Humph's Happy Horti-cult: harvesting, preserving, mulching, leaf-gathering, bulb-dibbing, seed catalogue-surfing and hunkering down for winter

[Lexilicious]

Following on from the original March to August thread. For all - whether still gardening through the winter or planning to sweep the shed, hibernate, sharpen the tools and get started again in the spring.

Happy gardening again!

::Feels guilty at unwittingly inciting Humphrey to hoick out all her yellow plants::

I like yellow but not that bright eggy sort of yellow. It has to be like very weak custard for me. So my sissyrhinchiums are ok, pale daffodils are good, but most marigolds and sunflowers would be a no, and I wasn't that keen on most of the gazanias I had this year. (I've saved seeds from the purple ones but I think they are hybrids so I may not get the same colour as they started, even if I manage to bring them up from seed at all.)

I made a leaf mould cage on Sunday out of a roll of green chicken wire (more expensive than I thought it would be) and will be taking the earliest opportunity to go and collect leaves in the woods behind my house. Also potted up an aubergine plant for an overwintering experiment...

I like my coreopsis moonbeam. I think it is yellow mixed with pink/red/purple that really puts me off.

I am transported by a vision of verbena bonariensis and tithonia now.

Chicken wire is expensive, isn't it?

If by chicken wire you mean the lightweight hexagonal stuff, we sell it quite cheaply by the metre in the gardening club store. If, on the other hand, you mean the heavier-duty wire netting with which I rashly decided to cover all my fences to give the climbers something to grow on then it did indeed become painfully expensive after a while! I tell myself it was an investment.

Muted yellows are fine, I think, and I'd even make an exception for annual sunflowers just because they're sunflowers (although I still prefer bronze), but the helianthus Lemon Queen is a thug and I'm just looking for an excuse to get rid of it.

So, let's all do tithonia and verbena bonariensis next year. It could be the MN gardeners' equivalent of a masonic handshake!

And Lexi has made me realise that all the sisyrinchium (of which I had lots) has vanished. Or did I rip it out in a case of mistaken identity?

Maud... £16.49 for a 10m roll of 50cm wide green hexagonal (23mm gaps) chicken wire, down from £23.49. I've probably used 2m of it for the cage and another 1.5m to stop the squirrels digging up my onion sets. So actually, seeing as I have plenty left, I suppose I still have value to get out of it!

If it wasn't something I wanted to have some structural stability I might have just used netting. For a fence to train climbers I might use relatively closely spaced posts and strong netting. On my fences, held on with cable clips, I have 5cm square plastic stuff which comes in a roll too - much cheaper than cw.

Yes, the green stuff (is it the plastic-covered version?) always seems more expensive.

Woohoo! Some of my trees arrived today so this weekend I are be mostly planting trees!

What are we going to do tonight with no Gardeners' World?

::Runs round shouting "We're doomed! We're doomed!" in manner of Dad's Army::

in our house has seemed to have helped

So how much do I need to consume before GW is back on then?

I watched my other main obsession. True Blood.

It wasn't the same, but I realised I AM more in love with Eric than with Monty

DH has just put James Bond on. Not Daniel though so I'm concentrating on the wine.

Not sure I've ever seen True Blood.

I know I haven't seen True Blood. Is it only on paid-for channels?

::Hopeless old buffer emoticon::

you would know if you had seen it

it is rather.... pornographic intense

anyone else had a sudden increased rate of leaf-fall over the last couple of nights? if I wasn't feeling so poorly (shivery, swollen throat, sore head) I'd be out collecting them. can't face going out to see fireworks tonight and I doubt DH will either - also poorly. Bah humbug...

sorry you are feeling ill. What a waste of a weekend.

This is the first year we are not having a massive bonfire party. Nothing to burn, no fences yet to stop the toddlers getting in the fire and no energy due to full time working

Can't wait till may when I go part time.

Still, DH has collected all the pears, I have cleaned out the chicken and geese and I have cleared up a bit.

Another plague house here - I'm too ill to leave the house and The Bloke is so afflicted that he even forewent his football. Ugh.

There's so much vampire porn media about these days I'm surprised to have missed most of it. I did read Twilight in order to be down wiv da kidz, though.

I only watch excellent tv - so the rest of the vampire stuff can go hang

I did read twilight though, although I felt soiled afterwards.

Indeed. I felt no desire to read any more of the Twilight oeuvre. They're not exactly ::cough:: great literature, are they?

Now that Spooks and GW have finished I don't know what to watch on TV. There's only Strictly left.

::waves feather boa::

Another Strictly house here - though we record it so we can fast forward through the talky bits

Quite like a bit of Downton too though, which I get to actually watch on Sunday now that Spooks has finished.

Back to the garden though - managed to get the final aliums in this afternoon. So just the tulips left to go in later this month when the weather finally gets November like and chills down a bit. Dh did a final cut on the lawn and collected up some more leaves. Coming down so quickly though that the grass is already all covered again.

Was it very bad of me to plant my tulips as soon as I got them (I was worried they'd go mouldy if kept indoors)? Does this make them more susceptible to tulip fire or anything? I have never got to the bottom of why some pots seem to succumb to tulip fire and some never do.

I have to admit to never planting tulips before but my 'instructions' say November/December so that's what I'm doing . Isn't it something to do with them coming up too early and getting a bit of tulip frostbite?

Hmm, quite possibly. Oh well. If I'd left them in the box they might have gone mouldy, so I guess you pays your money and takes your choice. Fingers crossed.

all the iris are coming up. should we have planted them later? Will it matter?

I'm telling myself, Humphrey (see posts above) that it doesn't matter. They'll do their own thing in their own sweet time and, given the vagaries of the climate, getting off to an early start may be no bad thing.

::refuses to listen to doom-mongers::