Readers’ gardens
Rain hinders our clear-up
We’ve had lots of rainy days, putting our garden clear-up a little behind schedule – but we’ll get there! The heated greenhouse is now full and winter-ready. I finished taking cuttings and also have plenty on the windowsills indoors of the ones that need more warmth.
Barry’s been busy clearing and cutting back in the garden and I’ve been busy cutting back and cleaning up the plants that'll be in the greenhouses for the winter. They include my banana plants, cannas and a couple of pots of pineapple sage and lemon verbena.
I’m keeping one of the old standard fuchsias in there. I’ve cut it back really hard and I'm hoping it will keep the fuchsia gall mite at bay – only time will tell. Apart from a couple of large-leaved fuchsias, I've disposed of all the others.
The colocasia, eustomas, astelia, tetrapanax and a senecio ‘Angel Wings’ – a present from my son – will be OK in the cold greenhouse.
I’ve been collecting seeds from the white cleome, my fiber optic grass (Isolepis cernua) and some chillies. I’ve made sure I labelled them correctly – I still remember the year I didn’t use a permanent pen and didn’t have a clue when the time came to sow the seeds! I’ve also been drying sunflower heads for seeds for next year and what’s left I’ll put out for the birds. Our modest harvest of squashes was put in the greenhouse to ‘cure’ for a couple of weeks and I gave most of the chillies away to our family and friends.
Looking good in the garden at the moment are the callicarpa – I love the colour of the berries – and the white potato vine is still flowering, as is the beautiful salvia ‘Amistad’. As always, the blueberry’s autumn foliage is lovely.
I’ve also been planting up baskets, pots and the windowboxes. I chose the ‘Zebra Blue’ primroses and ‘Tête-à-tête’ daffodils for the windowboxes as I thought the blue and yellow would look pretty together. The tulips in pots are a beautiful mix of colours – ‘Purple
Prince’, ‘Apricot Beauty’, ‘Christmas Pearl’, ‘Diana’, ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Sunny Prince’ – I can’t wait for them to flower.
Without knowing where I was going to plant them I succumbed to a collection of alliums. By chance I happened to catch an episode of The A-Z of Gardening on TV and Alan Titchmarsh was planting alliums in pots in autumn. He overwintered them, then planted them in the garden in the spring, so that is what I’m going to do!