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 …

The revenant

Our fears for Lefty seem to have been premature.

He has been back – just once – to have a drink in the bird bath, and briefly limped across the patio with Mrs Lefty, but has not returned since.  D saw a woodpigeon with a trailing left leg in flight – as Lefty had – over the fields opposite the house, which supports our theory that the old bruiser is still around.

The nearby fields have been mown and there is plenty of grass seed around for him to feed on.  He did seem very dapper, as if he had moulted, and well fed, so there is obviously good living to be had in the area; but he doesn’t seem to have shown any inclination to re-join Mrs Lefty.  Perhaps he was upset by the destruction of the original nest, and doesn’t trust us enough to come back? 

Mrs Lefty, on the other hand, rebuilt her nest in the wisteria and settled down to brood two chicks, which have now flown the nest; at least one is still about, and was seen today being fed by Mum in the garden; they are probably spending most of their time over in the fields, away from the threat from us.

We’re hoping that Lefty might return when food becomes less easy to find as the weather cools.  Not that the weather now is particularly warm.  June was hot and dry, but July was cloudy and wet, with wind at times and not much sun, and August not much better.  There is not much relief promised in the forecast.  This is in stark contrast to southern Europe, which has been alarmingly hot; but the Jetstream is staying to the south of the UK, keeping us unseasonably chilly.

Despite the cool weather, July saw the return of the butterflies.  Earlier in the year they had been much fewer in number than usual, but the flowering of the large patch of oregano in the garden attracted good quantities of bees (of various types) and butterflies.  A marbled white was about for a while, and a scarlet tiger moth spent a few days here; I’ve also seen a hummingbird hawk moth on the mint and buddleja.  (And, speaking of mint, there have been tiny moths which I think are mint moths, although they seem more attracted to the oregano!).  The holly blues have been overtaken by the common blues, and we’ve had a couple of brown argus (another type of ‘blue’ butterfly) as well; meadow browns, small heaths and gatekeepers have been plentiful, with a few ringlets; and in August the summer red admirals, tortoiseshells and peacocks, and a painted lady, came out.  I’ve learnt to identify small coppers and skippers; and today I saw a speckled wood on the brambles across the lane.

Scarlet tiger moth

Marbled white

Small copper

And, after a bit of a hiatus – too much going on and needing done! – I’m also back on the blog, with much catching up to do …………..

Missing, presumed gone

Lefty, our lame woodpigeon, has disappeared and we fear the worst.  He has vanished before for a couple of weeks or so at a time, usually later in the summer, when we guessed that he might be quietly moulting somewhere and living off the abundance of seeds and fruits out in the local fields; but this time his mate Mrs Lefty is still around, solitary and looking rather forlorn, and we think it unlikely that he would have left her un-chaperoned for any length of time.  There are no signs of a fight, no giveaway piles of feathers in the garden or crushed remains in the lane, and no indication as to what might have happened to him; and no body to bury.

I feel particularly bad about it, because just before we last saw him I had intervened in his attempts, with his lady, to build a nest in the wisteria.  In fact, I pulled the sticks that formed the beginnings of the nest out of the plant, and gave it an early summer prune to remove the concealing cover from the site.  It’s illegal in the UK to disturb a bird’s nest, but I seriously doubted that the wisteria would be strong enough to support the activity of a woodpigeon’s nest – they’re heavy birds - and I knew too that the squirrel climbs the plant (and squirrels will eat birds’ eggs).  I left the sticks on the patio below the nest site so that the pigeons could use them to build elsewhere, but they’re mostly untouched.  Mrs Lefty is now periodically finding sticks and trying sporadically to rebuild in the wisteria, but I assume this is just her instinct kicking in (displacement activity) and don’t expect anything to come of it; otherwise she sits on one of their favourite perches alone, waiting in vain. 

We first saw Lefty, with his bad left leg – what looked like a dislocated hip – in 2013.   At 10 years old he did pretty well for a woodpigeon.  We don’t know whether his disability was congenital or the result of an accident or fight; if the latter, he might have been even older.  He managed well enough, limping around and taking on any other pigeon that displeased him; he was a determined and fearless scrapper, on one memorable occasion even facing down a sparrowhawk that landed on the birdbath.  We’ll miss seeing the old bruiser coming energetically hobbling down the path for his breakfast, seeing off any potential rivals and occasionally enjoying a soak in the birdbath; one of my last sightings of him with Mrs Lefty was them sitting together on the lawn, like an old married couple, preening in the sun.  

RIP Lefty.