AUTUMN IN THE GARDEN

AUTUMN IN THE GARDEN

Autumn is rapidly coming to an end and winter will follow on pretty quickly, so with this cheery thought we must make sure we are up with events around the garden before wet weather puts a stop to our plans. I always keep an eye on weather forecasts and get outdoors whenever there is a few dry sunny days. Priorities are removing any weeds before the end of the season, raking up leaves for the compost heap and cracking on with the winter digging incorporating heaps of compost for next years plants that prefer good feeding.

Flowers

Finish off any planting of spring flowering plants as well as bulbs. Every year I buy in new tulip bulbs for my spring bedding displays, but there is always fifty or more good bulbs left over from the previous bedding so I find an empty patch somewhere to plant them and increase the spring show.

This week I have removed another two shrub roses, devastated by the fungus disease blackspot. They were replaced by four hardy outdoor fuchsias Mrs Popple which is very reliable and gets covered in a mass of flowers from summer till the end of November. My existing bushes are still in full flower in spite of four nights of frosts. As the young bushes are quite small the ground around them got my spare tulips so I am guaranteed a good display.

Some rose bushes continue to flower provided they get a few sunny but cold days. Oshima bought from Cockers about ten years ago is a bright red tough rose that just will not go dormant.

Gladioli and chrysanthemums are now finished so can be dug up. The chrysanthemums get labelled and boxed up for over wintering in the cold greenhouse, but the gladioli get dried off and stored under a bench in my frost free garage. Tuberous begonias are also drying off for winter storage.

Fruit

All my apples are now picked, sorted, cleaned and boxed up for storing in the garage. After finishing off the Discovery, Red Devil, a deep red dessert apple was next for the table, while Fiesta gets a few weeks storage to sweeten up. One tree of Fiesta gave me 43lbs of apples but as it has a biennial tendency I probably won’t get such a heavy crop next year. Red Falstaff was picked in early November, and also gave me a very heavy crop. Finally in mid November I picked the culinary Bramley apples which then got sorted, cleaned and stored.

Windfalls, damaged and small apples are retained for immediate use or wine brewing, which this year will give me at least six demijohns of brew.

Autumn raspberries are now finished, though if you get a few days of sunny weather you will always get a wee worthwhile picking.

Greenhouse grape Black Hamburg continues to ripen and supply us with huge black sweet and very juicy grapes. Outdoor Brant grapes are also continuing to ripen up as the plant takes on its autumn colours. Outdoor grape vines planted in spring have put on excellent growth, with Regent reaching the top of my allotment shed.

Vegetables

Autumn salads are in plentiful supply both outdoors and in my cold greenhouse.

Anna has just created a brilliant soup from the first of my Pumpkins which may look like huge orange courgettes or marrows, but once cut open the texture was clearly of a pumpkin appearance. However I will not be saving any seed this time after last years home saved pumpkin seed was definitely influenced by close proximity to some courgettes.

Its been another fantastic year for beetroot, so soups, boiled and roasted savouries, beetroot risotto, chutney and beetroot chocolate brownies, will all be on the menu courtesy of an excellent beetroot cookery book just published by Christopher Trotter.

Cabbage, Swedes, leeks, parsnips, sprouts and kale will give us fresh supplies for months to come as they have all had a great year.

Plant of the week

Cape gooseberry Physalis edulis has been cropping in my greenhouse since early October, but does need a few dry sunny days to ripen up. I have allowed it to take over the space previously occupied by tomatoes which have now been removed. Prune out side shoots as they develop so the plant can concentrate on swelling up the young fruits in their protective lanterns. I keep trying them outdoors on a south facing fence, but as yet there is just not enough global warming on City Road allotments.

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A BLAZE OF AUTUMN COLOUR

A BLAZE OF AUTUMN COLOUR

It is good to see an excellent year go out in a blaze of colour. Deciduous trees, shrubs and ground cover have all gone into there final flurry of colour before winter arrives. Although summer could not have been better, autumn was not as warm and sunny as we had hoped for, so foliage colour is good but has been better. However colour can still be found in the wealth of berries from rowans to cotoneaster, rose hips, pyracantha and snowberry. Pyracantha can be grown as a free standing large shrub or trained against a wall or fence where it is perfectly happy with some spur pruning to keep it in bounds. It is fine on a north facing wall where it turns bright red in autumn and early winter as it covers itself in orange and red berries. Then the many forms of cotoneaster will create a mass of red berries on evergreen bushes from the tall Cotoneaster frigidus to the ground cover dammeri.

Hopefully this display will last well into winter, only being reduced as our wild birds enjoy their winter food supply. Reports of reduced blackbird numbers have been echoed around my garden as I have not had any problem this year with loss of outdoor grapes as my local blackie devours the crop as fast as he can. He has been absent, and as yet not replaced with any of his young family. Thus this year I have three and a half demijohns of Brant grape wine brewing happily from a very vigorous yeast.

This year has been brilliant for berries on nearly all plants.

However as winter sets in, remaining berries on rowans and cotoneasters are often rapidly lost as hoards of waxwings arrive from the continent and gobble their way up north devouring every berry in sight.

My rowan Joseph Rock is absolutely covered on large bunches of bright yellow berries to be admired for a few months as local birds prefer red berries. However those waxwings are not too fussy about colour. Some shrubs such as the snowberry, Symphoricarpos albus with white tinged pink berries and Pernettya with pink, white and mauve berries are largely ignored as a food supply for birds. These bushes remain an attractive garden feature all winter, though by early March when all the other berries are gone the birds have little

choice but to go for these remaining ones.

The arrival of autumn is usually first seen on maples and horse chestnut trees, then rowans, with ash usually the last to colour up. Beech trees have both size and brilliant colour, and although birch may just be a small tree it looks great mixed into woodland fringe plantings with rowans, elderberries and field maples. There are so many different maples with excellent attributes that they will form a feature all by themselves in a later article.

Plants are selected for our gardens for their floral beauty, shape, function, ground cover or may be our particular favourite. Plants having good autumn colour is often of secondary importance, so we benefit when they are both attractive in flower or with berries and have autumn colour.

Hammamelis mollis and deciduous azaleas come to mind when you buy them for their flowers, but then get the bonus in autumn with fiery foliage on the dying leaves.

The upright cherry, Prunus Amanogawa, and most of the other cherries have all got exceptional autumn colour as well as their spring blossom.

Even many fruit bushes go dormant in a fanfare show of dazzling colour when they lose their leaves. Blueberries turn golden, saskatoons turn orange then red, chokeberries go deep scarlet and even my outdoor grape Brant turns red around the huge leaf margins before falling off.

 I recently planted several outdoor grape vines, and it is great to see that they also are colouring up just nicely as autumn takes a hold.

As the edible landscape movement gathers popularity so our school kids see, harvest and learn how to use natural fruit from the environment, other plants such as rose hips and the sea buckthorn Hippophae rhamnoides, brambles, hazlenuts and many other edible plants will find their place.

Down at ground level, some varieties of heathers such as Calluna vulgaris Goldsworth Crimson, Golden Feather and Gold Haze really brighten up with golden and orange rusty coloured foliage once they get a bit of frost.

 

Plant of the week

Prunus subhirtella autumnalis is the autumn flowering cherry. It may not have the huge impact of some of the spring flowering cherries, but it is a very welcome sight to see a flowering tree with pale soft pink flowers in November. It will continue to flower all winter if there is a few days of sunny mild weather, but a cold frosty snap will stop the flowers. This cherry tree is very hardy and will grow on most soils reaching over twenty feet on maturity. It also has excellent autumn colour.

 

Painting of the month

Bridge over Brafferton Burn is a small oil painting with a winter landscape image appropriate for this time of year as we head towards the festive season. Other snow scenes, landscapes, flowers and figures are being finished off as I get ready for my winter exhibition in my studio at the end of November.

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SCOTTISH GRAPE VINES

SCOTTISH GRAPE VINES

We all like a challenge, and finding a grape variety to grow and ripen up north in Dundee is my current challenge. Grapes have become a staple diet at home as they get added to my muesli in the mornings and mixed with sliced bananas, other fruit and yoghurt for lunch. The greenhouse grapes ripen from August to December using Flame, Perlette and Black Hamburg, and my outdoor Brant fruits from October to November. Brant has small bunches and is more ornamental than commercial, but it is very successful outdoors so proving that grapes can ripen in our northerly Dundee climate. Now if I can find another variety with larger bunches which will ripen outdoors that will make me happy. Both last year and this year there were just too many grapes to eat, so some got brewed for wine. I make a fair bit of wine with surplus fruit crops including black and red currants, chokeberry, gooseberry, elderberry and saskatoons, but it would be nice to create my own wine from home grown grapes.

In the beginning

I have always enjoyed a wee drink from early youth with my pint of heavy, then as you got older and more mature you tried out the more sophisticated wines such as Blue Nun and Mateus Rose. They were the standard posh wines at that time to accompany an evening meal. Then in the seventies wine making from kits became fashionable and we found cheap plonk could be readily produced. However, if you read the books, attended wine making classes and experimented, every so often you brewed a good one. Many others failed the test and ended up down the sink. After many years home brew went out of fashion as supermarkets began to offer half price wines, so we could sample some reasonable wines at an affordable price. However a few years ago I ran into the problem of a lot of surplus fruit crops and no freezer space left, so I went back to home brewing, and soon discovered I had not lost all my old skills. My fruit wines give me a very flavoursome wine far superior to any I can find in a supermarket, and with a few modifications my Bramley apples produce a fantastic sweet dessert wine with a Sauternes flavour. My outdoor grape Brant has grown quite large with such a heavy crop of grapes that wine making is necessary. It will be Christmas before I open the first demijohn of Brant and compare it with my fruit wines. The future could give me even more grapes to try out as my young bushes grow and start to crop.

In the greenhouse

Muscat of Alexandria and Black Hamburg got me started, but the former needed heat to ripen up and Black Hamburg had pips. So Flame, a red seedless grape and Perlette a white seedless variety were planted to extend the range. These are all dessert grapes which we manage to eat so there is nothing left to brew.

Outdoor grapes

The promise of better weather to come for Scotland, if global warming reaches us up north has tempted several folk to try growing a few outdoor grapes. One vineyard was started on the banks of Loch Tay a few years ago, and Christopher Trotter has planted a trial block on south facing land above the River Forth at Upper Largo in Fife. Christopher has planted the early ripening varieties Solaris, Rondo and Siegerrebe. The favourite variety at the moment is Solaris, a golden coloured grape with a muscat flavour. It is more a wine grape rather than dessert as it has pips, but some people prefer this as the seeds are very healthy to eat. I have Solaris and had my first bunch this year. I am also trying Rondo, Regent, Phoenix and Siegerrebe, but there are many other varieties worthy of a trial. Although you should remove most of the early bunches to allow the newly planted vines to concentrate on producing good growth, I was tempted to leave a few grapes to see if they would ripen up. As this has been a brilliant year for sun I was not disappointed. All my grapes ripened and as was on a garden scale with very fertile soil growth has been very strong. To be successful, grapes need warmth and sunshine which the Scottish climate is a bit low on, so they need a south facing slope, wall or fence with reasonable soil which is well drained.

Plant of the week

The smoke Bush, Cotinus coggygria turns a lovely crimson in autumn before leaf fall. This deciduous shrub is a deep purple maroon all summer and adds a bit of colour to borders. It can grow quite tall but it can be kept down to a few feet by pruning at the end of March down to a few feet off the ground. However this also removes the flowers which give it its smoky appearance as they are small but numerous. This shrub is easy to grow on most soils as long as drainage is good.

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THINKING OF SPRING FLOWERS

THINKING OF SPRING FLOWERS

Autumn may have replaced summer but the flower displays for next spring need planning now for tubs, hanging baskets and beds. May can be a glorious month for flowers as all the autumn planted bedding plants and bulbs come into flower.

There are plenty of pansies, primroses, polyanthus, myosotis and wallflower plants available now in nurseries and garden centres. These are all container grown which suits most of them, but for a really large strong plant you are better to grow your own from seed sown in late spring. Most plants have a few flowers on them so you can select a suitable colour of tulip to plant underneath them. Dark blue pansies or myosotis will provide a great bed of solid colour for yellow, pink, white or red dwarf tulips. Yellow pansies can have red or purple tulips. I like to use the large flowering tall Darwin hybrid tulips such as Apeldoorn for my wallflower.

Tubs and hanging baskets

Large tubs usually have good soil to plant into as over time they get planted up twice a year. This breaks down the soil and adds compost. I usually add a dressing of fertiliser to get plants started.

It is sometimes easier to plant the bulbs first, putting them quite deep so they don’t get disturbed when planting the bedding plants. The bulbs come to no harm by deep planting.

If using low growing bedding plants you can get an additional flush of flowers by adding more bulbs such as snowdrops or crocus.

Many people only plant up hanging baskets with summer flowers, but winter flowering pansies are perfect for these and will open up a few flowers all winter if you get a few mild days in a row. Then in spring they really put on a great show. However I don’t put any bulbs into baskets as they are usually too high to see them and the baskets do not have any depth of soil.

It is wise to put fresh compost into baskets every time they get planted. Once finished, either spread the old compost on the compost heap or add to any border soil in need of improvement. Always check out old compost for vine weevil larvae as they are very fond of polyanthus, primroses and pansies.

Hanging baskets need not be hung up immediately after planting as sometimes watering is easier if they are at ground level supported on a large flower pot. Then if the weather turns severe in winter you can move them to a cold greenhouse, frame or sheltered spot for protection. April is a good month to hang them in their permanent spot on a wall.

Keep checking pansies for greenfly and leaf spot and spray if necessary.

Beds and borders

I have always liked to have an impressive flower bed at the front of the house which gives me two main flushes of flowers every year. It must be my past Dundee Parks department training which has never gone away. It is not really surprising as way back in the sixties Dundee was mass planted with spring and summer flowers in the town centres, parks, highways and cemeteries. These were all grown and looked after by trained gardeners dedicated to the job. It was normal to have ten to fifteen new apprentices every year.

If Dundee could return to some of their past flower power glories it could really add a bit of strength to the bid for the City of Culture.

Borders can be built into house frontage or patio areas to create impact. I add some compost when digging the borders in the autumn, as wallflower is my normal choice for spring bedding and they like good fertile soil. Spring bedding plants can also be planted in any other border where space permits and some extra flowers would be welcome.

Primroses and polyanthus are perennials, so after flowering they can be lifted and replanted out somewhere for the summer to build up a strong plant for the following year. All the others only flower once in spring so end up in the compost heap when they finish flowering.

Plant of the week

Potentilla fruticosa is known commonly as the shrubby cinquefoil. It is a deciduous shrub growing about three feet tall and has white, yellow and red flowers from late spring till the end of autumn. It is used very widely as a ground cover plant in urban planting schemes as it is very attractive, though quite tough and is useful on sloping ground liable to soil erosion.

It is easy to propagate with semi ripe cutting in summer.

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