Some interesting advice from Monty Don on the Christmas Gardener’s World this week covering putting the garden to bed and getting fruit trees and rhubarb in. [...]
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Now the leaves are off the trees, it’s time to take hardwood cuttings It’s an easy and reliable method for propagating deciduous trees, shrubs and climbers. The “season” lasts from now until late winter. [...] Those of you who follow Gardener’s World may remember that Monty Don was warning you about these last week. If you don’t nobble them now they’ll keep on chomping away at your plants and their roots all through the winter so that by the spring they’ll be feeling sorry for themselves. [...] 
You cut below a bud horizontally. For best results cut with scissors or secateurs first to seal the cut and again with a really sharp knife just before you pot it. This cut is square. At the top end you either include the apical leaves and between 2 and 4 nodes depending on the plant or you make a sloping cut above a bud. You keep the cuttings moist until its time to pot them. Then you seal the bottom with Root!t Gel which contains auxins and then keep them moist and sheltered over the winter. [...] Best of all he tells you in explicit detail how to turn a lawn into potatoes by spreading cardboard round the dripline of a handy tree and covering it in compost. Put the potatoes in, follow up with beans over the winter and bodge in some rasp canes the following autumn and your on your way to your very own forest garden. [...] I can honestly report that on this year’s lot there’s been a pitch invasion of docks and at the back where the swimming pool came out 18 months ago it’s stiff with clover. Both of these happy events have been organised by nature with no input from me at all. So while I’ve been on holiday I’ve been avidly reading David Bell’s book the permaculture garden and am busily planning a forest garden round the house for a permanent supply of fruit. [...] Part of the trick with growing things commercially is that you always need to have something to sell. So for us we expect to have a good crop of peppers and aubergines and squash over the next couple of months with about half a dozen beds of sweet potatoes coming through. However our main focus is on providing a succession of chard and spinach that will take us through to Christmas. [...] This whole approach to designing a functioning ecosystem from day one is something that we really should be looking at more given that I’m beginning to suspect that what we think of as conventional farming is uncomfortably dependent on cheap oil. [...] 
In some ways these reservoirs are just like big garden ponds. We’ll be stocking them with Rudd shortly after a bit more fiddling with the overflows And just like garden ponds, one of the things that needs management is removing excess nutrients from the water to prevent algae developing. We’ve already had a couple of minor blooms. Mainly because we had more topsoil in the bottom of the reservoir than subsoil. Hornwort Fundamentally you need to have plants or other organisms that compete with the algae for the nitrates. For emergency reduction we use a product called blue [...] So here’s a selection of 5 vegetables you might have a crack at. Perpetual Spinach, radish, rocket, mixed salad and the carrots. Plants are very susceptible to daylength rather than temperature but we have about 8 weeks before they slow to a crawl. Under protected cropping they really only stop between mid december and when the light turns in mid february but still – if you’re feeling bold this selection should give you the best shot. [...] |
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