October grapes need special attention

Gardens have never been more popular, but gardening is another matter. How many of us really know how to do it? Not many courses teach the tricks and skills that were once commonplace. Instead, so much is said about sustainable gardening, ecological gardening and “organic” practice. Where does that leave melon-growing or the propagation of short-lived summer bedding? Gardening is not about sustainable “solutions”. If it was, we would all grow nettles and bindweed. Much of it is short-lived and transitory, loved for its brief beauty or for the challenge of persuading something rare and useless to grow in a state outside nature, often far from home. It is not about saving the planet.

This weekend the seasons are changing and plunging us into tasks we all think we understand. We need to cut down herbaceous borders, a job that can be greatly speeded up by careful use of a power strimmer. We need to plant next season’s tulips, but we will plant them even better if we put a pinch of bonemeal in the bottom of each bulb’s hole.

Sweet peas benefit from early sowing

We are excellent shoppers who know how to find universal pansies ready-grown for winter and spring flowering. Surely modern living has taken the slow chores out of what we have to do. Shopping in a garden centre is not gardening. Whenever I need to remind myself of what garden-shoppers miss I return to a classic text with strong FT roots. At the height of last autumn’s financial panic I observed that the best of all pocket gardening guides was selling second-hand on the internet for only a penny a copy. By the next Monday prices had leaped and copies of Your Garden – Week By Week had reached £16 each, a fairer tribute to their author, the great Arthur Hellyer, former gardening columnist of the FT. Hellyer really knew how to garden and, in case you think that you know it all, I will put to you his jobs for the last week in October.

Sweet peas are still the dream of flower gardeners but how many of us remember with Hellyer to sow their seeds now and, then after their germination, to move them into cold frames, well ventilated but sheltered from possible snow? Such an early sowing makes for stronger plants in pots, ready to be transplanted while forgetful gardeners are still sowing new plants next spring. The flower stems are stronger and earlier, a fact which exhibitors, not amateurs, still recognise. Hellyer observes an outdoor sowing to be less successful in October than a sowing of about five seeds to a pot 3ins in diameter in an unheated frame. Sweet peas do not thrive on my poor stony soil but at least I can give them an early, sure start.

Warm winters have made us sloppy about gladioli

Do you also think of late October as the season to apply slow-acting fertilisers? Perhaps you recognise bonemeal, an excellent top-dressing for areas of grass naturalised with bulbs, but what about the other two Hellyer tips, basic slag and kainit? The first one sounds as if it comes free with coupons from a tabloid newspaper and the second is a mystery to me, though it gives off “mainly potash”. Apparently fruit trees benefit from a topdressing now of basic slag at 6oz to the square yard and kainit at half that strength. Perhaps their absence explains the poor crops on several of my fruit trees, especially pears.

In this third week of October “all gladiolus corms will be better out of the ground now”. I agree. But warmer winters have lulled too many of us into laziness. Even after this February’s severe frosts some of the bigger gladioli survived in the ground without being lifted and went on to flower well in late summer. It is a risky way to treat them and stops them being properly sorted. Small new corms can be split off their parents when lifted and grown on for a year in a prepared bed, if planted again in spring. Very small cormlets were not worth even Hellyer’s attention. We can throw them away with a clear conscience but we should also remember to throw away the old, shrivelled corms that are found, when lifted, to be clinging to the bottoms of the new corms for next year. They have had their day and only when lifted do they show you the cycle of a gladiolus’s life in progress.

So far, so sage, but I smile when the great man tells us to apply the same care to “choice montbretias”. Most of them are now named crocosmias and are hardier than Hellyer reckoned in the colder 1950s. I leave all mine in the ground and expect to lose only those that enter the winter still unplanted in plastic pots. Warm winters have made us sloppy about gladioli but wiser about most “montbretias”.

Until returning to Hellyer I had no idea that “it is rarely wise to continue the feeding of exhibition chrysanthemums” after this very weekend in October. One reason is that I grow only hardy varieties outdoors and lack Hellyer’s “experience”, which “proves that if feeding is carried on too long, buds tend to decay in the centre”. From this day on it must be plain water only. If your chrysanths have brown middles you now know why. It has been proven long ago.

What a calm rhythm there is to it all, week after week. If only we were going to be allowed to retire at earlier ages. All very well, you might be thinking, but nowadays there are corners in these areas which can be cut. What corners, I reply, and most of them are being finessed in ignorance. If you still doubt it, here is how to treat vines with their last few bunches of grapes as October ends.

“There is not much point,” Hellyer knows, “in trying to keep the bunches of late grapes hanging on the vines any longer ... Cut each bunch with 9ins or more of the lateral on which it is hanging, insert the lower end of this into a bottle nearly filled with clean, soft water and containing a few pieces of charcoal ... Stand the bottle on a rack or shelf, tilting it sufficiently to prevent the berries from coming into contact with it or, for that matter, with anything else.” Nowadays, which of us still knows all the wisdom in these exact, carefully verified sentences? It is a truth in gardening that we have lost.

A late bunch of South African grapes from a supermarket is no substitute, even if the grapes are nowadays seedless.