COLUMN: Gardening on the Edge by Diana Wayland
I have been unable to write about this year’s gardening experiences, because I have been too busy doing them!
The spring dry spell curbed weed growth, but meant that watering was a regular chore. The only part of the garden that gets watered is the kailyard. Everything else must take its chance.
Cabbage, kohl rabi, dwarf French beans, cucumber, courgettes, carrots and beetroot.
I water really well and then leave for a week. That encourages stronger growth than light but frequent watering.
Seed germination was not without issues, either. Many seeds require heat, provided indoors by my heated propagator, but a number, such as brassicas, do not. I sow those in the greenhouse, in a home-built cloche to keep off predatory slugs, and could not understand why so many would not germinate.
Then I realised. Spring, despite cold winds, was extremely sunny. That warmed the greenhouse and the seeds. The added cloche warmed them even more.
So very little happened until I put them outside in the cold frame. Then up they came!
Runner beans leapt up, but dwarf French beans, and peas, refused until, in desperation, I soaked them, which I do not usually need to do.
The dwarf French beans cropped well, but the peas this year have been a failure.
That the year has been cold, if sunny, is supported by one plant especially. I buy chocolate-scented Cosmos every year for the scent of its pure chocolate dusky brown flowers.
They always flower by July 24, the anniversary of the loss of a loved cat who was called Cosmos.
But not this year. Not one flower until September 2, despite the later warmer spell.
Further, the aromatic Mediterranean plants that I put out in our kailyard Sitooterie along with them did not grow well, and the colourful annuals grown from seed were slow to get going.
Then there was Floris. I hid from watching the ferocious north-westerly gale strip leaves by the handful from the windbreak osiers, and flatten tall herb plants despite the windbreaks.
The runner beans, which had started to flower earlier than last year, when I only got one large one and one tiny one, were bludgeoned and the leaves and flowers torn off them.
The tattie shaws were blackened and beaten horizontal.
It looked like utter devastation. But, unable to go out afterwards for a week to clear up due to continuing strong winds, I watched something unexpected happen.
The plants recovered. Not to as good as new, but flowers started to open again, the osiers started to sprout new leaves, and the runner beans grew new shoots and budded flowers.
A late crop anyway, now more of an experiment than a hoped-for harvest now. The maincrop tattie shaws mostly recovered, too.
For the second year running I tried to grow cordon tomatoes in hanging baskets!
They were meant to be Tumbling Tom Red, but have not come up what it says on the seed packet! Next year I am buying plants! Good crop though – all at once!
And some of my dwarf beans turned out to be climbing! They did crop amazingly well, but weren’t what I actually wanted in the greenhouse, as they shaded the dwarf ones behind them.
It’s always a challenge, every year, for various reasons.
But, despite that, I have so far harvested a good vegetable crop and the onions and tatties will keep us going until next year.
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