Red-leaved ornamentals and dieback

With the sun dipping ever earlier over the horizon, early afternoon is currently the best time to enjoy autumn’s last colours.

Cotinus ‘Grace’, ungraciously floppy in response to the fertility of my clay, is nevertheless looking stunning, magenta-pink to orange-red. Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’ (a notoriously iffy plant that so far seems quite well) makes the ideal butter-yellow partner, with coral bark that picks up the warm tones of the cotinus.

Sadly, a red-leaved Acer japonica is suffering terribly from dieback. Previously a beautiful specimen, underplanted with cyclamen and ferns, it was a highlight of the pond garden, contrasting with the surrounding greenery, an elegant form in deep bronze, bright crimson in autumn. Shrubs and trees with leaves that are red throughout the growing season, seem to pay in vigour for their attractive colouring, and are especially prone to dieback; oak, ash, maple and birch are susceptible too. The causes are too varied to list, but specimens tend to reach relative maturity and then die back from the twigs down through the limbs, eventually killing the plant. Cutting out affected tissue below the telltale staining inside the wood is said to help, but often the cause is below the soil, and in my experience, there is nothing you can do.

Looking on the bright side, I shall dig out the floppy cotinus, and replant with a new baby red-leaved acer. If it brings as much pleasure as the last one did for a decade, even if it too eventually succumbs to dieback, it will still be well worth the cost and effort.

Biodynamic cow pat pit

Apologies to regulars for the time lapse. Since my last blog a duvet of oak leaves has floated down, a handful at a time, to blanket the ornamental garden, obscuring paths and border edges, making the cottage look as if it had sprouted naturally like a giant, misshapen mushroom.

One of the fortnight’s most memorable afternoons was spent preparing Bertie’s Cottage’s first biodynamic Cow Pat Pit (sometimes known as barrel preparation). My friend Hannah arrived with her son, Charlie, for Sunday lunch, bearing cider, chocolates and three buckets of best quality organic cow muck (Fortunately Charlie bonded instantly with my girls, united by embarrassment at their freakish mothers!)

With lots of news to catch up on, the sky was already darkening by the time we finished coffee. But undaunted, Hannah and I traipsed up to the veg garden, tipped the sloppery muck into a wheelbarrow and, adding the recommended dressings of finely crushed eggshells and basalt flour, we stirred it for an hour. The end result was much lighter in colour and fluffed up like an egg white half way to the peaky stage. The tonic or ‘preparation’ we were making is said to aid the breakdown of organic matter into stable humus (gardener’s treasure) by stimulating the energies of beneficial bacteria and microrganisms. These both require plentiful oxygen, so it felt like whipping up cowpat mousse.

After the hour’s stirring, we poured a third of the mixture into its mould - an enormous, bottomless clay pot, sunk under the soil surface almost to its brim. The six compost preparations Rudolf Steiner prescribed eighty-odd years ago were pushed in like booze-soaked amaretti into a trifle, then the process was repeated with a second layer and then a third. To finish we covered the pit with a hessian sack and a board to repel the rain, and left it to slow cook.

In six weeks time I’ll give it a stir to help maintain good oxygen levels, and by the end of winter, with luck, we’ll dig it up, dilute it extensively and apply it as a tonic to the soil of both Hannah’s new garden and our plot.

Autumn colour and the Green Roof

A still, sunny Sunday raised all our spirits. The children fetched their bikes and skateboards, excited dogs and the cat weaving chaos all around. I made the most of a ‘leaf day’, weeding raised beds of salads and kale, and Jim, anticipating a cool evening, carted logs up from the woodshed.

The green roof that covers that shed is a tapestry of emerald green mosses and heather-purple sedums that take it in turn to predominate according to the season and rainfall. At least seven years old now, the roof receives negligible maintenance, just a sprinkling of the biodynamic preparations and an annual top-dressing of seaweed. Occasionally I tug out an evening primrose or dandelion seedling, but there is so little nutrition available, that weeds can only reach pathetic proportions, and are unable to compete.

Tudor peas

The vegetable garden is feeding us handsomely with salads, roots and kale (the leeks are still rather small, but I don’t want to resign myself to ‘baby leeks’ until I’m certain they have stopped growing). Our dining room is always several degrees cooler than the rest of the house, and it doubles as a vegetable storage area, now well filled with squash, marrow, onions and garlic, cobnuts, apples and medlars.

Back in the summer, rather disappointed by a crop of Pea ‘Wegisser’, recommended as a mangetout variety, we left the pods to fatten and ripen on the haulms and harvested them when the cases were papery. They continued to dry in the dining room, and I just recently shelled them, soaked them overnight and simmered them for a couple of hours. They looked simply disgusting, mottled, muddy brown with little black flecks - if it wasn’t for Jim’s passion for historical recipes, I would have fed them to the geese. However, I persevered and once the peas had finally softened, I drained and mashed them, and added butter, cream, salt and black pepper. The resulting peas pudding was dirty brown and very unappetising to look at, but by common consensus, surprisingly tasty – just the job with strong-flavoured meats such as bacon or venison.

Netting the pond

In our neighbours’ field beyond the woodshed, a possy of young charolais cattle cantered down the hillside, cream against green, then cream against russet, gold and burnt orange as they made for a hedgerow of oak, hazel and bracken. Realising it won’t be long before the ground, rather than branches are strewn with leaves, I cut back the plants that grow in the shallow margins of the pond so I could net over the water surface. (Nutrients released from rotting leaves would feed algae next year, so to keep the water clear, collecting the leaf litter is well worth the effort). Dying iris leaves, withered loosestrife and long-empty primula seedheads were no loss, and the pretty cattails were still tidy enough to bring in for dried flower arrangements, but, as every year, I hated shearing off still fine goblets of carnivorous Sarracenia and the broad glaucous flags of Thalia dealbata. Fortunately I did manage to lift free a pot of Osmunda regalis, the Royal Fern, at the height of its autumnal splendour – it won’t suffer for a few weeks with its feet out of the water at this time of year.