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!

Wheeeee - I've found you all again!!!!

Ok, I need advice - my garden is still looking green but all the flowers have bloomed over. I need some advice for fall-blooming perennials (not mums, I hate mums) for a lovely temperate climate.

Hi Jacks - can't help you I'm afraid as I'm definitely still learning when it comes to flowers! Someone will know though and I will be watching for those words of wisdom too. Though I do have some Sedum Autumn Joy which is just starting to show some pink now and should flower through to end of September.

Picked 7lbs of blackberries today. Also picked 4lbs of green beans. Freezer is now working full out and DH and I will be perusing Gumtree later as we've realised that if we want to make the most of the veg & fruit then we need to have an additional freezer.

Was intending to go out tonight to weed, relocate some plants and plant out my new plant 'gifts' as MIL is coming tomorrow and need to be able to show off the long bed. However, it's a little rainy out there now and all that blackberry picking has worn me out....time for a bottle of wine instead I think.

Remembered today to recommend making blackberry and apple gin. Same principle as sloe gin - about 200g of fruit to 1litre of gin. And some sugar. Not sure of precise quantities though.

Found friend who is happy for me to take box cuttings!

Also worth looking in garden centres for cheap seeds at the moment. I got loads at 50% off last week. And most have dates up to 2013 on them. Saved a fortune and got some things that I wouldn't have chosen otherwise. Planning to do a wildflower pot/barrel.

Garden vandalism today as DS (aged 4) decided for some reason to pull leaves off the borlotti beans and left a big hole in the line. I have no idea why he did this. I don't think he's done much damage to the actual plant/beans but it's not something I want to encourage (obviously) so we had words Usually he's really good in the garden and quite interested in the veg growing.

Jacks I'd second the sedum - I have Sedum Spectabile which is looking lovely and will burst into pink in a few days I think. Also roses - if you choose the right varieties and dead-head them they will bloom again. But is it already 'fall' for you or just late summer (USA, aren't you)? Is there an equivalent of the RHS plant finder where you can put in your conditions + perennial + late flowers + etc.

What about fruit? ok they're not flowers but they could bring colour into the greenery?

Hydrangea can be good at this time of year. Mine are only just flowering now when quite a few things are starting to be past their best.

I'm in the Pacific Northwest, 45 mins east of Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. Hardiness zone 6-8 depending on which map you look at. Let's call the average :)

I have masses of hydrangeas on my back patio, but they've all long since bloomed over - except one, which is startlingly gorgeous - a deep pinky purple with white rims around the edges, and it popped 8 new blooms!!
I ruthlessly cut two of them back last year, they were getting too woody and leggy and so of course they didn't flower this year, but they obviously liked the rest because the leaves are massive and a deep deep green.

It's late summer here - of course you can't hear the hollow laugh - we really didn't have a summer. We had a handful of days, maybe two dozen at the most, over twenty degrees, this summer. Sad sad sad. Somehow, now, the days have been crystal clear and there is that nip in the air in the evening. Let's hope it lasts - we are owed good weather until January!!

Sedums, huh? Hmm. I have one. They are not my favourite. I find them kind of useless.
I wish I could play hooky and go to a gardening centre today - I have three hours free in the middle of my day. But I can't. I have files to work on :( so it will have to wait until tomorrow, which means I'll have to take DS. Oh well. Can't be helped.

Jacksmania...v v v envious of your location though not from a gardening perspective! I love that part of the world...

Me too. And normally it's gardeners' paradise. You can grow almost anything here. But this year has been shit

Huh, and I just got an email back from the website where I looked up what zone I'm in and she said I was zone 8A which is one of the warmest in Canada! Cool.

She sent this link for anyone who's interested: www.facebook.com/botanuspage

Still no blackberries here. Why is everything so much later?

Have a glut of runner beans which I am not that keen on. I wish I had planted more french beans, much nicer really. I am planning to freeze a few beans. I realised today that we have damsons in the freezer from the year before last, so I have to persuade DH to eat more of them or not cook so many. There are a lot of damson trees in the orchard though and it goes against the grain not to use them. I might put some on freecycle on a pick your own basis. At least the pigs eat the fallen apples, and so do the new geese we got today.

We have a man coming to talk about making a hazel hurdle for an immediate boundary and protection for the new hedge. We are dithering between hornbeam or yew - the only thing putting us off the yew is the fact that when mature it needs five feet at the base, which will cut into the space.

DH planted two cherry trees to fan train against the long stone wall outside the living room window, something to relieve the rather dull view. This is a typical old house in that it has hardly any view of the garden at all.

Spent a happy couple of hours in the garden this afternoon sorting out the long bed. Have weeded, moved things between beds and planted out the new additions. Also snuck into a garden centre today and bought two japanese anenomes as I fell in love with one up the road and needed one (or two) immediately. I think I have an addiction.

Felt like a proper gardener this afternoon though as DH made me a cup of tea and I drank it perched on the edge of the bed in the rain. Muddy, wet and happy.

Going to order the bulbs tonight - DH has agreed my choices so I'm not feeling so guilty at the cost. Still a bit behind yours though Humphrey....

I love japanese anemones too - such a beautiful shape to the flower.

Jacks, the more I think about it the more I think the answer does not lie in flowers for you, even with your 8A status. How about coloured stems and foliage like dogwood? Or some really striking two/three tone planting schemes - black, silver, red?

Today I did a completely different garden - the flat we're letting out in NE London. It was a little overgrown in the beds but easy to put right - there are a couple of climbers, a small berberis, some ornamental grasses, bay, lavandula. There is some ground-hugging sedum which has just arrived on the wind, I guess, I certainly didn't put it there. The grass hasn't been cut all summer so it is dry, patchy and weedy, but it will recover. There is a wonderfully laden apple tree hanging over the garden which I'm tempted to ask the tenants to collect the apples from, so I can make jelly. If they're not preservers themselves, that is!! It was good to get a change of scene, and I acquired three spare recycling boxes which I will use to plant veg over winter or in the spring!

I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I don't really have time or energy to spend on planting anything and keeping it alive! And I'd really rather make choices based on what I really want in my flowerbed, rather than just grabbing something that's blooming right now and bunging it into the flower bed. So I think I'll be some more hyacinth and snowdrop bulbs when the time comes, and next spring start to plan a bit more in terms of colour scheme.

A really beautiful AUTUMN day here. It is august!

Garden smelling and looking lovely. There are advantages to being incredibly late putting sweet peas in as they are all in full bloom atm, along with the cosmos purity which are only just getting into their stride. Someone is burning some sweet smelling wood up the lane and the scent of smoke on the crisp air is very evocative, and in the words of Susan Hill making me feel nostalgic for I 'know not what'. The aga is being serviced so will put that on again ready for all the jam making and fruit preserving. I feel in the mood for baking.

I've been to see my parents' new farm in Devon yesterday and this morning. It's not yet habitable but we were picking fruit in the orchard - at least the parts of the orchard that aren't overgrown with nettles. I sawed some saplings down (ash/elder) and cut off ivy at the base of some lovely old apple trees that were being strangled a bit.

I've come back with 5.7kg of victoria plums, 1700g of bramleys, 500g of mystery stone fruit (bullace or damson), 400g of pears and 400g of red apples. I've set aside 1.2kg of plums which are too ripe for jam, and will make them into crumble tonight/tomorrow. I've done 3kg (after stoning) of plums into jam this afternoon (took roughly 2 1/2 hrs and that was partly because I had to do them in two pans slightly staggered). Put another kilo in the freezer because I've run out of jars.

Still haven't done that chard pesto. Maybe tomorrow.

Heuchera is currently starring in my non-edible border (yes, there's just the one!) with beautiful delicate flower spikes that bend gracefully when bees hang on them. Astible 'mighty pip' also looking striking, and I have a second bloom just starting on a peach-coloured rose. Am glad I bothered to dead-head.

Off out to Tesco Extra to buy more preserving sugar now...

Autumn has really been in the air here two then yesterday it felt more like summer again.

Fantastic haul of fruit there Lexil. How fantastic they have a farm, I am very jealous.

Having spent ages hacking away at my tomatoes to let some sun on them , I think I'm going to lose them to blight. On the plus side I came back from allotment with a massive Beetroot, lots of spuds, carrots , vast quantities of beans, more cucs, courgettes and harvested marigold flowers with a view to making calendula oil. Our allotment needs to raise money so we're looking at the possibility of making calendula balm using the beeswax from the hives on the estate (NT allotment) but not sure if it will be economical with the lab certification etc.

The downside is my plot is now a tourist attraction. Everyone has been very nice but it is incredibly off putting getting stuck in with your hoe, bright red in the face, muddy hands, having an audience watching you. It's just started raining again which isn't good news for my tomatoes.

Just returned from MILs with a carrier bag full of victoria plums too Lex. We're not big jam eaters so as I've already made a batch of (runny) plum jam I'm planning on doing some spicy plum chutney tomorrow...that's if I don't eat my way through the entire bag though as they are beautiful.

Went to a car boot sale this morning near to MILs (was in dire need of a replacement pushchair as ours broke just three months before the ceremonial binning when DD2 turns 4). There were loads of people selling the best looking plants - they don't do that at car boots around here. Only bought one blue grass as unfortunately not enough room in the car for everything else I could have bought. I'll remember that next spring though when I'm filling the gaps in the beds as so much cheaper!

Looks like we're going to get hit by this severe weather that's coming in Monday night/Tuesday. What should I bring in from the garden? Tomatoes, presumably, and anything ready for harvest. Hope not going to get hammered too badly.

And I checked out the tree in the woods - it's a yellow plum! Will look up a chutney recipe too, good call Pkam. Also found an apple tree out on the fields - small red apples, I guess you would call them crab apples. I showed my friend at work a crab apple tree I'd found, and they're the size of large cherries and slightly rosehip-shaped. She didn't recognise them as crab apples at all, thought they should be a lot more apple shaped. I guess if it has a bit of pectin and boils up nice, it doesn't really matter the full Linnean categorisation...

How did you get on with the weather Lex? Do hope you weren't too badly hit.

Autumn raspberries getting into their stride now. Blackberries STILL not ready.

I am planning on doing spiced plums for Christmas with our rather small plum crop. Plum chutney sounds good, do you think I can do it with damsons? No shortage of those here. Cucumbers are finally arriving, hooray. I am determined to be on time with all my planting next year .

::staggers in::

Hello all. I'm just back from my hols and things are looking better than I hoped, although the slugs have devastated the hostas. ::sob:: The sweet peas are fab - the benefit of late planting, I guess - but I could only look by torchlight last night so will do a proper survey this evening.

Jacksmania - Lovely to see you on a gardening thread again. [Disclaimer: what follows is a minority opinion]. Sedums are vile, ugly plants and you should not listen to these sirens encouraging you to plant them. In the UK, something like helenium Moerheim beauty lasts well into autumn - could it work for you? Or how about Japanese anemones? Mine are just about to start flowering.

Where was the boot sale, Pkam?

::inveterate bargain hunter::

Hi Humph. How far north are you that blackberries aren't ready?! or is this an effect of your exposed wind-tunnel garden?

Damsons, in my limited experience, can be used in most of the same ways as plums with a couple of caveats: 1. they are smaller and therefore fiddlier, making the de-stoning stage rather labour intensive, 2. They are high in pectin and acid (reference: 'Cooking Explained', Barbara Hammond, 2nd ed, 1974, with a library stamp in the front that my mother has obviously tried to obscure before handing it on to me...!), which means to each kg of fruit use 1.25 to 1.5kg of sugar, and when first stewing the fruit add 400-900ml water per kg.

Others in the high pectin group are cooking/crab-apples, black/red currants, green gooseberries. Plums are in the average bracket along with Apricots, Blackberries, Raspberries and Loganberries. Low pectin/acid group is Late season blackberries, Cherries, Pears, Strawberries. You need to add 1-2tbsps lemon juice or half to 1 tsp tartaric acid per kg to these before starting cooking. Or for apparently a shorter boiling time, retaining more of the flavour, use lemon juice plus half a bottle (per kg) of 'Certo' liquid pectin which is 2.99 in Lakeland or 2.29 in Tesco...

We've been spared this weather it seems. It has rained all morning - a sort of steady drizzle-plus. I did bring in a squash and some tomatoes last night but by the time i got out there it was dark. Must find my headtorch and keep it next to my wellies.

I am home sick today with sniffles, aches, sore throat, general ennui. Can't go outside (although am tempted to wrap up with scarf like it's winter...) but am loving the vivid wet colours of the garden that I can see from my kitchen extension - great thing about a small garden is you can see it all at once, it's like a stage set. Top of the list when I do get out there is to glypho that bindweed that's coming through the fence from next door...

bloody bindweed, it is the scourge of our garden.

We are in Monmouthshire, so not that far north at all! Don't know why the blackberries are so late here. Garden has been not windy at all in the last six weeks so we have modified our hedge planting plans somewhat.

Thanks for the damson advice, very useful knowledge to have.

Glad to see you back Maud, I have been wondering if you were away. Hope you had a nice time. I agree about the sweet peas, mine are in full splendid flower right now

Oooh ooh also re damsons, you can start them off slow in the pan and just lift out the stones rather than chopping tediously.