High summer

 

Mid-July, and the weather is pleasantly warm but not stiflingly hot.  The greens in the garden are quietly starting to lose their greenness and lustre as we head towards summer’s end, but we’re not there yet.  There has still been no rain; a hosepipe ban has just been announced, not that we use one, but the media is starting to talk about drought.  Ah well.

The little pots are still being cared for at the soaking stations, and the few seeds that I’ve sown this week – salads, sprouting broccoli, spring cabbage and the like – are being looked after and watered in the greenhouse.  One little plant that has had no water at all is one of my sage cuttings.  When I investigated, I discovered that it had put down roots through the bottom of the pot and between the flagstones; there can’t be much root there as the flags are very close together, but obviously it’s getting enough moisture to survive.

Unwatered sage plant

The borlotti beans are producing pods, but the other climbing beans are still at the flower-bud stage (maybe the fact that the sparrows seem to perch on the supports has something to do with that?  Are they pecking the buds off?).  Climbing pea ‘Alderman’ has all but finished, and has suffered no pea moth damage.  I’m also pleased with my carrots, which seem to have avoided all the attentions of carrot flies; I sowed them beside the garlic and shallots (now lifted and drying off, they’ve also done well) which is supposed to help, and it does seem to have worked.

The plums, however, have not escaped damage from plum moths.  I put up a moth trap at the usual time, but it seems to have been blown askew by the wind and I think the lure has dropped out.  Most of the plums have, or have had, caterpillars in them, and the centres are having to be cut out.  It’s the time of year to do pruning of plum trees – something that I rarely do, and the tree is showing the effects of that; there’s a lot of dead wood in there, and much of the fruit, often in large unthinned clusters, is only hanging at the ends of very long bare branches.  I spent an afternoon up a ladder sawing dead branches off (and very satisfying it was too, if quite hard work), and once the fruit has finished I might shorten some of the fruiting branches.  It was pleasing to see a lot of new shoots forming on the tree, so it’s not in as bad a state as I had thought, and it should be possible to re-shape the tree to some extent. 

Plum cluster

We have had a lot of swifts flying around, at least until a couple of days ago; it looks as though they have disappeared.  I hope they’ve found somewhere to nest.  There are still good numbers of swallows and house martins.  The more terrestrial birds are enjoying the water that we’ve put out for them, both for drinking and bathing.  I have also solved a puzzle that was bothering me.  For some time I've been hearing a sort of repetitive wheezy call coming from somewhere across the road, not unlike a blackbird’s reassurance call (‘it’s only me, I’m not a threat’) but louder and more insistent.  The Merlin app tells me that it’s a stock dove; this makes sense as we’ve had a few appearing in the garden this year.  In the past I’ve tended to assume that pigeons who are not woodpigeons are racing birds, as we do get them from time to time, stopping off on their travels for food, water and a brief rest, but I’ve noticed that some birds aren’t ringed and had worked out that they must be stock doves, the ancestors of racing pigeons (and feral pigeons in towns and cities).  It’s nice to see them here.

Wilting

We’re wilting – both me and the plants.  Another very hot (for us) weekend – temperatures up to the mid-thirties Centigrade (mid-nineties Fahrenheit); and I know that won’t sound remarkable to some of you, but for us it’s not at all what we’re used to.  It’s now a little cooler, mid-twenties (around 75F) with a fresh easterly breeze keeping things manageable, but forecast to warm up again, and still no rain in the forecast for a week at least.  It doesn’t help that the problems with the village water supply are ongoing; the water company is keeping the taps flowing, but I’m trying to conserve as much water as possible.  The tomatoes are surviving, more or less, and they and the bigger pots get water mostly saved from the kitchen; there are now three soaking stations in the shade for the little pots, and plants in the ground are having to put up with nothing (except for the courgettes, which get a little but are still not producing fruits of usable size). 

Achillea and feverfew

It’s interesting to see which plants are flagging.  As you might expect, the Mediterranean ones (lavender, oregano, etc) don’t seem to mind too much, although the thyme (in pots) is looking a little crisp at the edges.  Surprisingly, the osteospermum (also in a pot) flags a bit in the heat, while the little pot of mint seems to be doing well on short water rations.  The big achillea is still going strong; it and the feverfew provided some flowers for the (rather hot) porch (the achillea will dry off, for some out-of-season colour in the winter).  The penstemons are also bearing up well, and the sunflowers in the veg patch are coming on fine (though I should have staked them as they're looking a bit bent!).  The dahlias (in pots) are trying to flower but they, and their underplanting of annuals, aren’t really doing much, and they’re also being knocked around by the wind.  I suspect that the drought damage to the plants in the ground won’t really be apparent until the autumn at the earliest.

A fine display of dill flowers

In the veg plot, the garlic has been lifted – it looks surprisingly good, considering that I haven't watered it – and the broad beans and most of the peas eaten or cut and frozen before they dried off on the plants.  The ‘Alderman’ peas are good, and pest-free; ‘Douce de Provence’ produced nice petit pois but some pods had been attacked by pea moth.  ‘Alderman’ was sown a little later, and perhaps that had something to do with it?  There's a fine display of dill flowers.  The lettuce is finished, with the next generation still tiny seedlings waiting to be planted out (which I won’t do until I can provide them with decent watering).  The plums are starting to ripen; they look reasonably plentiful.

Neat paths ...

... rearranged by the birds

The birds are making the best of it.  I'm keeping their water supply going, but they have to find their own food.  Earlier in the summer, I became fed up with weeding the veg plot paths and bought a load of shredded bark to top-dress some of the paths, on top of a layer of cardboard and some packaging paper that I had lying around.  It looked really good when I’d finished; but since then the birds have been rooting around in it in search of food, and exposing the paper, making it all look very untidy.  A male blackbird has been sunbathing down there, and he is the main suspect, I fear.  A female pheasant has also been sunbathing in the garden in the hot weather; she was pancaked in the grass beyond the plum tree the other day.

Sunbathing pheasant

Many plants seem to be flowering, or fruiting, early this year; the buddleja has had some flowers on it since the beginning of the month, whereas it often hasn’t done anything until late July.  In the past I’ve wondered if it had something to do with when I pruned it, but this year I finished pruning it very late and so that can’t be the reason.  Presumably it’s the weather.  It does mean, however, that there are plenty of butterflies.  In the past I haven’t attempted the Big Butterfly Count, from mid-July until very early August, because there haven’t been enough butterflies to count until later, but this year the sun has brought them out early; there have been single individuals of peacock, red admiral and comma, but plenty of whites, meadow browns, gatekeepers and common blues, and I’ve seen skippers and small coppers enjoying the oregano flowers.  There was also a lovely painted lady on the buddleja the other day.  I’m looking forward to doing a BB Count when it starts in a couple of days’ time.

Gatekeeper

Small copper

Painted lady on the buddleja

One of the blues

The result of backsliding

The combined effect of last month's two weeks of holiday, hot weather during which I avoided spending too much time outdoors and having other (non-gardening) things to do has not been good for the garden.  It’s now looking even more dishevelled than it did on our return from abroad.  There’s another spell of hot (for us) weather starting; today we had 29C (85F) and temperatures in the low thirties are forecast for later in the week, but I really need to get out there and do something about the weeds and other long-overlooked jobs.

The soaking station

With only one day of rain recently – a couple of heavy downpours in the middle of last week – watering has been high on the list of must-dos.  Fortunately the village's water supply problem has been solved, but I’m trying to conserve as much water as I can; grey water from the kitchen is being stored for the plant pots.  A ‘soaking station’ has been set up in the relative shade of the house for those pots in need of emergency care; only small pots will fit in the old washing-up bowl, but it means that the watering can is reserved for the bigger pots, the bird baths and those plants in the ground that need it most (like the courgettes). 

Some areas of the garden are so overrun with grasses and other weeds that they have to be left for intensive attention, preferably when the weather is a little cooler and I can spend longer in the open!

Overrun with grasses!

Today I spent as much time in the shade as I could, venturing out into the sun from time to time to deal with specific jobs.  The dill is flowering beautifully – it’s a very ornamental herb – and I cut a good amount of the leaves to chop and freeze, which I hope will see me through the year.  There were small twigs on the patio to be swept up and disposed of, the remains of a nest that a pair of woodpigeons started to build in the wisteria; woodpigeons make a terrible mess of their surroundings, so I had pulled the nesting material out, repeatedly (and untidily), but that didn’t seem to deter them.  Even putting some holly twigs in their preferred space (I reckoned that the female wouldn’t want to sit too long on holly leaves) didn’t work.  In the end I put some chicken netting around the nest area, and they transferred their attention to the top of the hedge instead.  While I was sweeping the patio, I remembered that the lilies in the big pot in the corner needed staking, and that was another shady job that I could do.

One benefit of having a lot of plant material that needs removing is that some of it can be composted, and it’s a good time of year to be filling up the hotbin and the other bins.  The leaf beet is running to seed, and, although the seed heads are destined for the council’s green waste bin, the stems and leaves are good for composting; the same is true of the foxgloves, most of which are fading.  I was also going to do this with last year’s parsley stems, which I allow to flower partly because the flowerheads are decorative and partly to save seed for next year, but when I examined them I saw that they were covered with soldier beetles, harmless red insects which are part of the garden’s biodiversity, so I’ve left them for a little longer.

Soldier beetles on the parsley flowers

The garden’s biodiversity never fails to surprise me: yesterday a (harmless) grass snake was spotted slithering through the grass below the apple tree.  I hope he was able to find some water; they prefer dampness rather than dry gardens.