Season’s greetings

With 2018 hours away, John looks back at a year of trials and tribulation in the garden and discusses his hopes for the year ahead

As the year draws to an end, now is the perfect time to look back and compare our hopes and expectations of creating a great garden with 2018’s choice of plants and seeds, while trying to figure out how to work with the weather, which isn’t always in our favour.

Gardening activities are an ongoing process, so success in one year is often the result of the previous year’s planning and purchasing of plants, bulbs and seeds.

If I was to choose the best success of 2017 it would have to be the spring bulbs with tulips.

The previous autumn I had bought in a batch of the tall bright red Apeldoorn and Golden Apeldoorn Darwin hybrid tulips to make a bold splash of colour, and also a large batch of dwarf early tulips to plant among my roses.

As they are dwarf and early they would not interfere with the roses which would grow strongly once the tulips were over. The display was immense but the weather was on my side.

The spring was dry and sunny but never hot so the show lasted from early April until the end of May, then in June the rain came on and lasted for months.

This year may have gone down as one of the warmest on record, but not up north. We got a really wet summer which wiped out my sweet Spanish onions with white rot. Next year I will go back to established varieties.

However my tubs of geraniums and tuberous begonias put on a brilliant and very long lasting display.

Impatiens and lobelia were also favourites but the petunias died out from lack of sun and too much rain.

Azaleas all enjoyed the spring with a mass of colour for a couple of months.

Although there was a lot of wet weather and we may have missed out on heat waves, it was warm all summer so many crops excelled.

Berries of all kinds produced heavy crops and right into late autumn for my star performer, autumn fruiting raspberry Polka.

Strawberries were also cropping well, except my new variety Colossus, which was not all that big and cropping was very light.

It is getting dug out along with blackberry Reuben which is very highly rated in catalogues but does not live up to the description. The fruit is not big and the flowers are so late that most of the fruits don’t ripen.

Bramble Helen is hard to beat and has very early fruiting in August, so it would be good to find one that crops into the autumn. The search goes on.

The warm wet summer suited the green leafy vegetables, from lettuce to cabbages, kale and Brussels sprouts as well as all the root crops, especially potatoes. They grew so well early on that even those which got blight still produced a heavy crop.

The star performer was Sarpo Mira with massive spuds, but Amour, which also cropped well, turned out to be a poor keeper as shoots started to grow

We got a really wet summer which wiped out my sweet Spanish onions with white rot. Next year I will go back to established varieties

after a couple of months in store. So I’m afraid it is off the list for 2018.

We have a problem with clubroot disease on the allotment so I use a lot of resistant varieties of cabbage, cauliflower, sprouts and Swedes.

I made a sowing of clubroot resistant swede Invitation and standard variety Best of All. None of the crops showed any sign of disease, though the best roots came from the cheaper Best of All.

Clubroot resistant cauliflower Clapton was sown in mid-March, then again in mid-May. All were successful but as the whole row is ready at the same time next year I will sow smaller rows with three sowing dates, each a month apart.

Grape vines both outdoors and under glass had a growth year, though continual summer pruning kept them under control and there was no wasp problem this year as they were discouraged by the continual rainfall.

Outdoor varieties Solaris, Muscat Bleu and Polo Muscat all failed to impress so after several years of trial they have all been dug out.

Rondo, Regent, Phoenix and Brant all gave good crops so they will remain for a few more years.

Grapes gave me four demijohns of wine, but I had to add some sugar to get 11% alcohol, as the autumn sun did not last long enough to sweeten the grapes.

I will rest the wine for three years in a cool room to let it mature.

Pictures: John Stoa. Clockwise from main image: Black Hamburg grape in October; New Year greetings; Lily Casa Blanca; Good crop of Sarpo Mira; Tulips with wallflower; Berries in abundance; Crocus Yellow Mammoth; and Red tuberous begonias.