September - Retrospect and Prospect

For my family who asked me what had happened to my posts....

September is a good month for taking stock and looking forward.  As always, there have been horticultural challenges. 

• Our tomatoes took a long, long time and are now suddenly ripening all at once in this week's high temperatures.
• Our cooking apple has three fruits - however this was to be expected as it did so well last year.
• Our eating apple is again netted against the blackbirds.  Reduced yield here too but much larger fruits ripened and ready to eat.

Some successes too:

• French beans have been great.  Thanks to Y and her memories of Aunt Berta's garden.  They flourished in the sun, as predicted.
• Blackcurrants and raspberries did well.  Gooseberries got sawfly again.  Drat!
• The blueberry has been magnificent.  It inhabits a specially constructed tent to protect from those pesky blackbirds.
• Runner beans are also doing well.
• Spinach needed several attempts but has finally overcome the 'leaf miners' and kale is as reliable as always.
• Garlic and shallots produced a yield but I shall sow earlier and at the recommended spacing next time.

Looking ahead - 

• My husband has just finished his next recycled raised bed for the greenhouse made from pine bunk beds.  This is purpose built for next year's tomatoes.
• Yesterday we visited our usual source of horse manure and came back with plenty of bags.  There were no shovels left out and we forgot to bring a spade so he improvised with two fallen branches.  Next year we are anticipating a better harvest of squash and cucumbers with the addition of this special ingredient.

Wallflowers under glass

In my compulsion to keep sowing I unearthed the seed box from the cupboard under the stairs and found the saved wallflower seed.  The wallflowers, which must have come from my family, lasted two years as I recall, and when they got too large and straggly we let them go to seed.

I checked in a reference book that this was the right time of year to sow and then went to the potting shed and filled two seed trays with compost.  My husband's experience told him that they would not germinate in such a cool place unless covered by glass and he found two sheets.  (Probably recycled from an old fridge.)  

Under the glass the wallflowers did well and germinated within a week.  They are bi-annual and require patience.  The related rocket, an annual salad crop has been slow this cool and rainy season and only now is beginning to sporadically come to life in our 'salad crib' alongside the Little Gem lettuce and radishes.

Meanwhile my husband has lifted our little trough of tulips from the front gatepost border and left them by the back hedge to die down.  He inserted  and netted another one sown with a mix of saved wild flower seeds and a part packet of free seed (the annual Clary - salvia horminum) for the pollinators.  

This is how we live now, protecting what we sow, mostly saving and sowing again.  The days of filling our front border with bedding plants have gone.  We are returning to the traditional stuff of gardens like ours - Sweet Williams and wallflowers.  We split what we can - gifts of perennials from friends and the occasional purchase like phlox, and in turn pass on where we can - mint, Michaelmas daisies, golden oregano.

Now for a packet of fresh 'Rocket Runway' and let us hope for the best.

Home-grown Hedging

 Our hawthorn hedge is recovering from last year's renovation work and is about to come into flower.  Every now and again I go outside and pull a few more dead twigs out of its interior.  This is not strictly necessary but it satisfies my urge to tinker and does point up the moral that it is easier to see a dead branch when the rest of the hedge is filled with green leaves.  

I hope that there will be more green leaves at ground level as some hawthorn berries that scattered when we brought down the unwieldy sections onto the back lawn have begun to germinate in the flowerbeds.  So soon we will have our own little trees to plant for the Queen's Jubilee Platinum Year (as announced today).  These will be in addition to the pre-existing holly, hazel and two hornbeam saplings that we found in a pot while gardening for a friend - a project of a previous tenant.  There are dog roses, ivy, privet and forsythia too, but no potential for alliteration there. 

Amidst all this colourful jumble (or jungle) we will have our home-grown hedge.

PS.  Since posting this we have found hawthorn germinating on the other side of the hedge in the glade, the area freed las summer from the dominating and dark Leyland Cypress.

Sparrows on Sweet Peas

One of the delights of our small scale 'gardening for wildlife' plan has been the way that small birds have become increasingly tame in their search for aphids to eat.  We regularly see them among the branches of the rose 'Golden Showers'; they also inspect our two apple trees, nooks and crannies in the shed and guttering on the greenhouse.  Insect eaters such as blue tits are a delight to watch as they balance on the tips of the trees delicately picking away.

Until this week I would have included sparrows on this list but I have been sadly disappointed.  At first they appeared to be flying down from the fence to the staging on which my husband had set out his tripods of home grown dwarf sweet peas and carnations.  I assumed that they were removing greenfly.  Unfortunately for us they were pecking at the tender leaves and buds of the sweet peas and eating them.  I wonder if this is what sparrows do in farmland to commercial crops.

The sweet peas on which my husband expended such care over the winter have now been moved to our recycled plastic 'bothy' and concealed behind a length of recycled net curtain. We shall have to consider where to put them when they bloom in warmer weather.  I shall still enjoy watching the sparrows - but now their diet will be restricted to what they can glean among the grass of our unsprayed lawn.

'Lockdown Logjam'

The windowsills of our downstairs rooms are filled with seedlings - tomatoes, sunflowers, herbs, French beans.  All this is because of the windy and dry conditions outside.  Our seedlings are in a 'lockdown logjam'.  

Today I re-potted the ridge (outside) cucumbers 'Marketmore' positioning them on a circular table that came from my family; re-purposing this old and exotic replica.

Yesterday I put shallots in one half of a raised bed and sowed lettuce 'Little Gem' in two rows alongside.  My husband netted them against our hungry blackbirds.  The bamboo wigwams for the runner beans are still waiting in their adjacent beds; it is too cold to sow carrots, perpetual spinach and rocket.  There is no space left in our potting shed to start our kale.  

As I survey the cracks in the clay of our lawn under our apples I, unlike the cheerful weather forecasters of our regional TV news, am praying for good soaking rain.

Fresh seed

 All our saved seed (with the exception of our winter squash) has come to an end.  So we have been online and ordered for this coming season. We've done this before.  We once had the leisure and liberty to stand before the enticing carousels in garden centres, rotating them, and asking each other should we try this, or this.  In the absence of physical inspection we decided to ignore the new or exotic and go for what we know does well in our wet and windy climate: kale, runner beans, perpetual beet spinach, carrots, tomatoes (under glass), rocket and Little Gem lettuce.  Our one innovation will be dwarf french beans grown in a sheltered spot.

Reluctantly I said no to broad beans as they take up so much space for such a limited period and to summer cabbage, an open invitation to caterpillars.  

When our local garden centre re-opens after refurbishment in mid-March we will be getting seed compost and before long, as the days lengthen, tomatoes Ailsa Craig and Gardeners Delight will be germinating indoors.

 

Cookery Challenge

 In January our microwave developed a small technical fault.  After some 'marital discussion' we concluded that it was destined for the electricals recycling at the tip.  It is now in the garage, plug-less, awaiting its fate.  So there is more room on our kitchen worktop where the microwave used to be.  

I am enjoying this additional space, a place for pans, plates and cookery books.  So now I am wondering if and not when we should replace the microwave.  It is obvious that the current layout of our annexe kitchen, dating from the 1990s or possibly the 1980s, was not designed with it in mind.  The black box blocked the light and took up space.  

The speed and convenience that microwaves bring to cooking are without doubt.  However, in this period of retirement and lock-down, are these as necessary?  Porage can be cooked on the hob, meals cooked the day before can be reheated in the oven (as long as I remember to heat them right through until they bubble).  Stuff from the freezer can be defrosted the old-fashioned way overnight on a plate.

I will leave it to the campaigners to debate whether or not microwaves are of benefit to our environment.  I know that in our own lock-down microcosm, as with so many other things, it is not an automatic conclusion.