The garden is quickly taking on an autumnal feel this year and the late sunshine that we have had is very welcome to keep up the day time temperatures – it has turned quite chilly at night! My thoughts are turning towards tidying the wood shed to make room for more logs. We have plenty of dry wood in store, but it always seems to be a last minute job cutting it up!
As I mentioned before, the garden has put on huge amounts of growth this summer, with all of the rain and warmth, so I have started my tidy up early and already made several trips to the green skip with a lot of the woodier material that I don’t want to compost. We are going to invest in a shredder so I will be able to store wood chip in a corner and let it rot down for a couple of years to use as yet more mulch on our hungry soil, or mix it with our own compost to dig in to the allotment.
As I write this sat in the sun, the bees are buzzing around the garden and especially loving the late pink flowers of the Abelia and the Caryopteris (Blue Spiraea) which is just starting to open its dusky blue flowers. Our Sedums in the front garden are full of bees, butterflies and other insects including lots of hoverflies, and the Verbena bonariensis are a favorite with the late broods of Small Tortoiseshell and Red Admiral Butterflies. They have definitely been the two most abundant species here so my patch of stinging nettles has worked for their eggs and caterpillars!
The summer bedding plant containers have struggled this year with slugs and too much rain being a constant battle. I am adding them to the compost heap early and have made a visit to my local garden center which now has a great selection of autumn and winter bedding plants as well as spring bulbs.
I have renewed the multipurpose compost in the containers and mixed in some long term Osmocote fertilizer. Some pieces of broken slate and clay pots make ideal ‘crocs’ for the base so that they will drain properly.
Winter Pansies are such good performers with a little dead heading and I have decided to plant some orange ones with the darker markings or ‘faces’ that Mrs McGregor insists on! I am going to under plant them with some early Daffodils for extra color next February. ‘Tete a Tete’ is such a good performer with stout stems and bright yellow, multi headed flowers that have darker gold trumpets.
Some of my other containers will be planted with ‘Blue Blotch’ pansies and the dwarf white Daffodils ‘Thalia’ for a cooler combination and later in November I will be planting up pots of Tulips that can be placed in borders and near the house when they flower, for spots of color. I may top the Tulip pots with Forget Me Not plants (Myosotis) to fizz around the base of the bold Tulip leaves.
Until then it’s back to watching the butterflies and pruning back the jungle that is the back garden!
Happy Gardening!
Mr McGregor
