Nature’s restored the garden balance
A small garden in Merseyside packed with a variety of different features.
We arrived back home following a threeweek holiday to be welcomed by green grass and overflowing water butts. Mother Nature has restored the balance after the heatwave.
Fig trees have been in production overdrive through our ‘Mediterranean’ summer, with fruit being picked almost daily. And as summer moves on, ‘Discovery’ apples have been eaten straight from our small apple tree, while the ‘James Grieve’ crop is healthy, though with smaller apples than usual.
Summer bedding plants have a new lease of life, so we’ll get a late show if the autumn is kind. Dwarf sunflowers planted in a pot before our break and moved to a shady spot to survive are revelling in their new location and the resultant display has brightened up gloomier days.
One area of bedding (‘Destiny’ begonias and a yellow-flowered Mirabilis jalapa grown from seed) has benefited from bowls of washing up water applied daily, but I wonder if the resident slug population enjoyed their showers? We may repeat this on the hosta bed next year!
In the greenhouse, the tomatoes and cucumber are still cropping. The strawberry box with ‘Mara des Bois’ is still producing, sharing the staging with fuchsia plants taken from cuttings in spring; the flowers being produced are a bonus as I look to use these plants next year. A pleasant greenhouse task was to tidy up the polyanthus Gold-laced Group plants and they’re now in a shady area to ‘bulk up’ for next spring. Likewise, the dwarf cyclamen, raised from seed four years ago, had a tidy in preparation for their kitchen windowsill role in the run-up to Christmas and beyond.
I always prefer to keep the cyclamen with a few leaves on during summer and not let them go fully dormant, despite advice to the contrary, and so far have never had a problem pushing the plants on into full growth again.
Like most gardeners, I’m fully aware that our garden is only ours when we’re in it, and that we share it with an abundance of other life. As our granddaughter Ava (now aged eight) visited over the years, I’ve always been keen to share sightings of our garden’s residents with her to develop her interest in the natural world.
I now have a unique Nature Diary produced by her to record our findings, a wonderful way to pass the time when rain has stopped play.