have a good quantity of compost from the hotbin, which has been quite successful this year; it was re-started in April, and not emptied until September, by which time nearly all the contents had turned into very reasonable compost which, if slightly rough, is easily good enough to fill the new bed.  The bin then had to be started virtually from scratch (it doesn’t heat up until about a third of the bin is filled), but got going quite quickly and has been steaming away enthusiastically at 50C (120F) for a couple of weeks; the main task now is to keep the contents topped up and the bin cooking everything over the winter.

Behind the patio, the dogwood is going to need cutting back again next spring but, in the meantime, is playing host to the dark purplish-red clematis (it’s either ‘Etoile Violette’ or ‘Royal Velours’, I can never remember) which has clambered out of the undergrowth and is flowering happily on top of the bushes.  It has done very well this year.

Clematis climbing through the dogwood

Although I only sowed the cosmos and lobelia for planting out, I did also sow an old packet of mesembryanthemum seed direct; I wasn’t sure it would germinate, and it was a ‘nothing to lose’ sowing.  It was sown straight into the gravel under the repotted Camellia ‘Ruby Wedding’; it did germinate, but took a long time to do anything more; the first flowers are only showing now.  It’s not hardy, so will disappear with the frosts.

Mesembryanthemum under the camellia

One of the veg plot beds had antirrhinums and foxgloves in it last year, and I left them to self-seed; the foxgloves did well, but the antirrhinums were slow to flower and not good enough for cutting.  I’ll dig them out and sow some fresh seed next year, I think.  The yellow antirrhinum in the greenhouse has continued to flower, even squashed between the tomato growbags and the greenhouse glass; it has probably seeded itself everywhere, so might have created a problem for next year!

The foxglove bed, earlier this year

On the subject of self-sown flowers, our lawn orchids did well again this year; that part of the lawn was left uncut over the summer, and we had over 70 blooms.

Orchids in the lawn

Not so good this year are the nerines; we had a bumper crop last year, and this time – just three.  I have no idea why.

One small success was the survival of the littlest of my hedychiums; the larger ones succumbed to my maltreatment of them, but the baby one has produced a spike of leaves, which promises well for next year (the photo shows it at an earlier stage).  I intend to treat it with more care this time!

Signs of life in the hedychium pot

Also flowering are the ivy bushes that have climbed up the leylandii hedge and are sticking out of the top.  I’ve been trimming the hedge – actually ‘cutting back’ would be a more accurate description as it’s a job that hasn’t been done for at least three years and some serious hacking is required.  I’m leaving the ivy at the moment as the flowers are providing some welcome nectar for bees and butterflies (red admirals), which are flocking to it in search of a meal.

Harvest home

 

A morning's harvest

A morning’s harvest from the garden, for the evening’s supper, prompts me to review this year’s produce.

I’ve got the veg plot better organised this year.  The new layer of compost went onto the beds (most of them, anyway – some of the outer beds missed out, and one remains seriously weedy) later than it should have, in spring, but that didn’t seem to matter much.  First crops in were the shallots (good harvest), garlic (small bulbs again this year, but a good quantity) and broad beans.  The latter had to be re-sown after interference from the squirrel, and the plants were badly affected by blackfly; the ladybird larvae didn’t show up to eat the blackfly until late this year, but once they did, I managed a small late crop.  This autumn, I’ll sow my broad beans in modules and plant out under cover to keep the squirrel at bay. 

The shallot crop

I’ve done better with salads this year.  I got a nice row of corn salad until it eventually ran to seed (and a row of seedlings is coming up as a result), though the land cress didn’t do anything.  Lettuces were a success; the first batch bolted earlier than I expected, but the second sowing came along before too long, and I had a third lot, which is still on the go, ready when the no 2s started to flower.  I’m saving seed from the plants for next year.  And there’s a row of radicchio waiting to be cut (probably more than I need, to be honest). 

My leek seed, sown in modules, didn’t germinate well, and only a very few plants have been planted out into the garden, but I had more success with beetroot, after which I decided to use up my rather old packets of beetroot seed by scattering them on a spare bit of the plot, where the plants are now much too close together but doing well.

The more tender vegetables were started late because of the cool weather in April and May (June was hot, but July and August relatively cold and wet).  My three courgette plants are still cropping.  The two ‘British Summertime’ plants were the first to fruit (being bred for the climate here) and produced slim and attractive courgettes (first prize at the village Show!) but are now petering out.  This isn’t really a problem, as the single ‘Defender’ plant has made it its mission in life to single-handedly solve the world food crisis, and is producing courgettes from several growing points, mostly low down under the enormous leaves where I can’t see them easily.  Fortunately they’re good keepers, but there's a few meals-worth of roast courgettes in the freezer and a couple of courgette parmigianas have also been produced.  Courgette cake, anybody?

The summer beans have done well: only a few of the dwarf French beans came up (the squirrel again?) but they’ve cropped well, as much as we can eat, and are still producing.  Of the climbing beans, ‘Blauhilde’ and ‘Moonlight’ have produced well from one plant each, and I’m hopeful of saving seed from both.  I was also pleased with my ‘Alderman’ climbing peas (another first prize at the Show, although the crop hasn’t been large), now about to be pulled up.  The structure that they and the beans were climbing on, however, was blown over in the September gales and is now at a rakish angle; basically I’m waiting for the remaining beans to dry on the plant so that I can save the seed, then the whole thing can be pulled up.

A leaning tower of beans

It seems almost unfair to mention the leaf beet, which I didn’t sow this year: one of last year’s plants (or was it the year before?) seeded so prolifically across the plot that I have many plants this year; they’ve produced small leaves for salad and larger ones for stir-frying and are still going strong.  There is some flea beetle damage, but with so many plants it doesn’t matter.  I’ve put in a few kale plants to see me through the winter, but they’re still small and I’m not confident that they won’t succumb to slugs, pigeons or caterpillars.

One crop that didn’t succumb was the dense row of carrots that I sowed between the beanpoles; really it was a last-ditch attempt to use up old seed packets whose contents I thought would be too old to produce much.  ‘Maestro’ germinated prolifically and, remarkably, didn’t seem to be attacked by carrot fly; I’ve seen comments on a gardening website that carrot fly hadn’t been a problem this year, so it’s not just me.  On the one hand, this is good, but on the other, is it a sign of declining biodiversity?

Tomatoes: this year I sowed five varieties – cherry tomatoes ‘Cherrola’, ‘Apero’ and ‘Gardener’s Delight’, beefsteak ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’ and outdoor tomato ‘Harzfeuer’.  Strictly speaking, the latter isn’t true to type; I used seed saved from last year’s crop, and only discovered belatedly that it’s an F1 hybrid, so doesn’t come true from seed.  These were ok, but a bit watery in cooking, and the plants succumbed to blight after the wet summer, so I’ve pulled them up and consigned the plants and remaining fruit to the green recycling bin.  They had been poorly supported anyway and had collapsed on top of the parsley.  The other tomatoes, being grown in the greenhouse, have been fine; ‘Apero’ is a particularly well-flavoured tomato and keeps better after harvest than the other cherry tomatoes, so I’ll grow it again (as well as good old ‘Gardener’s Delight’, which I can grow from my own seed as it’s not a hybrid).  They’ve been prolific this year.

I’ve also managed a reasonable crop of parsley and dill, especially the latter, and oregano, rosemary and sage are always to hand in the garden.  I thought I had some coriander seed, saved from a previous year’s crop, but it turned out to be parsley.

The plum crop this year was much larger than we expected, and the plums were unusually large, but very early – they were all gone by the end of July.  Apples are doing well, except for the little tree in the middle of the lawn, which did so well last year but is clearly ailing this year – possibly because of damage to the bark by the woodpeckers; the fruit has been tiny, and several branches have obviously died.  Is it too late to save it?  Raspberries were prolific but there were hardly any gooseberries, and the blackcurrants have ‘big bud’ disease and need digging out and replacing.  Across the lane, there has been an excellent harvest of blackberries, but again they were early, and gone by mid-September.

Part of the cooking apple crop

Blackberries for free!

The squirrel has also been taking his harvest home; he has been bounding around the garden, burying hazelnuts all over the place.

A trip to the garden centre

A lot of catching up to do on the blog!

I’ve recently been down to the nursery where I normally buy my potting compost, to stock up for the autumn planting, and bought three sacks of my usual compost.  Good stuff (you can’t always rely on this, even from this normally reliable brand).  It hasn’t always been thus.  Back in June, I changed my routine and went to a garden centre instead.

Good stuff

In early June the weather had suddenly turned from unseasonably cold to very warm.  One week I had given in and switched the central heating on for a couple of hours, the next it was windows open and curtains closed to keep the house cool.  It was officially a heatwave (there are rules about this, apparently) – which meant a lot of carrying of watering cans up and down the garden.  The nighttime temperatures more than doubled over two weeks previously, and the more tender vegetable plants (summer beans, courgettes) were planted out, and needed watering.  In the greenhouse, the tomato plants were put into their d-i-y growbags, using up all the remaining compost that I had left over from the previous autumn – so a trip to get some more was in order.

Normally I buy my compost from a place whose main customer base is the trade, but which sells in smaller quantities to domestic gardeners; however I also wanted some bedding plants, so it had to be an outing to the garden centre.  Garden centres are dangerous places; it’s all too easy to come home with all sorts of things you had no intention of buying (especially plants).

This time I was quite clear in my mind what I needed, and stuck to it.  Besides needing the compost, I wanted to put some summer colour into the windowbox.  The windowbox is the only bit of the front garden seen by most passers-by; there is a bed behind the front garden wall, but it’s not easily visible from the road (which is usually a good thing!), and the rest of the front is gravelled.  I’ve never managed the sort of spectacular container planting that some gardeners achieve, but the windowbox had a passable display over the winter: a bronze sedge, a couple of small rosemary plants grown from cuttings and a small Euonymus ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’, also from a cutting, to provide a bright and cheerful note; and some Crocus ‘Blue Pearl’ and daffodil ‘Tete a tete’ for spring colour.  But the bulbs had long since died back and something more was needed for the summer.  The garden centre provided a tray of pale blue lobelia and a ‘Sunpatiens’ (sic), a bedding impatiens with nice pink flowers.  With a couple of lavenders – more cuttings – and a few of my seed-grown Cosmos ‘Xanthos’, they made a decent display.  The sedge, rosemary and euonymus were potted up, and the bulbs fished out and stored, all for future re-use.  The rosemary plants in particular will be valuable, as the original parent plant is in poor shape (the cold winter?) and ought to be dug out; I’ve taken more cuttings from it, but having the two ex-windowbox plants as insurance is useful.

Window box, planted up

I also needed ericaceous compost, to repot the two camellias in the front garden.  Neither had been repotted for years; the older one, a Camellia williamsii ‘Donation’, flowers tolerably well but has become rather woody, while the other has never flowered, and I thought some fresh compost would give it a second chance.  I’ve since repotted the latter, and it’s now looking a lot healthier, but ‘Donation’ is still waiting for attention.  If there’s any compost left over I’ll use it to repot the azalea, which is seriously elderly and was brought back from the brink last year with careful pruning and the addition of some rather old compost round it.  (I’ll be interested to see if the camellia that has never flowered blooms next spring, and if so, what colour the flowers are.  When I bought it, I was looking for a red-flowered plant, and chose one based on the photo on the plant label.  I was about to head for the checkout when I noticed another camellia with the same photo – but a different name!  So I went instead for one labelled ‘Ruby Wedding’, on the basis that it ought to be red.  But I’ve never had the chance to verify that.)

Camellia 'Ruby Wedding', repotted

While at the garden centre, I also bought a couple of bags of soil improver, intended for those front garden beds behind the front wall.  The soil there is atrocious, and a good layer of mulching with soil improver should help matters considerably.  But since then I’ve found another area that could benefit from the stuff – so I may return to the garden centre for more!

Rather than carry on down the road to my usual compost supplier, I thought I would save time by buying my ordinary potting compost from the garden centre.  Mistake.  The peat-free compost brand that they sell is a widely available one, which I’ve found in the past to be very variable in quality.  A few years ago I got some from one nursery and it was reasonably good stuff, so I got some more (same brand) from elsewhere and it was just wood shavings.  This time, when I got it home and opened up the bags, it was spongy stuff with all the consistency of chewed-up felt carpet underlay.  I used it with some home-produced compost mixed in, and it has been just about ok, but I’m glad to have returned to my usual brand.  There’s some of the carpet underlay left over, and I’ll spread it on a few of the veg beds as part of the autumn mulching process.

Caveat emptor …