AUTUMN SOIL CULTIVATIONS

AUTUMN SOIL CULTIVATIONS

As crops get harvested and the ground is cleared, there is no need to leave it bare. It may now be too late for some quick maturing salads, unless you have brought them on earlier in a cold greenhouse, but there is time to sow a green manure crop. Later on as autumn cabbage and late crops are finished, if it is too late for a green manure sowing then the winter digging can start. I try to complete this task before the end of the year, but the weather can hold up work if it is too wet or frosty. Then there is always a fair bit of land still holding winter vegetables such as leeks, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, Swedes, kale, chard and beetroot. Spring cabbage and cauliflower will also over winter cutting down on the need for digging.

To get the best out of allotment grown fruit and vegetables, the ground needs to be very fertile. To achieve this incorporate well rotted manure, leafmold or compost into the soil when digging.

Some heavy feeders such as peas, beans, onions, leeks, courgettes and pumpkins get the lions share, then brassicas and potatoes should also get a good feeding, but avoid the root crop area as long as that land got a good composting the previous year.

Green manures

Mustard has always been a favourite as it is very reliable, grows readily and has an excellent root system. However it can grow up to four feet tall before flowering so can be difficult to crush down and dig in. It is also in the same family as the brassicas so will get infected with club root and carry this over to the next crop. I prefer red clover which has even better roots, does not grow so tall and has nitrogen fixing nodules on its

roots which help to add nutrients to the soil on decomposition. Tares, or field vetches are similar, but are very hardy so can be left to grow over winter before digging in before spring.

Ryegrass winter field beans, phacelia, lupins, buckwheat and fenugreek are all used for this purpose. If the top growth grows too tall for digging in it can always be chopped off and added to the compost heap then the ground with the roots can be easily dug over. Soil that has had a green manure crop has a greatly improved crumb structure and following crops are always very healthy and strong.

Compost heap

A compost heap is an essential on any allotment as there is so much vegetable waste to utilise to the benefit of soil fertility. Almost all plant material can be used, except diseased plants especially those with clubroot, onion white rot or rose blackspot or rust. Paper, cardboard and wooden prunings can all be shredded and added. Most vegetable kitchen waste can be added. Grass cuttings and rhubarb leaves are all excellent material. All annual weeds should be composted and most perennial weeds can be added after digging out and leaving them on a dry surface to dry out and shrivel up. Compost created from spring to summer is usually fine to use the following winter provided the heap gets turned at least once or twice if you can find the energy.

Digging or no-digging

I spread compost on the ground before digging commences, then if the weather turns frosty the compost protects the surface and I can carry on digging. I leave the surface as rough as possible to expose a large surface area for weathering over winter.

Areas of ground about to be permanently planted with fruit bushes, as well as my sweet peas all get double dug. As I get older and my energy for digging diminishes and I don’t need so much exercise I will look into the gardening by the no-dig method. It is becoming the latest fashion and as yet I have only heard good things about it. However perennial weeds need to be eliminated before you begin, and it does need ample compost used for mulching and encouraging worm activity which opens up the soil over time. A bed system is often advised to retain the mulch and plenty of paths to prevent soil compaction.

Plant of the week

Autumn Raspberries help to extend the summer fruit season as they will continue to fruit till the frost comes in late October. However they are always at their best and sweetest during warm sunny spells. They are very easy to grow and need very little feeding otherwise you will get huge canes well over six foot tall. Prune the old fruited canes to ground level in winter and new canes will grow up again from below the old stumps. I grow Autumn Bliss which is very reliable, but breeders are always bringing out new varieties so look out for autumn rasps with even bigger fruit and now spine free canes to make picking more pleasant. Check out Autumn Treasure, Joan J and Polka all of which get great reviews, though I have not as yet tried any of them.

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A GOOD YEAR FOR APPLES

A GOOD YEAR FOR APPLES

This year has created a massive problem for the gardener with a few apple trees. The crops have been so heavy that we just don’t know what to do with all the fruit.

Flowering was very late due to poor weather with an extended winter. We were running three to four weeks later than normal. Then the weather turned, the sun came out, the rain stopped and the apple trees were full of blossom. As it was much later than normal there were plenty of flying insects around so good pollination was guaranteed. A very heavy crop was obvious so thinning of the small fruits was essential after the natural June drop had completed the first thinning.

During the warm sunny summer we got just enough rain to keep crops growing, though I did bring the hose out on several occasions when rain just refused to come our way. In Scotland that really is a rare occasion. The dry atmosphere kept scab away, and mildew is not a problem with me as I only grow strong healthy varieties.

My first earlies, the Oslin, lasted for two weeks at the end of August, and then Discovery ripened and gave us fresh apples till mid October. This was followed by Fiesta and Red Falstaff, both of which will store for many weeks. However my late Red Devil will store for many months keeping us supplied with fresh apples till the end of winter.

I don’t harvest my Bramley cookers till the end of October or early November. They are fantastic in store and will be fine till next spring provided you keep checking them and removing any that go brown. Otherwise they start to give off ethylene gas which causes other fruit to ripen rapidly.

I store my apples in boxes in my frost free garage and should have enough to keep us in apples till well into 2014.

Eating an apple a day will be no problem, and apple sauce, crumbles and apple tart will appear regularly. They are also excellent added to curries, pastas and I just love to slice some for adding to the pan when frying up my bacon, eggs, tomatoes and mushrooms.

The windfalls and damaged fruit is chopped and simmered before straining off the juice which is retained as natural pectin to help jams set.

I always manage to keep back 30 lbs for wine, giving me three demijohns to brew. I add some bananas for body and raisins to create some vinosity then try to leave it alone for a year once fermentation has stopped, but it is hard. It really makes a brilliant dessert wine.

Health benefits of apples

Apples are one of the healthiest fruits to eat and as they are readily available and cheap they should always be in the daily fruit bowl. This fruit is packed with soluble dietary fibre, i.e. pectin, vitamins B, C, E, A and minerals potassium, iron, magnesium, calcium and phosphorus. A lot of the goodness is in the skin, so don’t peel it off, though wash all bought apples very thoroughly as the skin has been bombarded with chemicals while growing in the orchard, then coated with wax to preserve it while in the store.

If you grow your own fruit it will be chemical free and extremely healthy.

Plant of the week

The African Blue Lily Agapanthus africanus is a bulbous plant from South Africa which makes a very impressive specimen with large heads of blue lily flowers when grown in a tub. Grow it in a sunny sheltered border in good but well drained soil, and if the winter is not too severe it may survive, otherwise keep it in a tub and bring it into a frost free greenhouse for the winter.

Painting of the month

Random Thoughts is a painting of a pure abstract subject. The need arose as several of my art class students wish to go down that road, so I needed some experience first so I can teach others.

I wanted my abstracts to have attractive artistic principles that help to make the image stand out. I am not interested in throwing paint on a canvas in a twenty minute frenzy of activity and pretending it is art. The difficulty for beginners is always just where do you start with an abstract image. However once you have some marks or colour on the canvas, your own experience kicks in and you go looking for good composition to draw in some lines or shapes, then follow with ideas on tone, colour, shadows and highlights. It also helps if you can create a focal point with strong colour within a pure abstract image. It may be a journey into the unknown for most of us, but once you make a start it can be a very interesting and enriching experience.

I will work up a body of images for an exhibition later on this year.

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PLANT SPRING FLOWERING BULBS NOW

PLANT SPRING FLOWERING BULBS NOW

The summer this year will be well remembered as one of the best for a very long time. The garden has never looked better and fruit and vegetables have been prolific. However, good results are only possible if we plan well ahead so that the garden is ready when the sun shines. Now is the time to plan for next springs flowers and look out some good bulbs while they are available in catalogues and at garden centres.

I buy in some bulbs every year, and although the garden must be packed with them, I can always find space for a few more. This autumn my priority will be buying in dwarf double early tulips to plant in my annual flower beds where they will be underplanted amongst pansies, polyanthus and forget me nots. I normally use wallflower as my main bedding plant, but this year I got duff seed which failed to germinate leaving me with very few plants. However I got great germination of polyanthus and myosotis from an early summer sowing and I now have several rows of strong plants growing on my allotment ready to lift in October.

Early flowers

My first flowers from bulbs are always the aconites. It is so welcome to see the first flowers appear towards the end of winter, often pushing their heads above the snow. You only need to buy bulbs once as they spread very readily from seed saved after flowering and scattered on the surface where ever you want them to grow. Aconites are quickly followed by the snowdrops which also spread very easily both by seed and also by splitting up thick groups just after flowering.

Then comes the crocus species, flowering a week or two ahead of the larger flowering crocus hybrids. The best species for me are Blue Pearl, Snow Bunting, Ruby Giant and Cream Beauty.

Good  larger flowered hybrids include Pickwick, Remembrance, Flower Record, Golden Mammoth and Joan of Arc. Always plant bulbs in a sunny spot as crocus need sunshine to open up the flowers.

Daffodils, tulips and hyacinths

When the daffodils start flowering you know spring has arrived, so you must find some spots for them. King Alfred and Golden Harvest are the best large flowered trumpet daffodils, but Mount Hood is an excellent white, then there are numerous narcissi all with great merit. Double flowered Cheerfulness comes in a range of varieties all with an excellent scent, but it is very hard to beat the Jonquils for an exotic perfume. Plant daffodils and narcissus about four to six inches deep and spaced randomly about six inches apart in drifts. They can all go in deciduous shrub borders, herbaceous borders or in the lawn, though you won’t be able to mow it for at least six or more weeks after flowering. This allows the leaves time to build up a good bulb for flowering the following year.

I plant new hyacinths in my flower tubs placed by doorways every autumn so we can enjoy the flowers and scent in spring as we come and go. Jan Bos, Pink Pearl, L’Innocence and Ostara are all great varieties. After flowering these get dried off and stored till autumn when I then find a sunny spot in the garden to plant them.

Tulips form my main flower display in beds, tubs and borders everywhere. I keep all bulbs from one year to the next as well as the wee bulbs as these will flower after one or two years. I like early tulips to follow on after the daffodils, but then by the end of May I am looking for early summer flowers rather than late spring blossom. Thus I have never favoured late flowering tulips like many Triumphs, Lily flowered, peony, parrot or fringed, though very many of them have lovelly flowers. My favourite tulips include the single early, (Bellona, Apricot Beauty, Princes Irene, Keizerskroon, and Couleur Cardinal), double early, (Peach Blosson, Monsella, Abba and William of Orange), Fosteriana types, (Purissima and Red Emperor) and for a massive impact of large bold flowers try the Darwin Hybrids, (Apeldoorn, Apeldoorn Elite and Golden Apeldoorn.)

Plant of the week

Hardy outdoor Grape vine Brant was really only intended as an ornamental grape vine with brilliant autumn colour. The grape bunches are small and never really considered the main attraction. However it does produce bunches very prolifically which ripen every year in my Dundee garden. The small bunches are packed tight with sweet juicy black grapes and although they do have pips, these are very small and contain most of the health benefits of grapes. Our single grape vine trained onto a south and west facing walls will give us numerous bunches every year. Last year we produced our first demijohn of wine which is now down to mature, but after this years very hot summer the bunches and individual grapes are quite large so we look forward to even more wine if we can stop eating the grapes.

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A DAY ON THE ALLOTMENT

A DAY ON THE ALLOTMENT

As summer fades and autumn begins to show with the first autumn colour on my saskatoons which have a short season I still find plenty of jobs around. Anna and I decide to have an hour or so on the plot, as the Autumn Bliss raspberries will always produce a decent picking, and it shouldn’t take too long to cut a few vegetables. I thought I was well ahead with most of the seasonal work.

However we were still there four hours later as it is so easy to find numerous wee jobs to do.

We did get quite a few rasps, but also a few brambles from my thornless Helen, a few strawberries from Flamenco and five large sweet figs just ready to eat. So although we had not planned on a long stay we still managed to have our three o’clock coffee break minus the coffee, but with loads of fresh healthy fruit to eat, and just on time the sun decided to appear. Allotment life is no all that bad.

Weather forecasts were giving us a couple of dry days, so I decided to weed the whole plot using my onion hoe. Recent harvesting of crops was very demanding of time so weeding got ignored for the last month. Now was the time to chop them out before they got too big.

While I was weeding Anna cracked on with the fruit picking, then cleared away the old Kelvedon Wonder pea stems and supports as the crop had been picked.

A row of Physalis, the Cape Gooseberry planted against a warm south facing corrugated fence has now grown four feet tall with quite a few lanterns hanging along the stems. We need a warm autumn for these to ripen up, so we hope this brilliant summer continues for a wee bit longer.

Vegetables

Cabbage Kilaton has now hearted up and is ready to harvest. It is a late summer, early autumn cabbage that will keep us going till November when the January King winter cabbage will then be ready.

Nets have kept the pigeons away and collars prevented rootfly maggots. However these collars are perfect hideouts for slugs so pellets are necessary. The variety Kilaton is clubroot resistant so this year it has been a great success. Cabbage white butterflies have had a great year and caterpillars have had to be picked off all cabbage, cauliflowers and sprouts at least once a week.

Spring cabbage April and over wintering spring cauliflower Aalsmeer has established very well from a planting made about six weeks ago, but a few were showing signs of stress. Turns out to be clubroot as none of these are resistant, but I kept plenty of spares so I did a wee bit of replanting.

Beetroot have had a fantastic year and we will have plenty to overwinter as we use a lot of these very healthy vegetables in soups and numerous other dishes. Anna lifted a few to take home together with some Golden Ball turnip, radish, lettuce, kale, Swiss chard and the new salad leaf Polycress. This is the first of my autumn salad leaf vegetables to germinate and grow, though most of the others are not far behind.

Flowers

Chrysanthemums are all in flower as well as gladioli giving us plenty of cut flower for the house.

The front of my allotment has a flower border to add a bit of colour and now the bright orange African marigolds are in full flower growing up from a bed of deep blue lobelia Crystal Palace.

Gardeners must always plan well ahead, so I have several rows of Forget me nots and Polyanthus planted out in rows in well prepared soil. These will bulk up and give me good plants to lift for autumn planting of spring flowering bedding plants. I usually have a lot of wallflower for my spring displays but this year the seed failed to germinate and I only got about ten plants, whereas I normally get well over a hundred plants from one packet of seeds. I won’t use that seed supplier again. Now that next years bedding display will all be low growing plants I will have to order a fresh batch of low growing tulips to plant with them as my normal tall growing varieties will be too big. I will look at bulb planting next week.

Plant of the week

Astilbe comes in many red, pink, mauve and white shades, though my favourite has always been the bright red “Fanal” Astilbe prefers a cool moist shaded area and is perfect around the edges of a woodland pond. It is a perennial herbaceous plant that dies down in winter, but regrows again in spring. Make sure any new plants are kept well watered after planting to get them established. They can be propagated by careful crown division in late autumn, and are best divided after three or four years to maintain plant vigour.

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