Kate's August Catch Up
St Swithin’s Day if thou dost rain, for forty days it will remain,
St Swithin’s Day if thou be fair, for forty days will rain na mair
Since St Swithin’s day fell on a Saturday this year it’s hard for me to say definitively whether or not it rained in the garden, but something about the last month tells me it probably did. July was in fact the sixth wettest on record which meant a lot of trudging about in heavy waterproofs which is usually hellish in summer but luckily (!) it was also unseasonably cold – every cloud and all that. The cool, damp weather meant we could move onto jobs more usual for autumn, chiefly mulching and planting. The former we’ve been doing quite a bit of, sealing in the moisture with thick layers of woodchip and good dark mulches. This will help to suppress weed growth but will also improve soil structure over time, which is particularly important in a garden as old as this one where several beds have remnants of an old path of rubble and clinker running through them. It’s also had the fringe benefit of freeing up a compost bay so I can now turn all the heaps into the next bay along while everything is nice and moist and the air is warm, which will give us yet more lovely organic matter to spread on the soil over winter. We’ve also managed to plant out some perennials and the remaining annuals into the cutting garden. It’s the first year for our new cut flower beds and whilst it’s been a learning curve, it’s also exceeded my expectations in terms of productivity and we’ve been able to make regular wholesale deliveries into Edinburgh.
On the odd day where the rain became too gruelling we took the opportunity to do some pruning in the glasshouse. Chiefly this involved the thumping back of a well-established apricot that had become very congested over time and was outgrowing it’s allocated wall-space. This is a job that needs to be done in summer to avoid the dreaded silver leaf, and for us involves taking out one or two big branches every year and tying in any useful new growth. This is the second year of this treatment, and it feels like it’s starting to take on some kind of recognisable shape. We also pruned all the exuberant growth from the grapevines and thinned the bunches in the hopes of getting at least a few decent ones. The apple cordons also got their summer trim to concentrate energy into the ripening fruits, with the exception of the one that had an active birds nest in the top which remains resolutely hirsute for now. Speaking of hirsute, the hedges will be getting a stay of execution for another couple of weeks at least since nesting birds are also still in residence there.
As we move into August we’ll start collecting seeds from Aquilegia, Digitalis, Hesperis, Lunaria, Verbascum and corncockle as they become ripe. We’ve got a tricky bosky corner out in the flower garden that has been recently strimmed then scalped back to what looks like a beautiful deep layer of leaf litter, so a few of the woodlanders will be thrown into there to see what happens. Some of the biennials we can sow into trays now so we have stocky little plants to go out in autumn for flowering next year. We will also start taking cuttings of the best of the Penstemon and Salvia after last winter’s near total wipe out, and of course Nepeta which I maintain it’s impossible to have too much of. In the next couple of weeks I’m hoping to spend a bit of time labelling the apple varieties in the garden from a list kindly left for me by my predecessor. I did do this job last year but was dismayed to find the marker I’d used had washed away so this time I’m armed with the kind of aluminium labels that you can emboss with a sharp implement.
Since I have, ironically, chosen to write about the rain on one of the few dry days we’ve had this summer I’ll sign off here and get back to the garden. In the meantime I hope St Swithin isn’t causing you too much bother, and you’re managing to get out and enjoy what the season has to offer!
Kate