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.
It’s almost the end of March, and it feels like every Tuesday afternoon since the autumn has been overcast and very rainy. We’ve had to cancel sessions at London Rd Station, and put off getting started on preparing beds for planting. Today was yet another wet Tuesday …
However, two weeks ago we did manage to spend a happy couple of hours sowing a first lot of seeds in small trays, and the majority have now germinated. I’ve had to move them inside – cold and wet conditions typically lead to seeds not germinating and rotting. I’m always surprised how high the temperatures are that are indicated for germination on seed packets: 15 to 20C for many and 20C to 25C for some. When do we get up to those temperatures consistently in the UK? Certainly not in March, perhaps in the second part of May? So the seed trays have been moved indoors into my south-west facing window. Not that we’ve had much sun …
We’ve sown: chard and kale (growing well), leeks (four weedy little seedlings have so far appeared) courgettes (only one of 10 has so far germinated), comfrey (no sign so far), cosmos (some …), daisies (quite a few), red orach (five spindly red seedlings) and marigolds (over 20 seedlings). I’m proud that the seeds we saved from last year’s marigolds germinated quicker than the ones I bought this year. The seedlings have already been potted on. We should have some lovely companion planting to brighten up the edible plot.
We’ve still got some seeds to sow: parsely, borage, cavalo nero, climbing beans (not until late April early May) and of course, lettuce and other salad leaves. And the seed potatoes have been chitted and are ready for planting. Normally, seedlings are potted on by this point in the year and potatoes are in the ground late February. Who knows what the next weeks will bring … will we be facing dry conditions by May as we have in previous years?
So far, we haven’t started renewing the platform planters or the herb planters. The shady plot is benefitting from the wet, daffodils and celandines are out, our planting from last autumn has survived the winter. Spring weeds are creeping in but we’ve let them be … it’s just a case of waiting now for dryer weather.
This last week I’ve pruned our cordonned apple trees and the pear. It’s always a job that fills me with uncertainty. The trees never look like the diagrams in the book where there is a clear leader stem and clear laterals with buds facing the right way. My principles are: (1) as Monty Don has said, ‘Always prune to somewhere – a bud …’. (2) Cut back to 3 or 4 buds on the laterals or sub-laterals. (3) Make a diagonal cut running away from a bud, and (4) cut to outward facing buds in the direction you want to encourage growth.
Our trees are now 12 years old and had grown waywardly during 2023. I’ve tried to cut out stems coming forward to restore the shape growing along the wall. Sadly, there’s some evidence of disease: maybe canker, maybe some kind of gall. I’m hoping that the trees are robust enough to survive. We’ll just have to see.
Last year and the year before, they mostly fruited well apart from the middle two (Saltcote Pippin and Mannington’s Permain I think). These two were infested with wooly aphids. I was advised to treat them with hand sanitiser! It sort of worked, and as we are a mainly organic garden, I wasn’t going to spray them. Now it’s just a case of waiting and hoping that my pruning technique hasn’t made things worse. This afternoon, I’ll be wiping over some of the larger prunings with wound sealant.
It’s been a very damp and warm winter, rather depressing. However, we’ve managed to liven up the tree pits at the front of London Rd Station with cyclamen, polyanthus and some winter hellebores. The bulbs already planted – mostly daffodils – are coming up.
We also did a clear-out of our composting area where we had been storing all kinds of “useful” things, like odd bits of wood we’d inherited from A.A. Taylor’s, the local joinery and a panel from a shower I thought at one point we could turn into a cold frame. All those extraneous things have been taken to the municipal tip.
We also had three leaky water butts. These we are going to turn into a ‘water-butt garden’ in the edible growing plot. I’ve experimented with rhubarb, which grows well in converted water butts, but I think potatoes, chard, leeks and maybe also rhubarb should work well. The only place for the converted butts is in a somewhat shady corner but they are higher than our raised beds and should get a bit more sun. Then it’s a question of ensuring good drainage and carefully nurtured soil.
I’ve also converted one of the old wooden herb planters into a low planter which we can use for ornamentals. We thought we’d use it for our ‘Madeleine’ mini-garden. To celebrate the life of one of our dear founder members who died earlier in the year, we thought we’d plant flowering plants with the title ‘Madeleine’. There’s a rambling rose called ‘Madeleine Seltzer‘, there’s a Salvia ‘Madeline/Madeleine’ and there’s a giant daisy Aster ‘Madelaine’. We have the rose, which can be planted in a large tub and will grow up a pyramid. The other plants (or their seeds) are on order. We hope to be planting up in late March or April.
We’d love to get more people involved and are thinking about organising some ‘drop-in’ sessions in the garden on a Saturday morning. We particularly need help during the summer months when watering everything becomes a labour of love … If you’d like to get involved, get in touch: lrspartnership@outlook.com or come and find us on a Tuesday afternoon 2-4pm at London Rd Station.
London Road Station Partnership Blog 