My gardening DIARY

MONDAY

Several years ago I sowed pips from different apples and a few germinated. Eventually a couple turned themselves into trees and I’ve come across one of them while walking down the field side of our hedge. It’s covered in bright yellow-green apples of a decent size. They’re not ripe yet but it’ll be exciting to find out how they taste.

TUESDAY

Walking back up the garden, I was stopped in my tracks. My nostrils were assailed with a beautiful scent, and looking across the garden, tall spires of pure white flowers were spotlit against the darkness of the hedge. Actaea racemosa, pictured, was the source of this divine scent.

WEDNESDAY

At one end of a big concrete trough (the one with our brassicas in) a little garden had made itself. The brassicas are netted but the netting stopped short of the end. Now it’s home to a clump of sedum in full flower, an aquilegia, a beautiful white scabious and an edging of Erigeron karvinskianus.

THURSDAY

The last dangling fruit of cucumbers have been picked, the plants added to the compost heap and compost from the pots turfed out onto one of the veg troughs. Everything is recycled and reused.

FRIDAY

Having added the cucumber compost and mixed it in thoroughly, some of it has been ‘stolen’ to half fill five-litre pots. These pots will house some of the tulips when the bulbs arrive.

SATURDAY

Bare soil is never bare for long here! In one trough, since there’s no winter veg to go in, the space has been used as a nursery bed for some perennials I’d like to bulk up and plant out next year. These include Anchusa azurea ‘Loddon Royalist’, started from root cuttings earlier this year, and Selinum wallichianum, grown from seed and now chunky plants.

SUNDAY

Trying to sort out and plant up the jumble of plants that have accumulated in front of our polytunnel. Have just discovered a peony that must have been waiting a year to be planted out. Shame on me!