Garden Centre

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Indian Summer?

I’m typing this at 12:23 on 27th September 2011 and it’s actually too hot to work outdoors in my Sussex garden. The day started with heavy mist, but has cleared to scorching temperatures and a glancing sunlight that’s actually painful to eyes that had already begun to adjust to the more mellow hazy sunshine of an average September.

Do I sound as if I’m complaining? I’m really not. My garden is confused though. I walked the dog past a ceanothus in full blossom at the weekend and was faintly perplexed because I’m pretty sure that in the past it’s been a spring-flowering, shrub, but this morning I was equally bewildered to find a well-developed lupin spike in bloom in the east border, along with the nicotiana, and then in the south border there are nerines in full flower (which don’t usually emerge until mid-October) in front of a cotoneaster which is heavy with orange berries several weeks earlier than is usual.

It’s not actually an Indian summer - that requires there to have been a frost heavy enough to kill plants before the abnormally warm weather returns – but it’s definitely unusually hot out there.

Dealing with unusual weather conditions can sometimes require a little ruthlessness: I’m going to cut the lupin spike down, so that the plant isn’t left full of sap when the frost does arrive or it may cause the whole plant to be frost-struck and die, and I’m hoping that the nerines in the west border will hold back on flowering a bit or there will be none left in November, which is when they can be just about the only splash of colour in the garden.

Labels: ceanothus, cotoneaster, indian summer, late summer flowers, lupins, nerines

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:16 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

September garden tasks

My climbing roses are all still in bloom. Just about all my books say ‘prune climbing roses once they have finished flowering in September’ but in Sussex my roses never stop flowering until October.

I am getting ready to plant up my indoor hyacinths – I love their scent in the house at Christmas. This year, to go with the pink and silver colour scheme I have planned for the tree, I am growing the light pink, strongly-scented ‘Anna Marie’ which requires around 8 weeks in a dark cool shed with a cardboard box over the pots just to ensure there is plenty of air and no light, and then around 18 days inside to bloom (so I’ll be planting them around mid-October).

I’m also ensuring my sempervivums and alpines are kept clear of the leaves that are falling from the apple and pear trees – there’s nothing that encourages them to rot and die so fast as being choked by the decomposing layers of autumn leaves.

And I am about to cut down my mildewy, tangled, exhausted, short-stemmed sweet peas, even though they are still (just about) flowering, because I will be sowing next year’s seed in the cold greenhouse in October!

Labels: Anna Maria hyacinth, climbing roses, indoor hyacinths, september garden tasks, sweet peas

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:05 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, September 16, 2011

Replanting wooden planters

Summer planters full of bulbs
Finally the weather is dry enough to start emptying out the fruit box planters and getting them ready for spring and summer again.

There's no point trying to empty out containers with bulbs if the compost is soaking wet, apart from anything else, the risk of a trowel skidding in wet soil and slicing a bulb in half is high and the risk of the bulbs rotting if they are lifted wet is even higher. Bulbs need to be plump and relatively dry if you want to store them over the winter: although they can continue to dry once they are lifted, they can't take up any more nutrients to help them flower the following year, so it's a bit of a balancing act to try and get bulb lifting just right every year.

Each box contains a mixture of bulbs, in a high-nutrient compost with extremely good drainage, as bulbs rot very easily. Wooden planters look great, but they can harbour fungi and bacteria that attack bulbs, so good hygiene is important as well as good drainage. I scoop the soil out between the bulbs and then lift each bulb on the trowel with its soil surround and pop it into a mesh basket.

When I’ve got all the bulbs (ha ha) out of the soil, I lift out the rest a trowelful at a time and pour it into a box – this allows me to find at least three or four bulbs I’d missed.





Emptying the first planter

Each mature bulb usually has a great skirt of babies, if the growing conditions have been right, and this year is no exception. I expect shop-bought bulbs to grow well for three to five years, if they are lifted in the winter, and that by the time they are starting to look less than great, their offspring are ready to take over. To begin with, I use my gloved hand to gently brush the bulblets away from their parent, back into the basket.

The ‘adult’ bulbs go into another mesh basket, in the shed, to overwinter and will be planted out in February. For the babies, I take a shallow tray and fill it with the soil that’s come out of the planter – this usually reveals another couple of bulbs I’ve missed! Then I just sprinkle the infant bulbs over the surface and top them up with about half an inch more compost.

The trays go into the unheated greenhouse over the winter. They are watered once a month and get a comfrey and seaweed feed in March and again in June. They spend from April to September outdoors.






Bulbs with babies
When I empty the big planters in September I also tip out the ‘baby trays’ and replant the now reasonably-sized bulbs. Half go into pots to fatten for another year, the other half get randomly planted out in borders in the garden and on the allotment. The ones that go into pots are back into the greenhouse for another winter and then get used to plant up the big planters in the following February or March.

I suppose about a third of the babies, or maybe only a quarter, mature to flower well, but it hardly matters, as this gives us many, many, many flowers, and we usually end up giving away flower pots of ‘randoms’ which are just bulbs we can’t identify with any certainty but will definitely be less then a metre tall and will flower in the following summer!

These are great bulbs for naturalising, maybe around trees or even (dare I say it?) on roundabouts, which is what I've done with many a fattened bulb before now - there's a roundabout in Worthing that has a display of freesias every year that makes me feel like a fairy godmother!





Baby bulbs in their nursery tray

Labels: container planting, garden bulbs, garden planters, raising new plants from bulbs, september gardening, wooden planters

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:59 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Late summer flowers

I did not expect the house-leeks to flower this year, but right on the edge of the weather getting too cold for them to do so, they did!

Our sempervivums (to give them their proper name, they are also called hen and chicks) get moved around quite a lot, and this year they’ve been relocated to an upside down dustbin lid, placed in a cooper’s barrel ring. Cold doesn’t bother them at all, but poor drainage kills them in weeks, so a shallow planter with lots of drainage holes is a great start. Then we give them some good soil mixed with an equal quantity of horticultural grit and another topping of grit to stop the soil being washed away by rain. I feed them with a liquid comfrey feed in early summer, as they use up the nutrients in the soil quite fast, especially if they are due to flower.

The true hardy sempervivums only flower once per rosette and then die, so you have to take the ‘chicks’ around the edge of the rosette and replant them elsewhere – in my experience it takes three years for the chick to flower itself, so we have a constant progression of small planters filled with houseleeks in different stages so that some are flowering every year. They hybridise quite readily, so it’s important if you have the hardy varieties mixed in with less hardy ones, to remember that any offspring might be less hardy than their parents and may die if they get particularly wet/cold. The hairy-leaved kind seem to be the most prone to dying in winter, in my experience.

One thing I've noticed about my houseleeks is that if it gets to a point in the year when they are about to flower and then the weather gets cold or sunshine levels drop, the bud will hold over for a full eleven and a half months until it's ready to have another go ... quite frustrating!

Labels: bulb planters, hen and chicks, house-leeks, sempervivums

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:50 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, September 8, 2011

Changing seasons in the garden

I am very confused, and so is my garden. I have nerine bowdenii in full flower in one border, a good three weeks earlier than usual, and nicotiana mutabilis also in full flower in the other border, which is exactly what I would expect, except that the heavy rain and gales of Monday and Tuesday got to one of the nicotiana so that instead of flowering up, it’s flowering along … the path. And that's going to require two of us, with stakes and string and hammers, to sort out!

Similarly the apples and pears are falling from the trees at the same time, which is very annoying as usually the apples are several weeks earlier than the pears so instead of having a nicely staggered harvest, we’ve got an insane glut of both (very much aided by that rain and gale scenario that kindly brought down a vast number of both fruits that need to be processed in some way if they are not to be lost to the damage of a hard landing and subsequent rotting).

And finally, the lawn has decided that right now is the time to make a bit for lushness, just when we’d decided that ‘lush’ was not in its repertoire, and after five years of gentle suggestion (nagging) I’d persuaded OH that his beloved little lawn should go in favour of a bigger set of borders … damn!

Labels: apple trees, autumn lawn, nerine, nicotiana mutibilis, pear trees, seasonal gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:17 AM 2 Comments

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Monday, September 5, 2011

Garden photo September

Better late than never, no? So the garden today: very green, very verdant, also very windy! Yes, that’s my hammock – the best investments I ever made for garden life were actually non-plant related: the hammock for summer and a proper cast iron chiminea for winter. The hammock makes it worth spending time in the garden (twenty minutes weeding earns me twenty minutes in the hammock, turn and turn about with OH) and the chiminea is fired up in winter when we’re doing vile jobs like clearing the pond or pruning fruit trees or clearing snow (about which more in a few weeks) and we share the duties of either doing the dirty work or standing by the chiminea, toasting bread and stirring the soup pot on the top of it, and cheering on the one doing the working.

The fruit boxes should be emptied of bulbs by now, and have their winter planting instead, but I’ve been caught out by major rain so instead I have to get OH to help me move the boxes into the shed for a couple of days to dry out, before I lift the bulbs and dry them thoroughly, ready for planting again next spring.

The area around the pond is lethal – OH had an apple the size of a cannon ball land on his head at the weekend and yesterday I was bruised by fair-sized but unripe pear, which whacked my cheekbone on its way to the ground, so that I now look like a rugby forward wearing face paint!

Squirrels are trying to bury nuts in the trough by the shed, and that’s annoying as I have soldier beans in there – Rebus does his best to see them off but there are a lot of determined squirrels and he is only one small and aging terrier so I think they are getting the better of it.

Labels: apple trees, chiminea, container bulbs, garden hammock, garden snow, september garden, spring bulbs

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:09 AM 0 Comments

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