Definitely not Mr Floppy

For the skeptics amongst you who thought we’d mutilated the Sedum we Chelsea chopped back in May, here’s a picture of how they look now – not a collapsed stem in sight!

There are 3 plants here (only 2 of them were in shot in the May post) and they’ve grown into an imposing clump haven’t they?   And flowering pretty much on time too.

We haven’t grown a control group to demonstrate how they’d look if they hadn’t been chopped – but we had a customer only this week complaining that their Sedum had “collapsed in the middle” so we know we’ve done the right thing.

All we need now are some butterflies. Usually Sedum are engulfed in tortoiseshells, and we’re hoping there’ll be some around when these flowers open fully, but we’re not sure – there seem to have been very few butterflies (of any species) around this year. Did the very cold weather of last winter do for them?

Louise's flower shop

High summer is undoubtedly a hiatus in the garden;  the mad rush of growth and flowers in spring and early summer are fading in the memory, the plants that delivered that early season glory are enjoying a quiet bit of r & r and concentrating on building reserves for next years display, and the late season flowerers are still coyly waiting in the wings.

But your borders don’t have to be lacklustre!    We’ve tried especially hard to keep the nursery looking fresh right through the summer this year, and it’s certainly possible to keep a good show of colour going through the season.

There are Chrysanthemums, Phlox, Penstemons, Dahlias, Coreopsis, Heleniums, Heliopsis, Echinaceas, and many others to fill the mid-summer hungry gap, and Louise has spent many a happy hour recently playing florist with them in our shade tunnel.

And it looks lovely doesn’t it? You don’t often get customers saying “Wow”, but we’ve genuinely had several do so in the last few weeks. And “it’s just like a garden!”. And if that inspires them to take some plants home for their gardens, so much the better!

One of our customers leapt onto the grow your own bandwagon last year, but seemed ready to leap off it again when we saw him last autumn – his beetroot hadn’t germinated, frost had damaged his runner beans, the pigeons had eaten his brassicas…the list of problems and failures went on (and on) and he was seriously questioning whether the veg growing lark was worth the candle.

When we followed him into grow your own food land this year we were determined to keep the scale of our plots manageable (there’s only 2 of us, so we don’t need huge volumes of stuff) and to grow things which were both easy, and either tastier or substantially cheaper than the fare you’ll find on supermarket shelves.

Mmmm....

And boy have they grown!   The picture here shows our garden plots last week.   The picture here shows them about 6 weeks ago.    A bit of a difference huh?

We’ve already seen off the first batch of broad beans (and very tasty they were too) and we’re looking forward to batch number 2 cropping in a few weeks.   We’ve had courgettes on the menu for several weeks (but haven’t yet had the “what shall we do with all these?” moment) and have had a couple of pickings of runner beans (so far!).

We’ve had salad leaves and radishes from these plots too, and are looking forward to leeks and parsnips in the winter, as well as pink fir apple potatoes in the autumn.

And as long as you discount the effort in stripping the turf and digging the plots over to actually create the beds, the amount of work has been very modest.   And most definitely worth it. We’ve probably had some luck in avoiding the sorts of disasters that befell our friends’ forays into veg growing, but what the heck, you need a bit of luck sometimes! We’re definitely coming back next year.

We get quite a lot of power cuts here. Mostly that seems to be down to the ancient rural distribution system (our ‘phone line is equally unreliable – the cable feeding our house runs along the bottom of a roadside ditch for about a hundred metres!). But sometimes the blackouts are down to human intervention.

Our power failed at about mid-day yesterday, and after several revisions of the “repaired-by” time on the power company’s recorded telephone message, several engineers turned up in our garden at about 6 pm (we have an electricity transformer there) and announced that because they hadn’t even identified the source of the problem yet, they were going to install a temporary generator to keep us supplied. What nice people!

After several more deadlines had passed, a team of chaps with floods lights and head torches arrived in the lane in the early hours of this morning, made all sorts of banging and clattering noises, and at about 2.15 am, turned our power supply back on.

It was way too late, dark, and wet for us to investigate what they’d done last night, but we were mighty impressed when we ventured out this morning to find this :

Enough to supply us, and a few others ....

It could be catastrophic for us to lose power for any length of time of course – our irrigation system is electrically powered, so if the weather was hot and dry we’d be in real danger of losing stock, so hats off to the power company!

And the reason Farmers get nil?   It seems that the problem was caused by a plough ripping through an underground supply cable.   Ploughing too deep, or too close to the field boundary?   Cable not trenched deeply enough?   No doubt that’s a debate that the power company will be having with the farmer in question, but for now, take a bow Central Networks, you’ve played a blinder!

(This blog post is brought to you courtesy of the generator in the lane!)

We’re starting to think we may have blinked and missed a good part of 2010, because we were greeted by a distinctly autumnal vista when we flung back the curtains this morning.

Mellow fruitfulness must be next then....

We know it’s a sign of getting older when time seems to pass quicker, but blimey, surely it can’t be autumn yet?

It is, of course, classic August weather;  it’s a transitional month, still gloriously warm when the sun shines, but with noticeably longer and cooler nights, it’s a real teaser for things to come.

And while we may mourn the apparently accelerating passage of time, there’s always a bright side – the first picking of hedgerow blackberries made it into the freezer earlier in the week, so the first apple and blackberry crumble of winter can’t be far away!

Just in case you missed it on our homepage (and why would you go there?) :

SALE!!!

20% off all herbaceous plants during August (while stock lasts!)

’nuff said.

We’ve never seen an Elephant Hawk-moth, but we find their larvae in the polytunnels most years.   And they still make us jump.

Elephant Hawk Moth larva

The moths are common across the whole of the UK, and internet message boards fill up at this time of year with questions from gardeners who’ve found these giants in their gardens, usually feasting on Fuchsias .   We haven’t grown Fuchsias in any volume for years, but the larvae’s other food of choice is Rosebay Willow Herb, and there is loads of that in the hedgerows around here, so there are probably thousands of these monsters in the neighbourhood.

The chap in the photo seemed to have developed a taste for Tricyrtis, because Nick found him hiding amongst a stand of  T. hirta ‘Tojen’ in the back tunnel, with some seriously nibbled leaves around and about.

These guys are BIG – this one is about the size of your index finger – so they must eat a serious volume of foliage in their lifetimes.

Not wishing to harm such a magnificent beast, but also wanting to preserve some Tricyrtis for our customers, we carefully transferred this chap to a pot saucer (which is where he was photographed) and then re-homed him on some willow herb on the roadside.

We’re looking forward to seeing a moth any time soon!