Autumn is harvesting and nature’s planting time in the garden. Here’s what to gather, sow and grow this month
Chores
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” wrote Keats in his sumptuous ode to the glories of autumn. For the gardener, it is a time of harvest, when the fruit filled “with ripeness to the core” may threaten to overwhelm – in the best possible way, of course.
Much can be stored fresh, which is easy enough to do. Just ensure harvest takes place on a dry day.
Onions are ready to reap once the leaves have started to yellow. They need to be completely dry before being stored, so leave to dry on the soil surface for a few days, then somewhere warm
and dry till fully dry. Leave the leaves so the onions may be plaited together and hung in a dry, cool place.
Like apples, late varieties of potatoes keep the best. As a rule, potatoes have stopped growing once the foliage starts yellowing. Stop watering, let the foliage die back and the skins thicken. Harvest carefully so as not to bruise and store in a cool, dark well-ventilated space.
Late-season apples and pears will keep for months if stored well. While it is often a race between you and the birds, leave them on the tree as long as possible for the sugars to form. Apples are ready when they come off the tree with a light tug, rather than a pull, which can damage the spurs and affect next year’s crop. Leave the stalks on. Save only undamaged fruit and store somewhere dark and cool.
Pumpkins should also be left on the vine as long as possible – but preferably picked before the first frost. Leave in the sun to cure for a week before storing in a cool place.
To aid tomato-ripening late in the season, trim back leaves. If that fails cut them, leaving them on the vine and place on a sunny window ledge. Remember too, fried green tomatoes are actually delicious.
How to: grow the very best sweet peas
Put their heads in the sun and their roots in deep, rich, cool, moist yet free-draining soil and your sweet peas should be very happy. Sprinkle lime on soil if your dirt tends to the acidic. Soak seeds overnight before sowing, which is preferably done in autumn, but spring is next best. These tendrilled vines need something to climb up – although they will often happily clamber over other plants, which will also keep the soil shaded and cooler for them. Once flowers appear, feed with a fertiliser high in potash. As pretty as they are in the garden, regular picking for the vase will encourage more of these lovely, highly fragrant flowers and prevent the plants from setting seed too early. Letting the plant die back in situ in summer will help ensure more plants the following season. Scour the online catalogues to get the most desirable variety and colour.
Consider this: a planting spade
Although there is variety aplenty in their design – with pointed, rounded and flat blades, offset and straight shafts, and D-shaped and T-bar handles, not to mention a range of colours and materials – planting spades generally have narrower and longer blades than conventional spades. Which, of course, make digging holes for the planting or transplanting of trees, shrubs, seedlings and bulbs hugely easier, especially when the ground is hard, clayey, stony or just plain bone dry. Most gardeners probably wouldn’t need more than one so it pays to work out just what your conditions are and matching them perfectly to the spade before purchasing.
Timbersaws Ace light planting spade, $175, from Gubba.
Steal this look
Dismissed as old-fashioned, dowdy even and too-often overlooked in recent times, ’mums – as chrysanthemums are fondly dubbed by their fans – are the star of this inviting scene celebrating the glories of the season. Here these potted ’mums and other plants burst out of a generous assortment of charming containers from classical urns to cosy baskets. Their neatly curvaceous forms echoing those of another autumn icon, the pumpkin. These, as delightfully indulgent as it may seem, are frequently grown as much for their ornamental qualities as their nutritional ones. The walls softened by curtains of ivy, the handful of mats on the terracotta terrace and the hat and rug draped artfully over the chair are a nod to the cooling, shortening days of autumn and cleverly blur the lines between outdoors and indoors. A most inviting spot for a warming mug of tea, glass of red wine and a good book.
Landscape 101: Rills
The earliest depiction of water as a landscaping feature in a garden is on the walls of an Egyptian tomb, circa 1400BC, in which a tree-lined canal and four rectangular ponds are arranged in a formal setting among walls, plantings, pavilions and house. In the great Persian gardens, long channels of water were almost de rigueur, not just, and often not even, for distribution of water and refreshing the hot dry air, but also for more aesthetic considerations. These Persian designers knew the unparalleled reflective qualities of still water, be it mirroring the clouds scudding across the blue sky, the sunlight sparkling on the gentlest of ripples fashioned by a passing breeze, or the majesty of mature trees. Often Persian and later, Islamic gardens, were divided in quarters by long, narrow, shallow channels, which came to be known as rills. In geological speak rills are narrow channels created by surface erosion. As popular as they have been throughout garden history, rills are not common in New Zealand gardens.
Yet they are a relatively easy feature to integrate, be the garden formal or informal, and any size from a rambling country estate to a diminutive urban courtyard. Traditionally, rills are relatively still, the movement of their water barely perceptible unless they are on slopes in which case they tend to be designed like staircases with horizontal stretches joined by drops. Generally, they are hard sided and edged with plants sited back from the water rather than fringing it. Always, they are clearly rectangular – otherwise they are mere ponds – and the leaner the better. Their size, however, has no limits, depending entirely on the site and the whim of the gardener. For best results in designing and installing a rill it would pay to consult either a garden designer, landscaper or pond specialist.
Words by: Mary Lovell-Smith
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