echinacea – Garden Gate Flowers

Preparation & Performance

This week I learnt that plans are afoot for the 2022 Open Gardens Day in the village. I have been told the date (confidentially), but as it probably needs to go through the usual committees and organisational debates, I am not allowed to say what it is. But suffice to say, we are all excited here at the Midlife Garden to think that we might be making our debut in the biannual village event. The Open Gardens Day is an opportunity to raise money for charity, while giving villagers the chance to enjoy the gardens of their near neighbours. But we all know what it really is: it is the Village Horticultural Olympics.

With the date set for next summer I was motivated to get going on preparation for big day. Initially, I needed to take stock of the current state of the garden. Is it under control? What has grown well and what has failed?

The mid-season performance review has not been positive. Yes, visitors to the Midlife Garden have been extremely complimentary on the state of the beds but, like a British Olympian crying over gaining a bronze medal instead of a gold, I see failure all around me. The broad beans that I did not tie up properly or keep weeded; the kohl Rabi that got eaten by slugs; and the kale that has struggled under the same onslaught, until I belatedly sunk beer traps. The late and lacklustre crops of cosmos and sweet peas and the negligible numbers of sugar snap and ordinary peas. It has not been a classic year. The review reads like the inquest into British Rowing. Ok, millions of lottery funds leading to five 4th place finishes and a lack of gold medals sounds might sound more serious in comparison to the Midlife Garden – but your opinion would change if you could see how the bindweed has clogged the echinacea or saw the total failure of this year’s Rudbeckia Marmalade.

While underperforming athletes are pointing to tough lockdown training conditions, in the Midlife Garden we have had to contend with the weird weather of a cold dry April, followed by a wet and windy May and then flaming June. Plants have struggled to adapt. But ultimately, I need to take a long hard look at my systems and procedures. I need to improve my funding and support for these plants and apply my experience to plan and monitor performance.

In short: I need to be more like The Old Man. Suddenly his insistence on slavishly doing things to a strict and regimented timetable seems laudable, contrasting with my approach which at times borders on laisser-faire.

But the impending announcement of an Open Gardens Day has provided fresh impetus in my gardening. In my thirties I used to run regularly, but rarely for the sake of getting fit: I needed a goal over and above the simple essential of BEING fit. Which is why I regularly entered half marathons and even one wet and windy marathon in Dublin (finishing time: 3 hrs 43 minutes, thank you for asking). Training for an event was what kept me focused and committed. So now, in a summer in which I have been, at times, going through the motions in horticultural terms, I find I have something specific to plan for, and I need to get going.

So, biennials are frantically being sown (a month late) and more hardy annuals are being purchased for autumn planting. It seems a long way off, but time will fly, and as Auden wrote:

“We are left alone with our day, And the time is short and History to the defeated May say alas but cannot help or pardon”.

Planting to the Music of Time

The rhythm of the seasons is changing its beat as summer segues into autumn. In the past, it was a time of year I would associate with final harvests of the summer and then closing down for the winter. I would clear the veg patch and cover it over to suppress weeds, allowing only space for Brussels, leeks and broccoli to battle the winter. I would uproot the deceased annuals in the borders and tidy the beds to wait till the warm weather returned. This year I have even managed to pick some mushrooms from a local field.

But these days I have started the autumnal season with a sense of anticipation for the spring. Like a tight rope walker looking straight ahead rather than down in order to make it successfully to the other side, I am planting stuff for harvesting and flowering in the spring. If I keep my eyes on the early summer of next year, perhaps I won’t even notice winter.

So over the past few weeks I have been nurturing and planting out my own self-grown flowers, like Honesty, Foxgloves, Lupins, and Echinacea, as well as Sweet Williams. I have sown Nigella and Phaecellia in the new bed out front. Instead of a fallow time, it is a season to plant and nurture. And to sit back and see everything shoot and take root in the still warm autumn.

In the raised beds I have planted a Curly Kale, garlic, shallots and broad beans. Broad Beans were something The Old Man never planted in the autumn as he claimed the flavour was not as good as spring planted. But considering the disastrous crop of spring grown Broadies I had this year, any kind of broad beans in 2019 would be an improvement – whatever the flavour. But, to improve my chances I have sown two types: Aquadulce and The Sutton. The first in the raised bed, the second (dwarf variety) in pots.

So now, with any luck, I will have the benefit of watching stuff growing – even in the dead of winter – which is what this whole gardening lark is about, isn’t it?

Picked these from the fields nearby

Foxgloves and Honesty in trays

Curly Kale

Broad Beans and Garlic either side of the rows of leeks n Khol Rabi

Pond Life

IMG_20180107_160856916_HDR — Ready for planting

It was back to school for me this week, but with no Saturday lessons, weekends really are weekends: two full days of fun and frolics. The intention was to start planting in the new garden, as I last weekend I had ransacked the Cut Flower Patch at the old place for a load of stuff to start populating borders. But in between a trip to Hive Beach and visits to the sick and elderly (our three surviving parents are taking it in turns to be Harry Hill’s “Most Sick Person of The Week”) we did not get do anything till Sunday afternoon.

But we got a lot done for what was officially our first proper stint in the new garden. Mrs B wanted to start with the back yard border which last summer was inundated with geraniums that had taken over the place. A new challenge for us here is to sort out a pond, so with images of Monty (or more pertinently Charlie Dimock) in our heads we donned wellies and started dredging our water feature. It turns out that not only was the pond a lot bigger than we thought, it also contained a wealth of plant life that seemed to be choking itself – though not apparently a large number of frogs that were idly lolling in the bottom.

We took a lot of water lily out (laying it on the side to allow any fauna to find its way back, just like Monty had told us) then cleared geraniums, rearranged some of the bog-type plants around the pond and planted irises. I say we – actually it was mainly me as Mrs B was obsessing about the frogs that both intrigued and repelled her. She did not want to go near them, but was equally worried that they would be unable to escape the pond if we did not put a stairway of stones for them to ascend.

Elsewhere we planted snow drops which are the harbingers of our wedding anniversary in February. And in front of the house I started digging up part of the lawn to extend a flower bed into which the echinacea and more irises went. All-in-all it was a good afternoon’s work which augurs well for the future.

Irises and echinacea in the front garden

Warming Up

160508 (1) — New Camellia and mole hills

Finally the cold weather has relented and it suddenly feels like summer might be about to happen. It’s the time of year when I personally get constantly challenged over where I have just come back from holiday. Answer: nowhere. I have naturally tanning skin and spend a lot of my time outdoors in the garden or shouting at school children in PE lessons. Others have suggested I might have some sort of Mediterranean genealogical predecessors. Who knows.

It is also the time of year when stuff really starts to happen, with the perennials in the border suddenly getting going (I think they might have been growing for a while – I just did not notice the Echinacea as the rabbits kept grazing them back to the bare earth. I little chicken wire around them has worked wonders).

I’ve planted a camellia that the OM randomly produced from some mail order or other and I’ve had to earth up the potatoes as well. In the background of the camellia picture you can see the moles are enjoying the sun as well…

But many plants are taking some time to get over the cold weather. The sweet peas might have been terminally affected by the frosts and the extreme temperature range in the greenhouse meant the tomatoes looked as if they had blight. They have survived but are struggling to regain their good looks and start growing properly. And the melons, to coin some schoolboy humour, have gone from up and coming 34B’s to something akin to sagging, flaccid aged A cups. No amount of surgery is going to help them, I suspect.

Season of Lists

I’ve rewritten this post about three times as I have tried to get the tone right. Autumn has always been to me a time for reflection though in my younger years it was enlivened by my birthday in October which would be closely followed by Guy Fawkes night and then on to Christmas. These days another birthday is of little consequence – although the arrival home of Verity for my birthday was a wonderful surprise. This, sadly, was tempered by the premature passing of my cousin Dave at the age of 55, which put me back into reflective mode. Attending a funeral of one of our peers reminds us that there is no point in hanging about – life is out there and it is not waiting for you so it was apt that two days later Mrs B was running 10 miles in the Great South Run to celebrate her own good health three years on since Lymphoma and stem cell transplant.

Squashes - not too large — Squashes – not too large

So as the clocks go back and the nights draw in one must be thankful for one’s blessings and to look forward, which is exactly what one does in the garden, as we start planning for next year. We have been designing a new border, planting out Sweet Williams and other perennials, and planting garlic. We have also cleared the last of the squashes (much smaller than last year for some reason) and harvested the last of the green peppers and aubergines – which were also disappointing in size and number. So we will be looking to rectify what might not have gone right this year and trying to add new and different aspects to the garden.

Halving the irises in the Silver Wedding

So, as I had a couple of spare days at half term I took time to make the extension to the Boomerang bed. Not sure what to call this…the didgeridoo? I shuffled plants in the Boomerang and the Silver Wedding, putting the Veronicas together in the former and splitting the irises in the latter (hard work, that one). I surprised myself by how many plants I had for stocking the bed: as well as the Rudbeckia Marmalade and leftover Sweet Williams that we had grown from seed, there were a whole bunch of perennials that I had acquired as a bargain plug plant offer last year, and a lot of them have been doing nicely up by the top greenhouse over the summer and look ready for planting out now. It’s almost like a planned it all along. It was potentially back-breaking work, but immensely satisfying.

The great summer of 2016 starts here (or at least the planning does).