When does the garden year begin and end? I have never found an answer. Perhaps, simply, the garden year begins and ends in some little ways every day of the year.
When I was training as a gardener and being taught the principles of design, it was with the language of music. Borders were to have rhythm and harmony. Now that I am mostly growing vegetables, gardening seems quite percussive. There are beats I need to hit such as the planting of the First Early potatoes or there won’t be notes or music later in the year. I live in fear of forgetting to sow something then to realise only when it is too late. Earlier this year, I had two failed sowings of parsley. It is a slow germinator at the best of times and by the time I had decided each sowing had failed, weeks had gone by. Chef was starting to use up the plants from last year and would soon be looking for more.
The importance of hitting the beat at the right time was brought home to me again this year. I had sown my courgettes at the beginning of the right period for courgette sowing only to have tired courgettes sitting in pots in the glasshouse. The days were bright, at times un-seasonally warm, but the nights were still cold and I couldn’t possibly plant them out. They have been in the ground for ten days now and I finished the week of their planting feeling that I had that beat at the right time. Likewise I had planted out the pumpkins, sunflowers for cutting, and some Cosmos ‘Purity’. Two nights ago the forecast was just for 5C overnight. I drove into work in the evening and covered my courgettes with cloches. I could do nothing for the runner and Borlotto beans which are now an unpleasant shade of yellow. They are still alive and they will pull through, but they are a picture of misery.
I have a poly-tunnel full of tomatoes, aubergines, basil, coriander, sweet and hot peppers – ‘Padron’, ‘Cayenne’, ‘Corno Rosso’, cucumbers, watermelons and cantaloupes, and an intriguing little thing like a hairy cucumber called a Carosella. I have grown them before but not this variety. It should grow to the size of a Syrian hamster before being eaten. I have been shutting the tunnel doors at night and opening them in the morning so that the tunnel can air and those all important pollinating insects can enter. There has been a little too much air or cold air, at least. The Carosella nearest the door may not pull through.
I suppose that hitting the beats is not simply time-specific but place-specific too. I am gardening in the Cotswolds – an area of land with an average height above sea-level of 500′ and about as far from the sea as it is possible to be in England. Summers can be hot, gloriously, continentally so, but only July and August are guaranteed frost-free. Patience is needed when planting out, despite the lengthening days.
The tomatoes in the tunnel remind me that the ‘right’ of ‘right time’ is not set in stone. I had sown my usual favourites at the usual time: Beefsteaks to cherries, yellows, reds, ‘blacks’, plums and round. Their names are like poetry: ‘Principe Borghese’, ‘Crimean Black’, ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’, ‘Yellow Pear’, ‘San Marzano’, ‘Red Cherry’, ‘Cuor de Bue’, ‘Black Cherry’, ‘Piccolo Dattero’. Like the courgettes, these were starting to grow tired in their pots, not because it was too cold for them to go to the tunnel, but because I had inherited crops which were lingering on and ‘bed-blocking’.
I had fielded a late request from Chef for a particular variety of tomato from Sicily, ‘Marinda’. In Sicily it is grown outside from January to April hence its other name ‘the winter tomato’. I sowed ‘Marinda’ a good six weeks after the others. It was ready for the tunnel when the tunnel was ready for it and is now just as mature as the others.
I have a south-facing wall in the walled garden and have planted one of each of the ten varieties against the wall as an experiment. I’m particularly interested in ‘Marinda’. Will an Oxfordshire summer be as benign as a Sicilian winter? I fear not.
Tomorrow, I will harvest the last of the rhubarb and the first of the strawberries, but I don’t know that yet. Nor did I know that ten days after cloching the courgette plants against the cold, I would harvest the first courgettes.
Summer begins.
thephilosophergardener 