The summer fun has died down, the children are back in school, and there is suddenly plenty to do in the garden again.
Lots of tidying of course, but other tasks as well such as sowing a green manure, tidying the climbing roses and assessing your garden tool collection…
Tooling up
Have you ever watched The Repair Shop and thought ‘Yes, these guys are super-skilful but look! They’ve all got exactly the right specialist tools for the job they’re doing – that’s gotta help a lot!’
Well, it’s very like that with gardening. Yes, you can get by with blunt cheap secateurs, a rickety stepladder and a trowel with a wobbly handle, of course you can. But treat yourself to well-made gardening tools made by experts for the very horticultural task you’re doing, and the difference is amazing.
Most of us have certain implements and gear that we turn to time and time again. I now can’t imagine gardening without big name mini-secateurs and regular secateurs, both in holsters, proper gardening trousers with knee-pads, a pruning saw, a perennial spade – see the feature pic this week! and a Sophie Conran digging spade, Harris dry boots, and a rock-solid Henchman ladder. Those are my non-negotiables these days.
Have you got your own list? I bet you have. How about looking at those things and considering if you could upgrade the dodgier items, either as a treat to yourself, or great additions to your Christmas list. I promise you that you won’t regret it – just imagine how much more difficult the Sistine Chapel ceiling would have been if Michelangelo had only had a loo-brush!
Layering it on thick
There are a few shrubs that most of us find a bit tricky to propagate from cuttings. Plants like Magnolia, Jasminum, Azalea, Camellia, Daphne, Cotinus, Viburnum, Clematis etc. can be reluctant to root using the usual method of taking pieces of stem.
But there is another way to do it called Layering, which rather cleverly means that the ‘new’ bit develops roots while still attached to the parent plant and isn’t having to make it all alone right from the start. Think of a teenager who’s left home but still goes back every weekend to get their washing done and a good meal inside them. Early autumn is a good time to start this process, though if the plant is evergreen, these layerings tend to root more readily in the spring.
I love this way of making more plants, because it seems so risk-free – the shoot stays attached to the parent-plant until it’s made its own roots, then you just snip it off and it is now a new plant. Easy!
Here’s how to go about it:
1. Find a flexible young shoot that can be bent down to the ground.
2. With a knife or a secateur-blade, scrape some of the outer surface of the stem behind the buds near the tip.
3. Mix some compost into the soil where it will lie and water the area.
4. Pin down the scraped section on to that area of soil with a pin made from strong garden wire (or a metal coat-hanger) so that the stem is in close contact with the earth. Shoving a brick on it will keep it from being blown around.
5. If there is more than a few inches of stem at the end after you’ve done the pinning, you can train this up a bamboo cane.
6. After a few months, your ‘teenager’ should have developed roots of its own, and you can cut the apron-strings – separating it from its mother-plant, digging it up to grow on elsewhere in your garden or give away. Truly not difficult, and hugely satisfying.
Green manure
Now here’s an odd thing – you can sow a load of seed onto a bare patch of soil, and the resulting plants will IMPROVE the fertility of the ground!
We are so used to hearing that plants of all kinds strip the soil of its goodies, and we’ve got to pile on the feed, fertilizers and compost to make up for it, but if you sow certain things onto that empty patch in your veg garden that will be lying empty till the spring, then dig the resulting plants into the soil, usually before they flower, they will keep the ground covered AND add nitrogen (lots of it! The charity Garden Organic has found that growing green manure can reduce the loss of this key nutrient by up to 97% compared with soil left bare!) to help massively with next year’s crops.
There are various seeds to use – any sort of bean or pea, Phacelia (scorpionweed), Limnanthes douglasii (poached egg plant), the enchantingly-titled hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) . You are supposed to sow it quite thickly now, cover the seed with half an inch of soil, water them well and stand back…….
Gardening shorts
- If you’re thinking about starting to plant bulbs, begin with the woodlanders – anemones, trilliums and the like, which prefer a longer autumn season than most spring bulbs, to get established.
- Climbing roses generally flower twice, once on wood made last year, and again on the current season’s wood. If your climbing roses have finished flowering, it’s a handy period to sort them out to maximise next year’s flowers. Take 1 in 3 of the old stems right out to encourage new shoots from the base. Tie in the rest of the stems and try to ensure that you train some of them horizontally which encourages more laterals and thus flowers. Then cut back the lateral shoots on the main stems to about 3 leaves/buds.
- Chard will be starting to slow up its production of leaves as the weather gets colder, but if you pot up a root or two of this veg and bring them into an unheated greenhouse, they will go on throwing out leaves for you all through the winter.
Autumn bulbs
Laura takes you on a charming little trot through some lovely autumn bulbs for pots in this short video.
Perennial spades
If you’d like to buy the smashing perennial spade that Elaine can’t garden without these days, you’ll find it in our online shop:
NB Here’s a native of south central China known for its long flowering period, attractive fresh green pinnate leaves and airy appeal. It’s a worthy Great Plant of the Month for Louise:
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