On a visit to RHS Wisley this spring, I paid a fortune for six strawberry plants of the variety Buddy, one of the new ‘everbearing’ types which fruit all summer and autumn rather than just a big flush for a month or so.  This is the third everbearing variety I’ve tried and the best so far –  I’m impressed and looking forward to planting up a lot more Buddies for next year.  How lucky then that strawberry plants multiply themselves so easily.

Each vigourous plant sends out several baby plants on stalks, so-called ‘runners’ just like the way that spider plants and the weed creeping-buttercup reproduce.   The strawberry runners will usually root themselves into the soil, but it’s better to get them to root into a pot of compost so that you can grow them on then plant them just where you want them (or sell, swap or give them away to friends).

All you need is a short length of garden wire, about 3 inches or 75mm long, bent into a V shape, and a 3 or 4 inch pot filled with good potting compost.  Use the bent wire to peg the baby plant firmly to the compost in the post.  Water the pots if the weather is very dry.  After a month each baby plant will have rooted well into its pot and the runner stalk can be cut. Keep in a sheltered place over the winter and plant out the new strawberry plants in the spring.

Most of my time in my own garden this autumn has been spent working with wood rather than plants.  In August, joy of joys, I had a 6 metre / 20 foot long  hedge of tall leylandii conifers cut down from part of the eastern boundary of my garden.  Patrick of Treeation efficiently cut them down, cut the trunks into logs and chipped up the tops into useful woodchip, but I’ve still had weeks of work trying to turn the ground that was under the trees into a passable border.  Worth it though, as it has freed up an area four feet deep and 20 feet long – a significant amount of space.

It took a couple of days to dig out the thinnest tree roots and all the tangle of ivy and bindweed roots that had, to my surprise, colonised what I expected to be a totally barren, dry, dark area under the trees.   I then cut the stumps off level with the soil, and will cover them with 8 inches of compost, plant things on top, and just leave the stumps and roots to rot over the years.  One good thing about Leylandii and most conifers is that they don’t re-grow if cut down.  Rather than digging or grinding out the stumps, a horrendous job, I’m employing a permaculture principle – ‘use simple and slow solutions‘.  Nature, in the form of fungi, will take care of digesting the roots and stumps for me in a few years.

The next job was to put up a fence.  By great good luck, there were old fenceposts still standing that had been buried in the hedge, and as they had metal ground fixings, they were still solid.  That only left me to fix some horizontal rails and vertical feather edge boards – resulting in rather a beautiful fence.

My other autumn woodworking job is putting up an old cedar greenhouse which someone was giving away.  I’ve always yearned for a cedar greenhouse – nothing else sets such a warm and nurturing tone in the garden, so I’m putting this up and restoring it.  Unfortunately the base has rotted all the way round, probably due to having been stored for a couple of years dismantled in a shady damp place with too little air circulation. So I’ve tracked down a supply of cedar and will be setting to with the table saw and planer thicknesser when the timber arrives in a couple of weeks.   One of my other great loves, apart from growing plants and food, is mending things!  Once mended, the greenhouse will last indefinitely – being wooden it is easily repairable, unlike aluminium and (heaven forbid) plastic-framed greenhouses.

I adore the scent of wallflowers, especially on an early Spring evening when it is most intense and often takes me by surprise with its amazing strength and loveliness. Wallflowers are among the earliest spring flowers, certainly the best scented, and very easy to grow.   For me that makes wallflowers a ‘must have’ flower in my mainly edible garden.    I don’t know how I’d failed to notice the uniqueness of  wallflowers’ perfume until about 3 years ago!  Until then I’d just dismissed wallflowers as traditional but rather so-so flowering plants.  Shame on me!

Anyway, September is the traditional time to plant out wallflowers in your beds and containers, usefully filling gaps that have been left by the summer’s flowers.

You can buy bundles of bare-rooted wallflower plants on markets at this time of year, with their roots wrapped in damp newspaper and tied up with string.  This is virtually the only way of buying them, and it’s fantastic that this traditional, fuss free, eco-friendly style of packaging hasn’t been superseded by plastic.  As with other members of the cabbage family, wallflowers are perfectly happy to be dug up and transplanted as bare-rooted plants.  Just keep them well watered for a week or two after planting out and they’ll thrive. Although they do sometimes seed themselves successfully in poor soil in cracks in walls, they appreciate good soil and will grow much bigger and bushier in it, so enrich their soil with home-made compost, or rotted manure or a few chicken pellets, before planting if you can.

I’ve grown a lovely row of wallflower plants to sell this year, so as well as buying from the market, you can buy them from me if you choose:  £1.50 for a bundle of six big strong plants.

I also have good perennial herb plants which would do well planted out now – sage, rosemary and mint, and soft fruit bushes – currants and gooseberries, which will establish well for next spring if planted out this autumn.

As I’m enjoying my annual gooseberry harvest, I thought I’d share an excellent gooseberry cake recipe which I’ve cooked dozens of times over the years.   The recipe is a good way to make use of fresh or frozen gooseberries.  It’s also a great vegan cake recipe which can easily be adapted to use other allotment fruit (e.g. rhubarb or blackcurrants).

This recipe comes from The York Wholefood Restaurant Cookbook, published in 1985 and sadly long out of print.  It must be one of the most charming and useful books ever published.  My well-used copy was given to me about 25 years ago by my sister Chrissie who lived in York at that time.

Ingredients:

half a cup of oil (I use sunflower)
1.5 cups of stewed, unsweetened gooseberries
1.5 cups of sugar (I normally reduce that)
8oz flour (wholemeal is fine)
1.5 tsp baking powder
2 level tsp mace (I use nutmeg as I don’t usually have mace)
pinch of salt

Method:

Mix together the oil and sugar, then add the stewed gooseberries.  Add to this the flour with the baking powder, salt and mace sifted in.  Your mixture may need a little more flour, it should be reasonably stiff.  Bake at gas mark 4 for 50-60 mins.

As I recall, I usually have to add quite a lot of extra flour, and bake it for at least 15 minutes longer than the time given above.

Because the book is out of print, I have taken the liberty of scanning the page from the cookbook so that you can download it as a pdf and print it out in its original form if you wish:  download recipe pdf of gooseberry sauce cake (vegan) .

Although endangered nationally, slow worms are still fairly common in Stroud and they deserve our help.  They eat slugs and snails, after all!

You can help them by making a simple home for them in your garden.  All you need is a bit of corrugated roofing sheet (black bitumen sheet, trade name ‘Onduline’, or galvanised corrugated iron sheet).  Put it in a sunny spot, and put a brick or two on it to hold it down. Couldn’t be simpler, and with luck a family of slow worms will soon move in.  They love the heat and safety under the corrugated roofing sheet.

I have some offcuts of black roofing sheet available for £4 each (a complete two-metre long sheet is £16 in B&Q Stroud or Wickes Gloucester).

This week I made my first delivery of plants to Stroudco Food Hub.  Stroudco is an innovative local online shop, matching local producers with local consumers.  You can buy everything from locally-baked sourdough bread to local veg and Essentials Wholefoods via Stroudco.  It’s well worth trying – it gives consumers convenience and lower than retail prices, and gives producers much better returns than selling wholesale.  It really is a win-win system, pioneered in Stroud and inspiring the setting up of other Food Hubs across the UK and the world.

I’ve been working with Stroudco in my other guise for a few years (as an IT person, providing technical support for their software), so it’s nice to now also be part of Stroudco as a producer.

I’m continuing to sell plants via word-of-mouth/email,  and via a stall outside my house, and sometimes at the Country Market stall at the Shambles Market on Fridays.

I have a two or three hundred tomato plants, plus courgette, squash, cucumber, melon and pepper plants for sale.    They’ve been raised in my garden polytunnel as a labour of love – until the nights warm up,  I have to carry most of them from house to polytunnel in the morning, and back again in the evening!

You can buy or reserve plants now.  Prices are £1.20 or £1.50 depending on size.  They’ve been grown in peat free compost, many from organic seeds.

Sungold (super-sweet orange cherry) and Marmande (large slicing)  tomato plants ready to go, with many more varieties now or soon, including Tumbling Tom (trailing bush for baskets), Red Alert (cherry dwarf bush for containers),  Totem (dwarf bush for containers), Alicante (cordon, medium sized fruit),  Gardeners Delight (cordon, red cherry).

Two very large (about 8 inches tall) ‘Telepathy’ glasshouse cucumber plants would like a new home asap, with more on the way.

Squashes – Sweet Dumpling, Butternut, Crown prince.

Melon – Hales Best Jumbo (glasshouse)

Aubergine – Early Long Purple, Black Beauty

Courgette – yellow: Jemmer, Gold Rush.

Courgette – green: Black Beauty, Nero Di Milano

Send me an email (peter@stroudgardener.co.uk) or call (07729 103263) if you’d like to come and view or buy plants.

If you missed the annual Stroud Potato Day in Merrywalks last month,  here’s another chance to buy individual seed potatoes so that you can grow a mixture of varieties – you can plant them anytime between now and the end of April.

I visited Pound Farm shop in Whaddon recently to buy some New Horizons peat free multipurpose compost.  Pound Farm is just opposite Wynstones school, on the road from Stroud to Gloucester.  It’s a small independent garden centre and farm shop – much preferable visiting a typical big garden centre that’s part of a soul-less chain (I really can’t bear them!).

Pound farm is also selling pea and bean seeds loose by weight, so you can just weigh out as many as you need.  The old fashioned method!  Well done Pound Farm.    No organic seeds or plants unfortunately…    They also sell their own-grown potatoes by the sack – tasty, local and good value if you don’t mind buying non-organic veg (I tried a couple of bakers and they were excelllent).

It’s a shame that we don’t have a good independent garden centre/nursery/plant shop actually in Stroud.   For plants, the Country Market stall at the Shambles on a Friday morning is very good (I sell veg plants there in the summer).  There are also plant stalls at the Saturday farmers market. But there’s nowhere decent to buy seeds and compost and pots and garden tools – the best option is usually Wilkinsons, which is OK (and cheap) but lacks atmosphere and plant knowledge (they also stock a few plants but tend to kill most of them by neglect soon after they arrive – rather depressing!).  There are also Homebase and B&Q of course, a little out of the town centre – but they are just DIY chainstores.   None of the above shops, including Pound Farm, offer organic seeds.

There is a  small selection of  organic seeds and a few hand tools at the Stroud Valleys Shop in Threadneedle Street.  If they could just expand to running a dedicated garden shop somewhere in town it would be lovely – there’s definitely a gap in the market.  Maybe Ruskin Mill could supply them with plants too… ideas ideas!

I’m making an early start with a few greenhouse crops this year.  I planted my first aubergine seeds (pictured) in January, because they take SO long to grow up and produce fruit.  I’ve also got sweet peppers, cucumbers, and a few extra-early tomatoes at the seedling stage at the moment.

But… the lack of light is the big problem with growing seeds in Winter (which it still is, though I’m pretending it’s early Spring!).  Although these are greenhouse plants that I’m growing, it’s far too cold in the unheated polytunnel for them – they won’t be able to live out there until April.

Placed even on a south-facing indoor windowsill, seedlings at this time of year are very prone to getting leggy (too tall and thin) due to the shortage of sunlight in winter.

Commercially, growers use growing lights.  Big powerful lights over their seedlings.  This ‘artificial summer’ makes the seedlings grow nicely, but it isn’t really a solution for small scale growers: who wants to spend hundreds of pounds on equipment, and use lots of extra electricity, just for a couple of dozen seedlings?

A cheaper, greener solution which I’ve used successfully in previous years, and am doing again this year, is to place home-made reflectors behind the seedlings, to reflect the light from the window back onto the plants.  The reflectors are just made from aluminium cooking foil.  (It’s my own idea but no doubt other people have thought of this trick too.)   So the seedlings get light from both sides, rather than just from one side.  It helps to stop them from getting tall and thin and leaning over towards the window!

I’ve been thrilled this autumn to harvest some lovely Romanesco Broccoli.  It must be one of the most beautiful and other-worldly residents of the vegetable garden.

I sowed the seeds in early summer, planted out the young plants in about July, and then, knock me down with a feather, found lovely heads of spirally fractal broccoli appearing in October.   According to wikipedia, the florets grow in a self-similar, logarithmic spiral, in a pattern which is approximately fractal.   A point where mathematics and vegetable gardening meet.  I’m glad there aren’t many of those!

This success helps to make up for my relentless failures with cauliflowers!

I had a delightful day last Wednesday.  It was delightful not just because it was a perfect, sunny Autumn morning when I ventured out along the canal tow-path on my bicycle: it was delightful because I found charm and eccentricity in a most unexpected place.

I’d set out to go and choose some tiles for my kitchen, which I’m ‘doing up’ over the autumn.  So far, so mundane.   I thought I’d take a look at Tile Trader in the Ryeford Industrial Estate (right off the Ebley Bypass as you’re heading towards Stonehouse, or turn left soon after Ryeford double lock if you’re cycling along the canal tow-path).

I’d pictured a typical unit on an industrial estate, selling tiles, hopefully an independent family-run business rather than a chainstore.  That’s what I found there, but so much more!

The first thing you see when you go through the gates is an anarchic yard full of vintage cars, chickens pecking around, and architectural salvage such as old stone urns, sinks, roof tiles, old blue wavey path edging tiles, staddle stones, pots, garden forks, iron gates, garden canes, garden gnomes and anything and everything.   A weirdly large number of golf clubs too.

Tile Trader is a normal-looking large tile shop with helpful staff and a great selection of tiles.   But then there’s Dave, the retired owner, who still hangs out there doing the sort of stuff that doesn’t normally go on at a tile shop.  He restores old cars there as a hobby, and trades in a mixture of junk, curios, second hand goods, and architectural antiques and salvage.    If you want a chimney pot or an old iron gate, a settee or an old enamel advertising sign he’s your man.  Loads of stuff that you might occasionally want for a garden, such as old sinks, paving stones, path edging tiles, gnomes, canes, garden forks, and who-knows what.

Dave was friendly, the prices seem reasonable, and the charming experience of coming across a corner of ‘different-ness’ in an unexpected place really made my day.