The All Seasons Gardener

Gardening in Snow

2009-01-06T05:44:00.001-08:00

If your garden is anything like mine, today, it’s frozen solid with small drifts and layers of snow from yesterday that didn’t melt. Snow is rare in Southern England and snow that stays for more than a few hours is rarer still, so many of my plants are having their first experience of this unusual situation.

Almost all native plants will cope well with snow and heavy frost, especially if it happens early in winter – the problem comes when extreme weather arrives late in February or even in March, when sap has started to rise in the plants and buds may even have opened, and then the plants’ new growth will be blighted by the freezing of watery sap that literally explodes the plant cells, leading to rot.

There are several things you can do to minimise the effects of extreme weather on your garden. The first and most important is to stay away from high-nitrogen fertilisers as they encourage plants to make lots of sappy leafy growth – this growth is then very liable to that exploding cell situation, even in the lightest frost.

The second step, if you live in an area prone to heavy frost, is to leave your pruning until spring. If you have last year’s growth on tender plants over the winter, it will protect the new inner growth and if it is damaged it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to cut it away from the plant as soon as the frost risk is over.

Something that many people don’t realise is that chilled air and frost always descend to the lowest point of your land and stay their longest, so if you have delicate plants, avoid putting them in dips and dells in your garden as they will be exposed to potentially damaging frost for much longer that plants on higher ground.

If you have snow, you need to calculate your risks. If you have heavy snow and it looks like staying around, you may want to go and shake it off the branches of trees and larger shrubs so they won’t be damaged by its weight. On the other hand, remember that shaking fragile branches is likely to snap them, especially if they are already frozen, so it may be better to let light snow melt away on its own.

You should always remove snow from greenhouses and cold frames to let in the light if you have plants inside. It also stops them bending under the weight.

Above all you mustn’t walk on snow-covered lawns, put down planks if you have to cross the grass, or you’ll end up with dead areas of lawn.

New Year, New Greenhouse News!

2009-01-03T09:34:00.000-08:00

We couldn’t wait to try out the greenhouse, so we decided that even though December is the month when NOTHING germinates, we’d try and get something to grow for us from seed.

We started with peas, hardy peas. Now they aren’t going to grace the garden (because they are going to the allotment) and they aren’t even a variety that I particularly like (because they are early hardy peas and I like the later super-sweet petit pois) but my impatience knew no bounds and we’d been assured that if there was anything other than mustard and cress that would germinate in the dark of December, it was hardy peas.

And our advisers were right. As of this morning, with icicles forming on the inside of the greenhouse glass, the pond frozen over and even the dogs not very keen on going outside in the chill air, we have fourteen pea seedlings.

Suddenly all the money we spent on the greenhouse seems worthwhile …

Christmas roses

2008-12-28T02:30:00.000-08:00

It’s very odd, but one thing that you can rely on, or at least I can, is my Iceberg rose producing at least one flower in time for Christmas. It’s an amazingly hardy rose, very suitable for beginners and the one rose I would recommend for anybody who has problems growing other roses. Here's mine in full summer flower.

It’s sold as both a free climber or a standard floribunda and it’s the climber that seems to always give Christmas gifts. The RHS says it bears medium-sized, white blooms, starting from shapely pink-tinted buds, (which) appear very freely almost all season. Hmmm. At any season, would be my judgement.

In my life I’ve had three Iceberg roses in three houses, two were pinkish in bud form, one wasn’t. One of the pink budding ones was lightly scented, neither of the others were. When you buy, it sometimes says that Iceberg is lightly scented and sometimes unscented – weird. The floribunda is more likely to be scented, as far as I can tell from decades of sniffing other people’s roses.

But honestly, although I think a flower without fragrance is like a dog without a tail, if you can cut a rosebud from your garden on Christmas Day, it really would be asking too much to have it scenting the house as well.

December flowering shrubs: Mahonia

2008-12-18T08:12:00.000-08:00

It blooms in winter, provides berries you can turn into jam, offers architectural foliage, and loves the dry shade. Mahonia is quite possibly the shrub that every garden needs.

My Mahonia easily makes nine feet tall in its utterly dry and mainly shaded north facing corner of the garden. And now, in December, it towers over the bare shrubs around it, giving off a sunburst of bright yellow which tempts me out into the garden, where I’m rewarded by its strong Lily of the Valley fragrance.

The only time I get blackbirds in my garden is December, when they come to pick the stamens out of the Mahonia flower, because they love to eat them, but their depredations seem to do little harm to the flower spikes.

The blue-black berries can be gathered in spring, if you don’t mind getting a few scratches from its spiky leaves which are green in summer and red-ting but remain on the plant all year round. The berries make a great, somewhat tangy, dark jam. And finally the mature bark has a snakeskin appearance which is most attractive.

Mahonia courtesy of DH Wright

Growing your own plants - stratification

2008-12-15T04:13:00.000-08:00

One of the great mysterious processes of seed germination is stratification. Basically, all this means is that where perennial plants are from temperate climates, their seeds will probably need a period of both soaking and chilling before they will germinate. This is because the natural conditions in which they would germinate are that they would spend a winter on cold, often wet, ground. So that’s the process you need to recreate in home conditions to get your seeds to understand that its time to grow. Without the stratification process, they don’t get the message and remain dormant.

For plants from the Australias, stratification often involves heating, to mimic the forest fires that allowed seeds to grow where mature plants had been destroyed.

So to work out how a seed may need to be stratified, consider where it comes from.

This week I’m stratifying Alpine strawberries. They grow in extremely cold areas, so I’m going to give them at least a month of cold – normally this would be in the fridge, but as the Alps are under snow cover for much of the winter, I’m putting my seeds in the freezer! And although the process is usually both moist and cold, because of the extreme cold of the Alps, I’m giving them a month of dry cold (frozen in a plastic bag) and then two weeks of moist cold (in the fridge on some damp paper – that should give the impression of the ‘spring melt’ that they need to get their seed cases cracking and the embryos inside growing.

It feels very good to be starting to grow something in December, even if the growing process does begin with a period of chilling.

Frozen fruit courtesy of mindluge

December greenhouse

2008-12-12T09:18:00.000-08:00

Next year, I promise, this blog will be full of pictures of glorious forced bulbs, flowering in perfect time for the festive season, and lovely tender perennials, lovingly being overwintered in my brand new greenhouse. As it is though, what I actually have in there, right now, is one rhubarb crown being forced under a black plastic box (yes I know it sounds stupid to put something under black plastic to remove light, and the stick it in a bright greenhouse, but forcing rhubarb requires both dark and warmth, you see) and a tray of pea seeds that I’m hoping will germinate, and some bubble wrap.

Yes, just about the only thing that is flourishing in my wonderful greenhouse is the bubble wrap I’ve lined it with to keep it warmer. I’m also on the look-out for families that are buying big electrical goods for Christmas so I can go and beg the polystyrene packaging from them, as no less a resource than Gardener’s World says that sheets of white polystyrene can be used to line the sides of a greenhouse below staging level. Good enough for them is good enough for me!

And of course, given that I have only one rhubarb to examine, there’s no difficulty for me in examining the contents of my greenhouse for overwintering pests! By next year though, I hope to be having to search a dozen lush plants for infestations of whitefly, red spider mite and greenfly.

Icy greenhouse courtesy of Aunt Owwee

Mistletoe – a kissing crop

2008-12-09T06:21:00.000-08:00

This year Britain has a massive mistletoe glut – and that’s good news for anybody who’s hoping to get romantic this Christmas! Good mistletoe harvests depend on mild winters and damp summers, so very few people actually desire the right weather to grow this strange parasitic plant, but given how much it costs, even in a glut year, you might want to try growing your own.

Traditionally mistletoe grows in orchards, and the two trees on which the average gardener might manage to produce their own crops are apple trees and limes.

If you want to grow mistletoe, don’t try planting your Christmas crop, because it won’t be ripe and therefore won’t germinate. The berries are actually mature in March and so you need to spot a suitable clump of the plant in a tree you can actually reach, and wait until spring to cut your berries. Bear in mind that birds like mistletoe too, and you might need to cover your clump to keep them off while it ripens.

You also need to take care when harvesting the berries, as they split easily and then the seeds inside harden, which makes germination much more difficult. And once you’ve cut your germinating specimen, remember that it is most likely to grow on the same species of tree as the original plant came from. Your tree also has to be at least fifteen years old, preferably twenty, and the branch you put your seeds on needs to be at least four inches in diameter.

It’s a really odd plant to grow as you need to cut some shallow grooves into the bark of the tree, then squeeze the sticky seeds out of the berries and insert them under the bark flaps which should be covered with fine net to keep the birds off. You need to get quite a few seeds into each branch, as you need both a male and a female plant for berry production and there’s no way of telling which seeds are which in advance.

Then be patient – as the seeds germinate and the mistletoe develops, you’ll see the branch swelling but it takes five years for a mistletoe clump to be big enough to set its own berries.

And a little known fact is that girls who refused a kiss under the mistletoe were said to be destined to remain single!

Pruning Peach Trees

2008-12-06T04:40:00.000-08:00

Well, it’s something that you don’t really want to have to do – you want your peach trees to have been beautifully maintained like filigree jewellery, to be productive and lovely. Sadly that’s not always the case – neglect, ignorance or winter storms can all leave you with an overgrown and underproducing tree.

Here’s what you do:

Begin my removing any broken or diseased limbs and then take out any branches that are downward facing. The ideal peach tree has what’s called an open centre, so you should think about cutting away any strong upright shoots developing on the inside of the tree, leaving smaller shoots for fruit production and keeping outside shoots for growth.

You can also cut out branches or twigs that will bear poor quality fruit such as shoots that are less than the diameter of your little finger, branches that point downwards or are shaded.

Good growth is about the diameter of a pencil and a foot to eighteen inches in length – if it is more than two feet long, you should cut back one-third of the length.

That should get you back to a reasonable tree, and then, annually, you simply repeat the process, trying not to cut back wood that will fruit well, and keeping all pruning to the absolute minimum that will open up the tree to allow sunlight to get to its entirety and to give air movement for pollination.

Peach tree courtesy of runder

Winter Wonderland of Shrubs

2008-12-02T09:37:00.000-08:00

Assuming that you’ve planned ahead, your garden should be looking something like mine – filled with flowers, scent and colour.

No?

Well I can probably help you – what I’ve got in bloom right now is Witch Hazel Latin name Hamamelis with it’s odd spidery yellow petals, and which will continue to flower until mid January. Because this is a heavily scented plant, I cut long flowering stems and put them in a tall vase so that their spring-like scent can cut through the dusty aromas of central heating and woolly jumpers.

Both Viburnum farreri and Viburnum tinus are in fine form: farreri has clusters of small pink flowers from December to early February which are lightly scented while tinus offers pink flower buds that become miniscule star-shaped white flowers, followed by small dark blue-black fruits which appear when the flowers go over around March – both are hardy and easy to grow. Excellent for decorating table settings.

My old favourite Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum in Latin) is a classic – the clear yellow flowers are guaranteed to appear in December and remain until March and in a vase with Witch Hazel, make a blaze of colour that looks like you flew it in from the Caribbean in a private jet.

2008-11-30T07:15:00.000-08:00

Well, it’s done. There’s nothing in it but gravel and a piece of staging donated by a friend, but there is a complete greenhouse at the bottom of my garden.

Established greenhouse users look away now, as I’m going to be a bit dense. When it was all done and I stepped inside and closed the door, I couldn’t get over how much warmer it was than outside. Yes, I know that’s what a greenhouse is FOR and I know that every other greenhouse is exactly the same, ie warmer than the outside temperature, but this is MY greenhouse and I never really believed it was going to work. But it does.

Now I am going to fill it up. What with, I’m not sure, although I already know it won’t be big enough, because everybody tells me that greenhouses never are.

My greenhouse courtesy of me, real greenhouse courtesy of jmurawski

More Greenhouse Advice

2008-11-27T04:21:00.000-08:00

First and foremost – if you want to buy a greenhouse and install it yourself, don’t pick November as the month to do it. There are three reasons for this:

You will have to dodge rain, hail, sleet and snow to get out there to do it, and once out there you will slip and slide around on mud and frost, causing potential damage to the greenhouse and actual damage to bits of yourself.

You will find that whatever form of greenhouse you’ve gone for, it is impossible to tighten nuts, fit tiny fiddly fixings and install large fragile panes of glass or large flyaway panes of plastic, in November winds.

Your marriage will be begin to crack under the strain, even if the greenhouse glazing doesn’t.

I think July is probably a good time to put up a greenhouse – that way, even if it is fiddly, time-consuming and frustrating work, you’re out in the fresh air in the lovely weather and you have long hours of daylight to work in.

Putting in sliding doors by torchlight in a force nine gale is not fun. Trust me. I know. The only thing that’s keeping me going is the idea that one day next year my greenhouse will be filled with the aromas of heirloom tomatoes and orchid blossoms – if we ever get it finished, that is!

2008-11-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

Protecting your Plants in Winter

More and more of the plants we are offered in nurseries and garden centres are not winter-hardy in our climate. Now the weather has turned icy, we’re seeing the effects of bitter weather, wind, rain and chill, on those plants. Some of them can cope with a few hours of chill but not a prolonged cold spell, while others won’t even survive one night of below zero temperatures.

There are a number of ways you can protect plants that aren’t fully winter-hardy:

Tender climbers against walls can be protected by fleece tacked onto light wooden batting to act as a frame. This is good for hibiscus and other tropical region plants but may not keep them safe in full cold – really they need greenhouse overwintering.

Tender bulbs and herbaceous plants (ie those like peonies that die back) should always be given a thick covering blanked of manure or old leaves to prevent the soil around them from freezing. In the spring, new shoots can be protected with a loose layer of straw – don’t use straw in winter though, as it’s insulating properties are lower than a lot of people think.

Even evergreens can suffer and Monkey Puzzle trees are a case in point. Like many other mild zone evergreens, they will thrive better if given a layer of mulch around their root areas to keep the soil free from freezing. This protects the roots and also allows the tree to take up moisture from the soil – because such trees come from regions that don’t freeze, they need more winter moisture than evergreens from colder regions.

Really tender plants are best grown in containers so that can be taken inside during bad spells of weather. It’s a good idea to take cuttings from any potentially tender plants that haven’t been grown in pots so that if the worst happens, you have a replacement plant to take over from the one you’ve lost to the winter.

Choose outdoor pots that a fully frost proof or they will crack. Move unused containers into the shed or greenhouse and if there are any that can’t be taken in, put them on feet or lift them from the soil to stop waterlogging.

Garden Flowers - Planning for Christmas

2008-11-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

I’m wandering around the garden this week with secateurs in hand and a gleam in my eye. I’m planning my Christmas decorations.

There are a number of ways you can guarantee fresh flowers for Christmas without paying a fortune to the florist for them. You can force bulbs like narcissus and Amaryllis, and I intend to be doing that next year when the greenhouse is finally installed or you can grow flowers that will be at their best in December, which is a lot easier than it sounds, because Winter Jasmine, Witch Hazel and Tinus are all lovely hardy shrubs and trees that simply thrive on bad weather. Finally you can preserve flowers, leaves and seeds by a variety of means. I have taken seed heads from some plants and hung them upside down in the shed to dry and in the next few weeks I shall be giving them a light spray with gold paint and using them to make wreaths and place settings. I’ve also got a number of palm leaves in mind to cut fresh from the palm tree to use as backgrounds for smaller decorations to be hung on the internal doors of the house - they will have dried ivy leaves stuck to them, with a centre of bright poinsettias.

What I’m doing right now is preserving the last summer flowers with glycerine. You have to buy special liquid glycerine from a craft shop and heat it according to the directions which can vary. Then you slide the stems of mature branches or flowers (note mature – young growth doesn’t have enough fibrous interconnections to work with this method) into the liquid and leave for up to three weeks. You end up with perfectly preserved and pliable flowers – often a little darker than their original colour but otherwise as natural as if you’d just picked them.

Dried flowers courtesy of Elizabeth Tritippo at Flickr

All Seasons Garden - Tropics in November

2008-11-15T10:21:00.000-08:00

It’s been a while since I did one of these, and because I happened to be walking past a town-house in a rare moment of sunshine a couple of days ago, and peered into the garden to see what was there, I got the shock of my life, in a good way. I really couldn't believe my eyes!

A couple of things to say about this: first there is obviously a micro-climate around this particular area of South London (here’s a surprising tip – colleges of adult education and public swimming pools often create micro-climates where frost rarely happens because they are heated at night and chuck out enough warm air to stop ground frost for nearly a quarter mile radius, assuming the area isn’t windy) and second, the house-holder or (more likely) the house-holders gardener, has very green fingers.

Even so, this is impressive, it could be a garden in July. My fuchsia is still flowering but with nothing like the intensity of this one, and that stunning structural plant as a key feature make the whole garden seem tropical in the extreme.

Most of us can’t get away with such large tender plants, but palms are hardy right up as far as Norwich now, while everybody can have a bit of winter colour from heathers, even when there’s snow on the ground.

Gardening failures

2008-11-13T07:57:00.000-08:00

We all have them, don’t we? Although it seems that they are something nobody likes to talk about: like stress incontinence and affairs outside marriage!

A recent survey claims that people don’t just buy Marks and Spencers food and pass it off as their own dinner party creation, they also buy similarly ‘expert’ plants and con their friends that they grew them. I do know one lady who can’t produce blue hydrangeas in her garden because the soil is alkaline. On the rare occasions when she is visited by her overbearing mother-in-law, she actually goes out and buys a blue hydrangea plant and sticks it in her shrubbery – there’s a space left just for it. So why does it have to be a blue hydrangea, I asked her? And the answer was that she personally hated hydrangeas in any colour, but her mother-in-law loved the blue ones and couldn’t grow them either, so she thought the investment was worthwhile to make the other woman green with (blue) envy. And as she’s given away all the hydrangea bushes as soon as mother-in-law leaves, and I’ve got two of them, I have to say that her failure is my success!

But the bulk of our failures result from having big plans and small skills. We invest in orchids or cactus or tender alpines or rampantly invasive water plants ‘because they look lovely’ and then, when we don’t put in the time necessary to maintain them, the result is failure.

But however bad we are at what WE do, this picture should make us all feel better. Somebody put that ladder up there to prune that Virginia Creeper, once upon a time … at least we’re not that bad!

Mulching autumn beds

2008-11-09T08:53:00.001-08:00

There are several tasks that should be done in November, no matter how little we like the idea.

Where you have empty flowerbeds, you need to mulch them for winter, because even the best and flattest of beds can experience soil erosion in the wind and become compacted under the pressure of rainwater and snow. Mulching prevents both these things happening and also adds organic matter to the soil.

It’s also time to terminate the adventurous weeds that have germinated as a result of autumn rains because getting them out with a hoe right now is fifty times easier than trying to hand weed them out in spring when the are out-competing the plants you want to preserve.

Cut back your peonies all the way to the ground (even if they are having a last flush of flowers) – especially if you live in a frosty area and then mulch their crowns so frost can't get in and kill the plant. It's also good to prune late summer and autumn-flowering shrubs like Buddleia and hydrangea now, because if you don’t get round to them you’re going to have to wait until late February to cut them back. Roses should be taken back to around two feet so that winter winds can’t whip their stems and cause damage.

And my least favourite November task: pulling up the snapdragons and nasturtiums that have begun to die back, because it’s the final admission that winter is really here!

Greenhouse update (not)

2008-11-06T07:37:00.000-08:00

I wish I’d bought my greenhouse from somebody else- because then I might be able to show you a picture of the finished building, not a picture I've borrowed from somebody luckier than me – but I was seduced by the fact that I’d been given a nice big gift voucher and ended up buying from a major chain of DIY stores that shall be nameless. And what a mistake that was!

I have now had three different greenhouses delivered – and three different bases and three different sets of glazing. But never has this major chain managed to the right base and the right glazing to arrive with the right frame – and not until this week have they mastered the fairly basic skill of only collecting the wrong items and leaving the right items to be matched up to the next delivery. Oh no! Their idea of customer service is to take everything away each time so that it turned into a kind of lucky dip conducted by delivery van: take three random huge cardboard boxes from the back of the vehicle, unpack them, and call the store to complain that once again, the wrong things have turned up.

Sigh. So finally, this week, I have the right three elements to create a greenhouse. But now I don’t have the free time to put the dratted thing together.

Take my advice – buy your greenhouse from a company that has good customer service: it doesn’t matter if it costs a bit more, it will be worth it in the end!

Peaceful greenhouse courtesy of orin optiglot

November garden tasks: get those suckers!

2008-11-03T12:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, it’s that time of year. Both fruit trees and ornamentals (those purchased for their blossom or beautiful autumn leaf colour) are prone to producing suckers from their roots and stem bases because the chosen variety was grafted on to the roots of another robust, disease-resistant variety that is now making a bid for dominance via the suckers. Wisteria are prone to base suckering too, which is great if your wisteria is a wall covering but less great if it’s climbing a pillar. In either case, November is the time to prune the suckers neatly back to the base of the main plant with secateurs or a sharp knife.

It’s also leaf-fall month.

I do get fed up with picking up leaves, although I tell myself it’s great aerobic exercise and anyway, the sound of a leaf vacuum is one of the least pleasant garden noises, so I would never have one, even if I could afford it. And I tell myself that lots of leaves mean lots of leaf-mould. To make leaf mould for yourself, make a few holes in the base and sides of a robust black bin liner and then rake or collect your leaves and pack them into the bag - it's best to do this on a dry, non-windy day or you simply double your work.

When the bag is full, sprinkle the leaves with rainwater (it’s softer than tap-water and therefore more likely to help the leaves break down) tie the top of the bag with string and shake well. Don’t, as I once did, shake the bag before tying it, as you will almost certainly let go of it and have to collect your leaves all over again! Put the bag a shady, wind-free spot (or tie the string to a hook in your shed, which is what we do) and in a year the leaves will have become a sort of chestnut brown oat-textured material which makes a superb mulch. Either use them like that or tip two bags into one (they will have shrunk a lot by now) to make room for that year’s fresh leaves and let them rot for another year, by which time they will be an almost black granular material which is a fantastic soil conditioner.

Autumn leaves courtesy of Dominic's pics

No wine but a great vine

2008-10-31T08:14:00.001-07:00

The best of October, for me, is the colours in my grape-vine. There are three vineyards within eight miles of my home, all of them producing British white wine, so there’s no reason that I couldn’t have a proper viticultural vine, if I wanted to, but I’m lazy enough to prefer to buy my wine in a bottle and not have to go through all the hassle of pruning a vine and harvesting and making a few bottles that would probably end up utterly undrinkable.

And yet I do have a vine. It is Vitis vinifera 'Purpurea' which is perhaps the most decorative of all the vines, and has the advantage of being hardy in the south of the UK. Even the young foliage turns from pure green to having blushes and tinges of bronze, which become a mauve colour through the summer and then the traditional (but actually quite rare) deep purple in autumn. Fruiting vines don’t produce such uniform depth of colour.

The burgundy foliage coincides with the ripening of tiny bunches of grapes which have the same rich tone as the leaves, but don’t be fooled, they are bitter and so full of pips that once you’ve spat the pips out there’s nothing but skin and a sour taste left in your mouth! Even the birds, in the depth of winter, won’t eat them.

Having a great autumn garden

2008-10-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

There’s a reason that open gardens happen in spring, in the UK, not autumn – it’s that autumn gardens are generally pretty messy affairs.

Here are a few ways to make sure your autumn garden is show-worthy next year:

• A wet summer means autumn mildew and rot – clear away vegetation now, so that you don’t store up problems for next year. Make sure paths are cleaned too, so they don’t harbour spores and infections that you’ll walk all over the garden in spring. Remove yellowing or dead leaves or flowers before rot develops, that also gives you a chance to get rid of weeds hiding under the plant foliage.
• This is the best time to turn your compost heap, aerating it so that it can rot down through the winter, hopefully giving you lovely planting out material in spring.
• Get your spring bulbs, especially daffodils and tulips, in the ground while it is still warm and moisture levels are increasing so plants can settle in before the cold hits.
• You should be mowing less frequently and raising the cut to keep the grass taller. Give your lawn a potassium-rich feed this month to keep it strong through the winter.

Autumn beauty courtesy of davida3

October lawns, butterflies and plants

2008-10-25T14:11:00.000-07:00

A few years ago the advice I would have been giving for October would have been very different. For example, I’d have been telling you with complete confidence that in October you should cut the lawn for the last time – and yet, looking back over my notes for 2007 and 2006, I notice that we carried on cutting the lawn until the first week of December!

I’d also be telling you to prune your shrubs, but now, with the increasingly warm and wet autumns we’re having, I’d say you should wait to prune until a period of cold weather and frost is predicted, because you want the pruning cuts to seal swiftly and cold weather promotes sealing of mature wood, while merely cool weather, especially when associated with damp conditions is an invitation to fungal and other infestations to move in. And while October was also the traditional month to sow seeds from trees and shrubs, if these seeds need a period of cold to germinate you may be better waiting until November, because seeds sitting in pots of damp compost are prone to rotting or damping off.

There are tasks that you can complete regardless of the changing weather patterns: split and divide herbaceous plants that are starting to look weak or overcrowded; weed and mulch your herbaceous border; check tree stakes before winter gales arrive.

It’s also a month to take note of the last of the summer wildlife – my garden fills with red admiral butterflies whenever the sun comes out: they feed on fallen apples and pears and take nectar from Michaelmas daisies and sedums to see them through their winter hibernation. Not since 2005 have we seen any painted lady butterflies on their southern migration, but we live in hope.

One reason I only have two little containers with summer bedding plants is that I find it almost impossible to dig the plants out of the soil while they are still looking great, but it’s a necessary task if you want to have spring bedding looking at its best next year. This is because it needs to go in the ground now, to get its root systems well established while there is still some warmth left in the soil – plants such as wallflowers, polyanthus and primroses leap ahead in spring if they can get their roots down reasonably early in the autumn. Equally, winter pansies are much more likely to flower through the winter if they are established before the cold weather comes to slow them down.

Painted Lady courtesy of Ben Matthews

Autumn garden colours

2008-10-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

It’s always satisfying when the autumn garden has as much colour, if not more, than the summer show, especially when, for all kinds of reasons, the amount of time that we can spend outdoors is becoming shorter.

I like colours that clash. I know it’s not to everybody’s taste, but for me, the vibrancy of colours later in the year is a real antidote to the weather – and this morning we had a heavy frost that tells me winter is truly on the way. Subtle colours can be kept for spring, when the lengthening days compensate for a bit less va-va-voom!

And this combination is one of my favourites, partly because the colours are so glorious and partly because it starts now, in October, and extends well into late November. The orange-berried Pyracantha will keep its berries until December or January, if the birds allow it, and the nerines continue to throw up their hot-pink flower heads until late November.

Nerines naturalise well, if you don’t plant them too deeply, and at this time of year I’m happy to cut great armfuls of them to give to friends who are always amazed at their tropical lushness in an otherwise chilly season.

Major works in the garden

2008-10-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

Why is it that just when you get things to a perfect condition in the garden, you decide to go in for some major, disruptive project? I suppose it’s the constant striving after an even more perfect perfection than you already have …

So this weekend has been a busy one: we’ve dug up three currant bushes, a tayberry and some very prickly raspberry canes, a thornless blackberry (hurrah for thornless, so much easier to uproot without donating a fair amount of your life blood to the soil) and my prized and lovely Katsura tree. Now we have a patch of bare earth which looks miserable, and a whole collection of fruit bushes making a miniature pot-jungle on the path.

And next weekend … we shall begin the insanely complicated process of putting together the greenhouse! Yes, over 300 components of aluminium and polycarbonate glazing, bags of sand and bags of gravel, cement, steel posts and all the rest of the paraphernalia are waiting in the garage to become a small Eden (except it’s a standard greenhouse, not a biome) in which I shall grow tender crops and exotic plants.

There’s only one problem. Well, two, really. Problem number one is trying to guess how long it will take us to do the assembly – a weekend, a week, a month? It looks worryingly difficult.

Problem number two is that the list of things I want to grow is already too big for the greenhouse, and I’m adding to it at least three times a day ….

Edible garden in October

2008-10-13T04:07:00.000-07:00

Just when the major work of the garden is winding down, the edible part of it goes into overdrive – the pears and apples all need harvesting, the crab apples are falling to the ground and even the autumn raspberries have gone for a second surge of fruit.

And even if that didn’t force me to spend all day either up a ladder or in the kitchen, there are the nasturtiums.

I love nasturtiums for their no-nonsense colours, their tendency to spill over every path and boundary and their willingness to grow in the poorest soil, but I also love them because you can turn their unripe seeds into poor man’s capers. All you need to do is pick the green nasturtium seed pods after each blossom falls off and store them in the fridge until you have enough to make the capers.

Boil and cool:

1/s litre white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon pickling salt
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1/4 lemon, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon pickling spice
1 clove garlic, crushed
4 to 6 peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon celery seed

Add the green pods and seal. Keep the mixture refrigerated and use the nasturtium pickles in sauces, dips, casseroles, soups and stews.

Autumn flowers that are guaranteed to please

2008-10-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

Looking out on my garden in October, it’s nearly as bright as in July – while there may be less blooms to admire, the colours are actually more intense, in fact, because the flowers that are in bloom are highlighted against the bright autumn foliage of my sumach tree and the katsura tree, both of which become yellow-orange at this time of year.

The nerines shine out with their lollipop pink and against them the salvias make an exciting contrast, especially salvia involucrate 'Bethellii', which is known as the rose leaf salvia and has similarly glowing pink flowers, and the related but utterly dissimilar salvia corrugata which picks up the colour in the garden in a most impressive way – first with deep green heavily corrugated leaves (hence the name) but offering intensely blue flowers, almost gentian like in shade, which look utterly fantastic against the backdrop of an orange berried pyracantha, or simply highlighted by a grey wall or fence. Of course salvias can be tender, and you need a sheltered spot to get them to overwinter. Even in a safe place, you need to cut them down at the end of the flowering season (often late into November) and mulch them, or you can do what I do - take cuttings now – they root like mint and I simply plant them out the following year when they flower abundantly.