September Diary 2019

Sept 1st

Sweet corn from the allotment.

Sept 2nd

Tomatoes

Much cooler mornings now, a great opportunity to have a tidy up in the greenhouse. Picked the garden pearl as they were flopping all over the place and tied up and trimmed the others. Note new ball of string!

September 3rd

This outdoor cucumber is Marketer. I can’t keep up with supply, luckily the guinea pigs help out.

 

Still picking strawberries from the allotment.

Sept 10th

Good haul of produce from a customer’s garden. Keeping the tomatoes under control this year has worked well.

The plums may be on their way out but apples are ripe now in the orchard.

Sept 11th

First conker!

Sept 16th

Gardening in the drizzle but it makes for dewy photos. I planted these dahlias in a different place this year and they have been quite successful, for some reason the rabbits haven’t eaten them as much as in the main borders. And a beautiful unnamed rose.

Cleared a bit more pink geranium, a bit goes each year, and planted these rudbeckia to add a bit more autumn colour.

Sunday 22nd

Went to the allotment to squeeze an hour in before tea, 15 minutes later the heavens opened but we managed to pick cucumbers, courgettes and strawberries and dig some more potatoes.

Tuesday 24th

Allotment this afternoon. It rained all morning but when I turned over the soil there were still dry patches.  Cut back a bit more lavender and planted my Higgledy Garden hardy annuals using hazel plant labels from Woodview Gardens.

25th

Shifting a leafmold pile for an elderly customer and then raking the leaves up and starting all over again. Cyclamen and autumn crocus in the same garden.

30th

Courgettes still flowering and the Muscat squashes harvested and ripening on the wall.

Beautiful Vegetables

Well that was summer! I seem to spend month after cold month waiting for it to come only to find it fly past leaving my to do list barely dented. But there is still a lot of colour in the garden in September, and I’m talking about the vegetable garden!

Rainbow chard, of course, which I grow mostly because it looks so good

 

 Radish French Breakfast. I’m not usually great at successive cropping but when the heatwave ended I sowed a few seeds and the slightly cooler, wetter weather has resulted in a later harvest.

The beans are having a second flush too. Mixed runner beans above and French, Ecosse violet, below.

 

The courgettes are still going, the flowers and courgettes adding colour and structure to the vegetable garden.

Beetroot, another one with vibrant stems

Squash, Potimarron, and a giant(ish) pumpkin, beautiful colours and strokeably smooth skin, or is that just me?

Not strictly grown for the flowers but this belongs to a carrot.

Curly kale. This is ready now and will continue through the winter. All the bumps put off the caterpillars too.

 And in the greenhouse a small but beautifully formed cucamelon. I didn’t like them last year but I am willing to have another go!

And breathe!

I started this post at the beginning of September when I had been away for a week and returned to my gardens to find that autumn had arrived. August was hot, cold, cloudy, sunny, rainy and windy and already September is over with a mixture of storms and sunshine as well.

The hoped for Indian summer never came but there were, and still are, all those richly coloured late summer flowers and abundant pumpkins and squashes.

Dahlias at Houghton Hall

Harvested pumpkins left to ripen.

The dahlias have been good in my gardens too, I divided up the tubers in spring before planting in pots in the greenhouse so there were a good number but always room for improvement.

 

 

Also looking good for August and September the delicate looking, but actually quite tough, Japanese anenomes and the jolly rudbeckia.

 

August was a month of trying to keep it all going, like juggling balls in the air. A bit in the vegetable garden, a bit in the borders, doing the lawn edges and looking out for the giant sow thistles which seem to arrive fully grown. I always reach a point where I feel overwhelmed with amount of work still to be done and then it’s autumn and things that are cut back, stay cut back and phew! We can all breathe again.

 

I’m not saying that there is not still loads to do,  the weeds are still growing and deadheading continues, but I am taking time to enjoy the long awaited asters (Symphotrichum) and my head is full of plans for next year. The vegetable garden is slowly being cleared and I have even sown some late summer crops, a first for me. Tulips have been ordered and it will soon be time to cosy up with the seed catalogues.

Meanwhile, the roses carry on flowering.

 

Another garden!

I must be mad, I have taken on a new garden, shoe-horned into the bit when I used to do the school run. But I can’t resist overgrown herbaceous borders with the potential of finding something really good under the brambles.

Add to that a customer who just wants it to look more colourful and doesn’t mind me turning up whenever I have time and I was itching to get started. I even remembered to take some before photos.

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

Having blithely said it wouldn’t take that long,I found more brambles than I bargained for and an hour’s work didn’t look that productive.

However, on my second attempt, cutting through the tansy and willowherb I found some bricks. It looks like it is some sort of square pattern and there is a matching one in the opposite border.

So watch this space and hopefully a beautiful garden will emerge. I can’t wait to find out what else is in there.

And back again!

Here I am back after my holiday and guess what? Everything survived, it turns out I am not indispensable or maybe it was down to all my hard work beforehand, and a bit of luck. I had to cut my way back into the vegetable plot but just look at the pumpkins!

Also in need of a bit of taming were the tomato plants. I cut back most of the lower leaves, and all of the new shoots, to let the light in and the fruit ripen. This will also help the scotch bonnet chillies, hopefully.

 

In my own garden I returned to masses of french beans all too big to eat so now they are waiting to dry and be saved for next year’s seed or stored for eating in the winter. The outdoor cucumbers are still good and the courgettes remain productive now that I have removed a few marrows.

The one seedling that survived from the packet I sowed is also doing well, shame I haven’t got a whole border full!