Damage limitation exercise!
Gardening’s becoming more of an exercise in damage limitation. Watering is a time-consuming job, best done late in the evening. I’m concentrating on the vegetable garden and plants in containers, along with anything more recently planted, and I’m pumping cooled bathwater onto a different section of flowerbed each day. I deadhead plants and also cut them back during cooler times of day. The best flowers in the garden currently are provided by several different hydrangeas, my favourite being Hydrangea aspera ‘Peter Chappell’. Also coming into flower is the myrtle, with lovely white pom-pom flowers – such a relief it survived the cold winter.
Courgettes are doing well. If I take my eye off them for a moment they turn into marrows! Cut-and-come again lettuce are still cropping, as are beetroot and I’ve picked the first dwarf beans. Pumpkin plants are spreading rapidly with small pumpkins forming. The best so far belongs to one of our daughters, who saved and sowed seed from last year’s Hallowee’en lantern – although after sowing them she went back to University, leaving me to care for the plants!
About 10 years ago one of our sons, Ollie, sowed pips from a ‘Discovery’ apple. He wouldn’t be put off when I gently told him that any resulting tree might not fruit. We now have ‘Ollie’s apple’ growing in the orchard – the tree’s now taller than him (and he’s 1.8m/6ft tall) and bearing for the first time nine apples! The words ‘I told you so’ have been uttered once or twice! We’re all thrilled to see the fruit, although the other surviving tree from those pips is also in the orchard with no apples and an entirely different growth habit and leaves altogether. Maybe we were both right!
Tales from a Country Garden 