In Your Autumn Garden with Plews Garden Design
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About this ebook
“In Your Autumn Garden with Plews Garden Design” is part of our ‘gardening almanac for the 21st century’ series has seasonal gardening tips, garden design ideas, ‘how to’ hints plus a liberal sprinkling of photographs and original illustrations to help you get more from your autumn garden, whether that's actually doing or just reading about gardens and gardening.
Contents include:
Inspiration for autumn planting
Harvesting and cultivation
The folklore origins of many gardening traditions
Essential garden tasks for autumn
How to get the most out of your garden and enjoy doing so
Seasonal recipes
Anyone who has read the Plews weekly blogs or monthly gardening articles will know the wide range of interests held by the author so will be reassured to know that anecdotes about plant history and folklore appear and the usual quirky comments about gardens and gardeners.
Added to all this there are plenty of photographs to inspire and amuse; along with some original illustrations.
Oh, and a glossary to explain some of those odd terms that gardeners use and you have to pretend to understand...
In short, we’ve aimed to create a book for you to read from cover to cover or dip into as the mood takes you.
Plews Autumn Garden eBook completes the seasons of the year; and you may like to check out our previous eBooks “In Your Winter Garden with Plews Garden Design”, “In Your Spring Garden with Plews Garden Design” and “In Your Summer Garden with Plews Garden Design” also available on Smashwords.
Marie Shallcross
I have had many types of garden from a window box to 5 acres with livestock; interested in 'ordinary gardens', biodiversity & most things in between.Now a mother & son partnership, Plews offers garden design only; garden design & garden landscaping; gardening lessons; garden advice and horticultural consultancy; planting designs; maintenance schedules for Letting agents & landlords; light tree work.
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Book preview
In Your Autumn Garden with Plews Garden Design - Marie Shallcross
In
Your
Autumn
Garden
with
Plews Garden Design
Marie Shallcross
This e-edition 2013
Chrysanthemum
Dedication
Well, this Autumn Almanac makes the year’s journey complete, and although he doesn’t get involved with Plews directly, Marie’s husband and father to Nathan, Lucy and Hari has been supportive in the background.
So thanks and this one’s for you Simon
Copyright Notice
In Your Autumn Garden with Plews Garden Design
Copyright © 2013 Marie Shallcross
Smashwords edition
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author; with the exception of the quotations where the author is separately named; and with the further exception of the use of brief quotations in a review.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors and artists.
Illustrations Copyright © 2013 Lucy Waterfield
Photography Copyright © 2013 Plews Garden Design
Plews Garden Design
www.plewsgardendesign.co.uk
info@plewsgardendesign.co.uk
Contents
Introduction
Harvest Festival
Front Gardens
Harvest - Tomatoes
Cultivation: Should You Grow in Rows?
Planting for Autumn Colour
Harvest - Apples
Mountains out of Molehills
Spring into Bulb Buying
Hallowe’en – Pumpkins and Witches Broomsticks
Easy Maintenance Edible Gardens
Fireworks as Design Inspiration
In the Potting Shed
Fireworks –Garden Remedies
Nature’s Plough: The Earthworm
Greenhouses and Cold Frames – Autumn Maintenance
Leaf Mould Compost
Patron Saints, Prickly Flowers: Scotland
Allotment Gardens, a Brief History
Recipes
Endings and Beginnings...
About the Author(s), Illustrator and Plews Garden Design
Glossary
Clematis seed head
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird, I would fly about the earth seeking successive autumns.
George Eliot
Introduction
Welcome to Autumn, the fourth of our series of almanacs to mark the seasons of the gardening year.
Autumn, like spring, sees a big change in the garden over three months; summer and winter generally have a less distinct difference. By this I mean consider your garden at the beginning of September; then cast your mind forwards to the end of November. In September we have summer flowers in full bloom, warm days and light evenings encouraging us to spend time in our gardens. There are fruits and vegetables to pick and eat, jams to make; abundance all around us. By the time we reach mid and late November, the days are short; the leaves have fallen from the trees and shrubs and frost has blackened the brightness of flowers.
Of course, if you’re reading this in the southern hemisphere you’ll need to swop the months around, but if you compare spring and autumn to summer and winter, the same is true.
There are lots of food orientated festivals and events to mark the autumnal gardening season as we eat the fruits of our labours and cheerfully store fat to keep us going through the winter hibernation. Probably just as well we’ll be doing lots of digging and pruning; it’ll burn off some of those indulgent calories!
Rowan berries
What was paradise, but a garden full of vegetables and herbs and pleasure?
Nothing there but delights.
William Lawson
Harvest Festival
Harvest festivals are thanksgiving festivals, a way of showing gratitude to the gods for a good store of food to keep the people fed through the lean winter months. They are traditionally celebrated around the time of the Harvest Moon which is the full moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. This is usually at the end of September, but occasionally falls at the beginning of October.
Harvest festival was also an opportunity for the Landowner to give a feast for his workers in recognition of their hard work over the growing seasons. The first new ale would be drunk and loaves of bread made with the freshly gathered and milled wheat. Lammas loaves and Corn dollies are both a part of these traditions.
Lammas is an abbreviation of ‘loaf mass’; where the first loaf of the new harvest was used in a special mass to give thanks for a good harvest’. This was more usually in August, but depended on when the wheat crop was harvested. Lammas is also based on pre Christian Celtic traditions of Lugnasad. This is where the sun god of summer transferred himself and his power into the corn as it ripened in order to be reborn as the first loaf of bread.
Freshly cooked loaf
Likewise the Corn Dolly comes from pagan traditions. This time the ripening corn held the spirit of the harvest who was female; the harvesting of the wheat would make her homeless, so the last stems of corn were woven into a wreath, where the spirit could live. The corn dolly, often very decorative, would be carried to the harvest festival and be the centre of the celebrations. Kept safe over the winter the corn dolly would be ploughed into the first field when the new seed was sown so she had a new home.
As for gathering in your own harvest in, later isn’t better when you’re talking about timing the picking of your crops. Quite the opposite - early is best for some vegetables so that you get the most benefit from the tender and tasty crop.
Aubergine
For example:
Climbing beans: should be no bigger than the diameter of a pencil
Beetroot: as small as 1-inch in diameter. If it’s a lot bigger, check out our recipe.
Broccoli: when the flower heads are still tight
Carrots: as soon as they develop their colour
Aubergine (eggplant): while the skin is still shiny
Our cover illustration shows Demeter, who was the Greek goddess of the harvest and fertility, and represents one aspect of the Triple, Earth or White Goddess, better known perhaps as Gaia.
Street tree in autumn
Suburbia is where the developers bulldoze out the trees, then name the streets after them
Bill Vaughan
Front Gardens
September often starts with a blaze of warm weather as we all head back to work, school