Feast or famine II

Apart from a showery spell a couple of weeks ago, the weather has continued dry (we’re now in Heatwave 4, although the past few days have been more cloudy and breezy than hot).  The garden is parched, and although little has died prematurely in the veg plot, nothing is actually growing very much.  I have some seedlings (radicchio, cima di rapa, a late cabbage or two) ready to go out, and will have to water assiduously to keep them alive.  There are warnings that vegetable supplies may be impacted, and that, because berries and other wild fruits are appearing early, wildlife may run short of food this autumn and winter.  Although I've been picking blackberries across the lane, I'm happily leaving a good number for the birds and other denizens of the hedgerow.

Pears ,,,

,,, and apples

It has been an excellent fruit year.  The plum crop (now long gone or laid down as preserves, see below) was large, the apples are prolific and we have a few of the best pears our two little trees have ever produced.  Even the fig, in its over-shady position, has done well.  Down at the bottom of the garden, the wild damson trees – probably suckers from the plum tree, which was probably grafted onto a damson rootstock – rarely produce enough fruit for us to bother with; the fruit is small and very sour, and really only fit for use in flavouring liqueurs, in the manner of sloe gin, and you need a fair quantity of them to do that.  This year, though, there’s a good number of them.  We recently unearthed a long-forgotten bottle of home-made damson gin in the cellar, 2011 vintage, which has turned out to be delicious with its 14 years of bottle age.  There’s a bottle of cheap gin in the house, bought so that we could preserve some of the plums, so the rest of it has gone to make more damson gin.  I doubt if we’ll manage to keep it for 14 years though!

Damsons - ready for the gin!

I had carefully netted my cabbages to prevent butterflies from laying their eggs on them.  In the end, it has been the dry weather that has finished off the cabbages rather than the butterflies, helped by the presence of a red ant nest in the soil of that bed.  When I passed by yesterday, there was a frantic fluttering under the netting – a wren had somehow got in there and was trapped.  How did it manage that?  I lifted the netting and let it out, and it flew off with a loud chirp.  The netting was put back in place.  Later on, I passed by again, and – there, under the netting, was the wren.  So I let it out again.  And later still – yes, the wren was back.  I gave up and left the netting half off the bed, but still lying on its supports; the remains of the cabbages are so unappealing that no butterfly is likely to lay eggs on them.  The wren spent several hours in its little tent, fluttering busily around and apparently picking something (flies?) off the underside of the net; this morning, at breakfast time, it was in there again, working hard at finding whatever is attracting it.  Perhaps it’s feeding itself up in anticipation of a hard winter?

Freebies

I admit to being a bit lazy about weeding – but sometimes I deliberately leave a weed seedling to see what develops, and occasionally it’s worth it.

The edge of the gravel drive usually has a good number of ‘unintentional’ plants seeded into it.  A few are desirable – nigella and parsley, from plantings in the adjacent bed – but a lot are not.  There’s a good number of out-and-out weeds, but also a few buddleja plantlets.  My buddleja is a big old thing, with flowers in a reasonably good purple-blue, though there are better modern cultivars and I’m not inclined to propagate this one, even though it seeds itself quite a lot in this garden - I use the old seedheads and prunings in the compost bins and plants germinate from that.  Recently quite a large buddleja plant appeared in the gravel, and I haven’t bothered to pull it up – in the hope that it might flower, and (irrationally) turn out to be a better colour than the existing plant. 

White buddleja

It has indeed flowered – and it’s white!  Probably a seedling of next door’s white buddleja plant.  I’m hoping that it might be transplantable, with a little care; most weeds in the gravel don’t have deep roots, and there’s no obvious reason why this would be any different.  I’ll leave it until the late autumn and try to move it then; with a lot of watering and decent conditions, it might survive.  Then I need to decide where to put it (not many good places for it …)!

Panicum flowerhead

Another ‘unintentional’ plant is in the pot with Hosta ‘Krossa Regal’.  At first it looked rather like the young hosta leaves, and I paid it little attention, but as it developed I realised that it’s a grass.  Not just any grass; it has broad, chunky leaves.  A panicum seedling.  The only panicum that I’ve had in the garden is one of the cultivars with an explosion of little seedheads, rather like a miniature firework, which looks good in flower arrangements, so I left it alone.  The first flower-head went into a little vase with some dahlia flowers and a few sprigs of Dianthus ‘Siberian Blues’ (which is actually pink …), and it looked good on the table for a celebratory weekend!

Seed gathering

I mentioned in a recent post that my peas had dried up while we were on holiday.  I harvested the dry pods, from varieties ‘Early Onward’ and ‘Douce Provence’, anyway, looking for peas to sow next year – and found that nearly all the pods had suffered pea moth damage.  Not a pretty sight.  There were a few peas that were unaffected, and, making the best of a bad situation, I’ve saved them for future use – and put the pea moth caterpillars out on the patio for the blackbirds and sparrows to feast on.  Interestingly, the climbing pea ‘Alderman’ was less affected, at least by the moths, although there had been damage from the sparrows perching on the climbing frame to eat the flowers!  I was able to salvage some broad bean seeds from the early bean plants, again for sowing next year; these were variety ‘Aguadolce Claudia’, although I also grow later-cropping ‘Imperial Green Longpod’ and broad beans cross-pollinate, so these seeds may not produce plants that are suitable for very early sowing.  In any case I’ve decided that autumn-sown broad beans aren’t worth the trouble in this garden, and sowing them in late winter should give me reasonable results.  We’ll see.

Peas and beans

The earliest-sown lettuces are setting seed in the veg plot, and I’ll collect some from them when they’re ready.  The radicchio plant is still in flower, but looking at the old flowerheads I can’t see usable seed; maybe I need to look more closely!  However a couple of dill flowers with seed are drying off well in the greenhouse.

Dill flowers drying off

Having started on seed-collecting, I’ve been going round other plants that I’d like to propagate.  Last year the weather was too wet and cold for viable seed to be produced; my favourite Cosmos ‘Xanthos’ flowered, but the seedheads were too wet to do anything with, and I ended up buying a new packet of seeds.  This year I’ve collected and dried a nice little envelope-full of fresh seed, and am having a go at doing the same with the tall pink variety C. bipinnatus ‘Dazzler’ that has been brightening up the old herb bed.  The ‘Xanthos’ seedheads ripened nicely in the dry of the greenhouse, and I’m hoping ‘Dazzler’ will do the same.

Cosmos bipinnatus 'Dazzler'

I liked the pink corncockle plants in the rather experimental wildflower patch (most of which has now flowered and died off), and have picked some seedheads in the hope of growing more next year, in a flowerbed among ‘proper’ plants, where they won’t look too out-of-place.  Likewise I’ve gathered seed from the calendula and cornflower plants in the tulip pot.  

I’m on a bit of a roll.  Next up will be to take cuttings of other plants for next year!

Following on from the views we’ve been enjoying from the summerhouse, the fox has been back in the field again, possibly in search of the juvenile pheasants which are roaming the countryside at the moment.  When we spotted a cat hunting in the field, then making a hasty retreat towards our garden, we thought that the fox was on its trail – until we noticed a young pheasant determinedly pursuing it through the grass.  The cat presumably wasn’t taking any chances with that big beak.