First frost

A mostly dry end to last week continued over the weekend, and let me do some gardening (after a week of wet weather).  Thursday night was clear, and we had frost on Friday morning – nothing too severe, just a light frosting across the lawn.  The clear skies late on Thursday gave us a sighting of the Northern Lights; unfortunately my attempts at photographing them resulted in nothing more impressive than a slight reddening against a black sky!  All those visits to Norway, and my first sighting was back here in Gloucestershire ….

Peas sown under fleece

The last courgette plant had ground to a halt, and the frost wasn’t going to help matters, so I sent it to the compost bin.  But gardening goes on and moves forward, so other jobs included planting out garlic cloves (from this year’s rather poor crop) and sowing broad beans and – a first for me – some peas to overwinter.  I read somewhere that, with protection, peas can survive the cold, and cultivar ‘Douce Provence’ was recommended; I bought a packet and thought I’d give it a go.  Old gardeners used to sow four times as many seeds as they needed – ‘One for the mouse, one for the crow, One to rot and one to grow’ – and, having lost a lot of peas and beans to the mouse in the past, I tried another recommendation, which was to coat the seeds in chilli powder before sowing.  Rodents don't like the taste, apparently.  We’ll see if that works!  The garlic and peas have been covered in fleece as protection from disturbance by birds as much as against the cold; a new roll of fleece is in readiness for when (if!) the beans germinate.

On the subject of peas, during the wet weather I packaged up the peas that had been drying in the greenhouse - some of both 'Early Onward' and 'Alderman'.  If the mouse gets any of those in the spring, there will be plenty more to replace them with!

The autumn sweet peas have also been sown, in pots in the cold frame; the seeds are a little old, so I haven’t raised my hopes too high.

Insurance

With temperatures and daylight hours on the wane, I’ve started thinking about taking cuttings as insurance against winter losses.  A neighbour was admiring my penstemons but observed that he usually lost his over winter.  In the past I’ve generally kept mine in pots, which could be moved to more sheltered positions or into the cold frame or greenhouse when the temperatures dropped, but this year my dark red and blue-flowered penstemons have been planted out in the new bed and I’m planning to keep them there – weather permitting, of course.  So, just in case, I’ve taken cuttings of both of them.  I’ll also take cuttings of my Penstemon ‘Garnet’ (its real name is ‘Andenken an Friedrich Hahn’, but it’s not often sold under that name in this country, it being a bit of a mouthful); it’s in a large pot, and hasn’t flowered this year, probably because I haven’t repotted it for too long.  I think I read somewhere that penstemons flower best from fresh cuttings rather than from old plants, so that’s a good reason to propagate from it.

I’ve also taken hardwood cuttings from Rose ‘Gertrude Jekyll’; my plant (the sole survivor of three originally planted) is getting woody and a bit long in the tooth, and again, some insurance seems a good idea.

The new bed - mostly purple

The new bed by the patio, although a bit of a rag-bag of plants, has worked surprisingly well from the point of view of colour-theming; it’s mostly blue/purple and yellow, and those plants that have flowers of other colours have fitted in quite well.  Even the self-sown pink poppies haven’t clashed as much as I expected, and one of them – the last to flower, and still going even now – is a near-match for the dark red penstemon.  I’ll try to save some seed from it in the hope of getting more plants next year.

Poppy and penstemon

Insurance against the winter also comes in the form of storable, or at least overwinter-able, crops.  Salad plants haven’t done well this year; apart from the corn salad, a few lettuces early on, and a couple of radicchios, everything has been eaten by slugs and/or snails.  A line of wild rocket, planted out a few weeks ago, is no larger than when it went in the ground, and considerably thinner, and I’m not expecting anything from it.  I also sowed herbs – dill, coriander and chervil – along with some salad onions, and absolutely nothing has come up.  Too late in the year now to grow more.  But the brassicas, well-netted this year, have done well: several cabbages, both spring green-types and Savoys, as well as broccoli and kale.  The courgettes are now winding down and there’s probably nothing more to come from them.  But the apple crop has been good (and one of the cordons is trying to flower ….!).

Flowers on the apple cordon!

In the greenhouse, the tomatoes are ripening very, very slowly.  Green tomato chutney, anyone?