Season of musts
these around your outside space. With white, black and red fruiting plants available, you’ll be enjoying striking visuals as well as juicy fruits.
Blueberries are a classic soft fruit addition, preferring acidic soil.
I’ve grown these before in raised beds with ericaceous compost, or in containers with old nails or Brillo pads added to the soil to provide a source of iron to boost growth.
Blueberry plants also add decoration, with colourful autumn foliage and delicate spring flowers to complement their delicious deep purple fruits.
Coming into autumn, you can buy raspberry canes as bare root or pregrown in containers.
If you can, get them in the ground now so they bed themselves in to gain an established root system and they’ll grow fruit a lot better.
You can be clever with raspberries – plant early summer-harvesting varieties as well as autumn-producing plants and you’ll enjoy a continual harvest of plump berries from early June to the end of October.
PLEASING TREES
Fruit trees are perfect for now – apples and pears, cherries and plums. When planting apple and pears, it’s not just for producing fruit. The wistful white flowers of an apple tree are one of my favourite things and this spectacular blossom is not to be underestimated.
You can buy them as dwarf bush plants with a trunk of 75cm, as half standards – where the trunks grow to about a metre and a half – or as standards, which grow even taller.
It’s always best to check with a reputable local garden centre for advice before planting so you can ensure you get the best crop for your plot.
Another consideration is whether your fruit tree will self-pollinate or if you need other fruit trees round about to enable pollination.
Just like with flowers, pollen is carried from one fruiting tree to another through insect pollinators, or on the wind – but self-fertile varieties are also available to guarantee success.
There are self- fertile Cox and Laxton’s Superb varieties of apple trees, and look out for the Conference pear tree variety as well.
Autumn really doesn’t mean your garden is winding down. Plant these crops now and it will ramp up the look of your space – at the same time as providing healthy harvests next year. A fishing umbrella might seem an odd thing for a gardener – but one of these beauties is perfect for avoiding a soaking when you’re working on beds or borders during the sort of wet autumn we’re having.
They are ideal to work under… as long as it’s not too windy. Just put them up, and use tent pegs to keep the awning snug to the ground.
From £15.95 to £23.99 depending on size, via amazon.co.uk .