Episode 23 Gardeners' World

CHICKENS CLUCK

Hello, and welcome to Gardeners' World.

We've always kept the chickens in the orchard here at Longmeadow,

which I planted, I suppose, about 16 years ago now.

In that 16 years I don't know I've ever known a year

where we've had so much fruit.

The trees are just laden with them

and are pretty ready for picking.

You can see on a fruit like this, which is 'Jupiter',

it's worth checking them to see if they're ready

and the best way to do it is either to give them a twist, like that,

or just lift them up.

And if it stays on the tree, it's not ripe.

But do keep an eye on them

because autumn seems to be about two to three weeks ahead of time.

This week, Carol finds that with a little thought,

even the tiniest corners of the smallest gardens

can be a haven for wildlife.

Everywhere you look in every nook and cranny

there's just the perfect place for

a huge diversity of wonderful creatures.

And we visit a garden that is not just designed

to be admired and enjoyed,

but is also an important part of a healing process.

Being outside is amazing but just to be in such a beautiful place,

it's made such a difference to my recovery.

And I shall be planning for next year by planting out bulbs

that will give me a really good display next spring.

Come on!

These grapes are Black Hamburger.

We've planted the vine last year and last year and this year,

really all the attention has been put into developing the vine.

This year it's grown much stronger.

We've got a structure forming

and four bunches of grapes which are beginning to ripen.

There's taste there.

It's a little sharp, but from next year,

we'll start to treat the grapes as a proper harvest

having established a decent framework for the vine.

And of course, that will just get better and better

as the years go by.

Come on, Nige!

There, you see? Perfectly ripe. Slides off the core.

And slides into my mouth! Lovely.

Autumn raspberries are at their very best now.

This is a variety called 'Autumn Bliss'

and we have a yellow on here called 'Fallgold,'

which is really sweet and good.

And these should go on cropping into November if the weather stays kind.

We've been eating them for the last month,

picking great bowls of them and the beauty of Autumn raspberries

is they tend to be completely trouble-free.

They go on cropping until October/November,

and then when the leaves have dropped off

you simply cut them right back to the ground.

However, summer raspberries,

which have completely finished fruiting, need a slightly more

complicated pruning regime and the time to do it is now.

We have one row of autumn raspberries at the back

and these at the front are summer fruiting,

which means that they start to produce fruit in June and that

tails off round about the time the autumn ones start in August.

They produce their fruit in the previous season's growth.

Normally, that means you've got a mixture of new growth

which is floppy and either green or brightly coloured -

they've got a lovely sort of purpley bloom on these -

and brown, quite brittle canes.

The first thing to do is cut off all the brown, rigid canes

that produced this year's fruit.

So, that gets cut out right down at the base.

And here's another one which can be removed

even though it's got a few side shoots on it from this year.

And there's another little one in there.

The next stage, having cleared all the brown canes away,

you want to leave five or six

nice, strong, straight new canes per plant.

It's always really difficult

because you've got these lovely, straight growths

and you don't want to lose them.

Experience shows that you don't get any more fruit

if you have a lot more canes per plant.

The root system can only support so much growth.

So, by thinning it out now, you'll get better fruit next June.

So, be ruthless.

Stage three is really a bit of handicraft,

because we're going to weave twine to hold these into place.

It is important with summer fruiting raspberries that there is a

strong structure for them because they've got to stand all winter,

and they'll act a bit like a sail, so easily blow around,

and they've got to bear fruit all summer.

So, I've got a long length of twine.

Take the first one...

and I go round like that...

And you can see that I'm fanning these out equidistant.

That's partly because I want to cover the area

with an even spread of canes to make picking and fruit production easier,

and also to let air through - ventilation is important.

Now, you can see I do it as a kind of weaving process

and don't tie each one individually.

There's no reason why you can't,

it's just that it's a bit fiddly and you have to have lots

and lots of pieces of string and you need to keep cutting them

and these fingers weren't made for little detailed fiddly work.

Whereas by having one piece like this,

I can keep the tension and it's nice and tight and strong.

Now, I'll repeat the tying process along this top layer

and these will be held really strongly.

One of the problems with raspberries is that blackbirds adore them,

so we try to keep that particular piece of wildlife

out of this piece of garden whilst we're harvesting the fruit.

But Carol has been looking at ways of attracting

as many varied types of wildlife into the garden as possible

and this week, she's visited Bridget Strawbridge down in Dorset

to see the ways she's gone about attracting insects,

and in particular bees, into her garden.

The creatures that visit our gardens don't pay much attention

to their size or grandeur.

It's the spaces within our boundaries,

the nooks and crannies, that they seek to fill their needs.

These spaces offer refuge to a multitude of creatures.

But the question is, who are they and what are they up to?

Bridget Strawbridge moved into her garden less than a year ago.

And it's already brimming with life.

Here we are.

Oh, isn't it perfect? It's beautiful!

That's astonishing - this tiny little space

and you've got so much packed in here.

The whole point was to turn it into a wildlife haven.

This whole area here, the idea is this is foraging, you know,

mostly for pollinators, but it provides habitat here as well

underneath, for some of the smaller insects and the frogs.

And even the Larchlap, you hear this tap-tap-tapping,

and it's the wasps coming to get material for their nests.

-We had wrens nesting here earlier in the year.

-Wrens love ivy to nest in.

I know it's ideal, isn't it?

But this is the really fascinating bit, isn't it?

Plant pots I just put there that you can see are

so covered in spiders' webs now.

And I mean, these lovely little stones, where they all here?

-No, we put these in for sort of really tiny little mini beasts.

-Oh!

-All sorts of things!

-See - woodlice.

-Particularly woodlice.

The whole garden is alive with life, isn't it?

And so many wonderful plants for things to pollinate.

The plants that I really have bigged up on are the plants for the bees,

-because it's bees that I love. I absolutely adore bees.

-Honeybees?

It's funny, when you say bees, people think honeybees, but actually there

are 267 species of bee in the UK alone

and one of them is a honeybee.

I love also the bumblebees and, in particular, solitary bees.

The unsung heroes of the pollinating world!

This, for instance, is a plant that I have planted

specifically for one type of solitary bee

and it's a solitary bee called the wool carding bee.

This is called Stachys lanata, lanata meaning woolly.

And this is what is attractive to the female wool carding bee,

who will come and actually card the hairs on this leaf

to use to construct her nest.

There's a male!

The male of the species knows this, so he will patrol an area

and he will actually attack a fully grown queen bumblebee

so that this patch is reserved for the female wool carding bees.

-Just for her.

-Just for her.

And the reward is that he gets to mate with her.

I've noticed all around your garden

you've got these bee hotels, aren't they?

-Bee hotels, yes.

-B&B!

-B&B!

Solitary bees, especially mason bees and leafcutters,

struggle often to find suitable nesting sites and this is perfect.

That will attract four or five different species

of mason bee and leafcutter.

Mason bees build with mud, good old-fashioned mud.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh, my goodness. That's a leafcutter.

Do you think she's putting on a show just for us?

She's already filled these two cells.

So, that's where she's been at work already.

The adult leafcutters will emerge in June/July. They mate.

The female will straightaway start looking for a suitable nesting site.

She will line the cell with little pieces of leaf.

She will provision it with pollen and nectar.

She will reverse in and lay her first egg.

And then she'll chop little round pieces of leaf

and block off that cell.

She keeps going and going all the way to the front.

Then she dies.

The eggs will hatch out,

they will grow as they use up the provisions

and then they will emerge as full adult bees.

So, when you see this on leaves, it's not a question of damage,

it's a cause for celebration, isn't it?

Because it means leafcutter bees are here.

This is the most exciting thing in the world for me

to come into my garden and find this, because it means that at long last,

-the leaf cutters have arrived.

-Hooray!

But solitary bees aren't the only bees, are they?

There's another whole world out there - the world of bumblebees.

The bumblebee life cycle is entirely different.

In spring, you get the newly emerged queen bumblebees

zigzagging across the floor, looking for a prospective nesting site.

Once she has found her nest, she will lay about half a dozen to eight eggs

and they will emerge as her first worker bees.

Somewhere in the height of the summer,

she will start to produce males and daughter queens. They will mate.

The new mated Queen will stock herself up

and she will go into hibernation.

Meanwhile, the old queen will die,

or very often is stung to death by the remaining workers.

They will all die and all you have got left is the hibernating queens.

And then they will emerge in spring...

..and start the whole...

..start the zigzag thing all over again.

..zigzagging all over again.

We actually had a Bombus terrestris, that's a buff-tailed bumblebee,

nesting in here earlier this year.

So that was kind of like the ultimate thing for me,

is to have this garden and then to see the bees come and nest in it.

Everywhere you look, in every nook and cranny,

there's just the perfect place for one or other insect or creature.

It just proves that in a small space

you can have this huge diversity of wonderful creatures.

Do you know, the biggest thing for me

is this knowing that the wildlife's there.

I think the really important thing at this time of year

to attract wildlife into your garden

is not so much what you do do, it's what you don't do.

Don't tidy up too much - that's the best thing you can possibly do

at this stage, as we go into winter.

Leave some cover for every kind of creature.

And talking about cover, I covered these cabbages with a net

to keep the pigeons off when I planted them.

And the pigeons haven't eaten them.

But the cabbage white caterpillars have had a field day

and because the net was on it,

the birds couldn't get at the caterpillars to eat them,

so our whole organic balanced system was thrown out of kilter,

and human nature meant that it was more difficult and more trouble

to hand pick them off

if you had to lift the net every time to get at them.

Long and short of it is, the caterpillars have done more

damage than the pigeons would have done if we hadn't netted it at all.

They're recovering, but they've taken a beating.

However, there will be enough cabbages for winter,

but I want to plant some cabbages now for next spring.

Spring greens are not a fashionable crop,

but they can be absolutely delicious,

because essentially they are loose leaf cabbage -

or cabbage that hasn't yet formed a heart.

And if you plant them now they won't grow much over winter,

but they start to grow properly February/March,

and you harvest them in April and May.

You can buy young spring cabbage plants from garden centres now.

These are Durham Early - they are ideal for growing of spring greens.

Cabbages respond really well to a little bit of garden compost.

I just chuck it on the surface -

and the weather and the worms will work it in.

It gives them a bit of a boost.

I know that spring greens have a slightly unglamorous reputation -

there's a touch of the school dinner about them -

but one of the best meals I've ever eaten in my life, I remember,

we'd just had rib of beef, we had boiled potatoes and spring greens.

Just lightly cooked with a little bit of butter

and salt and pepper and gravy,

and that combination was just heaven.

Now, about 40 years ago, now,

my twin sister was in a bad car crash, and she broke her back.

And she spent nearly a year, as part of her recovery,

in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which was fantastic.

But there was nowhere for the many patients to go -

particularly when the weather was nice.

In Salisbury, a new garden has been made called Horatio's Garden,

specifically for people who've had spinal injuries,

and we went along to take a look.

Well, the idea for the garden came about several years ago.

My husband, David, who's the medical director of the spinal unit,

realised that patients really needed somewhere to get outside -

somewhere to be in the sunshine and just escape from the ward.

Most people, fortunately, who come to hospital now,

only stay for a short time - but in spinal cord injury

patients are here for three months, six months, sometimes even longer.

Our son, Horatio, was a volunteer in the spinal unit

because he wanted to study medicine,

and because he was quite an outdoor person himself,

he was quite overwhelmed

with how there was just nowhere for them to go.

So he came up with a questionnaire for patients.

Well, what he found out

is that patients wanted a beautiful place to be in.

They wanted somewhere to escape from the ward,

and all the clinical things, the sounds -

and they wanted somewhere that they could watch wildlife.

And just generally somewhere that they could be on their own,

somewhere they could share with their friends and family.

When Horatio was 17 he went on an expedition to Svalbard,

and tragically the group was attacked by a polar bear,

and Horatio was killed.

After that, there was an amazing outpouring of love

and generosity from so many people, which enabled us

to create the funds which then created this garden.

Well, Olivia contacted me to design Horatio's garden.

I was instantly interested.

Not only because it was a very important garden to build

for the spinal unit,

but because my best friend had spent a whole year here

recovering from a diving accident.

So I knew the hospital,

and knew the fact that it was quite a dingy sort of place -

they didn't have a garden to go into -

and so I was delighted, really, on all sorts of levels.

I was given quite a free rein, in terms of the brief.

The only restrictions, really, were slopes -

slopes would be very difficult for people in wheelchairs,

obviously, so we've got a very smooth resin-bonded surface,

which is easy to manoeuvre wheelchairs and beds on.

But the paths also had to be quite wide,

and that's something that threw me.

Two metres wide, to get a bed comfortably round the space,

was larger than I would normally want to put in a garden.

You know, I want to put more plants than anything else.

And I thought about shrubs, and then I quickly dismissed that,

because as nice as shrubs are,

I just felt that this garden needed to be a celebration of life,

and watching the changing seasons,

and so we decided to go down the perennial path.

And I'm really pleased we did that,

because it is a high maintenance garden,

but people get so much joy from it, because of the changing palette,

the changing scene throughout the year.

Anything that's going to draw in insects is going to be great,

so, you know, you've got centranthus -

so you can see how this has really taken over.

And you've fennel, echinacea, agastache.

People just love it.

I'm not really a great fan of themes in a garden,

but as I was designing the space

and breaking the path up with these low walls,

some of them sort of resembled spine shapes,

so I actually took a spine shape

and created these low walls into these spines,

and where the path dissects the spines, here,

they are broken spines,

and suddenly that took on a really strong message - you know,

that you've got two broken spines that led to a complete spine.

And it's a metaphor for the journey people make through a whole year,

perhaps - sometimes even longer - in the hospital itself,

mending not just their body...

Some people never walk again, but, you know, mending the mind,

the spirit.

So I'm quite pleased with how that's worked out.

Our volunteer and occupational therapy team

do all sorts of different activities with the patients in the garden.

Hand therapy is really important for patients

who are learning to recover from spinal cord injury.

Gardening lends itself perfectly to it,

so whether it's pricking out some little seedlings,

planting bulbs, doing some cuttings...

There are so many different things

that can become purposeful occupational therapy.

What's lovely about the garden is seeing it being so well used -

not just to be wheeled round looking at plants,

but seeing all the activities that go on as well.

There've been some really interesting studies

that show that being outside, and green space in particular,

in a beautiful garden, can improve recovery rates,

can decrease the need for pain relief, can improve vital signs,

and really importantly, can reduce hospital length of stay.

Being outside is amazing,

but just to be in such a beautiful place, it's made such a difference

to my recovery, and my mood, and my mental health, to be honest.

To me, it is to get out and get some space.

It's quiet, it's peaceful, it's idyllic.

The smells from the flowers, and the fresh air,

which is absolutely wonderful.

There are 11 spinal injury centres in the United Kingdom.

Salisbury serves the whole of the southwest,

but our hope is that we can bring Horatio's Gardens

to all the other spinal injury centres as well.

Having experienced this garden and the way it's evolved,

I can't imagine going into a spinal unit

without one of these gardens attached to it.

I think if Horatio saw this garden, he would be absolutely thrilled.

He'd be thrilled to see patients using it, for the impact it has.

It's a really special place, and I know he'd be delighted.

Well, there's no question that whatever your garden is like,

it can give limitless pleasure.

And also there's no question that whatever your troubles,

gardens heal.

September is traditionally the time when you take box cuttings,

and that's a good thing to do

if you've got healthy box plants to take them from.

But this garden has been blasted by box blight.

And the game is up, really,

as regards the future of box here at Longmeadow.

I intend to replace a lot of the box in this garden with yew.

But if I went and bought a mass of yew plants - let alone big ones -

that would cost a fortune.

However, you can now take yew cuttings,

particularly if you've got a yew hedge that hasn't yet been clipped.

And amongst the other jobs you can be doing this weekend,

that's a good one to be starting with.

Choose strong, straight shoots and cut them

to at least six inches in length.

Strip off the bottom third of the foliage,

and place the cuttings in a very free-draining compost.

Put them somewhere sheltered, but without any extra heat,

where they can overwinter.

And they won't start to show any signs of growth

until the middle of next spring.

It's been a good year for tomatoes,

but there are a lot of green fruits,

and to ensure that as many of these ripen as possible,

remove all the foliage from your plants.

This will look drastic,

but it will let as much sunlight onto the fruits as possible,

and put all the plants' energies into ripening.

It may not seem a glamorous job,

but it is the most important of the season,

and that's to deadhead.

As soon as a flower starts to fade, cut back to the nearest sideshoot.

This will promote new buds and colour for weeks to come.

And don't just do it this weekend -

try and deadhead daily, if you can.

Now, I'm about to do a job

that doesn't have to be done this weekend,

but certainly is best done this month,

and that's bulb planting.

Here in the copse we've got a number of bulbs that are working

through, and they're mixed up with plants.

We've got, for example, really a mass of crocus,

and they're over by March, and we have primroses and cowslips,

they work through, and wood anemones,

and I've got some bluebells to plant.

Individually, bluebells are lovely,

but we appreciate them best en masse.

And anybody who's seen a bluebell wood which is just carpeted

with that shimmering blue in late April or early May,

knows that nothing else really can match it.

Now, it'll take a while for that to be the case here,

but it can happen, and we can make it happen.

There are a number of things, though, to be aware of

when dealing with bluebells - the first is, there are two types.

There's the English bluebell and the Spanish bluebell.

And English bluebells you can tell because they curve,

and all the flowers hang down on one side,

whereas Spanish bluebells tend to be upright,

and the flowers whirl around them.

The bad news is that A, Spanish bluebells tend to dominate

English bluebells,

and B, they hybridise.

So, if you live near a lovely bluebell wood,

do not plant Spanish bluebells in your garden,

just in case they cross-hybridise.

It doesn't matter what kind of bulbs you're planting -

if you want them to look naturalistic,

there are really only two ways to do it.

You can either just take a handful and throw them on the ground,

and plant them exactly where they land -

don't try and reorganise them. It always looks artificial.

The other way is to plant them in groups of, say five or seven,

in a little cluster,

and then another one over there and another one over there at random,

and those groups will join up.

Well, having thrown those down, I will start to plant them.

Bluebells want to go in at least twice their own depth.

And at this time of year the ground is often hard,

so what's good about the wetness we've had this year,

it is soft enough to get a trowel in.

But the main thing is to make sure it's deep enough -

and if in doubt, go deeper.

Never plant bluebells into a border,

because they can and will become invasive.

And what they really like is light woodland -

so, an area like this, which has got grass growing

underneath trees or shrubs is absolutely perfect.

Well, I'm going to be doing this for a little while yet.

But that's it for this week.

One word is, although it's really important to get your bulbs

in as soon as possible, there's no rush for planting tulips.

In fact, it's better to wait till November.

But do order any that you may want now,

because when it comes to November, they go very fast indeed.

Anyway, I'll see you back here at Longmeadow next week.

Till then, bye-bye.