Here cometh the autumn garden
21.08.2023 - 12:00
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
The garden and I are both grateful for the rain. The hot and dry weather doesn’t suit either of us. I’m happier in the cooler seasons of the year, which might explain why my autumn garden is going better than the summer one! The purple sprouting broccoli is starting to grow past its cabbage white damage, to the point where I am starting to stake it now, against the wind rock that will damage its roots in the winter. The flower sprouts haven’t got to that stage yet, but at least they are planted out in their final home and can start getting their roots down into the fertile soil. The leek bed is doing well, although there are one or two holes where seedlings have died. It doesn’t matter.
It will soon be time to buy sets for autumn planting onions, shallots and garlic, to take the place of the summer crops that are still thriving. And on Sunday morning I harvested the garlic to make room for a salad/stir fry bed. As Alys has just said in the Guardian (late sowing for wonderful winter salads), the next couple of weeks are the last for vegetable sowing for eating this year. The seeds need warm soil to germinate, but they also need a reasonable day length in which to grow, and the days are rapidly getting shorter. (I’ve talked about sowing Oriental vegetables for autumn in the past, as well.)
A salad/stir fry bed was always on my garden plan for this year, but it got bumped to the autumn to make room for unexpected sweetcorn (some rescue plants I didn’t expect would come to anything. They are a motley crew, but we’ve already had 3 lovely cobs and there are more to harvest). So the garlic came out and the bed was topped up with bags of manure, topsoil and peat-free compost, and replanted and sown. The plants are ‘Bolder’
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