Gardening Notes

We will soon be into October but the summer bedding is still providing plenty of colour, most especially where tidying and dead heading has been regularly carried out. This was very evident when I visited the winning gardens in the P&J competition. For the most part they were immaculate. In my book that is classed as good husbandry.

I lifted the last of our beetroot the other day (it has already been pickled!) and subsequently I spent a few minutes getting rid of the detritus – dead leaves etc and with a few scrapes of the garden fork, left the soil surface roughly level and clean. To be honest, the beetroot yield was disappointing considering the healthy foliage which was dispatched to the compost bin.

Growing in a raised bed and covered with enviromesh, I reckon they must have been short of water at times! Why the enviromesh? Well, at the risk of annoying some people, our garden is visited daily by several cats who are not invited and are not welcome.

Having first checked out the areas around bird table and feeders they head for any exposed area of cultivated ground to do their daily business, and despite having tried a number of ploys to invite them to buzz off somewhere else, none has been very satisfactory. I class their activities as antisocial behaviour! As a result, I have to cover my veg plots. Next season, however, I will be swapping over to an open mesh net when the seedlings have become well established.

Already the leaves are beginning to be blown from the trees in these stormy outbursts we have been enduring recently. It is at this time that I regret having changed from a rotary mower back to a cylinder type because the rotary was so good at hoovering up the leaves on the lawn while shredding them at the same time.

I make my annual plea nice and early – don’t bag and dump fallen leaves – keep them in a heap to rot down before returning the matured material back to the soil. You will sometimes see the comment that large-leaved Horse Chestnut and Sycamore should not be composted with others because of the time it takes for them to break down. The shredding process achieved through using a rotary mower means that these larger-leaved types can be handled with all the rest.

Though I don’t have a rotary mower I do have an electric sucker/blower and that makes a great job of shredding the material as it is being collected. I can also blow them out from among the border plants to be able to collect them. This routine has to be pretty regular to prevent a significant build-up of leaves which can be detrimental to the health of lowgrowing herbaceous perennials.

Back to thoughts about the P&J gardening competition and the choice of the overall winner. It was based on balance. In their own way each of the regional winners was elected to be the ‘best of the bunch.’ As you know there has been a tremendous response to the initial invitation and that made the narrowing down process quite difficult. As it turned out, thankfully, the powers that be had decided to separate the entries geographically.

The process was then narrowed down, as with any competition, whether it be the current craze for cooking and baking or the seasonal Halloween lanterns to be with us soon.

I visited all the regional winners and that in itself was a delightful experience and a privilege to meet and have a blether with the gardeners. As always, the final decision is difficult because one has to separate out thoughts of what this or that garden looks like in an all-year-round context or to compare a garden which is only a few square yards in extent with one which might be over an acre. You must restrict your thoughts with what you see on the day.

The thoughts do run through your mind, they are bound to. When you think that some entrants with the smallest of areas might put in as many hours in the week in maintenance as the person with a large garden. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I loved every minute of it. What the result can’t ever fully express is the motivation of the gardeners, the skills that they develop, their awareness of how to use colours and shapes, the contentment they experience when the job comes to fruition, they can sit back, breathe a sigh of exhaustion, pour a cup of tea or something a wee bit stronger and think – I’ll have all this to do again in a few months’ time!

Huge congratulations to all who took part, I hope you enjoyed the experience. In closing this chapter, let me thank the sponsors at Kellockbank for their generosity, I hope they feel that it has been a worthwhile exercise and thanks to the backroom team at the P&J – they might even think of repeating the exercise another year.