It's Autumn, but not as we know it.

The late Christopher Lloyd, renowned for his fabulous borders at Great Dixter, adopted a practise of taking a morning stroll around the gardens each day with his head gardener to discuss the plan of action for the day. It's a great habit to get into as often the garden itself will suggest what needs to be prioritised.

A few days ago, I went to the garden here intending to take photos for the blog. Three happy hours later I'd got photos, staked up some flopping raspberry canes, lifted (chucked) piles of overgrown nasturtiums that were shading herbs, pruned some lavender that was becoming a tripping hazard on the path, dug out some horseradish, weeded around the broccoli and cut off some old courgette leaves to make the space more manageable. I also cut back leaves to allow the tomatoes to put energy into ripening the remaining trusses and found that one of the Sungold plants had gone rotten half way up the stem so I was able to cut the plant down and save those tomatoes to make a green tomato chutney.

I'm wondering what possessed me to put rhubarb, courgettes, globe artichoke and nasturtiums in this tiny space! Lush, though, isn't it?

That still left me with a bit of a jungle down one end of the veg patch - and the realisation that with Linaria (the plant edging the path, above) you most definitely can have too much of a good thing. (It's self seeded into every crack and corner in the veg patch but the bees love it.)  I was also then able to look at the garden with a fresh eye this morning when I took another walk round with my neighbour Karen who helps out and also gardens the border under her window. Friday is our community gardening day, when time permits.

What we saw was new spring growth all around: new raspberry canes, poppies flowering having completely regenerated in the past month, same with the globe artichoke, the rhubarb leaves are now as big as a gunnera with no sign of dying off, the nasturtiums have formed a river of flowers down the path and even the cowslip is in flower (usually not seen until March).  Karen reports that her daffodil bulbs are starting to sprout. While this is all utterly delightful, it shows that we can't rely on the plants knowing which season they're in; it would seem their seasonal clocks have been thrown off the beat by the chillier weather of a few weeks back, now replaced by warm t-shirt weather in early October.  Better make sure to have some horticultural fleece ready when the frosts do come!


In other news, I'm still harvesting a few raspberries, courgettes, tomatoes, radishes, salad onions, salad leaves, spinach and a few beans. The bean leaves are looking very tired so some of the beans have been cut down (roots left in the soil so the nitrogen fixing nodules can return nutrients to the soil) and any remaining pods on the others will be allowed to grow into seed beans for next year.  These are the Canadian Wonder beans that I really didn't think would amount to much this year but have done wonderfully well once protected with anti-slug wool pellets.

Sugar snap peas sown at the end of summer are now flowering so pods won't be far behind. The yellow sunflowers are finished and I'll harvest some of the seeds to shell and add to salads.  The others will be left for the birds.

Yellow Pear tomatoes, Sugar snap peas, Cherriettes of Fire tomatoes
Polka raspberries, physalis, courgettes

The brassicas (broccoli, kale, romanesco cauliflowers) are growing really well, as are the chard and beetroot. I wonder if this is due to the wool pellets around them - they help keep the slugs at bay but also leech nutrients into the soil when it rains and as they decompose. Hopefully this bodes well for early and late winter veg. The photo above reminds me that this lovely extended summer encouraged the physalis to reflower in early September; providing the pods ripen, I can greedily anticipate another two dozen Cape Gooseberries before the year ends! Oh, okay, I'll share.

Thanks to the warm, and sometimes wet, weather, there's still a rainbow of colour throughout the York Rise gardens. I particularly love the chinese plumbago (Ceratostigma willmottianum) - I'm drawn to its startling blue flowers every time I pass, especially as it sits next to the salmon coloured pelargonium 'Pink Needles', an amazing colour contrast.

Sunflower, Impatiens giganteum, pineapple sage
Blackcurrant sage, scabious, pelargonium 'Pink Needles'
Verbena bonariensis, calendula, violet
Anemone, borage, plumbago

And let's not forget the roses; there are so many more than this but you get the idea ;)

I honestly didn't think I'd have anything to write about this month but, actually, it's all come right and been rather special. Heavy rain is forecast for the next few days but, for now, me and my garden are in a good, good place.

May October be kind to us all.  Caro xx

Jobs for October:
Keep on top of weeding
Clear plants as they die off
Sow seeds in pots for early spring flowers
Get ready to fleece on cold nights!

Linking up with the Garden Share Collective over in Australia.  If you want to see what's growing on in other parts of the world, pop over to Lizzie's blog for all the links.

Serendipity Summer

Autumn is the new summer, to borrow and misquote a piece of fashion nonsense.  Days like today and yesterday are my kind of weather: the sun is shining but it's warm, not hot, I've got washing drying in a warm breeze outside and there's a gentle buzzing of bees in the shrubbery and gardens. It's left me hopeful for an extension to summer, a boon after the chilly and wet end to August.

Having recently said that the veg patch was all leaf but little produce, I may have to eat my words - as well as lots of fresh garden veg.  It seems that the watering issue was at fault. A few days of torrential rain, some cooler weather and suddenly we have the right conditions for growing happy veg.  I brought home an armful of beans, courgettes, tomatoes and raspberries last night (just before it got dark at 7.30, a sure sign of the changing seasons).  A stroll round the garden at lunchtime today showed what I missed.

3 huge courgettes, 3 small finger courgettes, more beans, sungold and yellow pear tomatoes, a few more raspberries and lovely fresh leaves (spinach, rocket, chard and beetroot) and radishes for salad. Which reminds me, I'd better sow some more lettuce as only two of the Marvel of 4 Seasons has grown. I'm leaving those two to get a bit bigger before I start picking.


The seedpods of orach aka mountain spinach (Atriplex rubra) have turned golden with only one plant left with the lovely bright pink discs lighting up the veg patch. Spiders and their webs are everywhere, caution is needed when picking salad leaves so as not to disturb them.

Yesterday was made even better by discovering several crab apples trees.  I suspected what they were, took a photo and posted that to Twitter and Instagram asking for help with identification. Jules, the Suburban Veg Gardener (@embergate) confirmed in the affirmative. Slicing one of the fruits in half at home sealed the deal - yes, definitely crab apples and definitely going foraging soon for rosehips and crab apples to make jelly and, perhaps, also some rosehip syrup to ward off winter colds. 

The green apples were growing on the other side of the Heath path and are sweet apples of some sort.

That delight will have to wait until the end of next week as I'm driving up to Leeds this coming weekend, popping my son up to university where he'll be studying music production.  Before I hear the cry of #emptynester, although it will initially feel strange (on my own after nearly two decades) and I'll miss him (obviously), I'll be making the most of any free time to visit more gardens, knowing that he'll be having a great time.  I've heard that Leeds is Party Central for students so I'm sure my boy won't be missing home too much! (Although, possibly the washing, ironing and cooking services provided at home  … ) 

My bio-diverse garden: Southern Shield Bugs

There's a bookshelf in the design studios at college where unwanted books can be left for others. It was there I found a small pocket sized paperback of Bob Flowerdew's Planting Companions earlier this year. As I garden organically, I do consider Bob one of my gardening heroes. He advises that tomatoes benefit considerably from being grown with asparagus*. After reading it, I thought I was being so clever when I set six of my tomato plants out into ring culture pots within the asparagus bed. As the bed designated for growing asparagus is just one metre square, the crowns are positioned like the dots on a five-dice. The tomato plant pots formed a circle around the central asparagus plant.

As mentioned in my August end of month post, with hindsight, this left them too close together for the fruit to ripen in a timely fashion, until I stripped the lower leaves off. (Although, in a sense, the method does work as I had enormous plants.) By mid-august I noticed that there was a colony of what appeared to be tiny living dots enjoying the warmth at the top of one of the lower trusses. I thought they might be just hatched spiderlings.

See the mottling on the top of the tomatoes? I assume that's bug damage.

I don't mind spiders and they don't do any harm so I left them alone.  As the insects got bigger though I could see that they were, in fact, beetles of some sort.  Time to investigate.

My old friend Google told me that the bugs are Nezara viridula, more commonly known as the Southern Green Shield bug.  These differ from the more alliteratively named Palomena prasina, bugs that do little harm to the garden.  Nezara viridula have arrived in London in the last decade, believed to have travelled over from Africa via Europe, and can be found on tomatoes, raspberries, beans, mallow (Lavatera), Verbena and Caryopteris.  No wonder they're happy in my garden. They also favour allotments; bean growers beware. If handled, however accidentally, they emit a pungent odour.

All shield bugs are sap suckers (not as bad as aphids though) but the Southern Shield bug can cause minor damage to beans, tomatoes, etc by causing the fruit to distort. They're not considered a pest by the RHS as they're most numerous at the end of the season when fruiting is coming to an end.

So what's to be done?  Nothing. (Except (note to future me … ) space your plants out a bit more so that there is more air circulating and less hiding places.) Shield bugs will not do sufficient damage to warrant pest control. The adults overwinter and lay eggs on the underside of leaves in the spring so if you don't want them on your plants, check and remove.  Although that would be a shame as, in my humble opinion, they are all part of the garden's rich tapestry. And rather fascinating to watch.

The science bit: Asparagus roots kill trichodorus, a nematode that attacks tomatoes and in return tomato leaf spray will keep asparagus beetle at bay. Tomatoes also enjoy the company of parsley, basil and nasturtiums and they may be protective of gooseberries.  Certainly my gooseberry bush, growing next door to the tomatoes, appears very healthy. Case closed (for now).

And if there's any doubt:

Southern Green Shield bug

UK native Common Green Shield bug