Blue waste

Every few months I get stuck in and do some weeding and trimming. Blue likes to join in, by becoming as one with the pile of detritus I gather. Sometimes she tries to lure me into playing with her by depositing a ball or other throwable amongst the waste, creaking enthusiastically to let me know she's ready to go. I think she likes the smell.

fruit from the garden

autumn has arrived

Five buttery leaves remain clinging to the ginkgo. The withering tomato plants look like they’ve been set up as a prop for Halloween, ready to belatedly join the liquefying sculpted pumpkins on the compost. Knotted black bin bags full of leaves are piled behind the cabin. Autumn is here.

The day starts of well dreich, and is not obviously suitable for excavating a path. Since it’s a matter of lifting the turves and excavating to about 10cm dreich turns to claggy. Of the myriad animals I have caused to live with me none has so far failed to leave an imprint within the house given gritty strength by their previously visiting the now claggy garden.

  

Despite my best attempts and most consistent neglect the plug plants are all still having a go in the tiny plastic-covered staging. Now I’ll actually have to plant them out. Talk amongst neighbouring friends has been of saving on food bills once I start harvesting. I’ve made it clear that is unlikely. Especially at the moment, with one 2m row of landcress and 1/3 row of ruby-stemmed spinach.

My veg plot is 6x3m, with two raised beds offering around 12m2 of growing space. And two rows of herbs. I’ve yet to order two plum trees, which will be fan-trained, in fact I’m hoping for a greengage and a plum, which are x-fertile. Together with the frame they’ll also enclose the plot. The cherry is established now, this year we must have had around 6kg of fruit, and the birds fed well too. I’ve pruned it again, so that next year the fruit will be more accessible to us and with luck less accessible to the birds. I haven’t noticed if the cherry crops well every other year – I don’t think so.

planted today - garden work

The garden is pretty full, but this month I've felled the birch and added an apple tree, and added semi evergreen honeysuckle Lonicera japonica (West facing bed near cabin), clematis Dorothy Walton (west facing bed near compost bin). I've pulled up loads of forget-me-nots, and resorted to some chemical (toxic) slug pellets.

clematis dorothy walton - planted today

clematis Dorothy Walton (group three, hard prune after first sign of growth

Initial pruning and training

If young clematis plants are left unpruned they often produce very long single stems with the flowers produced only at the very top.

Unless the plant already has three or four healthy stems growing from the base, all newly planted clematis should be pruned back hard the first spring after planting. Cut back to just above a strong pair of leaf buds about 30cm (12in) above soil level. This will encourage multiple stems which can be trained in to supports to give a good coverage.

During the spring and summer, tie in new growth, spacing stems evenly on the support.

Pruning established plants

• In February or March, cut back all the old stems to the lowest pair of healthy buds 15-30cm (6-12in) above soil level.
• Small-flowered clematis with attractive seed heads (such as C. ‘Bill MacKenzie’, C. ‘Helios’, C. orientalis, C. tangutica and C. tibetanasubsp. vernayi) can just be thinned out and trimmed back to the main framework of branches, leaving the seedheads to be enjoyed.

If left unpruned, this group will continue growing from where the growth ended the previous season, becoming top heavy, flowering well above eye level, and with a bare base. 

If desired, they can be left unpruned to scramble over pergolas where space is not limited.

cordon currants

I am trying to pack in a lot in my mini-allotment. I am working up to a semi-cordoned currant arrangement. Actually, what I'm looking for is a currant hedge. The bushes growing alongside the Greengage need to stay lower than the lowest branches of the fan. Well, it's going to be a fan, at the moment it is an upright with a branch each side at right angles and a couple of stubby attempts at a fan.

Back to the bushes. They are redcurrants, and are already fruiting. It won't be plentiful this year, but I'm working up to a bumper crop next year.

composting and excavating

My compost bin is part of the fence dividing my 'garden' garden from my 'allotment' garden. In the limited space of a town garden these are the decisions you have to make - compost bins attract slugs and snails, which is not what you want near your tender veg plants. The advantage is that when the material is well rotted, it's near the veg plot. The one metre square bin is split in two, and household and garden waste (no weeds) goes into one side, then the other.

The bin provides a good backdrop to plants on the flowerbed side, and setting some bricks into the soil makes a nice path, favoured by all neighbourhood cats. I hope they enjoy hunting any rats that may be lurking. In fact our most recent ex-cat is enjoying it too, since I had to inter Pepper under the bricks, as other unbricked locations attracted too much attention.

In summer months the compost gives off a mild odour, which is only noticeable when you stand very near it. The nearest you get to it in passing is about a metre, or three feet in old money. Inevitably, it attracts insects to do vital work, but these are kept down by scattering straw over the top of the active compost every few weeks.

Experts talk about well rotted compost being like used tea leaves. This seems very unlikely, when you're chucking slops of this and that into the void, and inhaling that acrid smell. Still, the compost I dug out at the weekend was just like dense, fine used tea leaves. Within the solid tea leaf-y mass were egg shells, wine corks, avocado skins like thin brittle leather and dessicated but unrotted split avocado pips. And teaspoons. No babies have been thrown out with the bathwater so far in this house, but teaspoons are at constant risk. They survive better than the wooden pestle I discovered in the last batch of compost I made, which looks gently scalloped, as though made out of driftwood.

Some of the compost has been dug into a trench, awaiting the French beans. The rest will be used over the summer.