July
Seed saving
The opium poppies are tantalisingly not quite ready yet, which is annoying because I am itching to make cake. (The corn poppies are scattering seed everywhere but they just aren’t the same somehow.) However, the ravenswing is in danger of taking matters into its own hands if I don’t capture them in an envelope, and the earliest of the grasses are very much ready to fly. The ammi is in full flower and I have tied a red ribbon around a few of the best plants to remind me not to cut them. The Windsor I sowed in July last year reached the top of its tepee and flowered its socks off (I admit, I cut one or two and I know I told you not to. Do as I say not as I do…). One plant has scrambled sideways into a hedge of beech and honeysuckle and the other has obligingly set pods. I am keeping an eye on them and just as they start to brown and crackle, I will catch them.
The early tagetes in the Dyeing Garden were looking distinctly unattractive and dishevelled when I returned from holiday. Deceptive, because splitting open the old flower heads revealed the most perfectly packed torpedo-like seeds. How can anything be so satisfying?
Harvesting
Cut and cut and cut again. I brought armfuls of ammi into the house last week, and not a moment before time, because they were flattened by a rainstorm not half an hour later. There is barely a surface bare of a little jar of sweet peas. The first of the hare’s tail grass harvest are hung up to dry. The moment that you cut them depends on whether you want to use them for seed in the future or you want them to hold for longer. I, somewhat typically, hedged my bets and cut half and left half.
But as well as the cuts, there are other things being harvested too. The tagetes in the Dyeing Garden have come slowly and sporadically. Not enough to do anything meaningful with all at once, so I have been lopping their flowers off and drying them indoors. When they are fully dry, I add them to the growing collection in a paper bag. A winter project maybe.
With similar (and unusual for me) levels of thrift and preparedness, borage flowers are being added to ice cubes. Just in case it stays hot long enough for a summer supper party.
I caught my neighbours staring at my all gold raspberries yesterday. The canes are, rather unexpectedly, growing in a beech hedge and they are, rather startlingly, very yellow, so I can understand their consternation. I offered them some and they pulled that face that is so universally human that it makes me laugh out loud. There is evolutionary advantage in being careful about what you put in your mouth and unfamiliar food is meant to be approached reluctantly and with suspicion. Once they had got past the toddler with broccoli stage and put the fruit in their mouth, they declared them delicious.
(I ate one first, to prove them to be safe. Copying others is also a universal human trait.)
Sowing biennials
Biennials are worth a bit of extra effort for lots of reasons, but first it might be helpful to think about why they are an effort. I don’t know about you but the rush of effort that comes early in the season has slackened a bit. This is the time of year that I want to be sitting in the hammock, (or indoors watching the rain slide disconsolately down the windows) and drinking gin. I don’t have a square inch of a bed or a pot spare to put another seed into, and there is so much abundance that I cannot imagine that the earth will ever be bare and cold again. But, my lovely, overcome that inertia; biennials are worth it and your future self will thank you. My tips are:
Shove them in a pot or a seed tray in the short term. Mine are probably going to be on the shadier staging bits of the greenhouse but that is only because that is the only place that I have any room. Do not feel that you have to direct sow them if you simply don’t have any gaps going spare. It really isn’t a good use of space when you could have dahlias just coming into flower. However, do not leave them in a greenhouse over the winter. They need cold to trigger spring flowering. One year I smugly left a whole bank of trays of honesty seedlings protected under cover and then planted them out in March. I may be the only person to have needed a three year flowering cycle for lunaria.
Generally the best guide to when seed needs to be sown is when the flower is dropping its seed naturally. I do find this is a bit tricky with biennials; all the advice is to sow before the end of July to give the plants a chance to bulk up before winter but my foxgloves aren’t anywhere near ready to harvest seed from yet. I also have quite a few self-seeded honesty that are looking pretty small and I know they were from a crop I harvested last year and they won’t flower until next. I tend to operate a bit of belt and braces approach to get round this. I have lots of seed from last year in glass jars (I find biennials generally and foxgloves specifically to be abundant in terms of the seed that they produce) and so I will sow that now. But when the foxglove seed it ready, I shall chuck it about a bit and hope for the best. Oh, and save it, obviously.
Fruit trees
If you have any plum or damson trees, prune now. If you have apple trees and you are feeling replete at the prospect of a bumper harvest, thin now. The June drop means that there are tiny apples scatted all along the paths. These aren’t windfalls, they are too early and are good for nothing but compost. Not that compost isn’t inherently wonderful anyway. Do not grieve the loss of fruit, the tree is simply shedding what it cannot support and you will get much better fruit from what is left. Have a look at what is left, you should only have two apples max in each cluster. And this is where flower growers have the advantage over non; your sharp-nosed snips will make short work of snipping out small fruits and trying to do it with secateurs is a nightmare.
A lovely little article by the wonderful James Wong here.
Sowing
If you grow for eating, it is depressingly/wonderfully (delete as appropriate, I am very much in the latter camp) time to think about winter. If you would like vegetables and salad to harvest over the colder months, you need to get it to do its growing now. It won’t grow much from October, so you need to get plants big enough by then to be able to pick leaves off until March. I cannot recommend Vital Seeds’ Second Spring collection enough. The ground is warm and conditions are good and so they should absolutely spring into life now, and by the time the weather turns, you will have good strong plants. As with biennials (see above) I will be sowing into trays and pots because I don’t have room anywhere else but with a hope that they will slot into the spaces when the foxgloves are over.
(Other tips for kitchen garden growers, feed your tomatoes. It makes all the difference in the world.)
Did I mention weeding?