Scorched earth
Summer neglect is not necessarily a bad thing, says garden guru Steve Wratten
D on’t know about you, but I haven’t spent all the holidays gardening. I’ve cooked and catered, chased rare birds at a local lake, watched cricket and caught up on a few novels — but not gardening books.
I usually buy “used” books; I agree with the novelist Virginia Woolf: “Second- hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.” When I did venture into the vege garden, plants had somewhat got away from me, especially in my tunnel house and glasshouse. Pots of zucchini seeds planted in mid- December had grown like those in John Wyndham’s horror novel The Day of the Triffids. I don’t think my courgette plants would attack people but planting them out in the open garden was a challenge. Roots had pushed through the pots’ drainage holes and those delicate, papery leaves would have been damaged beyond repair if I tried to move the plants in that state. If this happens to yours, be brutal.
Cut off most of the leaves, together with the stalks, so that the plant becomes a shadow of its former self. Then, plant out its ugly remains, fertilise it and water very well. The flower buds in the centre of these bashed- about plants will soon open and fruits will promptly follow. I did the same with leggy cabbage and kale plants. Remove their outer, yellowing leaves and plant out the fragile things very deeply and water well, otherwise they will flop over and all will be lost.
Another job that had arisen during my occupation with other leisure activities was, of course, weeds. Three of these I would not really call weeds: borage, phacelia and marigold. All self- seeded, they make lovely cut flowers for the table and the bees go mad for the first two, so a weed by any other name, like Shakespeare’s rose, can smell sweet and need not always be blasted out of existence with Roundup. Anyway, resistance to this herbicide is now common globally and we don’t want that to happen in our gardens, so use it sparingly as a spot- spray on individual perennial dock or thistle plants, and pull out the annuals.
Apart from cherries ( we grow the excellent Stella variety), which are abundant and ripe for the plucking in their frost- cloth protection against birds, we are also having the best blackcurrant season ever. We share space for them in our neighbour’s freezer and they will form the basis of a mixed- fruit compote for our desserts right through to next spring. I cook them lightly in a little of the cheapest white wine on offer, adding honey to soften the acidity.
Mind you, something had found these abundant fruits before us. I knew this because some branches had withered, even with the currants still clinging to them. The culprit was the currant clearwing moth, which lays its eggs on the shoots and the caterpillar eats out its contents. You can spray against it, I suppose, or buy plastic twists which release in abundance the female’s sex chemical, so the males are too confused to find a mate.
I did neither. If you see the adult moth on your window pane at night, as I did, you will be amazed. It looks like a beautiful small wasp but its wings have delicate black margins and the abdomen is mainly black. Google it
We still had an abundance of fruit so I will just cut out those damaged twigs during winter pruning and get rid of them in the log burner. So, a bit of garden neglect during the festive season is not a disaster, as long as we know which weeds really matter and how to give neglected vege and fruit plants a new life.