My Garden

Well, actually, it's the end of a lot of bad things! I've started clearing out the greenhouse and beds of all the summer crops and consigning the plants to the compost heap - and boy the compost heap's getting big.

Although there are still a few peppers and chillies in the greenhouse I've started to clean it out ready for the late autumn and winter inhabitants - all the tender and exotic plants from the garden. Yes, shock horror, the greenhouse becomes veg free (apart from a few salads) during the winter. I've started to clean it - the structure and the glass - and given it a good autumn clean; it looks very appealing in there at the moment I have to say.
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Warmth and sun make ‘allotmenteering’ a pleasure at the moment and it is tempting to indulge in unattractive gloating over the late summer abundance.

Turnips were reported on national media last week to, according to supermarkets, be increasingly popular on account of their low cost compared to other foods.  One suspects that the increase was from a very low base as turnips are a minor crop; the media always omit the crucial information

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It has been a long wait and expensive in fungicide, but at last the outdoor tomatoes can be gathered by the bucketful; the slightly blight-tolerant ‘Ferline’, a moderate sized beefsteak cultivar, is the heaviest cropper by far with masses of bright red, tasty succulent fruits, but my favourite is ‘Russian Black’, really a chocolate-maroon sort of colour, with a tangy, salty fresh flavour to its massive ribbed fruits.   Wide spacing and a weed suppressing paper mulch have kept airflow up around the plants and backed up with fungicide the crop is disease free.  The cold nights are causing metabolic disorders so the crop will only last two weeks or so.

While waiting for the last crops to mature, maintenance tasks can be done before the soil gets wet and heavy to work.  As a start the edges were cleaned up.  Normally a carefully directed spray of glyphosate is used to maintain the grass edges but with the summer wind and rain this has not been possible, so it is back to the old way with edging iron and line to make crisp satisfying straight edges. The first steps for the big end of season clear-up have been taken

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OK, so this is it. Autumn is officially here - not only judging by the calendar, but also by the nighttime temperatures - on Saturday night it went down to 4C. So that's pretty much the end of the main veg growing season.

I spent Saturday going through crops tidying up, disposing of the ornamental aubergine plants and sorting through the tomatoes to remove leaves to allow as much sun as possible to get to the fruit - the latter may now have been a complete waste of time as the fruit will probably fair better indoors

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The last of the second earlies were dug in the rain this weekend. You can do that on sandy soil. There are few days in the year when the soil is too wet to work. The damp tubers were left to dry in an open fronted shed beneath plenty of newspaper to exclude light.

After the ground was cleared it was levelled with landscaping rake, trod firm, raked again and sown with Italian ryegrass and raked again to cover the seed and trodden again to firm the seed in. The grass should germinate in a few days and by March will be a leafy sward ready to incorporate after protecting the soil all winter.

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No point in sowing or planting new veg crops now of course so it is time to sow cover crops. Sandy soil should never be left uncovered if at all possible.  Cover crops will suppress weeds, scavenge nutrients left over from the manures and fertilisers used this year and protect the soil from battering under winter rain.

My favourite cover crop is Italian ryegrass – a vigorous annual forage grass that, in these mild southern districts, will grow all winter.  I also have some caliente mustard and finally some T&M mixed green manures.  Naturally these are pest free and even pigeons turn up their noses at these crops. The mustard is first as its larger seeds grow quickly smothering weeds that are still germinating in warm moist soil.

As the spuds come out the ground is raked level, seed broadcast, raked in and the ground trodden very firm.  Last year, as is usual in this district, the soil was too dry and dusty for good results but this year the moist ground is in perfect condition.  Recent last minute sowing of pak choi, turnips and salads germinated in two days, so the cover crops should be up very fast.

Second-early potatoes have matured.  I mostly grow these rather than maincrops because, here, in a dry year potatoes just run out of water and die in late summer and second earlies at least fulfil their yield potential by then.  I am trying out some new second-earlies this year.  ‘Vivaldi’ behaved like a first early and had a high early yield of smooth, white creamy tubes, but it won’t replace my favourite earlies, ‘Accent’ and ‘Lady Christl’. The first batch of Cosmos, a typical Dutch supermarket white cultivar ideal for pre-packing, and for my purposes drought resistant, tolerant of diseases and pests, very high yielding and good quality, was lifted and stored.  Next out was ‘Bonnie’, a potato new to me, white with pink eyes, that yielded less than Cosmos but had a high proportion of big round ‘bakers’.   Baked potatoes, with baked apples, are an autumn favourite of mine.  Of the continental cultivars tried last year, only ‘Red Laure’ impressed me enough to repeat and it has grown much better this year in the absence of blight.

The next batch of spuds have already died back and are ready for lifting and in fact the early maincrop ‘Ambo’ and ‘Robinta’ are maturing fast.  The late ‘Cara’ and ‘Pink Fir Apple’ are still going strong.  This greatly eases the blight spraying chore with what may well be the last spray given to all but the very latest spuds.

Tomatoes will still need regular blight protection but they are grown in a compact batch next to the shed, in which I keep a mini-sprayer permanently charged with fungicide with which to mist the plants very carefully whenever the weather is wet and warm.  At last the outdoor beefsteaks ‘Ferline’ are ripening meaning that I can now gather all the ingredients for ratatouille.

This summer I have done little cooking as such but feasted on whatever choice morsels of meat or fish that can be quickly and lightly cooked were on offer (or more usually approaching the end of their shelf-life) in the local supermarket and heaps of briskly steamed or boiled veg and plenty of salads.  This happy situation will soon end as autumn begins so I am trying to make the most of summer produce while I can.

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You can't beat a good bank holiday to get loads done in the garden. Having spent so much time away recently, we spent all three days getting the garden back into shape and finishing off a few projects that we'd got part way through. One of my main objectives was to give the veg area a good seeing to.

The beefsteak tomatoes obviously were never going to do anything, so they got cleared out of the greenhouse, which made lots of room to space out the remaining tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and cucumbers. One of the aubergines has actually set a fruit, although I don’t hold out much hope of it getting to edible size this late in the season. The peppers are doing really well and we’ll have lots of chillies to keep us going through the autumn. Photographer Tim Sandall is having his own Chilli Festival in a few weeks’ time, so it looks like we'll be able to add to his endeavours.

In order to get all the grubbed up tomato plants onto the compost heaps meant that the finished heap had to be emptied and this was used to top up the beds and as a mulch around the rest of the garden.

Next job was to have a good tidy up of all the other crops – removing dead, damaged or dying foliage, remove spent plants, weed and generally make everything ship shape.

By the end of Saturday I stood back, lent on my hoe and thought ‘phew’ things are back to normal.

There was plenty to harvest and deal with. Although the tomatoes at home have generally been disappointing we’ve had a few fruit here and there and this weekend everything that was ready was harvested to make a rich tomato sauce, which along with some runner beans made a fantastic sauce for salmon steaks. The ‘Hundred & Thousands’ tomato plants have been cropping well and consistently and the tiny cherry tomatoes are great to eat raw and add a hint of sweetness to sauces. Sunday’s gourmet meal was pork with roast beetroot (red & orange) and carrots.

On Saturday we had a real ‘rock and roll lifestyle’ evening and spent hours cleaning, topping and tailing and peeling shallots and by the end of the weekend had six jars of them pickled and ready to store. Similarly the onions were cleaned up and put into store. Clare was a bit miffed as she was hoping to get three that were good enough to enter into one of our local shows next week but we just couldn’t find three that were the same size and shape. The potatoes that we harvested last weekend were similarly cleaned, sorted and put into boxes for storage in the garage.

As always, there were plenty of courgettes to harvest, so many so that Clare decided to bake a courgette cake. I realised she was baking, but hadn’t realised that it was courgette on the menu until I had my first slice to eat and noticed the green flecks. How was it? Well, it wasn’t long before I was tucking into my second slice; I think that answers the question! Moist & yummy is another answer; as you'll see I'm a real connoisseur when it comes to food.

By the end of yesterday the whole of the garden was looking much better, I’d moved a tonne of gravel, I ached all over, I’d eaten well from produce we’d grown ourselves, and was wondering why I’d been moaning about what a waste of time, money and effort gardening was a couple of weeks before! A happy ending to a happy bank holiday.
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It has been a good week for biodiversity.  While cleaning and sorting onions into those for late winter storage, ones to use before December and the rest to use as soon as possible, I saw, through the corner of my eye, a rather dirty onion get up and walk off.  On inspection this unusual onion was a toad which had made a home in the cold frame where the onions are ripening. It crawled off into the herbaceous borders.

Then when lifting the mulching sheet as the last of the broad beans were cleared a slow worm slipped quietly from beneath the sheet into the adjacent strawberry bed. In fact there now appear to be slow worms under all my many mulching sheets - I have seen more slow worms this week than ever before

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At last allotment work is easing off and the plot is mostly up to date.  I have to say I am relieved – it has been a bit hectic harvesting and replanting at the same time.

With only six weeks or so of growing weather left, plants must not run short of nutrients.    However everything looks mighty lush and only some weak, newly planted or pigeon damaged plants need feeding. Brassicas checked by pigeons, have had a second dose of calcium nitrate to boost growth and keep the soil alkaline.  Where grow is not quite as it should be sulphate of ammonia has been applied, dissolved in water and placed at the base of affected plants with a watering can, to crops destined for autumn harvest; beans, beetroot, celery, courgettes and various salads and also in moderation to celeriac and leeks for winter harvest.  Ground cleared of summer crops and due to be resown or replanted has received a boost of dried poultry manure pellets

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Right! This is getting silly! I know each year in the garden is different – but I just wish they were different in a good way. Two years ago we were over-run with tomatoes, peppers, courgettes and aubergines and the freezer was swollen with ratatouille. Last year was the ‘blight year’ and tomatoes and potatoes took a bit of a hammering. This year – it has been beans all the way – in all their forms. But the tomatoes, peppers and aubergines…!

We’ve just come back from a holiday in the south of France – every day hot, sunny and glorious. And while I’m lying next to the pool trying not to become a British lobster I’m thinking it MUST be sunny back home and all the fruiting crops must be bursting with fruit. Luckily, the mother-in-law was house sitting so everything would be fed and watered as and when needed

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