lessons identified in 2021

Have you even known such a funny year? The seasons seem jumbled and I would have been hard pressed to tell you what month it was from the weather. There have been false starts and downpours and, just when I had given up on this summer, a heatwave.

Fruit

We are a way away from harvest yet but there are signs and there are omens. Usually it is either a good year for fruit or a bad year for fruit; this one has been contrarily mixed.  The plums seem to be adoring it. One of my plum trees, having been demure and modest in its habit, has suddenly doubled in size in the space of a few weeks. I have had to hack back limbs simply so I can get to the compost heaps. (NB. Now is the time for pruning stone fruit.) My favourtie Victoria is laden and needing branches to be propped up to keep them from snapping under the weight of the fruit. The sloes in the hedge are more densely packed than I have ever seen them before. Which is fortuitous, because if this winter is anything like this summer, I will be needing gin.

Cherries though? Zero. The birds took them long before they were ripe. And the tips of each branch are black and twisted. Aphid damage I think. Many of the apple trees have been similarly affected. I think this is because the poor weather at the start of the year allowed them to get a head start and the predators never managed to catch up. I don’t know why the ladybirds haven’t had a population explosion; I have certainly left enough nettles around for them.

The quince. Nothing. It blossomed and my heart was in my mouth but it set not a single fruit. In a way, I was relieved. Last year, we tended it assiduously, watering and practically tying the fruit onto the branches, and we were left with very little to show for it. At least I don’t need to bother with the futile rigmarole. When I post pictures of quince bounty in wicker baskets in September, you can out me as a fraud. I will have picked them from the Mill House garden down the lane. Their tree is not as fickle as mine.

Beans

Have you had more problems with slugs than usual this year? I think I have. What I do know is that I will never direct sow a bean again. There are blank teepees in the kitchen garden where I tried to do this and produced, at best, a sad looking little stick, stripped of leaves and hope. Around the base of one of them, I scattered night scented stock. It germinated, I know it did because I saw it, but one morning, nothing there.

The solution? Sow in pots out of harm’s way and get them really big and strong before you let them loose in the wild. Oh, and wait as late in the season as you dare; I also lost quite a few to a late frost.

Bronze fennel

Yes, beautiful. Yes, basically my dream colour palette. Yes, wonderful for sprinkling gold pollen on a summer supper and with seeds that give an aniseed pop to chicken dishes or fresh coleslaw. But, my love, if you are going to grow it for cutting, cut it. If you leave the seedheads standing, they will do as nature intended, and they will sow. There are parts of the field that are thick with it. Like a wonderful, magical carpet. Wonderful, but choking. If I left them, next summer the field would simply be a sea of seven-foot-high bronze fennel. As attractive a prospect that is, I would miss my roses.

This principle also applies to atriplex and erigeron annus. I do adore a self-seeder but there is generosity and there is thuggery.

Boom and bust

I have one single plum sunflower. I have one single Italian white sunflower. I have about a thousand opened seed packets and, on sowing my tender plants in April, I sowed the whole lot in one go and felt smugly tidy as I tossed the empty packets away. I could always thin, I thought. (I cannot thin any more than I can throw a sleeping setter out of bed. I am hopelessly sentimental about ridiculous things.) And then the mice came and ravaged the seed trays and I had staked everything on one throw of the dice, and I had lost.

Remind me of this lesson again next spring; I will have forgotten.

The redemption comes from how generous Italian white sunflowers are. In reality, one plant, if fed and cut regularly, will give you all the stems you need. I just need to rescue it from the fennel.

Permaculture

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I started the year fired with enthusiasm for all the regenerative practices. I would work with and alongside nature; acknowledging that I too am a natural animal. Partners in this project of growing food and saving seed. We would, together, defeat the stranglehold that the big companies have on our access to food and establish seed sovereignty. I have to be honest with you and say, I am not sure I have quite cracked it. My mixed planting was based upon the matrix designed for me by Joshua Sparkes, most devastatingly attractive man in horticulture, and like so many magical things, I found control slipping through my fingers and the harder I tried to hold onto it, the more fleeting it became. The wild bits tipped over into chaos. The height shaded out the grasses and the delicate Gillenia trifoliata. I couldn’t plant sweet peas along the tunnel because the planting was already high by May and so there wasn’t enough light. The Phlox paniculata ‘Blue Paradise’ thrived, and its colour clashed with everything else around it.

It’s all coming out. I am going back to orderly, potager-style beds until I have cracked the code of Piet Oudolf style planting. This decision is not entirely unrelated to someone asking me if I had heard of Alison Jenkins of Damson Farm. Have you? She lives in the valley of gardening celebrities to the north of Bath. Dan Pearson and Derry Watkins are nearby. (When I write my homage to Jilly Cooper set in the floral world, this valley will certainly feature.) Damson Farm is perfect. Pictures by Eva Nemeth in this month’s House and Garden and also on Alison’s Instagram. I think what I like the most about it feels so calm. Ordered. The garden has quite a lot of hard landscaping which adds a grounding sense of permanence and stability. The beds are wide which, counter-intuitively, gives a sense of abundance rather than scarcity.

Glorious.

Photo by Alison Jenkins