September Gardening Articles

• Strawberries in Containers
• Flower Bulbs for Indoors

• Plant your Olive Orchard Now

• Vegetable Bulbs

As with much of life, forward planning is everything and, if you want home grown tasty fresh strawberries in very early spring, you need to get some planted up now.

Planting and growing them in the best soil in your garden will achieve this but I find that it is well worth the extra effort of growing a few in a grow bag or two.

 

Grown this way you can really force on an early crop and have luscious fruits when shop bought ones are either poor tasting imports or seriously expensive tastier but British grown ones!

 

It is vital to plant early because the plants will crop much better if well established before the onset of winter and will then benefit from being chilled by a few cold nights. This cold period is important and planted grow bags should be left outside to chill before being forced into early growth. I usually leave my bags out until the turn of the year and find that it provides long enough period of cold to do the job. I am lucky enough to have a medium sized unheated greenhouse and can produce early crops from there. A sheltered glazed porch, polytunnel or cold frame will do but, if you have none of these, you can still grow early crops by placing the bags close to the base of a south or west facing wall. Here there is a favourable micro climate that you can exploited!

 

A standard sized grow bag is big enough for six plants but the easier to grow in larger bags like the Westland Instant planter will hold eight plants comfortably. When planting, take care to plant at the correct depth. This applies equally to planting in the garden. Try to get the crown of the plant [the swollen base where the leaves and roots meet] half buried after the soil settles. Deeper than this and your plants will produce lots of leaf, shallower and they tend to produce a poor crop. Always buy new plants ["runners"] as these will be grown from virus free healthy stock.

 

There are masses of varieties to choose from but in this case look for the earliest croppers and the best flavour. Many varieties have been bred to have long shelf life and travel well to suit the supermarkets needs. Sometimes this is at the expense of good flavour. I would recommend 'Honeoye' or 'Tamella' if you can find them but there are quite a few other good early varieties. There is little point in growing maincrop or late season varieties this way, unless that is, you plant some extra bags to provide continuity.

Back to top

Over ten years ago I attended a gardening conference and one of the guest speakers was the well known weather forecaster Bill Giles. Now weather has a major influence on gardening as we all know but what surprised us most about what he had to say was that he was encouraging us to plant olive orchards in the south of England then. In fact, he claimed to have planted a few trees himself and he was pretty confident that our climate would warm sufficiently to produce olive fruits here commercially by the time the trees had grown!

 

Olives are very long lived and some trees in Mediterranean countries are several hundred years old so, at the current rate of climate change, he could be right but I don't think that trees I plant will bear a commercially viable crop in my lifetime! Nevertheless, olives do make attractive and very suitable trees for today's gardens.

 

Thought for years to be too tender to survive, we now find that they are a lot hardier than was imagined and there are trees that have survived twenty and more of our now milder winters. Given an exceptionally well drained and very sunny position they will happily grow and, whilst the fruit they produce rarely ripens well enough to be harvestable, they do make an extremely attractive small tree. The evergreen, well actually more ever-grey leaves, are small and create dappled shade to sit under and are a perfect centre piece for a Mediterranean themed planting. This is the perfect small tree for a sunny courtyard with rosemary, thyme, lavender and geraniums.

 

Small trees are now widely available but time can be bought by planting really large and surprisingly mature trees. Trees of fifty years old and more are available and we can supply these to order. However, this comes at a price! If you are serious about growing your own olives for the kitchen, this is the way to go. These really old trees establish surprisingly easily and are full of character and charm.

Back to top

With autumn creeping up on us, the bulb planting season is with us again. Most thoughts will be to planting daffodil, tulip, crocus and other flower bulbs but, with space in the veg patch at this time of year, there are very worthwhile bulbs to plant here too.

 

The so called "Japanese" onion is not a new phenomenon and is widely planted to give the earliest crops of the year. The Japanese bit has been dropped and they seem to be referred to as "Winter" onions now. These autumn planted sets are very hardy and will grow slowly through the winter to mature before the earliest spring sown sets are fit. It's easy to prepare the soil for planting at this time of the year and it is well worth making a good job of it. Don't add any fertiliser that is high in nitrogen now as that can be added in the New Year when days begin to lengthen and growth speeds up again. A fertiliser that's well balanced with plenty of potash and phosphates is ideal. I find the varieties 'Radar' and 'Electric' perform well with the disease resistant 'Radar' having the edge over the red variety 'Electric'.

Onions are claimed to have a role in guarding against cancer and have good anti-oxidant properties. Garlic in our diets has many health benefits too and September is the best month to plant this crop for good yields. It's important to plant early and to grow varieties bred for our climate.

 

Varieties such as the mild flavoured 'Germidour' and the stronger 'Cristo' perform well. Like onions, good thorough soil preparation will be rewarded and soils with poor drainage should be avoided. When planting, the bulbs should be broken up so that individual cloves can be planted 8 cm (3") deep and 10 cm (4") apart. A little free draining sand in the bottom of each planting hole helps too.

 

If you can plan it, it's a good idea to leave enough space between rows so that early carrots can be sown there in the New Year. The smell of the garlic will disguise the smell of the carrots and keep the dreaded carrot root fly away and hopefully give you maggot free carrots!

 

Shallots are not often planted as early as this but they are certainly a vegetable that benefits from really early planting. The old adage of 'plant on the shortest day and lift on the longest' holds good. You may be able to obtain the so called "banana" shallot so favoured by chefs. The variety 'Jermor' might be found in some garden centres now and is well worth hunting out. Better crops of shallots will be grown if you can dig in some well rotted farm yard manure before planting. Personally, I prefer shallots to onions any day and I love them oven roasted with a little olive oil along with other vegetables such as squashes, pumpkin and peppers of all colours.

Back to top

Okay, I know what you are thinking, the kids are not yet back to school, there is still plenty of light in the evening for pottering around the garden and he is going to tell us to think of Christmas! Well I am and I'm not!

 

If you want to have a lovely bowl of scented Hyacinths in flower on Christmas day then you do need to get the bulbs planted in this month. But there are other easy to grow bulbs that you can flower too and some of them will be in bloom long before the end of the year.

 

Take the gorgeously scented Paperwhite Narcissus for instance. These are easy to force into flower and do not require any special treatment. In fact, it can be hard to hold these back and don't even need any soil to grow in! For this reason, they make fascinating and ideal bulbs to spark the interest in younger gardeners. With the countdown to back to school already underway, why not occupy those fertile little brains and perhaps spark an interest in gardening by trying to grow some of these?

 

All that is needed is 5 bulbs, a container without holes of around 15 cm diameter and about 10 cm deep and some pebbles. Plant the bulbs in the pebble-filled container so that the tops of the bulbs are sticking out and the bulbs are not touching one another. Add a little water to fill the bottom 3-4 cm and top this up as the bulbs grow and use it. All the nutrients that the bulbs need are already in the bulb and no more need be added. Unlike forcing Hyacinths, these do not need to be put in a cold place for around 12 weeks to get plenty of roots going before the flower bud comes out of the bulb. These Indoor Narcissus can go straight on the windowsill where their progress can be monitored every day. Bulbs planted now will produce lots of tiny scented flowers in November. Later plantings will obviously flower later and successional planting will produce blooms right through the winter. There are only a few varieties to choose from and most are white but Soleil D'Or is a popular yellow with tiny orange cup centres. A word of warning however, all grow very quickly in warm rooms and may need some support, so a cool room is best. After flowering this way the bulbs are exhausted and not worth saving for another year.

 

Colchicums are just as easy and will even flower on your windowsill without water! Everything the bulb needs to flower is stored inside. However, I think they are better if stood on a shallow container of grit with a little water in the bottom. The large chalice-shaped blooms are a beautiful pink.

 

And Christmas? Well it is time to pot specially "Prepared" Hyacinths to force into flower earlier than they would otherwise. These bulbs have received a carefully controlled regime of temperature that encourages them to flower a full two months earlier than they normally would. The bulbs, once potted, should be kept in a cool place (ideally as close to 4C as possible). They then will have developed a strong root system and you will be able to feel that the flower in the bud has emerged from the bulb. Bringing Hyacinths into warmth before that happens invariably leads to disappointment. It is not a good idea to mix varieties in a container as they will flower at slightly different times and for the most perfect bowl it is advisable to pot bulbs individually and choose the most alike to transfer to your container at the last moment.Finally, size really does matter! Bigger bulbs mean bigger blooms!

Back to top