Chris Palmer
I’m wearing a hand-knitted jumper and khaki shorts which were once too big for me and are now too small. I’m six or seven years old and I have a pudding bowl haircut. It’s a pudding bowl that I happen to have my eyes on. It is plastic and bright yellow. My mother has just made a sponge and this bowl contains butter icing. I know that if I’ve been good, I’ll have the chance to scrape it out. What a treat. The wooden spoon, as well as the bowl, would be licked clean.
I still have that yellow bowl. When mum moved out of her flat thirty years ago, and into a nursing home, I made sure it wasn’t thrown out. I now use it to make Yorkshire pudding batter, and when I do, my mind wanders back sixty years or so to that tiny kitchen, and my expectant look as the bowl is passed to me.
The emotional weight borne by a simple kitchen object can equally apply to gardening items.
My father died over twenty-five years ago and stopped gardening well before then. Maybe it was as long ago as forty years that he gave me a sturdy dark green plastic watering can. It had an unusual mechanism that had to be mastered before it could be used. It made him chuckle to observe first-time users unable to produce any flow as they tipped it forward.
I still have it. I think of Dad whenever I use it.
As with some gardening utensils, the mechanism has broken, but the watering can itself is as strong now as when Dad bought it half a century ago. I’ll pass it on, in due course, to whichever of my children shows the greater interest in gardening.
Gardening wasn’t Dad’s first love, but there were tasks that he reserved for himself. One was cutting the grass. As it involved an engine, like his car, he probably didn’t trust Mum with it. He thought mowers with an electric cable were inherently dangerous, so always relied on a petrol driven rotary machine. Unlike me, he would check the oil and the spark plugs, clean the blades and use the correct petrol. It was as good as a Formula One pit stop. Lewis Hamilton would have been impressed. And that was every few weeks during the summer! In the middle of winter, he stripped it down for a comprehensive service. I, however, rely on a friendly and inexpensive company based in Kilmarnock. I can’t claim like father, like son. If only.
However, I do follow his love of runner beans. What a great year it has been for them in our garden. They love warmth and lots of rain. The South Ayrshire weather has supplied both in spades this summer. We start to eat them in mid-July, and with luck there will be some to harvest into October. Although I never asked him, or indeed my mother, who also loved them, I suspect the reliance on runner beans goes back to Dig for Victory during the war. Every scrap of garden space was used to grow vegetables. Runner beans would have been an ideal to crop to grow. They are nutritious and easy to cultivate. Their greatest virtue is that the more you pick, the more you get. As I pull down the plants at the end of the season in October, I collect any pods that were not harvested and have become tough and leathery. If there are seeds nestling inside the pods, I collect and store them in a dry, cool place over winter. I will sow these next April when the annual growing cycle will start again.
Have I been banging on too much about tomatoes in the last few editions? The trouble is, growing them can become an obsession. And this is only my first year! By mid-August I had many trusses of green tomatoes, but they stubbornly refused to ripen.
“Have you any over-ripe bananas?” my greenhouse gardening guru, Sandy, asked.
“We don’t let them get like that,” I replied.
“Just for a change, let a few go.”
“Why?”
“To hang in the greenhouse.”
Sandy proceeded to explain why an over-ripe banana might help tomatoes ripen. I was soon lost in the science. As I was frustrated by the lack of red fruit, I followed up his tip. It proved to be a good harvest. I had success with a cucumber plant too. My first attempt to grow chillies was, however, frustrated by slugs or maybe a family of mice. If I had ventured into the garden with a torch in the middle of the night, I might have discovered the culprit. I’m not that obsessed – yet!
For many gardeners, autumn is their favourite season. The attractions in the fruit and vegetable garden are fairly obvious. The hard graft has all been done, weeding has kept the plot under control, and the harvest is proceeding over a period of weeks. Strawberries came and went a long time ago. I think for many this was a poor season. Plums and damsons are ready if not already picked. The few cherries that we had were ready in early July but were lost to pigeons. Now there are apples and pears, sweetcorn and autumn raspberries. Maincrop tatties are ready. Depending on your garden there may be others I have not mentioned. It can be an exciting time. Whilst, of course, not everything works, enjoy your successes.
In the borders, I love the rich colour of dahlias, at their best in my view in late summer and early autumn. They will continue to flower until the first frost of the autumn. Keep dead-heading them, or better still, cut them and make a show indoors. My favourites this year continue to be Edinburgh and Blue Bayou. I have a tried a new one this year to give a vibrant golden-yellow contrast – American Sun. I recommend all three.
Whatever the size of your garden, take a photograph now. In January, you can then consider what changes should be made and ask yourself if all that hard work was worth it. I hope it was. The first frost is on the horizon and the season will soon begin to turn.
