Prepare your camellias for winter

This spring, the camellia in my back garden produced a grand total of three flowers.  No more, no less.  Serious disappointment all round.  This lacklustre show was, I believe, a direct consequence of the prolonged hot and dry summer of 2018 and my general laziness with respect to watering the more mature and better-established plants in my back garden, including said camellia.

Water to swell the buds

Camellias form their flower buds during the late summer and early autumn, so rely on plenty of water during this time to help the buds develop and swell.  We’ve all been grumbling about the atrociously wet summer and autumn this year, but it’s brought benefits; you can imagine my delight today when I noticed that my camellia has a really impressive number of buds forming on it.  Every (rain)cloud has a silver lining. 

To get your camellia ready for the winter, give it a good thorough watering all around the root zone, before there are any hard frosts.  You can also protect the root zone by mulching with bark chips, pine needles or straw.  Don’t mulch with dead leaves unless they are well shredded first, otherwise they tend to layer up and form a dense mat that can prevent water and air percolating down into the soil, just where the roots need it.

Protect from frost

The next issue for me is that my camellia is situated up against an east-facing wall.  This means that the buds (and new flowers) are exposed directly to the early morning sun.  This direct sunlight following an overnight frost can cause the buds to go brown and drop without opening. 

To avoid this, I shall keep an eye on the weather, and if frost is forecast, I will protect the whole bush with horticultural fleece for the night, removing it by late morning, once temperatures are above freezing.  This will probably also involve faffing around with some bean poles, to prevent the fleece material touching the flower buds, but since the camellia is one of the only plants flowering in my garden at that time, I think it is worth the effort.

Autumn Lawn Care

The days are rapidly drawing in, the leaves are falling, and I’m relieved to observe that my lawn is no longer turning into a hay meadow the moment I turn my back.  In fact, relative to when we first moved in five years ago, our lawn is looking much healthier.  This is entirely due to the fact that a couple of years ago, we removed a number of self-seeded trees from the boundary so the lawn now enjoys more light.  I have never given my own lawn any good TLC, so it must be time to practise what I preach.  Here are the main steps:

1. Scarify to remove moss and thatch

Use a spring-tined rake to scarify the lawn.  The aim of this is to rake hard, to remove any moss and layers of dead grass (thatch) that may have accumulated in the lawn over time.  If left for too many years, the thatch can impact on air circulation and drainage, promoting moss and weed growth, instead of grass. 

The lawn will look an alarming mess after scarifying, but don’t panic; this is completely normal and it will soon recover.

2. Aerate to encourage root growth

Lawns become compacted over time, from frequent mowing, footfall, kids playing and garden toys and furniture.  As with all plants, grass roots depend on good air circulation to facilitate the uptake of water and nutrients, so soil compaction can severely limit healthy lawn growth.

To reduce compression, you can aerate by driving in a garden fork over the whole lawn, or use a hollow-tined lawn aerator.  I think this is a better option than the fork as it removes plugs of soil, rather than potentially exacerbating the compaction in the soil surrounding the solid tines of the garden fork.

3. Prepare and apply a top-dressing mix

Mix a top-dressing, using garden compost and sharp sand.  The proportions will depend on your soil type, but for my heavy clay, I will use a 1:1 ratio of garden compost to sharp sand.  For lighter soils, use less sand.  Spread the top-dressing over the lawn and use a stiff broom to brush it into the holes created during the aeration process.

4. Apply an autumn lawn feed and reseed any bare patches

In autumn, your lawn needs a fertiliser that is high in potassium to promote strong root growth, but low in nitrogen. Excess nitrogen would encourage a flush of new, soft growth that would be less likely to withstand winter conditions.  Look out for lawn-feeds sold specifically for autumn use, for this reason.

Read and follow the instructions on the packet for applying the fertiliser; over-application can damage the lawn. 

Reseed any bare patches; after raking out the thatch on the are to be reseeded roughen up the soil surface and then level it to a fine tilth using a rake.  Mix your grass seed in a bucket with an equal volume of sieved compost.  Spread it over the bare patch and tamp it down with the back of a rake.  Cover the newly-sown patch with polythene, pegged at the corners, to encourage germination and prevent the birds eating the seeds.  Once the grass seed has started to germinate, remove the polythene.

All you have to do now is look forward to a marvellously healthy green lawn in spring.

Gardening for mental health

I first wrote this blog post for World Mental Health Day in 2019, around the start of my change in career to gardening. This coming week is Mental Health Awareness Week, and I’m sure I will see the usual wealth of material floating around on social media, extolling the benefits of gardening for improving health and wellbeing. Even three years later, I still hold firm to everything I wrote back then, but perhaps with the addition of a little jog, once or twice a week, if energy levels and physical fitness permit...

Over the last few years, a number of people, on hearing that I’d made quite a radical career change have asked if I’d always wanted to become a gardener.  The honest answer to that question is, ‘No’.  My main reason for taking up and pursuing gardening is that it offers me everything I need to keep happy and healthy; fresh air, exercise, better control over the amount of work I do, and flexibility over when I do it; opportunities to keep learning, pay close attention to nature and the seasons, and to work both alone and with others.

When I was diagnosed with my first episode of depression in early 2017, a relative leant me Mark Williams’ and Danny Penman’s book ‘Mindfulness; A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World’. Mindfulness is a bit of a buzz word these days, but there is a growing body of research demonstrating the success of mindfulness techniques for treating depression. 

However, aside from the fact that at the time, I was struggling to make sense of any printed material, I just couldn’t get the Williams and Penman approach to work for me.  Eating raisins or cleaning my teeth in a mindful way just wasn’t doing it for me; I was too desperate to accelerate the evening routine so I could get into bed.  I don’t think I managed to get past the second chapter.

Gardening, on the other hand, provides the best setting for completely engaging with every one of your senses.  You can take your gloves off and feel the coolness of the soil; touch glossy leaves, velvety petals or mistakenly grasp a bramble; I love the smell of the garden after long awaited rain; lavender, roses, and I can never walk past my lemon balm without giving the foliage a rub and a sniff. 

There are always sounds to check-in with, from birds, buzzing insects and chattering squirrels to passing traffic and even diggers and dumper-trucks, if it happens to be my volunteering day at RHS Bridgewater.  My edible garden is still in its infancy, but I was pleased with the carrots this year, and am hoping that the new currant bushes will be sufficiently established to give me a good crop next year.

And once I’m out in the garden, there’s no restless scrolling through social media on my phone; I don’t even bother answering calls since I know that by the time I have wrestled off my gloves and found which pocket the phone is in, it will have gone to voicemail.  This is exactly how it should be, and I now know that engaging all my senses with the garden is my own personal key to staying healthy.

Things to do in the garden in October

It’s slippery-leaf season again and there are two reasons why I know this.  The first is that I just had a skid of cartoon-banana-skin proportions on the fallen beech leaves outside my house.  The second reason is that after this week, Manchester City Council will stop their weekly emptying of our green wheelie bins, just when there is a tonne of leaves to put in them. 

If you need a bit of advice on what to do with all those leaves, have a look at my blog post from last year on the subject.  Here are some other tasks worth tackling, if you can dodge the raindrops:

Plant spring bulbs and herbaceous perennials

Now is the time to start planting bulbs; crocus and daffodil bulbs can start going in now; wait a little longer before planting tulips, because they are more susceptible to disease.  Bulbs look best if planted in groups, and should be planted at about two to three times their own depth.

If you want to plant herbaceous perennials for next year’s displays, this month is probably your last opportunity, before the soil gets too cold for the roots to become established.  A good design tip; plant herbaceous perennials in groups of three or more, to give your beds or borders some coherence.  Incorporate lots of organic matter into the soil, before planting.

Store your apples correctly

If you intend to store your apples, pick the fruit with the stalks intact, and only store if healthy and undamaged.  ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ and ‘Pixie’ have a good storage life, and can last up to three months if stored properly. Keep an eye on the weather forecast and pick before any hard frost is expected, or the fruit will start dropping, and get damaged.

Store apples in a rodent-free, cool, dark, slightly humid but well-ventilated place, at around 3-7 degrees centigrade.  Garages, cellars and sheds may be suitable but store away from items such as paint, fertilisers, fuel and onions, because apples can be tainted by strong scents.

Store in open sided crates, shallow boxes or shelves with slatted sides, to maintain air movement around the fruit.  Lay fruit stalk-side down, in single layers and not touching.  Wrapping each fruit individually with newspaper can prolong storage, but makes it difficult to check the fruit regularly for any signs of disease or spoilage. Discard any rotten fruit immediately.

Rhubarb

I planted three new crowns of rhubarb at the beginning of this year.  One crown in particular has made exceptional progress, but I have resisted the temptation to harvest any. 

This is apparently the ‘done thing’ in the first year, to enable the plants to get really well established.  I shall wait for the leaves to die off naturally, before cutting the stems to the ground; have a thorough weeding session, and then apply a mulch around the crowns.

Keep on tidying…

Continue to tidy up any perennials that have finished flowering, but if the foliage is still green, leave it until it is blackened by the frost.  Try and tidy fallen leaves out of beds and borders, to prevent them harbouring slugs or rotting the crowns of other herbaceous perennials.  Cut or shred any dead, woody growth into small pieces as you remove it, before putting it on the compost heap; this will help it break down more quickly.

‘My Montbretia’s a mess!’

This may be so, but don’t mess with your Montbretia.  Not just yet, anyway.  If the leaves are still green, they are still photosynthesising - using the remaining autumnal sunlight to create sugars.  These sugars are then laid down in the corms (bulbs) to enable the plant to perennate through the winter before putting on new growth in spring.  Remove any spent flower stems at the base, but resist the temptation to remove and tidy up the foliage until it has turned brown.

Don’t remove Montbretia foliage until it turns brown

Montbretia is the common name for the hybrid Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora, created by a French plant breeder in 1879.  However, it actually grows extremely fast and clumps quickly get congested, leading to reduced flowering.  Much Montbretia has naturalised itself in the wild, and since 2010, it has been illegal to plant or let it grow in the wild.

There are still plenty of Crocosmia cultivars that are not so rampant, and they make a valuable component to late summer and autumn flowering borders.  They are usefully unfussy about what type of soil they grow in, and are tolerant of partial shade (although flower best in full sun).  Cultivars of Crocosmia pottsii and C. masoniorum are also tolerant of damp soil. 

Suggested Crocosmia cultivars and planting ideas

A century of hybridisation has generated a range of heights and a whole palette of colours from the ‘hot’ end of the spectrum.  Large cultivars for positioning at the back of the border include Crocosmia ‘Zeal Giant’ or the more well-known C. ‘Lucifer’.  Plant tall cultivars deeply to prevent them leaning over, and give them plenty of space.

For autumn flowering borders, three later-flowering cultivars include Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora ‘Saracen’, with its bronze leaves, and red and purply-black flowers; the orange C. ‘Star of the East’, and C. x crocosmiiflora ‘Plaisir’.  These grow to a height of around 50cm and would all work well alongside asters and rudbeckias in a border for late-season interest.

If you have a specific colour scheme in mind, the cultivar with the reddest hue is C. ‘Hellfire’.  More pinkish varieties include C. ‘Raspberry Spray or C. ‘Culzean Pink’.  For yellow flowers, there’s C. ‘Twighlight Fairy Gold’ and C. ‘Paul’s Best Yellow’.

Key care tips

·        Water well in summer;

·        Remove spent flower spikes, before the plant expends its energy forming seeds;

·        Remove foliage once brown – probably after first frosts;

·        Protect any grown in containers from frost;

·        Divide clumps every three or four years, in early spring, before growth starts.  Discard up to half to three-quarters of the old corms and replant the fattest.

Crocosmia in a border of Agapanthus at Hydrock Hall, Cornwall, August 2019.

Things to do in the garden in September

Another academic year is underway; the boys have been booted back to school and some semblance of routine is returning.  After some mixed summer weather, the handful of clear blue skies we’ve had this month has been a welcome relief.  My garden has run riot recently, so I’ve definitely got my work cut out.  Here is a selection from my own to-do list.

Tidy-up herbaceous perennials

Dead-head or even cut right down perennials that have finished flowering, if they are looking untidy.  If seed-heads look attractive, consider leaving them for some winter interest, and as a source of food for garden wildlife.  Relocate self-seeded biennials such as foxgloves and teasels, if they aren’t growing in convenient locations.

Relocate self-seeded biennials if necessary - such as teasels.

Container plants

Once summer bedding plants have finished flowering, they can be lifted and consigned to the compost heap.  Cease feeding container shrubs and trees, to prevent them putting on a flush of soft growth which would then be susceptible to frost damage.  You can, however, give containerised shrubs and trees one last feed of rock potash to ripen up the wood, which provides protection against the winter cold.

Fruit and veg

Lift maincrop potatoes on a warm sunny day, and leave them on the soil surface for a couple of hours, to dry off.  Store undamaged potatoes in paper or hessian sacks, in a dark, dry, frost-free place, to prevent them turning green and / or rotting.

I’ll be planting my autumn onion sets in the next few weeks; I plant them about 8cm apart, tips showing, in the window boxes that I have hanging on my decking balustrade - once I’ve cleared out the straggly nasturtiums.  I cover them with chicken wire to protect them against our resident pair of jays, and the numerous pesky squirrels.

Pest control

Pest activity is starting to slow down, but now is a good time to apply nematode control against slugs, vine weevil and lawn pests such as leather jackets, whilst the soil temperature is still high enough for these treatments to be effective.  Weeding, and tidying away the dead foliage of herbaceous perennials also removes hiding places for the slugs.

Halloween preparation!

Our recent family holiday to Switzerland included a visit to a maize-maze on a farm also dedicated to growing every type of Cucurbit (Squashes, pumpkins, gourds etc.) under the sun.  If you are growing pumpkins and squashes of your own, place boards or tiles underneath them, to prevent them rotting where they touch the soil.  Harvest them with a long stalk (this also prevents them rotting) and leave them in the sun or greenhouse to allow their skins to cure and harden to prolong storage.

Bindweed invasion

It’s a fact.  The bindweed has gone bananas.  I took my eyes off a client’s back garden for one fortnightly session in order to trim the front hedge and weed the paved drive, and before I knew it, the magnificent mature mahonia tree was completely smothered in it, not to mention the surrounding roses and spiraea bushes.

There are two types of bindweed; Calystegia sepium - commonly known as hedge bindweed or bellbind, and Convolvulus arvensis - also known as field bindweed.  Both plants have a similar, white rhizomous root system.  These rhizomes are brittle, and the plant is capable of regenerating from just a small section of broken-off rhizome, making cultural control of this persistent perennial weed particularly difficult. 

The roots can penetrate up to five metres deep, and spread out to as much as two metres in just one growing season.  This year’s combination of sunshine and showers appears to have created the optimal conditions for maximising its spread.

Calystegia sepium - Hedge bindweed

Calystegia sepium is what I most commonly come across in urban gardens in south Manchester.  It has heart-shaped leaves and white trumpet-like flowers.  If you look away for about three seconds, you find that it has entwined and smothered most of the garden. 

Calystegia sepium - Hedge bindweed

Convolvulus arvensis - Field bindweed

Convolvulus arvensis has pink trumpet-shaped flowers which are smaller than those of the Calystegia sepium, and tends to be more problematic in long grass, or is found scrambling over bare soil.

Convolvulus arvensis - Field bindweed

In both cases, dig down and try and remove as much of the white rhizomes as possible, without breaking them.  Autumn digging can also be a good opportunity to have a go at doing this.  I have been doggedly adopting this approach in my own garden for the last two years, and the problem is definitely much reduced.

Things to do in the garden in August

August is galloping by at an alarming rate.  For our family, this month has involved rain-affected cricket matches, another damp camp, flood-delayed train and car-journeys, and I’ve just disconnected our over-flowing water butts from the downpipe.  All-in-all, a rather different story from last summer.  If you manage to dodge the drops sufficiently to get outside, here are some suggestions to go at:

Keep it neat

The combination of sunny spells interspersed with downpours has resulted in phenomenal growth in the garden.  The volume of biomass out there, compared with last year, is amazing, but also somewhat overwhelming when you are trying to keep it all under control.  In general, if it’s finished flowering, prune out the flowering stems or remove dead heads.  If it is also trying to get in your back door, shroud your lavatory window or scalp you from the pergola, then give it a prune as well.  Keep hedges such as privet, yew and beech trimmed.

This week I have pruned a wisteria; these are vigorous plants, and pruning them in late summer and then again in winter diverts their energy from new stem production into flowering.  Remove weak and unwanted whippy stems, particularly those growing from around the base.  Remove any stems that have outgrown the space provided by the supporting framework.  Any thin stems should be shortened, encouraging them to thicken.  Shorten these again in late winter, to two or three buds. This is where the flowers will develop.

Fruit and veg

Keep harvesting soft-fruit, and prune the gooseberries and redcurrants; my father popped up this week with a freezer box stuffed full of fruit from his Yorkshire Dales garden.  And since it poured the following day, I was able to spend the time making a big batch of delicious raspberry and redcurrant jam.

Start lifting maincrop potatoes.  If the foliage looks blighted, remove it and put it in the municipal green waste (not the compost heap) and leave the potatoes for a further couple of weeks before lifting.  Lift and dry onions once the foliage starts to yellow.

Sowing for late autumn cropping

Once the summer harvest has freed up some space, consider late sowings for autumn crops, particularly in milder southern climes; beetroot, chard, kohl rabi and salad onions can all work well.  In northern areas, the growing season can be extended by using cloches, horticultural fleece or a cold-frame or unheated greenhouse.

Keep weeding

There’s always weeding to be done, and it’s particularly worthwhile to get those perennial weeds out now, before they set seed.  And if you’ve commissioned a neighbour to look after your garden whilst you’ve been on holiday, don’t forget to bring them something nice back, to say ‘thank you’!