A bit like Autumn

EASILY DISTRACTED
Autumn is moving in quickly. The temperature has dropped and fallen leaves are starting to build up in the corners of the garden. I was in Swan Park today and noticed that the elderberries are ripe and the sycamore helicopter seed pods are ready to drop. There’s still plenty of growth left though, so it’s not time to pack the mower away into the shed just yet. Grass, contrary to popular belief, never really stops growing, it just slows down a bit to allow you to conduct a few indoor jobs like tidying the garage.

So I am rummaging around our garage looking for something as the rain is stubborn and won’t go away. I can’t quite remember what it is I’m looking for as I’m very easily distracted. I have just unearthed an old Daily Diary from my college days back in 1991.


DAILY DIARY
The particular course I did at college was Amenity Horticulture, which meant that 80% of the time was spent being practical out of doors with a spade, notepad and piece of twine, leaving just 20% of the time for me to fall asleep in the classrooms. I was never that good at sitting so it was an ideal ratio. Throughout the course we were asked to log our work and observations throughout the year and compile a diary. At the time is seemed like a bit of a chore, but it’s the same as photographs, they become more historically valuable as the years pass.

PUT THE KETTLE ON
This needs a bit more attention so I tuck the diary under my arm and put the kettle on. Sitting comfortably in my armchair, I flick the diary open to the index page. I was very organised back then and everything is laid out in alphabetical order. It’s amazing what topics we covered. From alpine display beds through potting geraniums as well as day trips to nurseries to see how F1 seeds were produced, we packed everything in. Bizarrely, one of the most interesting and memorable trips for me was a visit to the local Tesco car park to assess the effectiveness of their low maintenance planting schemes around the car parking spaces…. How sad is that?

The diary also has my day-to-day interactions with the rest of the students throughout the year. The age group of the class members ranges from sixteen to sixty so there was always plenty of banter going on. I just started writing about everything that we did and thinking about it I have never stopped, it’s just that my location and circumstances have changed and I now write for the local newspaper instead of a college course…

REFERENCE
The idea of the diary was to use as a reference for when we were in the big wide world of work. It makes for a more animated read than a stuffy textbook and you have a giggle at the same time.

I’m on my second cuppa now and delve deeper. I remember we were also asked to do a monthly observation to witness the changing season. I found this invaluable at the time, as before the course I worked in a sand quarry and stared at large mountains of silica sand every day. It could have been any time of year as it looked like the Sahara Desert no matter what season it was (We sold sand to the Arab countries as a matter of interest, it was mixed in with nylon fibres to use on racecourses). I had never noticed the trees changing colour or seed heads appearing. The only time the quarry looked different was when it was covered in snow.

I started the observations with a visit to Westonbirt Arboretum (in Gloucestershire) to see the fabulous autumn leaves of their trees; acers, euonymus, oaks and cherry to name but a few. I then took to noting all of the plants around my own area that were radiant at different times of the year. I would recommend anyone who has an interest in gardening to do this as it really makes you realise just how quickly things change.

Another thing that the course taught me is that the more you learn about gardening, the more you realise just how much you don’t know…..

TRAINING COURSES
That’s why training courses can be a vital part of the journey to horticultural enlightenment. I was looking at the Greenmount courses up near Antrim. They have loads of courses on offer including amenity, organic and greenkeeping. If you are interested in a career in horticulture (and after all it is a growing industry ha ha) check out the courses on the website www.cafre.ac.uk

If you garden just for fun than a day or weekend course may be more feasible. The Organic Centre in Rossinver have loads of interesting courses running all year round. It’s getting to the mushroom season, so why not sign up for their Foraging For Free course or the Mushroom Hunting day? You can also choose a “Polytunnel” Course, A “Natural Remedies For Winter” weekend, “Alternative Energy”, “Growing Trees from Seed,” “Planning a Garden”, “Make Reedbeds” or “Organic Gardening Made Easy”. That’s just a small selection of what’s on offer, check out their website
www. theorganiccentre.ie for more information. If you get enough of your friends and family interested, you could hire a bus and have a fantastic, educational day out…

I had a tutor who told me that if I could remember three Latin names of plants and occasionally bring them out in conversation, then people would think you know what you are talking about and be impressed. It’s worked well for me for years…..or so I like to believe.

FULL OF BEANS

It’s been a while since we were down at the supermarket. It’s not something that we have consciously decided to do, it just happened.

In winter when the nights are long and the mountain madness sets in, it’s always very entertaining and sociable to venture to the supermarket to get a fix of dazzling fluorescent lighting, warmth from the cookers and wee chats with friends and neighbours. According to Steven Fry there were people in France at the turn of the century that used to hibernate all winter. Maybe they were onto something. Mind you, he said the same community used to walk about on stilts in the summer because their land was so boggy. I wouldn’t fancy that – how would I get into the car?

SHORT NIGHTS
This time of year though it’s different. The nights are short, the children keep you occupied and we are not short of a visitor or three. So the real reason for not having to do any shopping or go into town is that our homegrown vegetables are maturing at a fast rate of knots. We are coming up with more and more inventive ways of eating and cooking them up into delicious meals for the family. Freezing them is a possibility but that’s an art form in itself and I tend to get a bit confused with the blanching process...It doesn’t take much to confuse me at the best of times.




FREE RUNNERS
I’m outside picking the runner beans today and it’s getting to be a great way of doing stretching exercises to reach the fresh ones at the top. I used hazel rods for them to grow up at the beginning of the season and didn’t bother cutting back either the rods or nipping the tops off of the beans. Its suggested that you cut the runner bean plants so they only grow to about seven feet, to keep the plant producing more beans lower down which would save stretching your back too much (or worse still wobbling about on a kitchen chair) trying to reach the top. I thought I would give them a free run and they have reached over ten feet now and are going strong, and still producing. It’s amazing how many beans can mature over night. The broad beans are a straightforward crop to grow, as they are extremely hardy. They can be grown in borders without high supports so they are very versatile and I just love the softness of the inside of the pod. They have a lovely bed to lie in. After I’ve harvested ours I will pull out the plants and fill the space with something else. Maybe some late-flowering perennials or more than likely the leeks that desperately need to be thinned and given a new home with more space..

YOUNG AND TENDER
One of the benefits of the “Grow your own vegetables” is that you can pick the crop far earlier than shop bought ones. You get them at their tastiest and when the nutrition value is the highest, especially if they are cooked straight after picking. Some onions you buy from the shops can be up to two years old. I have picked our onions for tea and the white crispy flesh is so different from supermarket bought ones.

BIG TEA
I’ve picked enough for tea and everything barring the left over party burgers is out of the garden. We are having runner beans, broad beans, potatoes, courgettes fried with onion and raw carrots, There’s a side salad too, minus the tomatoes as again they have failed to fruit outside. There are a few small green ones on a couple of the plants which will get cooked up in a bolognaise sauce. I look back at my polytunnel days with some nostalgia when the family and friends alike were able to pick and eat their fill of these home grown sweeties. The salad is made up of lettuce, spring onions, coriander, chives, radishes, rocket and baby grated beetroot. We seem to be having a lot of earwigs this year and the lettuce and spring onions have had to be checked carefully. It has been common enough this year for earwigs to crawl out of the green leafy part of the spring onions or hide amidst the layers of lettuce. I have heard they taste disgusting and don’t want to inflict the experience on family or guests.


TEMPTING
By avoiding the supermarkets we are also avoiding unnecessary impulse buys and wasteful packaging. Smaller outlets like John and Mary Reilly’s organic farm in Malin will be the retail success stories of the future as we move more and more to buying locally produced products that are of high value, fresh and full of nutrition. Community gardens are springing up everywhere around the country too as families realise that growing your own food is important for mental and physical health. I like the idea of being close enough to your veggie patch to collect your crop with a wheelbarrow, so small community allotments are ideal.

In our own little way, us veggie gardeners are voting with our feet and showing that self sufficiency can work….well partial self sufficiency in our case….. We still need milk and cheese though as we don’t keep cows….yet.

POST PARTY PICK UP

We’ve just done the fifteen load of washing. Well that’s what it feels like. It’s the following day, post party clean up at our house.

I’m out in the garden again to see the extent of the damage. Like inside the house, I am pleasantly surprised. Years ago if I went to a party the doorways would be filled with bulging dustbin liner bags full of beer cans and bottles and there would be a thin film of grease all over the walls. The post synopsis of our party is that the house has been left tidier that it was before it began. The garden also appears to have escaped without any damage.

On the driveway I can see trails of burst water balloons, I knew about these, as it was me that stood at the sink for an hour at the party and filled them up. Apart from these colourful pieces of plastic and two skateboards that have lost their wheels, there are no other signs of destruction.

Marquee
We set up our marquee on the off chance that the weather would be wet, but we were lucky enough to have a completely dry day. Because of this we didn’t really use this protective covering so it doesn’t need any cleaning. All we need is a dry day to take it down and put the washing line back up. The rain has now started so this might not be for a while yet.
Decorating outside
The white marquee looked a bit sparse when I set it up so I added pieces of ivy to the inside corners to break up the colour. I copied the idea from the fabulously decorated churches I go to around the peninsula taking photos of weddings for the paper. I also put vases of cut garden flowers and shrubs on tables and corners of the patio to brighten things up a bit. We don’t really go in for flowers much in the garden but we had plenty of sweet peas to brighten up the dull corners.


Party spuds
Most of the food was confined to the tables in the kitchen or the decking and we had three dogs running around on the day so any scraps dropped by the guests were soon picked up. The potato salad went down well. I had dug up two different types of spud in one bed as I couldn’t remember which ones were the earlies. It turned out that I did them just in time as blight was beginning to take hold. The crop was a bit of a disappointment though (probably because they were supposed to be maincrop spuds) and I was left with only a bowlful from a whole bed. There was enough to make a tasty salad, though with all the digging, washing and cutting out the bad bits of the golf ball and smaller sized spuds, Julie commented, after about 2 hours, that it might have been handier to go to the supermarket..

Fingerlings
One guest came with a big bowl of fingerling potatoes that were just boiled up and coated with a drop of melted butter. They went down very quickly. Fingerling potatoes are turning up in the poshest places these days, such as the menus of some of the country's finest restaurants. There is a novelty value about them and like the salad leaves, Rocket, they command a very high price in the shops even though they are just as easy to grow as any other variety. These spuds are grown for their small size. Choose between the waxy type and ones that resemble the balls of flour we get from some of our local roadside sellers.


HUGE SUCCESS
All in all then the party was a huge success. The garden came into it’s own and gave the children plenty of space to go crazy and there were enough nooks and crannies for them to hide. The adults on the other hand made good use of the decking and seating areas closer to the house. I also had some very pleasing comments about how well the garden was looking. I have a theory that if the grass is cut and the hedges look neat then everything else around it looks good, even a bed full of weeds.

The party was a great motivator for getting everything sorted so I will need to get planning for a Christmas one to get everything tidy for the winter.

PARTY TIME

It might be June drop in August, but still no-one told the tree it should keep at least a few apples.

IT’S PARTY TIME
I’m outside in the garden getting everything ready for a party this week. It’s not for me I might add, I tend to shy away from such shows of socialising, (maybe it’s the fear that no-one would turn up). It’s for Hilda, my mother in-law. It’s her 80th and we thought having the shindig at our house would spare her the trials of having her arms submerged in soapy water washing pots and running around with a dustpan and brush. Hilda is active enough at the best of times running 15 yoga classes a week as well as body boarding in her spare time, so she probably needs a rest from that too.

MARQUEE
The weather is a bit unpredictable at the moment so I thought a 6m X 3m marquee would help if it were wet. If nothing else it will get the children outside so they could entertain themselves away from the boring adults. I can’t decide where to put it though.

Party planning is, I am finding out, a bit of an art. If the weather is fine we will need the lawn for children to play football so the marquee couldn’t go there, although if it’s wet it could….I have therefore decided to take the washing line down at the side of the house and squeeze the Homebase special in between the two washing line posts. This way if it’s dry the kids can play football and we can serve food in the marquee. I shouldn’t think we will be doing any washing as the last thing the 50 guests want to see are pairs of odd socks hanging up to dry.
TRIMMING
I have been a couple of weeks preparing the garden for this party, starting with the hedge cutting. We have a lot of escallonia around the front and back of the garden and I found that the electric hedge cutters just weren’t up to the job. I would get half way around the front and then have to charge them up for four hours. Four hours is along time in the garden so by the time they are ready again, I am on to new things, usually putting my feet up in the front room.

I decided to invest in an electric set of hedge cutters and they are far lighter than petrol types. My arms start to buckle after a few minutes. I get plenty of rest with the electric cutters too as half of my time is taken up taping the severed electric cable back together again after I have accidentally cut through it. You don’t get as many rests with a petrol one.

I was going to leave the grass cutting until the day before the party, but again I have had to make hay whilst it’s dry, so the grass will be growing again for three days. This means that the stripes won’t be so defined. I like stripes, to the extent that even at cup final football matches when the teams are battling it out for the premiership, I’ll be commenting on the accuracy of the patterns on the pitch, much to the disgust of the lads.

JUNE DROP
I have noticed all of the fruit on the apple tree has dropped, so I am tidying those up before the wasps get excited and start to terrorise the guests. There must have been over 100 apples. It looks like something called June drop (although it’s August) and its nature’s way of getting the tree to self regulate how many apples it will produce so it doesn’t get too burdened. New trees shouldn’t really be growing too many as it could snap the branches. This tree is about fifteen years old though and every apple has fallen. If it is June drop, it’s a bit severe.




FINER DETAILS
The strimming has been done as well as sweeping the driveway so I have had time to spend on small details around the garden. I usually try to anticipate where children will be playing and take out as many potential dangers as possible, so I have been cutting back small branches at children’s head height on the trees. The paths have also been swept and cleaned and I have gone around the vegetable beds with my new oscillating hoe to keep the weeds down.

One job that I will be doing a bit closer to the time is to dig up some early spuds for a potato salad. I grew four types this year from early to lates but as usual I have lost the labels. I planted them in a logical pattern from the earliest to the latest, but I have forgotten from which end of the beds I did it, so I will pick out random plants to see how they look. To tell the truth there isn’t that much else to do around the outside of the house. It’s not like I am entering the local gardening competition. There will always be something to do though like washing the windows and adding few trowels full of compost into the containers to liven them up. The longer I stay out of doors though, the less chance there is of me being set on doing domestic stuff. As long as I keep my gloves on and occasionally wander past the kitchen window with the wheelbarrow, I should look busy.

SUMMERTIME HERBS

The summer months are a great time to pick, use and dry herbs. Herbs are easy to propagate and grow and you don’t need a big space. Even if you are living in a flat or apartment you can have windowsill planters filled with these useful plants.

We always have herbs in our garden, a lot of them are disguised as weeds. They attract the insects, grow in poor soil, are easy to look after and add colour, life and fragrance to the garden. They can be used in cooking, for cosmetic and medicinal purposes.

Here’s a taster of some of the more well known ones…..

Mint
Mint is great. A sprig in your new spuds adds flavour. Mint tea is very popular these days. It is supposed to be good for the digestion so it is nice to enjoy a cup after a meal. Just wash a spring under the tap and pour on boiling water. When the kids were younger and had to be nagged to brush their teeth, getting them to chew the left over mint leaves or using their finger to rub their teeth with a leaf, always worked a treat. I am sure this is why mint became a popular flavour for toothpaste. Mint grows like wildfire and can take over a patch quite quickly. Contain it in a pot or grow it somewhere you have a lot of space. Easily divided to propagate so you can pass it on to your friends.
Sage
Speaking of dental hygiene, my lad also uses a sage tea as a mouthwash. This is supposed to be very good for gum diseases. Sage is the herb of choice at Christmas in our sage and onion stuffing, but it has also been used as a natural purifier. Sage stalks and leaves were used in hospitals to purify the air and it has also been used as a natural deodorant. You can take stem cutting to propagate, cut the leaves back when you plant them to stop the cuttings drying out too much.
Rosemary
Rosemary is great with roast spuds and roast lamb. Use a whole sprig and remove before serving, It can also be used as a bath herb to revitalise and has been used as a shampoo or hair rinse. People burn rosemary oil and drink rosemary tree to keep them mentally alert.

Lemon Balm
My mother-in-law often has lemon balm with her rosemary to make a refreshing herbal tea. The lemon balm lends a more subtle pleasant flavour to the tea. It is also a great tonic and is supposed to have a calming effect.

Parsley
Parsley is always a popular garnish. Chop finely and sprinkle over food or add to soups. If you want to keep some for winter stews, freeze after chopping in an ice cube tray. For a garnish with a difference, try taking a sprig, rinse and shake dry. Then deep-fry until just crisp and serve with any grilled or fried food. Parsley sauce is great with fish and is a great source of iron and vitamins and should be included in the daily diet. It is so easy to grow from seed too.




All of the herbs here can be dried and used throughout the year.



COMPANION PLANTING
Companion planting done well does away for the need of any herbicides or insecticides in the garden. Companion planting can also enhances the yield of most vegetables. Trial and error is the most successful way to see what plants go well together as most gardens are different.
Here are some ideas to get you started:

Borage, comfrey, elder, lavender, lemon balm, lovage and tarragon: good with all vegetables.
Dandelion:Helps mature fruit and vegetables. Don’t let them go to seed though….
Horseradish: good with spuds.
Marigolds: Controls soil disease, especially between tomatoes, aubergines and sweet peppers.
Nasturtium: Repels aphids from brassicas especially broccoli and benefits fruit trees.
Parsley: Tomatoes and roses.
Santolina: Insect repellent, especially for spinach and lettuce.
Thyme: Good protective border for the veg garden and repels fruit moths.
Not all work….
There are a few combinations that don’t work though. Basil dislike rue, coriander hinders fennel. Fennel is harmful to most plants especially beans cucumbers and tomatoes….but don’t let that put you off of growing it.


Here are a few suggestions of how herbs can keep away most garden pests:

Keep ants away : Catnip, Mint, Onion, Peppermint, Spearmint, Tansy, Wormwood.
Scare off those slugs : Artemisia, Fennel, Garlic, Rosemary, Sage
Maybe the flies are bothering you: Basil, Pennyroyal, Rue, Tansy

Aphids and greenfly. Lots to choose from here: Catnip, Chives, Coriander, Dried & Crushed Chrysanthemum, Eucalyptus, Fennel, Feverfew (attracts aphids away from Roses), Garlic, Larkspur, Marigold, Mint, Mustard, Nasturtium, Onion, Oregano, Petunia, Sunflower.