The weather has been encouraging hibernation: very low light, damp and rainy, then cold and frosty. What the weather bods call ‘anticyclonic gloom’ seems to have dominated the south east of England for the past months. But the days are getting longer and bulbs are pushing up shoots. This is the time for pruning apples and pears.
Crawley Beauty, Tinsley Quince and Saltcote Pippin
Every year, I put it off … it requires ladders, a pruning saw, loppers and the strength to turn exuberant shoots into stumps. But it has to be done – the apples and pear we have cordoned against the station wall have grown strongly. Chopped back they must be, if only to allow for more air to circulate to counteract the prevailing damp. Fingers crossed they respond vigorously with a good crop of fruit. You never can tell …
Four apples and a pear … like shorn sheep
Meanwhile our plum-in-a-box (Marjorie’s seedling) has grown enormous and if we don’t get it pruned, will shade the whole edible growing area in the summer. A ‘seedling’ it is not.
The plum tree (Marjorie’s seedling)
I think we’re going to need professional help again with this tree. It needs solid pruning back. It’s never really fruited well so there’s not a lot to lose. I’m hoping Brighton Permaculture Trust who helped us set up the mini-orchard back in 2012 will be able to advise.
You need celebrations in an English winter. The weather this year has been relentlessly damp, dreary, dark and drizzly. we managed a joyful Christmas tea just before Christmas – a more festive version of our usual Tuesday tea, with mulled wine, mince pies and a range of sweet treats, including chocolate covered dates and peanuts brought back from Egypt.
We also managed a sort-of harvest supper this year – a joyous occasion of a dinner made (in principle) from our produce. I say ‘sort of’ because by the time we managed to get together at the end of November, the ‘harvest’ was well and truly over.
It wasn’t a great year for produce anyway. But the spinach and chard at the harvest supper were from my garden, the starter was based on veg from Lynda’s garden, the crumble was made with frozen apple purée from our mini-orchard trees with Ditchling Rise plum compote, there were a few home-grown tomatoes and herbs, and the tiny bright red crab apples from the station garden provided colour for the table centrepiece.
The main thing was to have a really enjoyable evening together – and that was certainly achieved.
I’m always in two minds as to whether we should continue to plant up the tree pits in front of the station building. Given that they house trees – two Rowan trees and a new small elm variety – the environment can be rather difficult: the trees need a lot of water and in the summer, the tree pits dry out easily. But bright flowers look so pretty in the tree pits, it’s hard to resist.
We’ve now had frost and then plenty of rain so the soil is fairly friable. We had planted some cyclamen in the right side tree pit but several got dug up – I reckon dogs, though there are local foxes too. I rescued the plants and they recovered well in my greenhouse. We bought some more cyclamen and some bright yellow daffodil bulbs in flower.
So we’ve now been able to plant up all three tree pits and bring a bit more colour to the station forecourt. A dad and his daughter stopped to tell us how much they appreciated the colourful flowers, which they passed every day on the way to the school. That makes it all worthwhile …
We’ve just renewed the planting in our platform planters, with help from Maggie who used to garden with us. Fingers crossed, the bright cyclamen and early daffodils will last into the spring. It’s been a dry couple of weeks but sure enough, this Tuesday afternoon, it decided to rain, luckily only a light shower on the wind. True, the planters needed water and we’ve added plenty of our superb compost to keep the soil moist and add more nutrients. Now people, please don’t sit on the planters. Squirrels and foxes, no digging up – and slugs and snails, please go and eat something else!
End of October, beginning of November … the clocks have gone back to GMT, the evenings are dark. Gardens are winding down towards the winter. We still have flowers out at London Rd Station, and the weather has been remarkably mild. There are lots and lots of leaves, particularly from the sycamore trees around the station forecourt. We’ll try and clear some of them at our session tomorrow. Otherwise it will be planting cyclamen and generally tidying the plots … but not too much. Latest thinking is that less is more at this time of year. Leaves mulch into the soil, dead flower stalks protect the living plants from frost and berries provide food for the birds and insects. We will try and renew our wood chip paths which have got very messy, and tidy up our shed. Thankfully this week is dry, so a good one for autumn clearance.
Beautiful blue sky this morning at London Rd Station, and thankfully we did a bit of work late morning rather than our usual afternoon slot. We planted ‘Minnow’ daffodils in Madeleine’s mini-garden planter. We also cleared the rampant squash in one of the tree pits and planted cyclamen and daffodils (‘tête à tête’), and also cleared up Madeleine’s tree pit.
The big job was clearing the sycamore leaves from the station forecourt – four big bags’ worth. I’m not keen on storing these leaves for leaf mould; they seem to be a bit diseased. But the forecourt looks so much better – of course, more leaves will be down soon.
Indeed, by the beginning of the afternoon, the deluge showers had started … Tuesday afternoon … and haven’t finished. The silver lining? I’d forgotten to water in the cyclamen. All done now, … but along with a further drop of sycamore leaves.
The unexpected crops are always the best. This afternoon I set out to dig over the potato bed by the wall, adding compost and eventually sowing with green manure seeds. What I was not expected was a generous crop of Sarpo Mira potatoes hiding forgotten in the soil.
Our unexpected potato crop
These are potatoes from self-seeded plants. The last time we planted Sarpo Mira in that bed was at least two years ago. The plants must have grown from the tiny seed potatoes that appear on potato plants towards the end of the season. It’s apparently not great to leave them in the soil as they are susceptible to blight. But Sarpo Mira is a pretty blight-free variety.
I cleared the bed completely today and sowed rye grass and phacelia. A warm week or so is forecast so I’m hoping the seeds will germinate well. Come the spring, we’ll dig the plants in and they should provide nutrients for whatever we decide to plant there. Sadly, I think the soil needs a break from potatoes.
Bulbs can be very annoying. They come up with wonderful colour to break through the grey of February and March but after April, the flowers fade and the long ungainly leaves droop.
Received wisdom is to let the leaves die back, forming an unsightly tangle in May. This provides the bulb with nutrients for the following year, or so they say. We then try to camouflage the tangle with summer flowering plants, and end up digging up the bulbs. Committed gardeners may dig up the bulbs, store and replant, but this seems such a faff and it means the bulbs themselves don’t expand in the ground to produce rich clumps of flowers. But this last year, as we replanted ‘Madeleine’s’ tree pit on the left of the station several times, I dug up a whole lot of tête à tête daffodils and put them in a brown paper bag in the garage.
It’s time now to find them, and like a squirrel, bury them again in the ground. We’ll clear the crazy squash that has exuberantly grown over the tree pits, lay down some of our compost (no doubt containing more random tomato and squash seeds for next summer – ha ha!) and try and find space to stick in those daffodils, and some fresh ones. Come those final miserable days of February, we’ll be delighting in their joyful yellows.
This afternoon ended up being an admin session, not a gardening session. Why? Because two weather forecasts predicted heavy rain and thunderstorms so I suggested we cancel the session. What the weather actually did was quite different: bright sunshine, despite a troubled sky – and still none of the predicted rain.
This has been the kind of trickery we’ve experienced much of this last growing season: sudden rain, sudden sunshine, sulky clouds – and particularly on a Tuesday afternoon. We had to cancel the majority of our Tuesday afternoon sessions up until June because of the unpredictable weather. Oh well …
We did manage some successes. Our Madeleine mini-garden (below) was beautiful even though slugs quickly marauded through the gorgeous red-leaved pink-flowered dahlias and left the petunias leafless. The purple salvia bloomed and bloomed, as did the salvias planted in the apple beds. And as for the Madeleine rose – it’s certainly asserted its presence strongly in the corner next to the gate. Orange begonias have brought lasting colour to the platform planters.
And here is our harvest basket from last week: some apples, some pears, some rhubarb and some golden beetroot. Oh, and some rogue green tomatoes from a seedling that grew in one of the tree pits, no doubt from tomato seeds in our compost. The crab apple in the background is a delight with its cherry-red fruit, even if none of us really know what to do with it.
Meanwhile, the potatoes we didn’t plant (must have grown from bits left from previous years) did really well, and we did have some courgettes. Climbing beans were rubbish. The fruit trees have bounced back after my pruning but apples were a bit disappointing. Although the pear produced quite a bit of fruit, much of it has turned out to be floury. Meanwhile, the plum just grew and grew and grew, shading other parts of the garden, but only the inaccessible top branches had fruit. I think it needs the heavy prune …
We had surprisingly good results from the two mini-planters bequeathed to us by a young couple moving out of their garden flat last year: salad leaves grew well as did the yellow beetroot. The photo below shows the garden (and a blue sky) in May, full of promise. Kale and chard seedlings planted in our main beds, however, simply did not survive the slugs, snails and long stretches of very wet followed by very dry weather. Also devoured in short shrift were around twenty aster seedlings – upsetting, but what can you do? It’s been that kind of year.
So, as we head to our annual harvest supper, what’s on the menu? The potatoes are all eaten. The turnips could perhaps contribute to a root veg soup, I’ve still got sweet tomatoes in the greenhouse and there must be something we can do with the green ones. My kale plants survived but are a little tough and there’s a courgette or two about. I think that spells the inevitable ‘garden veg lasagne’.
It’s been a long wet autumn and winter. It’s now May and we’ve had a few bright sunny days but followed again by heavy grey skies and below average temperatures. This time of year is the most stressful for gardeners. It’s a case of ‘will they? won’t they? have they?’ as we nurture seedlings and try to protect the delicate green shoots of new growth from marauding slugs and snails.
We sowed seeds back in the middle of March, already quite late in relation to some previous years. They have germinated but then have stopped. We need more sun and more consistent warmth.
Still, our remaining pear tree near the entrance is really powering away, the apples are in blossom, the crab apple flowered this year, we have giant parsely from last year’s seeds and an enormous verbascum (mullein) growing in a shady corner near the ‘Crawley Beauty’ apple tree.
We have planted a few potatoes, and there’s evidence of potatoes growing from last year. We’ve not really planted out any of our seedlings yet; a couple of courgettes are waiting, as are chard, kale, cavalo nero and frisee lettuce. Chard from last year is doing well and we have dug in our ‘green manure’ bean plants to fertilise the soil. Last week, we dug in some of our mature compost from the compost scheme. The soil looks good …
We replanted two of the tree pits outside the station with cyclamen in late January, to celebrate the life of our dear friend Madeleine. We’ll be celebrating again when the growing season starts in earnest in early June with plants that bear her name.
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