Monthly Archives: October 2013

October garden: Greenhouses and fruit garden

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in garden design, greenhouse, landscaping, my garden

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octgarden_greenhousecukes

It’s amazing what you can fit into an 8×6 greenhouse: here be melons, cucumbers, chilli ‘Razzmatazz’, okra, sweet peppers and my amazing tree chilli, now taller than me

The slow dying of the greenhouses is the swansong of my year. They’re the last to go: long after the veg beds outside are brown with dead foliage and slimy with rot, the cucumbers are still challenging me to find new recipes and the chilli peppers are suffusing with colour from green to orange to red.

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Smaller but perfectly formed: ‘Sweet Crunch’ cucumbers, still going strong

It’s been a good year: and a bad. I have two greenhouses, facing each other in the lee of a hedge across the coldframe I made for my old garden (it’s falling to pieces now – a combination of age and a blackthorn tree just above which keeps dropping branches at inconvenient moments).

In one greenhouse I plant cucumbers, melons, peppers and anything else I fancy growing that year: in the other are my tomatoes.

I always start the year so optimistically with my toms: I love to try new varieties or revisit old ones. This year it’s been Gardeners’ Delight, Costoluto Fiorentino (quite the best beefsteak for flavour bar, perhaps, Brandywine) and the plum tomatoes Rio Grande.

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Not so successful. The other greenhouse has been sick with blight for months: nothing will grow in there but the marigolds. Pretty as they are, you can’t eat them.

But despite the dry weather, despite the perfect growing conditions of this blissfully warm summer, the blight got in.

I mulched with compost from the bins outside: mistake no. 1, as it no doubt carried blight spores. Then a pane of glass in the roof lost a corner, so the rain – laden, too, with spores – could spatter the Costolutos with fatally infected water. And the bush tomatoes I had in the corner – ‘The Amateur’ – turned out to be the most blight-prone tomatoes I’ve ever grown, finishing off my other plants by incubating and then spreading the plague.

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This was meant to be a ‘Black Beauty’ aubergine: but it’s turned out more like a ‘Pinstripe’. Duff seeds – veg which haven’t grown into what they said on the packet – have been a bit of a feature this year.

Well: it’s a lesson learned. This winter’s to-do list includes changing the soil in this greenhouse; replacing the broken panes; and fumigating with a sulphur candle. Then next year I shall use nothing but the cleanest compost and water with tap water. I’m considering growing only blight-resistant varieties, too: ‘Losetto’, ‘Ferline’ and ‘Fantasio’, perhaps.

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My fruit garden: the only ‘finished’ bit of the garden (and even then it needs a netting cage, quite a few more plants and a bit of extra path put in). My little still small place of calm.

On the plus side, my fruit garden is looking wonderful. I planted it just last winter with two maiden cherries, a redcurrant, a couple of blackcurrants raised from cuttings taken from plants I had on my allotment, and a slew of raspberries. Oh, and a bed of strawberries, of course.

You’re not supposed to grow fruit on chalk, and my soil is grey with the stuff. But as a gardener to the core, I’m going to try anyway. So far I’m encouraged: the raspberries have not turned yellow as I expected them to (though three canes have turned up their toes for reasons unknown); the cherries are thriving; and the blackcurrants have had their first fruits already.

Here’s how it looked in 2010:

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October garden: Veg plot

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in garden design, kitchen garden

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The beginnings of the zigzags are emerging at the far end: that’s my first asparagus bed on the left there, planted this spring

We have been here three seasons now: and what better time to start recording the garden that’s emerging slowly, painfully, from 30 years’ worth of indifference.

It is a humbling thing to create a garden. You come in with all kinds of grand ideas: you try to impose your own character on the soil but it turns around and says, no, this is me, I am this way and you cannot change my nature.

This garden has been far wilder than any I have made before. Nature insists on being taken account of: the great, woolly ancient Somerset hedgerows that surround us, for example, defining the space, and though we can cut them back to their bounds they are a physical, boisterous, living presence we can’t ignore.

And then there’s the growth: the exuberant, fecund, joyous speed with which greenery thrusts from the ground into the kind, West Country air. That’s great from a gardener’s point of view: I have never grown such lush, huge, wonderful plants. And exhausting, too: it includes hogweed above your head, bindweed sprinting madly up flower stems, cow parsley romping through borders and nettles thick as forests.

The previous owners dealt with the rampancy by mowing it within an inch of its life. They did little other gardening, in fact: it probably took all their time to get round the place with hedgetrimmers and ride-ons.

The veg plot was a long, thin lawn between looming hedges when we moved in. Very neat, very pleasant, very dull. There were four fruit trees: the remains, I think, of an orchard but sadly clogged with lichen and moss, the air still and heavy inside the bulging, overgrown hedges that left a narrow strip just 8ft wide down the middle.

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At the near end it’s more chaotic but I laid out the zigzags with canes and string last winter. I love growing in big triangles: so much more creative than four-by-ten beds.

I change my mind more about where I grow my vegetables than anywhere else in the garden, probably because this is the beating heart of the place where I spend most of my time: it’s no coincidence that this is the first part of the garden I tackled.

So this bit has undergone a few reincarnations since its hedge-choked early days: at first, fresh from my allotment, I laid out the beds in a practical line of sensible, not-too-wide raised beds, the path down the right-hand side, smaller paths between each bed.

But I got so bored: sooo bored of looking at those straight lines, and though I tried to shoehorn a little imagination in there – frothy ‘Salad Bowl’ lettuces at the feet of my Telephone peas, that kind of thing – it wasn’t the inspiring space I wanted it to be.

Cue triangles: big ones, hugely impractical, possibly verging on the perverse, but ah! so beautiful. I weave peas among the feet of my beans, and march lettuces along the edges; I froth nasturtiums over the boards and draw zigzags in beetroot leaves. Every time I go in here my soul sings and I get so excited about what becomes possible when you throw out the rulebooks and follow your heart.

Here’s what it looked like in 2010 when we moved in:

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