Green Fingers: Enjoy gardening without being a gardener
After a very favourable summer the growing season is slowly winding down.
As anyone who is involved in outdoor activities knows, you cannot change the natural cycle of the seasons, and early on you accept the limitations or opportunities and work with them for your own means.
For those engaged in gardening, it is obvious that the growing period is coming to an end, and adjustments are being continually made to making the best use of the plants, until one night a sharp frost will decide that enough is enough and that is the official end to growing for that year.
In the meantime, we will try and eek out the last of our patio containers, perennials, fruit and vegetables.
There is a huge range of garden activities that people engage in and, yet, they and others would not classify themselves as gardeners. I would say that a person who has a great interest in their garden and spends a significant time there would be a gardener in the traditional sense. Outside that description, I would say that all others are people who just enjoy being outside in the garden but do not have a strong continuing interest all the year round.
Gardening is a very popular and diverse hobby and there are so many variations that there are always some aspects that will be of interest. It can be a broad interest of a number of gardening themes or even on one specialist subject.
Oddly, today we have had two separate customers come in who have a single gardening interest, one of which was cacti and the other was growing vegetables, principally to enter into agricultural shows. He does very well, with the added advantage that they have some food crops to eat. My constant belief in gardening is to do what you enjoy and never let it become a burden or chore.
We are nearing an end to routine gardening and, therefore, it is a good time to review all aspects of what happened in the garden this year and make notes or otherwise critically look at what you enjoyed or got satisfaction from, and from this period of reflection plan for the year ahead.
In our situation at Orchardstown it was a very busy year, mainly due to the mild winter followed by a good summer, which I have to say continues, with the exception of the odd little hiccup.
In the meantime, we love autumn and hope for many days when the weather is fine and we can enjoy the leaves changing colours and also, on many plants, the extra bonus of some berries.
Planting garlic can, in theory, be carried out from October until March but to have any chance of harvesting some plump cloves at the end of the season you need to grow them between now and December, as they do like a period of cold weather to become established.
If you have any comments or queries you are welcome to share them with me on 051-384273 or orchardstowngardencentre@hotmail.com and if of general interest I will include them in a future article.
