Amateur Gardening 4-Sep-2021

“What veg crop do you enjoy growing most? Like many gardeners, I love the plentiful bounty of tomatoes, chillies and courgettes that just keep coming, but when it comes to taste my absolute favourite is the potato. There is nothing shop-bought that can compare with a homegrown spud. Normally, I grow them in containers, but this year I planted three rows in my sunniest border and waited the 12 weeks. There’s always some trepidation with potatoes, as you have no idea what’s under the soil until you start to dig. It’s a bit like looking for buried treasure, but worth all the fuss and time in the end. If you haven’t grown potatoes before, give it a try next spring. I think you’ll be hooked – I know I was!” Contact…

I LOVE autumn, I love the golden days and slightly wistful mornings laden with dew-jewelled spiders’ webs, the air crisp and fresh. I’m not so keen on the later grey, damp days when everything smells of old leaves and it’s impossible to get the washing dry, but the crisp clear days when there is still some warmth make it a joy to be in the garden. This is just as well, considering that autumn is one of the busiest times of the year and September, as its gateway, is the month to start planning. There are beds, pots and borders to clear of summer bedding, making room for it’s winter and spring equivalent or maybe perennials to fill a gap permanently. I took out a large stand of honesty this week and replaced…

1 Lift the last of your ripe onions, letting them dry on the soil for a few days before storing or knotting them somewhere cool and dry. 2 If you haven’t already done so, cut back fruited summer raspberry canes down to the ground and tie in new stems for next year. 3 A glut of tomatoes and courgettes? Why not make chutney – it keeps for years and makes a wonderful Christmas gift. 4 Cut back spent pea plants but leave the roots in the ground. Peas are legumes and they fix nitrogen in the soil through root nodules, feeding it for future crops.…

Perennial joy: Perennials are the backbone of the border and next week I suggest some of the perennial-related tasks you can be getting on with now. ONE of the most important tasks of the dormant months is pruning, whether its cutting back roses and perennials or trimming most fruit trees to keep them in shape and increase their productivity Not everything is pruned in winter. Evergreens can be damaged by cold getting to their pruning wounds and plums, apricots, gages and almonds should be left until midsummer when there is less of a risk from the spores of silver leaf disease. Leave your olive and lemon trees unpruned too, but do move them somewhere sheltered and frost free and wrap in fleece in very cold conditions. Cut back potted bananas, leaving around 3ft (1m)…

There is a cutting for every season, and autumn is when we take and pot up hardwood cuttings. These are taken from trees, shrubs, fruit bushes and roses in late autumn and winter when the plants are dormant and the wood mature. The cuttings are rooted in gritty compost and overwintered in a frost-free greenhouse or cold frame. Alternatively, you can set them in the soil in a sheltered area of the garden where they won’t be disturbed. Hardwood cuttings take around a year to root and grow and 12 months after they were taken you can either pot them up individually or dig up and plant them where you want them to grow. Although it is a lengthy process, it is one of the easiest ways of propagating plants…

IT’S been a game of two halves in the garden this year, with some wonderful successes but also a few disappointments. But that’s what gardening is all about, it’s an inexact science and although you can control a proportion of it, you can’t completely harness nature and She will be determined to do her own thing, her way, whatever you try and do. The weather hasn’t exactly been on our side either, from the cold, dry spring that held so much back, to the bakingly hot spell in July followed by torrential rain and flooding that affected just about every area of the country. So this year, while the borders bloomed and the wildlife meadow was abuzz with life, some of our veggies failed dismally and tree fruit was pretty meagre – though…