July
After a hot June, a wet July. Growth has slowed, and there is a lazy feeling to the garden. Grass is flopping everywhere, which never looks quite as lovely as hay meadow wafting.
Tomorrow, we will have to try and start the old strimmer, and clear away the grass from the topiary. I haven’t seen it since April.
Softwood cuttings
There have been some absolute joyous successes this season. After the devastation of the slugs in spring, cuttings have been much more cheering than the seed sowing. Every single one of the honeysuckles I took have struck, ditto the ‘Miss Jessop’ upright rosemarys. (Should that be rosemaries?) All but one of the roses, which means that I have six new ‘Claire Austin’ roses which I can train up the willow panels that I am planning to source for sweet pea beds. I will confess that I let out a little ‘hurrah’ when I opened up the box and found them all shooting.
I won’t be disturbing any of them until I can see white roots coming out the bottom of the pots (the rosemary is there already) but I feel confident. So much so, I will be sacrificing a very tatty box ball to the cause, and chopping it into a hundred cuttings.
I am taking these cuttings in July:
/ Anything hedging - Buxus, Lonicera nitida (now incomprehensibly called Lonicera ligustrina var. yunnanensis), possibly even a little yew from the churchyard
/ Roses (especially R. glauca), maybe just one more R. ‘Claire Austin’. And if I can source a container grown R. mutabilis, then I would be delighted to propagate that for the front garden.
/ Physocarpus
/ Hydrangea
/ Honeysuckles
/ Jasmine
/ Salvias (so excited about S. uliginosa)
/ Viburnum
Softwood cuttings are very easy but I have some tips. Firstly, work quickly. Secondly, cut don’t crush the stems. Soft wood cuttings are really quite soft if you are doing them right. Thirdly, label. One cutting looks much like another. Like twigs.
How to:
Remove shoots, longer than the finished cutting, just above a leaf on the parent plant.
Aim to make a cutting not more than 10cm long. Use clean, sharp snips to cut just below a leaf joint. Strip off the leaves from the bottom half of the cutting.
Insert cuttings into pots of moist compost with lots of added grit, keeping lower leaves just above compost level.
Push twigs in around the edge of the pot, then cover with a clear polythene bag held in place with an elastic band. Label.
Place cuttings in a warm position, out of direct sun. I put them on the lower staging of my greenhouse which is perfect.
And just wait. You will know that the cuttings have taken if you see white roots at the bottom of the pot, or new growth in the leaves at the top.
Seed saving
As well as taking more cuttings (and I fear that may become addictive), I am starting more seeds, some of them collected straight from the plant. The jester’s caps of the aquilegia are full of shiny black seed which I cast in wide arcs across the kitchen garden. I had spied a very fine buttercup, small flowered and elegantly tall, on a dog walk some months ago. This evening, I capture the last of the seed before it is lost into the long grass. I didn’t take anything with me to save the seed into so I carry it carefully in the palm of my hand, leaving only one other to wrestle three dogs onto leads and home up the lane.
The wild carrots will only be another few days, I already have the bladder campion, cerinthe and the ox-eye daisies harvested, dried and packed. There is a bowl of Stipa gigantea seed which I am going to germination test, before I ask you if you would like it in the shop.
Top tips for seed saving:
1. Pick your moment
Too early and the seed won’t be ripe. Too late and your precious seeds will be scattered to the four winds. Collect seed when it comes loose with a light touch, when they rattle, or when there is a change in colour.
2. Handle with care
Seed wants to be dispersed so it can be quite tricky to catch. Use a paper bag and a lot of care to maximise your harvest. Putting the bag over the seed head before cutting the stem will help for poppies. Label immediately.
3. Be mindful of moisture
Harvest on a dry day, and make sure the seed is free of insects and completely dry before storing. Keep in paper bags or envelopes in a cool, dry, frost free place.
4. Abundance
Plants are generous and you will quickly accumulate more seeds than you need. Share them freely.
SEEDS TO SOW IN JULY
Yes, I am still sowing. For some reason biennial seed, honesty excepted, are tiny. Sow very thinly - I have sown the nicotiana and the apricot foxgloves too thickly and they are going to be the very devil to prick out.
My favourite biennials for flowering next year
/ Foxgloves, of every colour, but I adore Sutton’s Apricot. Grow the perennial ones for low maintenance flowers; Digitalis lanata ‘Café Crème’ is exceptional.
/ Honesty. Because truly, there is nothing like the lunar seed heads. I have then in wreaths all year round.
/ Hesperis. The white one. The scent is utterly wonderful.
/ Aquilegia. Sow in early July is the latest you can sow them because they need to be a good size to make it through the winter to flower next spring.
/ Stocks. I grow the apricot and the copper double varieties. Beautiful.
/ Anthriscus sylvestris ’Ravenswing’. Black cow parsley. Whatever you have read or heard about what I said was my favourite flower, I was lying. It’s this.
Starting perennials :
My flower field, Malus Farm, is being guided more and more by regenerative principles and that means the surface of the soil should be covered, and the underneath of the soil should be as undisturbed as possible. & that means as much permanent planting - perennials - as possible.
/ Achilleas
/ Verbascum
/ Hollyhocks
/ Dianthus (Try D.carthusianorum)
/ Echinaceas (I favour E. pallida)
/ The big textural plants such as Echinops and Eryngium
/ Bupleurum - top tip: buy a plant and let it self-seed. Buying seed fresh enough to germinate is nigh on impossible. That said, I do have a stock alert on for Special Plants. Derry Watkins is very knowledgeable about what seed needs to be super fresh. I did hear a rumour that she nips round Dan Pearson’s garden (she lives next door) and collects seed when he isn’t looking.
/ Rudbeckia triloba - hardy enough for overwintering
Seed saving
Now is the time for starting your seed collection. Once you are self sufficient for seed, you have everything you will ever need.
The opium poppies are tantalisingly not quite ready yet, which is annoying because I am itching to make lemon and poppy seed cake. (I am having to make do with violas.) 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. One sweet pea 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.
OTHER JOBS
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.
Keep on top of the bindweed
I have it really bad in patches of the kitchen garden and it really is little and often, and yes, digging is essential. Every garden has its own bete noire, I recommend you keep on top of it.
Tie in sweet peas
This is mostly for the seed saving plants. Sweet peas are self fertile and so they are utterly fantastic for saving seed. The only thing that might go wrong if you are trying to keep your varieties true, you cannot let the plants become entangled. It might look obvious now when they are all full of colour, but it won’t be come harvest time. I keep a very close eye on mine so that the wigwams only have one sweet pea variety clinging, and if a neighbouring plant tumbles across, it is tied back into its own, sharpish.
Hedges & edges, supports & structures
We are starting to mow some areas, and also tidying the beech hedges with secateurs. I won’t clip properly until 1 September, just in case there are nesting birds (and well done them if I do, because the dogs are all gundogs…) but a little bit of tidying of the structural lines of the garden can make all the difference in the world.