English Summer

Sorry, I missed a week. I was away last weekend, working on a gardener’s question time-type panel at the Shrewsbury Flower Show on Friday and Saturday and at the Family Fun Day in Macclesfield on Sunday. For me, these three days pretty much encapsulated the summer we have had so far: Friday hot and sunny; Saturday windy and overcast; Sunday torrential rain just about all day. Driving back home to the South East was even more bizarre as it was a mixture of all three in the space of 200 miles. This is just like the summers I remember as a child, where the weather was only really consistently good just before we broke up and just after we went back to school.

 

Anyway, as a result of these changing weather patterns, I have been dashing around the garden, trying to keep the lawn cut and edged, trim hedges that have grown like bamboo while I have been away for those few short days and remove weeds that are doing a good job of camouflaging our bedding plants. In between all of this there is work to do, although our trip to Mr Fothergill’s seeds near Cambridge last week was hardly “work”. It was a very enjoyable day, as it gave us the chance to see what will be in next years seed catalogues and start planning what we would like to grow next year. The trouble is, we always want to grow more than we have room for, although at least our neighbours benefit from the surplus plants.

Interestingly, the trials at Mr Fothergill’s were a very good indicator of how well plants can cope with an average English summer. Some obviously hate the wet and others just shrug their shoulders and get on with it. The condition of some was all the more remarkable as they had been standing in water just a few days before.

Certainly, the newer generations of bedding plants and vegetables seem to be much more resistant to pest and diseases, as well as being more tolerant to bad weather than ever before. These new developments are very timely, as there is talk of the European Union withdrawing even more pesticides. These moves will also impact on gardeners who try to grow plants organically, as next month sees the removal of Derris from the garden centre shelves. This product is based on rotenone, extracted from the roots of tropical plants, and has been the mainstay insecticide for many organic gardeners.    

 

Oh well, back to the hedge cutting. There’s about ten more metres of privet to be cut and then I can sit down and watch the closing ceremony for the Beijing Olympics. You know, if we can lobby the London games in four years time to include such utterly British sports as the 10m Hedge Clipping, Long-distance Mowing and Synchronised Bulb Planting, you may see me competing. At least I know I can perform all of these in the pouring rain.  

Nasty Surprises

We are now a four-car family – you know, the sort of people Gordon Brown loves: four lots of insurance, road tax, fuel tax etc, not to mention the roadside cameras. It wasn’t through choice so much as the fact that where we live, the bus service is more of a weekly Stage and a return trip costs even more than a shop at Tesco. Anyway, it means that parking has become a real problem for us (and our neighbours), so we decided to lose the front lawn and increase the size of the drive to get another car off the road. However, since we are keen gardeners, we wanted to do something that would be good for the garden, so rather than opt for a carpet of block paving over the entire area, we looked at ways of getting something that would be suitable for parking a car on and still allow us some “green”.

We discovered the perfect solution with ‘GrassGuard’ from Marshall’s. This is a concrete ‘waffle’ block which is laid on a bed of compacted gravel. The holes in the block are filled with soil and sown with grass seed, so you have a lawn you can stand a car on. The whole lot is porous, so rain water soaks back into the soil, rather than going straight down the drains to add to the localised flooding problems.  

The contractors, Nigel, Dean and Paul, did a brilliant job and everything is now looking great. The grass seed has started to germinate to give us the beginnings of our new ‘car proof’ lawn and suddenly, the whole area looks like we hoped. Not that anyone has dared park on the grass yet!

 

I insisted on sowing the grass seed myself, which I thought at the time was a good idea. I also insisted on digging over the compacted soil in the borders around the new lawn and drive. I now know this was a very bad idea, as I’m as stiff as a board, having pulled muscles I didn’t know were there to be pulled. One more crack about a Zimmer frame and I may have to hit somebody, if I can lift my arm to do it. I always advise people to take it easy and ‘pace themselves’ if they have not done any digging for a while, I just wish I would learn to practice what I preach.

 

The other problem, which we had not foreseen, is cats. More to the point, cats turning my newly-dug borders into a litter tray! You don’t realise how many cats there are in your neighbourhood until they start to treat your garden like the local savings bank and leave a deposit.  We are just going to have to put as many new plants as possible in the border as quickly as we can to make sure there is less bare soil available.

 

On a more cheery note, this is the time of year when many of the seed companies invite the Press to view their trial grounds and take a sneak preview of what will be available for next year. Recently, Val and I went up to Thompson & Morgan, near Ipswich.

As usual, they have lots of excellent new introductions to be released in 2009, but three to definitely watch out for are;

 

Aubergine ‘Orlando’, which makes a stocky plant with hardly any spines and produces heavy crops of purple/black, finger-length fruits up to 5 centimetres long. It is ideal for growing in containers on the patio or in an unheated greenhouse.

 

Cucumber ‘Green Fingers’ – a name easy enough for any gardener to remember! This plant produces baby cucumbers the size of large gherkins and is a heavy cropper producing only female flowers. The real bonus is its tolerance to powdery mildew.

 

And finally, Tomato ‘Cherrola’, which can be grown under protection or in the garden. It shows some resistance to blight and crops heavily throughout the summer, producing long trusses of up to 20 cherry type fruits. This is their Vegetable of the Year for 2009.

Cut and Thrust

With the changeable weather, it is a job for gardeners to know what to do for the best. You water – then it rains. You leave plants to fend for them selves and they wilt, so you have to dash round the garden with watering cans and hosepipes.

If you want a job to do at this time of year that will not be time wasted and will pave the way for better results next year, grab the secateurs and do some pruning. This week, the first of our raspberries finally finished fruiting, so I cut out the old canes while they still had the old cores from the raspberry fruits hanging on them. They will never flower on the old wood again, so get it out of the way and leave plenty of light and space for the new shoots to grow up. Next it will be the blackberries. The old fruit-bearing canes can be cut out down to ground level (just like the raspberries), then you can tie in the new shoots along supports. We’ve found that the more shoots you can train horizontally along wires, the better the crop next year. This year, pruning blackberries has been the best it has ever been, because we planted a new thornless variety called ‘Loch Maree’, which is a good cropper and doesn’t fight back when you prune it.

We’ve had to net the apples to keep our resident blackbird off them, which is a nuisance, as we were just about to start summer pruning them. We do this most years, in fact we hardly ever prune in the winter now. To get the best crops, pruning at the end of July or beginning of August works really well, but rather than rely on a specific date, the trick is to count the number of leaves which have formed on the new shoots. Once the current season’s growth has developed more than 22 leaves, the apple tree starts to develop next year’s flower buds, albeit on a cellular level. Once the tree has reached this stage, the trick is to prune all of the strong, new shoots back to 5 buds and cut the weaker shoots back to 3 buds. Pruning at this stage of development encourages these buds on the shortened stems to form flower buds rather than growth buds for next year. Over the last few years, we have created quite small apple trees with large clusters of fruiting spurs and, most years, we tend to get lots of fruit from a small area – at least, we do if we can keep the blackbird off the ripening apples.

 

The other pruning we have been doing this week seemed to take forever. I spent that much time going up and down the ladder, I started to feel like and ageing yo-yo, which had been re-discovered in the toy box. This is because the wisteria needed pruning and training, so all of the unwanted growths were cut back to about 30 centimetres (12 inches) long. They will be pruned again just after Christmas when they will be cut back again to about 3-4 buds and these will eventually form flowering spurs. The growths we decided to keep were trained out horizontally along their support wires and tied into place. We tie them as close to horizontal as possible, which also encourages flower buds to form rather than growth buds, just like the blackberry I mentioned earlier.