1. Watch out for Cabbage White caterpillar on your Nasturtium: at our allotments they appear to be the new delicacy which they are devastating and they look like the only butterflies that are thriving.
2. Make sure to plant lots of butterfly-friendly plants next year like Sweet Rocket, Scabious, Honesty and others. The butterfly count showed that butterfly numbers are very much down this year and we desperately need them. Please ask me for Honesty seeds if you want some.
A suggestion made by Anna has prompted me to think what we can learn from random gardening mistakes, or shall we say, unplanned activity.
I use a lot of salad vegetables and always have a variety of leaves growing to use as a base for additional ingredients. I sow a selection in various seed trays, which I then prick out and later plant into the garden. A few years ago, at the tail end of the summer, I sowed seeds into their seed trays as usual. For whatever reason, I failed to prick out and then felt it was too late to do anything much with them, so I was left with several seed trays full of fresh young seedlings. And I left them. But what happened then was that they provided me with a steady supply of cut-and-come-again salad leaves (the kind you pay a fortune for in bags in supermarkets) to enjoy through the winter. Ever since then, I use this method to provide me with small young and tasty salad leaves, throughout both the summer and winter. I do this with Mizuna, Endive, Rapa da Foglia (turnip greens), mustard, rocket as well as the usual lettuce varieties which we grow. I am sure it works equally well with chard and beetroot and members will have their own varieties to suggest here. Obviously the mild winters we have been experiencing do help, I am not sure what a sharp frost would do. Ultimately, the plants will become very rootbound, but growth in the winter slows down, so this takes a while to happen.
Trays of seedlings sown 5 September.
The usefulness of this method is also that you could do this on your kitchen windowsill, balcony, or whatever space is available.
Vija
Charlton and Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society 