an hour in
the garden
As August comes to an end you can feel the changes in the world. For me it has always been the smell of the earth changing, as though the water was rising, passing its odour to the sky. Obviously the nights draw in the further from the equator you go and the days become shorter, and colder, though the summer here in the UK hasn’t been so warm in the first place.
It usually means a wetter time of the year for many, and wet soil is cold, plant growth slows, and we start to think about frost, when will they come? Will we have an early frost? It is with water that I usually slowly motivate the garden into winter mode. Checking the insulation of the taps and emptying the water butt so I can move it into the greenhouse.
I refill the butt, and use it when needed, which is increasingly rarely in the winter. The reason for moving it is to absorb heat during the day and release it at night. In other words it acts like a storage heater. The greenhouse usually is about 15 C warmer in the summer months than outside and around 5 - 7 C in the winter. The butt holds 205 litres of water, multiply this by the specific heat capacity of water, divide by the number of seconds it takes for it to cool down, take off your socks to help you work it out and you can work out that the barrel of water gives off 500 Watts of power into the greenhouse.
Free energy? Nope, it takes longer for the greenhouse to warm up in the morning! But it does help.
As I harvest my beds I either put new crops in for the winter, Japanese onion sets in September for example, Broad beans in October as well as garlic, or I manure them for crops like potatoes, or simply dig them over for crops like cabbages. It means making a plan before I start, and a jolly good read of the seed catalogues. I always picture myself sat by the fire with my feet up, smoking a pipe, drinking dark stout, while ordering my seeds and stuff for next year, but I don’t smoke.
City CottageMagazine/September, 2017
September
Sort your Lilies
When your lilies are finally finished, and as they die back, you can dig up the bulbs and separate them to make more stock.
We tend to grow them in pots anyway, but you can overwinter them in large pots of compost, they are quite hardy.
In pots and containers you need to do this at least every three years - it gives you a chance to change the compost too!