I Apple crop won’t go to waste!
’ve been wanting to cut the semi-circle beech hedge, but every time I get out there the sky opens up. There’s still over a foot of growth to come off the huge leylandii as well, as it didn’t get done last year.
I’ve managed to prune the fruit trees, but I had to dodge the heavy showers, and it took four days to get them all cut.
Along with the high winds and the crows, what apples we had ended up on the ground, so we made some cider with them as they wouldn’t keep for long.
Towards late August, I had a big haul of produce: more fallen apples, two buckets of runner beans, one bucket of beetroot, a large bowl of peas and dwarf beans, three spaghetti marrows, five courgettes, two cucumbers and a few tomatoes!
I even decided to dig the potatoes and I got dozens of kilos harvested. Not bad from three bags of seed potatoes! They were dried off on the patio and sorted. That left me with dealing with all the other veg – beans and peas in the freezer, and beetroot bottled. The spaghetti marrows were put up on the kitchen tool rack to harden, the onions are ready to lift and the leeks are filling out nicely. The plot where I dug the potatoes has been raked tidy, and this year I’m trying something new.
My bass player has a smallholding, so I’m getting some rotted manure from him, spreading it on the plots as they’re cleared, and covering them with black silage wrap over the winter. Hopefully, we won’t have to dig it all again in the spring, which will be a great help!
The best of the flowers in the garden are the tree lilies in the Giants’ Garden, and the white agapanthus in the black and white border. The hydrangeas are also beautiful, the pink one getting darker, but the blue one seems to be getting a pink tinge to the flowers due to soil pH. The autumn cyclamen in the Japanese garden are in bloom and all the trees and shrubs have long turned to autumn colours, earlier than usual this year.