Planting up the Hay Racks for Winter Interest

Hi everyone,
I'm well behind with posting my YouTube videos here on the blog. If you follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram then you know that my father has been very unwell, so we've been making a lot of hospital visits to see him.

In this video I'm planting up the hay rack baskets that sit under my craftroom window. I wanted to refresh them with some Autumn/Winter colour, and I must say, I'm very pleased with the results.

Enjoy!
Lots of love
Rebecca xx

Colourful Flowering Plants for Autumn Garden Decorating

Hello lovelies,

Goodness me it's busy at the moment. I had an operation, the garden has gone a bit wild, we've lost and gained pets, I've been preparing for craft fairs, and so much more...

I will write a 'proper' blogpost soon, but for now here's my latest YouTube video where I pretty-up the patio outside our lovely blue summerhouse with some Autumn flowering plants -it's the only time you'll see red and orange in my garden! 😉

This was shot on a very warm day, the sun was really strong and I was struggling with light/shadows and seeing the viewfinder...at least the planters look pretty 😊

Hope you enjoy it
Rebecca

5 Tips for Gardening in Autumn

Here are my top 5 tips for gardening in the Autumn.

Tree Fern Dicksonia Antarctica
Photo taken by Pumpkin Becki at Chelsea Physic Gardens, London

1 Move frost tender plants

Living in the South East of England, I don't worry about lifting Dahlia tubers once the first frost has blackened them in the Autumn, I just prune off the dead top and add a good 8-10cm mulch over the soil. I do take the time to wrap tree ferns up in fleece.

Further up country you're going to want to make space in a frost-free place to keep half hardy and tender perennials, including Banana Ensete, Cannas and Fuchsia.

I would also add Banana Musa to that list, as I've never been able to keep one in the garden over-winter, even really wrapped up well. It's so disappointing to find a dead plant when you peel back the fleece in Spring.

2 Clean paths and greenhouses

Algae growth goes into overdrive in October/November while it's still mild, and mornings are misty. Paths can become treacherous to walk on, so take some time now to scrub or jet-wash paths, decks and steps.

3 Aerate Lawns

Over the summer months our lawns take a real battering. We mow them to within an inch of their lives, they get parched and then drowned, we walk on them, pets do their business on them, and in my case the guinea pigs and chickens spend large chunks of time there too. I have two patches that get particularly compacted and in the winter water sits on the surface for hours after a good downpour. Early in the Autumn the ground is usually too dry to be able to improve drainage or relieve compaction, so once there has been a bit of rain and it's soaked in it's worth going over the lawn with a large garden fork at 10-15cm intervals, inserting it down through the turf into the soil (right up to the point where the tines meet the fork's shoulder if you can) and give it a good firm wiggle back and forth to expand the holes as much as possible without actually lifting the turf. Then you can dress the holes with a free-draining mixture of topsoil and sharp sand (aka top dressing), sweeping any excess in with a beesom broom afterwards.

The grass will also appreciate having fallen leaves raked off regularly with a springtine rake, and this will also scarify (scratch) the dead grass and moss out, making the lawn healthier and less springy.

Ladybirds over-wintering in sweetcorn plants
Photo by Pumpkin Becki

4 Don't be too tidy

Wildlife needs somewhere to live over the winter and spring, so make sure you have safe places for them in your garden. Log piles, bundles of canes and hedgerows are idea for insects and birds. Leave stalks and seedheads on plants over winter, they'll look pretty touched by frost and wildlife will make good use of them too.

For even more luxury why not add bug hotels, frog boxes and hedgehog hides in secluded corners. Dragonfli sell a huge range of habitats and identification guides for wildlife, as will your local garden centre and many other online retailers. Or if you're feeling practical, why not have ago at building your own

Hedgehog hibernating

5 Always check bonfires for hedgehogs!

I can't reiterate this one too much. This innocent looking pile of leaves behind my Hebe is in fact a hedgehog nest. He's set up home to hibernate over winter, and I discovered him while I was mulching the bed under the front window of my house.

I checked he was okay, and piled some extra leaves on top.

And Special Secret Tip Number 6

Take time to enjoy the changing season and all the delights it brings, the blazing colours, delicate frost patterns on windows, wild birds visiting garden feeders, pumpkins ripening, picking apples from the tree, and pouring over seed catalogues with a cheeky hot chocolate, deciding what to grow next year.

Pumpkin Becki xx

Garden Party and Panic Planting

We're having a family get together at the new house next Saturday, and I've been thinking about how things will look to our guests, most of whom have not seen the house in real life before.

I know the front garden doesn't look great, as it's really more of a Spring/Early Summer garden (before the trees have 'leafed-up'), but I thought the back would do me more credit...

Then I looked again, with fresh eyes...Oh dear!

So many garden jobs to do!

We still have half the garden as it was when the builders left, ie rubble and weeds. The fence needs replacing and there is still a pile of used Grow Bags waiting to be emptied into the raised beds. My answer to the weeds and rubble, was to pull a big tarp over the lot of it, the tarp is green, so hopefully it will camoflage the mess (cough cough).

I  knew the pretty side of the garden would cheer me up...oh...'x' has finished flowering and needs cutting back...so does 'y'...and 'z'...the slugs have massacred 'a'...and it looks like 'b' never grew at all. This is not good. The saddest loss is the big tree fern we bought last summer to replace the previous one that died. We've come to the conclusion that it must be something to do with the huge canopy of leylandii that overhang from our neighbours. The rain cannot penetrate it, and it sheds dead needles continuously to form a crispy, copper-coloured blanket over everything. The soil beneath, is just dust.

Urgent remedial action was required, so I went bonkers at the local DIY centre, and bought 2 trolley loads of flowering perrenials that should continue well into Autumn, things like Phlox and Pinks, and I also bought lots of Heuchera 'Palace Purple', which are such good doers, two Clematis to twine through the ivy on the fence, and a Fatsia Japonica to replace the tree fern. We've had one before, and know that it is pretty tough, so hopefully, once it gets it's roots down, it will be okay.

I had to do a surprising amount of clearing to make space for my new treasures, including uprooting and potting-up four or five nice Strawberry runners. The three clumps of Viola 'Rebecca' have had a bit of a haircut, and a slight repositioning. A lovely Heuchera, given to us by my God-Sister last May, had put on enough growth to be split into three decent plants. I love free plants!

The clump of Dahlia 'Dandy' which I grew from seed  a few years ago was looking really sad. I think again it is probably to do with the Leylandii. I decided that I would give the clump a haircut, and then changed my mind and dug it up, with the intention of throwing it away and starting again. However, the clump of tubers was enormous, and beautifully fat and healthy, so I instantly changed my plan, chopped off the top growth and split the clump into three. Hopefully this will reinvigorate the plants, and I'll get better flowers next year...fingers crossed.

After two evenings, working like a Navvie until it was too dark to see, the garden looks much more 'flowery'. The beds have been beefed up with the spent growbags and some manure, and if I keep diligently dead-heading, and watering, all should be well.

The front garden hasn't escaped this drastic action though - ooooh no! The block paved drive had begun to look like a hayfield, and we could literally have run the lawn mower over it. We decided that as this was the first impression our guests would have of the house, we needed to weed. So armed with a knife each and a bucket, we spent the best part of 3 days cutting out the weeds from between the cracks - whose idea was it to use 'rustic' paviours :-/

The effort was well worth it though, as it does look super. We also bought some low willow effect hurdles along the front of the short bed at the end of the drive, in front of the hedge. This means that we've been able to increase the soil level without it washing onto the drive in the first rain, and to put in some more new plants, including: 2 hebes, 3 Cottage Pinks, a dwarf Pink Echinacea and 2 Euonymous. That sounds like a lot of plants, but it looked a bit bare when I laid everything out in position, so I added 2 Heuchera 'Chocolate Ruffles' (split from a plant in another bed, and some 2 year old Hellebore seedlings.

I'm really pleased with what we've achieved, though we were dog-tired by Sunday evening ...now there is just the house itself to worry about!! :D .

Cheap lunches for work - Souper!!

I've grown some really fantastic Squashes and Pumpkins this year, and I like to put them to good use. My Squish soup is notorious at work, so here's me making a batch yesterday.

I started with a large Iron Bark squash (approximately 3.5kg). I put it in a roasting tin in the oven at 160 degrees for 1 hour 10 minutes, til it was soft when gently prodded. This is it with the skin being stripped off after cooking:

Meanwhile the stock veg (carrot, celery and onion) were softened in a stock pot in some olive oil, then about 500ml of stock added. Sometimes I use homemade chicken stock, this time it was a Kallo organic stock cube - they're not too salty. The stock volume isn't a fixed thing, it depends how thick you like you soup and how watery the rest of the ingredients are. I like to use less liquid at this stage because I can always add it later, once its been pureed.

Once the squash has cooled a bit, I peel off all the skin, halve the squash and scoop out all the seeds and add the flesh to the stock veg. I also add a teaspoon of turmeric, half a teaspoon of cumin, a pinch of chilli powder and some freshly ground black pepper.

Then it gets blitzed down with my trusty Sainsbury's Basics stick blender (£4.99 - bargain!!).

This time I ended up with 10 servings for the freezer, that's two weeks worth of work lunches for the price of some seeds and a stock cube - another bargain!!

What a stunning weekend!

Wow, the weather has been fabulous this weekend, so I made the most of it in the garden and at the lottie. 

Saturday afternoon I took down the 'summer' baskets from the front of the house. They really were on their last legs! The baskets have a coir liner, which I have then lined with a piece of compost bag with holes poked in the bottom. This time I cleared out the old plants and scraped out about half the compost, but left the ivy and liner in place.



Then I added fresh compost, and planted up two colours of pansy and two white ericas into each one. Then gave the ivy a bit of a haircut.

 

...not bad! And a darn site tidier than the remnants of the summer baskets that's for sure!!

  

Today, the weather continued to be fine, infact it was even better, as the strong breezes from yesterday had dropped right down. I took the opportunity to pop up to the lottie and plant out my onion sets and shallots. Normally I miss that window of warm dry weather, the Autumn rain sets in and it becomes too wet to plant them out. I end up having to wait until quite late in the year before doing this and the little bulbs sulk in the cold wet soil until the spring, so I am really chuffed that I timed it so well this year. I wore a fleece to walk up to the allotment, but once I arrived I decided it was t-shirt weather. Here's the lottie in the middle of a tidy up... I pulled up the remaining broad bean stalks and supports from bed 1 (in the foreground). Gave it a jolly good weeding , dug it over a bit and then applied Blood, Fish and Bonemeal.

I lightly dug this in and then planted out Shallot Jermor and Golden Gourmet, and 50 Onion Radar sets. Bed 2 got a similar treatment once I had pulled up the last of the pumpkin and squash vines, and here I planted out 100 Shensyu onion sets. I also hacked back a bit of the horseradish foliage (the big green blob in the middle of the picture). The leaves will die back naturally soon, but I needed to get a bit more light to the beetroot growing just to the side of the horseradish. I think we'll have to lift and divide the horseradish as its just a bit too happy where it is, it may try to take over the world soon!! I also applied a dressing of blood, fish and bone to my seriously pathetic leeks! I thought that the recent rain would have really got them off to a flying start, but they've made very little progress in the last month and are still no thicker than a pencil. I had a similar problem last year too.  Last year I bought plantlets of 'Autumn Giant' (phah, that's a joke!) from Sutton Seeds. This year a kind neighbour donated about 100 young Musselburg plants to me.  I just hope the extra feed will get them going again, otherwise I'm at a bit of a loss.

 

It doesn't always pay to be a tidy gardener.

I remember being told this time last year (by Two_Sheds on The Vine), that you shouldn't pull up your sweetcorn plants once you've harvested all the cobs. This is the reason why...just look at these little darlings all tucked up for the winter.

Seeing a sight like that just makes me smile all over. I love Ladybirds!!

Very pleased with the results

Well, I'm back from the Garden Society Garden Show, and I've been surprisingly successful:

Four 1sts
Three 2nds
One 3rd
and a trophy for aggregate points in the cookery class - I'm really chuffed

Here's some photos of the highlights:

Apparently the judge was very complimentary of my Yule Log and my method for tying off my onions and shallots (thanks for that go to Vegmandan from the Vine)

The Holly on top of the Yule Log is made out of Royal Icing sugar. I mixed it with cocoa powder. Piped the outlines in a soft-peak mix, then flooded the centre with a runny mix, then made a soft-peak white mix and piped on the veins while the rest was still soft, so it sort of flowed into the runny mix. They were then stuck on with more royal icing after the cake had firmed up in the fridge over night.

Oh yeah, I put a nip of whisky in the butter icing...no wonder the judge was raving about it!!!!

My first post...I'm very nervous.

It's two days before the Garden Society Autumn Show, and my garden is looking a bit disasterous.

• My huge pink Dahlias have been munched by earwigs (must remember to put straw-filled flowerpots out next year to catch the little blighters).
• My tomatoes are looking great...but they are all green - not a red one in sight!!
• I have one pathetic french bean
• My carrots are tiny

However, I might be able to scrape together a fair set of shallots, my grapes are looking super, I've got quite a few pumpkins and squashes, some lovely tiny purple chillies called 'Pretty in Purple', and I've managed to grow celery (thanks to my friend Zazen's advice), its quite slender, but its worth a go.

I've entered 21 classes for this show, but I don't think I'll  have enough produce to actually exhibit in that many classes on the day. I haven't looked at the lottie for a couple of weeks, so I'll either get some nice surprises, or some nasty shocks! Eeek!

I'll post an update with some piccies after the show on Saturday.