After what looks like it must have been a drought-induced false start a few weeks ago, Autumn seems to be getting into its stride now, and many of the trees and shrubs we rely on for autumn colour are starting to do their stuff.

Where's that Steeleye Span when you need them?

Thursday brought welcome – but not overly generous – rainfall, and left the ground wet enough to deliver our first proper misty moisty autumnal sunrise yesterday; friends and neighbours are helping to stuff our larder with seasonal bounty from their gardens, and with breakfast time temperatures hovering only a few degrees above freezing, it’s really starting to feel as if winter must be limbering up in the wings.

The nursery closes for the winter next week, but with this seasons first bare root tree delivery scheduled for a couple of weeks time, it doesn’t look like activity levels will be dropping any time soon.

Being optimisitic sorts, we thought that the drought conditions we were describing back in September would be well and truly broken by now.   But sadly not – we’ve still had virtually no rain.

The soil is still just as dry as it was when we photographed our northerly neighbour harrowing back in September, so we knew there’d be some dust when our other neighbour started cultivating this week. His field borders the nursery to the south and east; sadly his ploughing was accompanied by a brisk south-easterly wind, so from time to time we were treated to the spectacle of there being enough airborne soil that we couldn’t actually see much of the nursery.

And now the entire site has a thick dusting of our neighbours soil over it.

Enough dust to write in -inside the polytunnel!

The Met Office are forecasting rain for tomorrow – hopefully it’ll be at least enough to settle the dust.

We’ve always thought of Shropshire as a wetter than average sort of place, so it’s something of a culture shock to find ourselves praying for rain – but if we don’t get a much-wetter-than-average winter, there’ll surely be trouble ahead.

It may be late, but there’s still loads of plants that’ll bring a bit of colour to your autumn borders….

A view across part of our sales areas this morning

It hasn’t rained here for ages.  Really ages.   In fact, we can’t remember the last time we had a period of significant rain – it was probably about a year ago.     Then we had a really cold winter – lots of snow, but not much water in that, then an absurdly warm and dry spring, and then a reasonably okay sort of summer, warmish, calm, and dry.

Watching the weather forecasts this year has been like one of those crazy dreams where you can never quite reach the stuff you need (everyone has those, don’t they?).   There has been lots of rain around, but as soon as it approaches Shropshire on the forecast maps it just seems to evaporate, and the clouds go everywhere but here.

The garden is completely knackered – we don’t water the ornamental garden at all, trying to work with plants that will cope with our always-less-than-moist soil, but even they’ve been defeated by this years conditions.   Our veg plots have only survived because we’ve spent hours (many hours) hand watering.

We could illustrate this with a photo of our parched garden plants, but frankly that’d just be embarrassing.   So we were pleased to have a different photo opportunity this afternoon, when one of our neighbouring farmers decided to harrow his field.   Normally this is an entirely unremarkable event, but today, rather than calmly breaking down the soil and leaving it ready for sowing, the process seemed to have been extended to include sharing a good proportion of the field with the neighbourhood – as we, and anybody else trying to breath nearby, were consumed in clouds of dust-dry earth.   If it had been windier, the ploughman could have extended his largesse to the neighbouring county.

Dusty

Dustier

There's a tractor in there somewhere...

The garden is knackered, but we’ve been irrigating the nursery – it’s seemed at times as if that’s all we’ve done this season – and there are still huge swathes of late season colour to enjoy. Maybe that’ll be tomorrows photo opportunity.

Parent plants don’t get to have much fun;  they’re no sooner in growth in spring than a man with secateurs comes and butchers them for cuttings.   And in the autumn,  just as they’re thinking they might slow down and have a kip through winter, he comes around and does it all again.  Chelsea chop doesn’t come into it – these guys get all but demolished twice a year.

But for a few short months between scalpings they’re allowed to do their own thing – and in summer, the parent aisle in the polytunnel looks lovely:

Make hay while the sun shines...

Sadly, they don’t enjoy a long life either – after a couple of years, just as they’re starting to think they’ve got a handle on the annual routine, the man with the secateurs comes around again, replaces them with one of their offspring, and consigns them to the compost heap.   S’not easy being a parent.

Maybe it's time we bought a seed sowing machine...

Last week we were mostly sowing seeds…..

And this week we’ve been mostly marvelling at the speed and enthusiasm with which so many of them have germinated.

Sempervivum take the prize for being both the smallest seeds, and the fastest germinators.   Their seed is vanishingly small;  according to the packet the contents weighed just 0.07 grams (¹) and we had to sow this microscopically small quantity into 60 separate plugs.   But barely had the seed  touched the compost than it was showing signs of life – miraculous specs of green were appearing less than 48 hours later.

And most of the rest of the seeds were equally enthusiastic – within the week, the majority of trays were showing green shoots.

Our favourites are always the Lupins – in contrast to the Sempervivums these seeds are huge, and get buried under a thick blanket of vermiculite; when they germinate, more or less in unison, they push their covers aside, and wave flag-like seed leaves to the sky.   Anyone old enough to remember is bound to think “Quatermass”.

They're coming to get you....

For our own sanity we haven’t counted the plugs; there was about 5 man days labour in the sowing – in just a few weeks time we’ll be potting up, and that’s going to take just a bit longer……

(¹) You have to wonder at the technology in use at the seed merchant to weigh and handle such absurdly tiny volumes;  and whether they have to screen their employees for hayfever (the comedic potential for sneezy operators would be huge, though we have to concede Woody Allen got there first – remember the cocaine scene in Annie Hall?).

When the code words being used to identify D-Day landing operations began appearing in 1944 Daily Telegraph crosswords, the investigating authorities concluded that no espionage had been involved, and that the words had simply been “in the ether” (¹).

We used a word in a blog post a couple of weeks ago which seems to have found its way into the ether too.

When we used the word we weren’t actually sure we hadn’t simply dreamt it – we had to google it to make sure it really existed.   But it did, so in it went, and we thought no more about it.

Then, somewhat implausibly, we heard that same unlikely word used in conversation over the weekend, and we assumed that it had found its way into our own personal ether….

Then today, it appeared (even more implausibly) in a gardening blog that we follow.

So where did it come from, and where is it going?   Were we responsible for launching the word into the ether, or simply unwitting pawns in someone else’s word game?   Has it been out there all the time and we just haven’t noticed?   Or has it lurked in our subconcious for decades just waiting for its 15 minutes of fame?

It’s a very nice word anyway, and we’re happy to have been (re)acquanted with it.   And just to give it one more outing, we’re going to describe its appearance in our lives as serendipitous.

(¹)   It’s a famous story, but just in case you haven’t heard it, its re-told here.

The weatherman told us there might be a frost last night (”might be cold enough for a touch of grass frost around dawn in prone areas”) but we didn’t believe him – this is nearly mid-June for goodness sake, and for as long as we’ve been gardening the sage advice has always been that we don’t get frosts beyond the end of May(*).

But he was right;  the thermometer is showing an overnight low of zero, and there was ice on the cars this morning – quite thick ice on the pickup tonneau cover, which suggests it must have been freezing for more than a few minutes.

Brrrr!

So the weather is upside down, again – summer temperatures in March and April, and now April showers, and spring-like frosts in June.   Barmy, when it should be Balmy.

* Not usually anyway – the last time we remember was aeons ago (more than 20 years) when we used to grow bedding plants, and had a frost (in Telford) on June 6th. By an extraordinary stroke of luck (or careful planning!?) we’d bought a heater for our polytunnel a couple of weeks earlier. Phew!

Pulsatilla Papageno

The manic seasonal nature of working in horticulture means that at this time of year it’s easy to forget WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT. We tend to spend all our time rushing about sorting stuff on the nursery, and none of it standing back and admiring the reason we chose to work in this industry in the first place.

And so last year, when Louise found a particularly attractive Pulsatilla amongst a batch in one of the polytunnels, we made a special effort to take time out…..and planted it just outside our back door.

So this spring, every time we set off for our 60 second commute to work, we have to pass this little reminder of what we’re doing here.

We sell loads of pulsatillas every year, and if our customers get as much joy from theirs as we do from this, we’ll have spread more than a little happiness won’t we?

Pulsatilla Papageno is a seed raised strain;  the flower colour and the frilliness of the petals is entirely unpredictable – so we can probably sell you a plant which is quite like this one, but it won’t be exactly the same!

Hibernating’s all very well, but you can have too much of a good thing;  and so we’ve yawned, stretched, poked our heads outdoors, stumbled into the light, and realised that Spring is just around the corner.
Time enough to count the cost of winter losses next week – for now, we’re revelling in the reassurance that the seasons are on the move, and things are coming back to life.

Our Hellebore White Lady is flowering - from seed sown maybe 5 years ago - worth the wait!

Our winter salads are showing signs of life (we haven't grown these outdoors before; they must have been named by the same optimistic marketing man who named winter pansies. They're clearly not going to do owt until the spring).

And of course you can't blog at this time of year without a picture of some snowdrops. We looked for these a couple of weeks ago, and wondered whether we'd dreamt that we had them in the garden - there wasn't a sign. And here they are now, in full bloom.

The nursery opens for business on March 1st (officially at least – the “early adopters” have been in already) and we’re busily prinking and preening ready for the new season. More trees this year; more shrubs (especially specimen sizes) and an even wider range of perennials. Bring it on!