Equinox

A vase of autumn flowers - sedum and rudbeckia

It has been all about the weather, this year.  The autumn equinox usually brings strong winds, but not this time.  A short spell of good weather broke on Friday with a thunderstorm the likes of which I don’t think I’ve seen in this country – hours of thunder and lightning, and rain hammering down all afternoon.  Then further heavy rain for at least part of most days since.  Several roads locally have been closed, and despite our relatively un-floodable position we had a lot of water in our cellar.  It has been worse in Central Europe, with serious flooding (as D, who was there and found himself stranded in Belgrade for a couple of days, can attest).

The equinox has brought all the usual autumnal developments in the garden, both animal and vegetable.  As the birds finish moulting and look to establish winter territories, they’ve been returning to the patio to feed; not just the summer cast of sparrows, dunnocks, robins, tits and blackbirds but also at least a couple of willow warblers/chiffchaffs and the odd blackcap – and, after a few months of absence, Lefty the lame woodpigeon has started coming for breakfast again.  I wonder where he spends his summer holidays?

A less welcome autumnal animal appearance is that of mice in search of warmth and food in the house.  We’ve no idea how they get in – upstairs! – but two have been caught in the humane trap this past week.  One I didn’t find in time, and he had to be buried outside, but the other little fellow was taken a couple of miles away and released in a country hedgerow to live his best life in the wild.

At least the rain has been keeping the plants going, but on the other hand, it hasn’t been good for seed-collection.  One of last year’s radicchio plants apparently survived both harvesting and the winter cold and I left it to flower and set seed; the flowers, bright blue, were splendid but I couldn’t find any seed in the heads afterwards – too wet?  That certainly seems to have been the problem with Cosmos ‘Xanthos’, from which I collected seed last year (and sowed it successfully this spring) but whose spent flowers are just sodden this time round – no viable-looking seed anywhere.  I’ll have to buy a fresh packet for next year.  It’s a useful plant in pots, a good filler and a soft yellow that fits most colour schemes.  I had this year’s plants in the windowbox, along with pink salvia and fuchsia, and in the big pot with Dahlia ‘David Howard’. 

Sodden cosmos in the windowbox

One plant which I hadn’t considered saving seed from is lobelia; it normally needs sowing very early to get it going in time.  However lots of lobelia has appeared from nowhere in the two tubs that hold my miniature daffodils, and I can only assume that it’s self-sown (in the used compost that I used to top-dress the existing contents?); it’s an unexpected but very welcome hit of colour.

Lobelia in the tubs

The first nerine flower buds are up – something to look forward to as the cold weather kicks in, which it is forecast to do at the end of this week.  Autumn is here!

Nerine buds

September chill

September temperatures had not been too bad, for September, until late last week, when they dipped considerably – single-figure temperatures (Celsius) during the day, with a chilly northerly wind, and down to just above a frost at night.  It lasted only a couple of days and has gradually improved since, but this week’s bright sunshine is set to last only a day or two more.  It will then be back to sunshine and showers, with a fair breeze from the east.

Forewarned is forearmed, and I brought out an old bit of fleece to cover the courgette plants during the cold nights.  I’ve also closed the greenhouse vents, but I’ve left the door open; we’ve had a hedgehog snuffling around in there one night (it left its droppings!) and I’d like to encourage its nocturnal cleaning-up of any slugs it can find in there.

The only temperature-sensitive plants in the greenhouse at the moment are the tomatoes.  They haven’t done well this year, and it’s my fault.  When we went away in late April for ten days the plants were still very small; rather than ask a neighbour to care for them, I left them in the greenhouse under a propagator lid, which I reckoned would keep them both damp enough and warm enough.  It did, but the plants looked very unhappy when I got back; the damp warmth seemed to have steamed them.  They recovered with careful nursing, but are very late; the first fruit only turned red this week.  I’ve cut off all the flower trusses that haven’t yet set fruit as I doubt if they will produce anything, and I hope that will speed up ripening of the other trusses.

First ripe tomatoes

In the last post I mentioned the figs; we’ve now had six really good fruits, with a few smaller ones still to come.

The combination of dropping temperatures and ripening nuts and berries has brought more birds to the gardens round here.  A nuthatch was tapping away in the hazel trees the other day, and a garden warbler was feasting on the berries of next door’s cotoneaster.  There have been blackbirds and robins in our cotoneaster too.  Insect life also appears to be abundant, judging by the behaviour of the insect-feeding birds; at least one willow warbler has been about in the garden for a couple of weeks now, flycatching among the shrubs, flocks of house martins are feeding up over the garden prior to migration, and swallows have been swooping across the field behind the house, presumably with the same intent.  Although the buddleja flowers are now fading, the red admiral butterflies are making the most of what’s left, and a couple of speckled woods have been sunbathing down the bottom of the garden.

Speckled wood

Not everything is rosy.  The partridge shooting season has started, and the groups of very trusting partridges that had been trooping through the garden have gone into hiding; they prefer to hide rather than fly away when threatened.  A couple of weeks ago we had one that came up to the summerhouse while we were there and sat contentedly on the step; it then wandered into the neighbouring garden, where their dog found and killed it.  The village dog-owners all have similar stories; partridges just don’t have much sense around danger.  Another danger, although a rarer one, is a goshawk that has been hanging around the vicinity for a few months; it took and dispatched a pigeon in the garden of friends at the other end of the village the other day.

Partridge on the summerhouse steps

Working down in the veg plot yesterday I looked up at the hazels and spotted catkins forming.  Surely catkins belong to late winter?  Is this normal?

Catkins - is this normal for September?

Out of synch

Evening mist down in the valley

We’ve now slipped into autumn, with evenings darkening earlier and temperatures gradually starting to drop.  The mellow fruitfulness is here, along with the mists.  August was a little drier than previous months, and there were some warm days, but there’s no sign of an Indian summer. 

August always throws me off balance.  I've always thought of it as ‘summer’, but increasingly I find it more like ‘autumn’ – the garden starting to wind down, with plenty of produce in the veg plot but the freshness of early summer gone and the greens starting to turn to gold.  It’s also the time when my planning goes out of synch.  I know that the first eating apples will be ready later in the month, but I always buy supermarket ones ‘just in case’, to bridge the gap between the early Discovery apples and the Greensleeves that come along just that bit later; then I end up with too many apples in the kitchen.  Usually there are also plums to eat our way through at the same time, although this year we had hardly any, so that particular problem didn’t arise.  At least there don't seem to be as many wasps this year.

Then there are the blackberries.  Surely they’re September fruit? But the ones in the hedgerow across the lane fruit in August, and I find myself with bought-in blueberries to use up rather than picking the free blackberries.  Out of synch again.

Blackberries across the lane

A good pea (Early Onward) crop this year, but that wasn’t so much out-of-synch as all-at-once.  I must get better at successional sowing.  And my Alderman peas resolutely refused to climb the trellis I built for them, and sprawled across the bed; but at least I’ve managed to save some pods for sowing next year.

The butterflies here are also out of synch.  The Big Butterfly Count run by Butterfly Conservation finishes in the first week of August, but peak butterfly time in this garden is at least a week later.  Not that the peak amounted to much this year, but a few red admirals turned up to bolster the low numbers of peacocks that had been around before; I spotted one painted lady and one tortoiseshell, and we now have a few brimstones (and of course the whites, which have mostly been kept off the brassicas by judicious netting this year).  No commas, yet; they might come along as the apples ripen, as they like overripe fruit.

Speaking of fruit, the fig tree (bush?) has produced several rather nice fruits this year, despite its rather shaded position.  I have good intentions of clearing the weeds around it ….