Out With The Old, In With The New

Despite this late, and oh-so-welcome, dry spell, the season is showing definite signs of winding down. With lots of the flowers – the marigolds, the scabious, the sunflowers, the nigella – I stopped picking a while ago to let them go to seed, but even those that I’ve continued to pick are not producing the same quality flowers they did. The birds are going to bed earlier, it suddenly gets cold when the sun starts to sink, and I am getting enormous pleasure out of clearing the beds and planting out next year’s newbies. I’ve got a new exercise book and this year I’m going to keep it neat!

The number of plants which have self-seeded is encouraging. The soil seems perfect for that as, although it retains moisture well, it also tends to have a dry, crumbly layer on the top, and that combined with the warmth of the sun means seeds germinate quickly rather than sitting around in wet soil and rotting.

The downside to all this new growth is that I have had to curb my anal hoeing (hoeing in an anally retentive way, that is, as opposed to any kind of hoe-up-the-bum stuff), which means the rows I have cleared are not quite as new-term neat as I would like. But there is still tremendous pleasure to be gained from top dressing the rows with more compost, planting out my biennials and then banging some sturdy wooden stakes in -ready for some decent support this year as opposed to last year’s lamentable bamboo cane set-up.

So far I’ve put out Brompton stocks, sweet rocket, wallflowers and Sweet Williams. I’m also intending to transplant the foxgloves from the garden, but I think I’ll keep the Iceland poppies in pots under cover, and I’m also keeping spares of everything I put out in case they don’t make the winter. It’s decisions like this, about what to grow where, that I find myself dithering over. The field is pretty exposed and really wet in places and I’ve always grown in the luxury of sheltered town gardens. Planting things out in those conditions makes me nervous, like sending a child off to big school. I want to believe they’ll be fine – but what if they’re not?!

As well as the biennials, there are the hardy annuals. I’ve sown a whole load directly at the field and the cold frame and potting shed are full of seedlings which, again, I will have to decide whether to plant out or keep cosseted in pots at home.

And then there’s the bulbs! Only a few hundred more to get planted…