the autumnal equinox

I was just complaining about how August seemed to drag on forever, and I blinked and it was nearly October. I have to choose between going to bed with the window open and bedsocks on, or closed and without. There’s a chill coming down from the hills and, even on the warmer days, everything feels a bit damp.

Sowing Hardy annuals

Stop thinking about it, list writing, planning, or procrastinating. Just do it.

I have written a lot on this but if you are not sure what you are doing, it is probably best to just chuck some seed around and risk it, than try and do things perfectly and not get anything in the ground. You’d be amazed how much seeds want to grow. I think they are sensing the urgency too.

Read more about hardy annual sowing here, or read the full seed sowing guide here.

Collecting seed

Ah, I trusted my greenhouse. It only leaks in one place and I put a huge tray of Digitalis ferruginea 'Gigantea' on the side. Honestly, it was a massive tray (my serving dish for roast chicken) and the seed was an inch thick. I had not bargained on the storms that lashed the field and blew the rain in sideways. My beautiful brown seed that I had winnowed and cleaned and tilted to let the tiny insects crawl out from, swimming in a great big puddle of water. A bit of damp will dry but there was no coming back from that. I tipped the wet seed in clumps onto the perennial beds (a stretch to call it direct sowing, but I was very upset at the time) and thanked my lucky stars that there are a few more spires still standing. I wait for another dry day, if such a thing ever comes, and start all over again.

Talking of tipping seed willy-nilly, there are a number of plants that do best with this fast turnaround from harvest to sowing. As in, you will never get better germination than if you shake the plant all over a bit of bare soil. Daucus carota is one, and if you are lucky enough to have the gloriously coloured Bupleurum longiflorum ‘Bronze Beauty’ it truly is the only way.

If you are feeling lucky/experimental/curious/brave, then saving dahlia seeds is always a laugh. I have a few of the single ones which have fully dried (deadheading dahlias got stuck on the ‘I really should’ list but as I just grow them recreationally for me, I didn’t stress unduly) and the seeds just fall out. Sow in spring, not now.

This time last year I was still harvest bucketfuls of lovely fat sweet pea pods. Some of the later flowering ones are looking vigorous still, but the vast majority are tired, wet, and a bit soggy.  Time to call it a day with those. This weekend is (in the West Country anyway) one last dry day in a forecast full of drizzle. Collect what you can and leave the rest for the birds.

The kitchen garden

Yet more, on the topic of a fast turnaround between harvest and sowing, I am going to replant the vast majority of my garlic harvest. The kitchen is still in such disarray, I can neither cook nor preserve it. Unlike my seed disaster, I have managed to keep it dry but I cannot help thinking it might be the best use of time and space to simply use it all as a seed crop and have a wonderful bumper crop next year, when I might actually have a chance to eat it.

If you have garlic you want to store, or you fancy growing some of your own, I go to The Garlic Farm for all advice, suggestions, recipes etc. This post on all the different ways to store was the most useful place on the internet this year. You will notice that most advice is to plant garlic in January, but Charles Dowding says he is doing his now, and so that is good enough for me.  

On the subject of people you trust giving slightly unexpected advice, I was reading in the Nant y Bedd newsletter this morning that it is perfectly possible to eat the vines and shoots from your winter squash plants. This long wet year has been a terrible one for heat loving squash (although mine have had a late surge and are looking wonderful) and now is the time to get ruthless about cutting back leaves so whatever sunshine we might have reaches the fruit, and energy goes into sweeling and ripening the fruit, not growing foliage like a triffid.

Whether you compost the vines or eat them is entirely up to you. I’m composting.

Tidying enough, but not too much

I have, in line with the best practice guidelines on supporting wildlife, left big patches of nettle in various places around the place. So much so that my father in law dropped hints about getting me a strimmer for my birthday; he was unimpressed by my tales of butterflies and their larvae. Whether they have done any good or not is up for debate, but they are now covered in seeds and I am looking at a full on nettle farm if I don’t do something soon. The deal is that I clear some places (where I get endlessly stung), and leave others. Other things I won’t be tidying are the teasels or any of the big seed heads that I haven’t already harvested for the seed shop, any open stems, and any fallen wood. In fact, I might go searching out for more wood, as the Great Dixter ecologist was very clear that this is the ultimate in micro-life accommodation.

Compost

All this weeding, plus the thousands of apples that have fallen in the storm, are proving an absolute godsend for the compost heaps. There are still plenty of piles of thatch quietly composting too, and I have high hopes for how much I will have come spring when I have to fill all those new raised beds.

The shift is now moving from the lush greens of high summer back to the stemmy and twiggy browns of autumn, so keep any kitchen scraps so you can try and bump up the nitrogen to carbon ratio a little bit. However, it’s not worth getting hung up about, I tend to see autumn compost heaps as a more ling term, fungally rich sort of project, so I’ll be layering once, maybe turning once, adding the biodynamic preparations, maybe some biochar, and then walking away and leaving well alone.

Mulch

One thing that has made all the difference to my perennial beds (and therefore my entire life) was a layer of thick wood chip mulch last autumn. Bare soil is an endless reproach, full of weeds and thin growth, always overwhelming, always chasing my tail. The mulched beds have been a dream. So much so, I feel like I have been doing gardening wrong (or at least the hard way) for much of my life. You bet your bottom dollar I’m doing it again this year.

I just need to finish clearing some of the mypex inside the gate where the delivery is going to be, and then I am ordering from my local saw mill. I know everyone says that you can get it from your local tree surgeon, but I do like a bit of control about what I am getting, so I pay for it. Not too much conifer (although it is jolly hard to avoid some), more wood than bark, and more bark than leaf. A couple of days with a wheelbarrow and I’m sorted. In fact, it will take much less time than last year as the plants are so much bigger and thus the gaps in between so much smaller. I dream of the day that the whole matrix is a long bed of ground covering, dense, shrubby, perennial planting, but whilst I co-exist with bindweed, it will never be totally maintenance free. But oh my days, this makes such a difference.

Planting out biennials

My foxgloves are starting to look like they really want to get going. They are still in the greenhouse at the moment and I have learned the hard way that over-wintering biennials under glass means zero flowers the next year. They need the cold to trigger flowering. If you are clearing beds of the summer annuals that are over, this would be the perfect time to give them a new home. If you would like to interplant with tulips then put the biennials out now in their pots so they feel the chill coming on, and then you can put then in the ground at the same time as you put the bulbs in in November.

Watch out for self-sown annuals

I have ammi all over the place and I haven’t sown a single one. They are, of course, in inconvenient places but that is gardening for you; nature and fate have one idea about how to do things, and I have another. Whilst they are still small is the time to get a trowel gently under to roots, and move them into a more useful place.

Divide and conquer

If you have clumps of herbaceous perennials that are starting to look a bit thuggish, now would be the perfect time to dig them up and split them. You can be surprisingly brutal with this although the chunks should be big enough to give flowers soon (think a minimum of a 9cm pot; if you wouldn’t buy it in a garden centre then it’s probably too small).

I have split all my campanulas. Although it is recommended that sanguisorba is divided in spring, I need to move mine and I want lots of them, so it is going to be done now regardless. There is a bit of growing time left in the season for them to get some roots down before the winter and I think they’ll be fine.

Do not, under any circumstances, do this for grasses. Yes, I did this and lost a lot. Spring only.  

Lots of people recommend planting spring bulbs in September. I place this firmly in the category of ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if’. I don’t know about you, but I already have got enough on. Consider this permission to carry that over into October.