The Hackening

It's been a busy weekend in the garden, tidying things up and trying to ripen fruits before the first frosts, harvesting what we can, and building the big raised bed for next year. I'm super excited to show that to you, it's another garden upcycle and I'm pleased with how it turned out. But it's not quite finished yet, so I'm going to be sharing that one with you next week [edit: find it here!] If you're planning on growing along with me next spring, now is a great time to start thinking about where you're going to plant things, because a little work now will save a lot of work later. We'll talk more about that next week though. 

Despite the growing season starting to wind down, there's still lots to be done in the garden in September. 

Another Tiny Harvest

We've been busy harvesting. Even our toddler was able to help with that, and he really enjoyed pulling up the carrots.

I grew them in a raised bed made from an old drawer this year. It was great in that the fine, less compacted soil prevented forking, and they were ridiculously easy to pull up. I didn't space them brilliantly, and I could've easily grown another row. I'll definitely do them in my raised bed next year, but I'll plant a lot more, and space them more carefully.  We didn't have any signs of carrot fly at all; whether I can attribute that to the fact I didn't bother thinning them, or if the height of the beds helped, or if we just got lucky, I can't say. 

Another job this week was to clear the dead sweetpeas from the cot bed frame and collect their seeds, ready for the overwintering peas to go into that bed next month.  I cut them down with scissors, leaving the roots in place to slowly release nitrogen into the soil over winter, picked off all the brown seedpods, and dumped the trimmings on top of the (now empty) old bookcase beds. I'll be adding some other bits and bobs over the next month or so to help the soil recover and replenish nutrients over winter.  Again I'll talk about that next week, when I show you my new beds, and how to fill them with nutrient rich soil for very little cash.

One of the things I did add though, was tomato leaves. It really pained me because, as you know, I have a fear of pruning, but it needed to be done. 

Tomatoes - The Hackening

The unseasonably warm weather has been great for my tomatoes. They've produced brilliantly despite basically being neglected completely since being planted. They laughed in the face of cane supports and decided to explore the garden instead, rambling off almost as much as the squashes

 They are (or rather, were) still producing flowers even though September is nearly over and the nights are getting cold. The trouble is, the plants are putting so much energy into producing leaves and new flowers and teeny new fruits, they have none left to ripen the green tomatoes already on there, and I'm worried the frosts will arrive before they have a chance to ripen.

You can ripen green tomatoes indoors using a banana or a sunny windowsill, or make green tomato chutney, but they're sweeter if they ripen on the vine and my children will eat them as if they're sweets. So it was time to get over the pruning fear and get them chopped.

By removing most of the leaves, all of the flowers (*sob*) and the tiniest fruits (*further sobs*), the plant will (hopefully!) start putting all of its energy into ripening the fruits it already has so that the seeds mature. The added light to the tomatoes should help too.

As you can see in the above picture, I just used normal scissors to trim them. You could use a sharp knife or clippers designed specifically for the garden, just so long as whatever you use is clean.  I tried to cut diagonally across the stems so that any moisture could run off instead of hanging around creating the perfect habitat for bacteria to breed.

Again we were very lucky with the tomatoes this year and have had no signs of blossom end rot or major issues with pests.  Even the pigeons have left them alone (so maybe overfeeding them has helped a little). That may be more luck than judgement, but it's possible that the eggshell I added to the compost I had them in as seedlings helped too, so I'll be doing that again next year.  I save up our eggshells through the week, then bake them for 10 mins in the oven to kill off any salmonella type bacteria that might be hanging around and stop them getting smelly, then crush them up and keep them in a jar til they're needed. You can use a pestle and mortar to crush them, but I don't have one of those so I use a mug and a rolling pin. 

Once I had massacred my tomatoes I felt a bit more confident about pruning, so I removed the dead leaves from the butternut/cucumber trellis to give the fruit some more light. I didn't realise until I did that we even had cucumbers still, but I found 2 tiny little ones hiding under the dying leaves 

We've had one butternut already (and delicious it was too, I've never eaten butternut squash before, but was given the seeds and decided to try it. I'm so glad I did, hassleback butternut is lush) but there are a couple of small ones still on the plant, and one tiny one, the size of my little finger. I probably should cut it off for the same reason I cut off all the tomato leaves and tiny fruits,  but I just didn't have the heart to. I'll leave the teeny ones and give them another feed, and see how they do.

Garden Jobs This Month

I'll be talking more about this in my upcoming post about sharing your space with Mother Nature, and getting a hand from her in return, but if leaves are falling and grasses are going to seed in your garden, you might be tempted to give your garden a big pre-winter clean up. Don't do it! Relax, put your feet up, and start planning what you want to grow next year instead. 

Leaf litter provides much needed habitat and shelter for all kinds of garden friendly bugs, and in turn that helps feed the birds over winter. The leaves also provide much needed nutrients to the soil as they rot down. We'll be collecting some of them up for our raised beds over the next month, but a tidy garden is rarely a wildlife friendly garden,  so I won't be fretting about raking every last leaf up. 

I will be planting some peas next week to have a go at overwintering them (I'm using the variety Meteor, because I've heard it's very hardy,  but I'm not very optimistic. I'll the you know how it goes), and cutting back most of the dying perennials, like the giant daisies and fireweed.

 The fireweed has been spreading its seed everywhere, so I've cut some and taken them to areas I want it to grow in next year. I'll leave a few stems when I cut them back to the ground for ladybirds to shelter in. 

The stems I do cut will be going into the raised beds, to enrich the soil and act as a mulch. If I didn't need them for that, they'd be going into the bug hotel - a (now giant) pile of garden trimmings, cut grass, leaves dropped by nearby trees and bits of wood in various states of decay that's tucked behind our compost bin under the hedge at the back of our garden. There's an old rabbit hutch somewhere under there (rabbit removed beforehand) which is an ideal hibernation spot for local hedgehogs. The birds use it as an food source and shelter all year round, and in spring it's alive with ladybirds, a very welcome visitor to any garden. If you have even a tiny space to keep a pile like that, go for it. Our wildlife needs all the help it can get, and in return, it'll help you.

I'll be harvesting the last of the apples around the autumn equinox too. We've had a lot this year, so I'll be baking apple pies for the freezer and maybe trying to work out how to dry apple slices, if they last that long. My children think the best place for long term food storage is in their bellies and when it comes to fruit and veg I'm inclined to agree with them.

And of course the most important job this month: enjoy the last of the warm weather and sunny days before the dark half of the year. 

Half the fun of gardening is in stopping to smell the flowers.

Merry Mabon my lovelies, happy growing x

"Dwarf" Fruit Trees

In my first post, I mentioned that when I first moved in to this house, I planted three dwarf fruit trees. I promised I'd tell you more about them later. This probably counts as one of my biggest garden fails, was a total rookie mistake, and I'm still not sure how to fix it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When we first moved in I was super excited about the idea of food forest gardening - a low effort gardening technique that mimics the multilevel production found in nature. I wanted to get fruit trees planted quickly, so theyd get on with producing fruit quickly (generally speaking, fruit trees take about 3 years to go from bare root plants to producing fruit).

I ordered bareroot dwarf grafted apple, plum and pear trees (Braeburn apple, Conference pear and Victoria Plum if I remember rightly, but it was a long time ago). 

My planting technique was good -they arrived in early November and the weather was quite mild with the soil neither frozen nor waterlogged. I dug a hole about twice the size of the rootball, threw in some fish, blood and bone fertilizer, and planted the trees, backfilling the hole with a mixture of compost and the soil I'd dug up to plant them, up to the soil mark on the trunk where they'd obviously been planted before. They stood about 4 feet high, and the planting instructions (such as they were, you don't get many instructions with budget plants) assured me they'd grow to around 5foot, maximum. That suited my garden size. So far so good.

What went wrong?

My planting technique was great. But my planning left an awful lot to be desired, and my pruning...well.

I've always been scared of pruning. I worry about cutting back too harshly and damaging the tree, or inviting in disease and pests. And I figured that wild trees never get pruned, and they're fine. This was one occasion where I should've ignored my instincts and got some advice from a seasoned gardener.

Fast forward 10 years, and I'm trying to reclaim the garden. The apple tree is a nice size. It struggled to get going because the corner I planted it in doesn't have a lot of light and it is competing for nutrients with a huge overgrown hedge and other wild plants, but this past two years it's given us a bumper crop, with no maintenance at all. One out of three aint bad I guess.

The Conference pear and Victoria Plum are now both well over 30 feet high and still growing. 

Here is the Victoria Plum, taken from an upstairs window. Dwarf tree she most definitely is not. Despite all that blossom, we had only one plum this year. I'm not sure if that's just because the birds were stripping the fruits off when they were tiny, or if the tree has just put so much energy into height, it has nothing left to give for fruit.

As you can see, I planned the site of the tree badly. It's up against my boundary, so I can't walk all the way around the tree, and my lack of pruning means it's now helplessly out of control, and I'm not sure how to rescue it, or if it even is salvageable at all. If you have advice, I'd be very happy to hear it.

It's a similar story with the Conference Pear. It shot up and is a similar height to the plum, but it has never fruited, and blossomed only once.

 Looking back I think it may have had signs of pear tree rust when I first got it, so I always assumed that's why it didn't fruit, but much like the plum, it's now far too huge to manage anyway, and poorly sited so I can't walk around it.  At least the birds love to nest in them, and we get the joy of being greeted by song every time we step out the door.

So, that went wrong. That's something I find myself saying a lot when it comes to the garden. But there's hope for my mixed orchard yet.

The picture is pretty awful, but during the years of neglect the Victoria Plum must've dropped a plum, and it has grown into a healthy looking little sapling.

It's currently just under my shoulder height, and seems really happy, so I'm going to wait until the dormant season and then attempt to move it across the garden to become part of my mixed native hedge.  It's really important I don't let it grow out of control like the others (apart from anything else, that would upset my neighbours and block light to my planned veg garden) but I'm thinking that if I'm brave about pruning it should be fine. And if I cut it back too hard and it dies, I won't have lost any money on it.  I'm not sure it'll ever fruit, coming from a dropped seed rather than being a grafted tree, but I'm always happy to have more nesting sites in my garden for the birds and the insects. After all, they were here before me, it's their home too.

When I move it, I'll try and film the process to show you how it's done.