Episode 13 The Beechgrove Garden

Hello there and welcome back to Beechgrove Garden

after two weeks of trials, tribulations and triumphs of Wimbledon.

It's very nice to be back in the peaceful garden here

and what better place to start than our little alpine garden, though things are not perfect here?

I think we'll have to do a few bits of titivating,

but just look at that wonderful little cotoneaster over there!

Two years ago, it covered these three stones which is a seat

and the pruners were taken to it, but it's still there, cochleatus, doing a wonderful job,

following the contours and creeping along here.

Then we've got the thyme which has got a big takeover going on here.

It is lovely, but we'll have to restrain it a little bit.

The same with this lavender and white erinus, it's beginning to creep, creep, creep.

It's overstaying its welcome, so we'll have to spend some time here.

But we're not short of colour coming through the summer -

the helianthemums, there's Fire Dragon there, and little Amy Baring right here, gorgeous yellow.

There's colour coming on all the time. There's a lot of work to do, but it'll take time to sort it out.

Now then, in the rest of the programme...

Isn't this just fabulous? It's the River Findhorn in Moray.

The garden I'm visiting this week backs right onto it.

And I'm just outside Edinburgh, trying to get to the bottom

of why this garden has a persistent damp patch.

Here in the garden, we're going to take another look at our cucumbers

and I've one variety, it's called Socrates.

This side, they've been grown from seed and this side are the grafted plants.

The grafted plants are meant to give us more vigour, more yield

and are more disease and pest-resistant.

Well, it's quite interesting because I've got some figures here.

From the 27th of June, when we started cropping the grafted ones,

we've had 12 cucumbers already out of eight plants.

On this side, 1st of July we started cropping, so a few days later,

and we've only cropped three cucumbers so far,

but you can see there's a wonderful crop here and there's plenty of cucumbers here to come.

It's early days, but at the moment, the grafted ones are winning.

A little bit of work too, so when you start to get these side shoots, you need to keep them in check,

otherwise they get out of control.

There's the fruit and we count one, two leaves and then you just nip out the shoot here.

Or you can use a sharp knife with that.

Another crop... We looked at these tiny, tiny plants initially, the cucamelon,

and fairly small fruit at the moment.

They only get to bite-size.

They come from Mexico and are meant to taste of lime,

so I'm hoping we'll have enough of a season for those to mature.

Finally, the tomatillo, we have grown this one before.

It's related to the Chinese lantern and the fruit is actually encased in that lovely little casing there.

I'm slightly worried cos look at the foliage. It's rather white and yellow.

This happened to our okra last year and I think all it is is to do with the temperatures.

We've had extremes from really hot to really cold, and now it's over to Jim next door with the tomatoes.

Well, thankfully, I've an inside job to come to when the rain comes on.

And to recap, here in this glasshouse we've got nine different varieties of tomatoes,

three plants per bag.

They're all in the same compost. It's Gardening Which Best Buy.

So, they're all getting the same treatment. What I'm really after is what is taste?

It's very subjective, so a bit later on when we've got plenty fruits on the plant,

we'll have a bit of a taste test with a wee scientific spin on it maybe.

In the meantime, we've got to look after the plants and it's a question of get the string round there,

and don't take it underneath the truss, take it over the truss.

Why not? Because you could strangle it if the string slips.

I've already taken the leaves off the bottom. I've started trimming them up a little bit.

If you pull them off with an upward action, they come off clean, no bother at all.

One of the good things at this time now is that with so much foliage...

..it lets a bit of air circulate.

There are a couple of things I want to draw your attention to. First of all, this curling of the leaf.

In the daytime, the temperature can go up to the high 30s if you've not got enough ventilation on.

And at night, it can drop to 12.

Now, that is a huge change and it's stress that causes the leaves to curl up like this

because cold and very warm.

The more you can get it to about ten degrees centigrade difference

between day and night, the better they will be.

The other problem you sometimes get early in the season is this purpling of the foliage

which is phosphate deficiency, but it may not be that there's not enough phosphate in the compost.

It may be the conditions, it's not getting there fast enough and the plants are growing pretty quickly.

The compost in the bags has a certain amount of fertiliser in it,

but from now on with these plants growing and more fruits coming on them,

we start to supplementary feed and we use a high potash feed, the tomato feed.

There's quite a lot to be done here and I'm absolutely in my element. I just love it.

I'm in Balerno just outside Edinburgh to help with something

that's left enthusiastic gardener Sally Cheseldine feeling pretty exasperated.

It's very rare that I walk into a garden

and the piece that I'm addressing is very carefully and discreetly fenced off,

but you clearly have a problem here.

We have a lot of sogginess.

Last summer, particularly, brought it to the fore.

It was so wet and we think there are underlying field drains.

The two together have really made it terribly boggy

and the fence is around, so we don't plough a lawn mower over it.

We started off with a rowan tree in there and it didn't survive,

so knowing there were field drains, we put in a willow, thinking they like water, but that didn't survive.

It's the right course of action. If you've got wet ground, a willow should be perfect.

They grow alongside rivers and streams, so if a willow won't thrive, there is a real problem.

You can see straight away there's a difference between the lawn. This lawn out here is quite mossy.

There's also a difference between that and what's going on in here.

This is much more lush. The ground is really quite squelchy.

There's patches where you'd lose your lawn mower!

There's a whole collection of plants in here that tell you that there's an issue, so, for instance,

that little leaf there, that's hairy bittercress.

That's rosebay willowherb, a wet hedgerow plant.

And that little sweetie there, look at that, that's a little veronica. That's also a wetland plant.

Tell me a bit about how we arrived at this position.

The house was built 18 years ago on the previous front garden of the house behind,

so it was completely levelled and churned up.

And there was nothing in the garden, so 17 years ago, we had the garden landscaped.

I think a combination of builders, landscape contractors, big machines and potentially a field drain

could be why you've got the problem here,

but all we can do is dig a square patch out as deep as you can and we'll explore the soil profile.

The soil will tell us what the problem is.

-Have you got any preference over where you'd like to dig?

-The softest bit.

That's the bit I've already dug. That's cheating.

-It's a very sort of stagnant...

-Yes.

If you were delving around in the bottom of a pond, that's the sort of smell you get.

It's rotting vegetation.

Never a good sign. If your soil smells stagnant, that's never a good starting point.

Oh, we've had a leak as well.

The water's just lying in the ground,

just a foot below the surface.

Is that consistent with a field drain coming down or just the effects of rain?

This is more than just rainfall. This is water which is permanently in the soil.

That's the horticultural equivalent of Niagara Falls you've got there. That's not good.

The reason for digging a clear face like this is it starts to tell the story,

so in this upper horizon here, and the layers of a soil are called horizons,

what we've got very clearly in this top section here

where the grass is rooting, it just pulls back really easily,

are the roots of the grass, rusty and rotten.

As they try and penetrate down, even just three or four inches, they're rotting off.

It's too wet even on the surface.

Then we go into this layer here which is predominantly grey.

In soil terms, it's called gleying.

Under normal circumstances, it would be brown because of iron naturally existing in the soil.

When the air penetrates and you get water, it rusts and that's what gives us brown soil.

Where there's no air able to get because there's too much water, it turns grey,

so anything we plant has to exist in those top four inches in this part of the garden.

I hope in another part of the garden, the soil is better.

Calum is digging up here. We'll compare the hole up here and hopefully, we've got a bit more life.

Thanks. You've got a better end of the deal. That's a decent hole.

This is what it should have looked like. This is the perfect profile

with turf being laid. It's been laid on a sand bed.

The landscaper has used sand to level it off, but still roots going down.

You can see the brown nature of the soil. It's a good dark brown colour.

It's about the same depth, so there's about a foot of decent quality topsoil, plenty of roots.

There's roots even right down to the bottom of the topsoil there,

so this is what that should look like down there.

So, how are you going to fix it?

There are two ways, really, I can see of dealing with this.

The first is to put a full draining system in,

so that would mean starting at the other side of the garden, at the bottom of the bank,

and running it through here, then out to a soakaway in that corner. And that's a hugely costly exercise.

So the other alternative is to just put what we've excavated back in

and then plant in this upper horizon

plants that are going to tolerate this four inches of wet, but not permanently stagnant ground.

But we've got to bail out the water first.

I can honestly say I've never had to bail out a garden before planting.

So I think the thing to do is just place these out

and try and create the effect of a wetland meadow.

-Hmm.

-But it's an exotic wetland meadow, so we're using species from all over the world.

-How do I look after it now?

-It should be straightforward

because these plants thrive in these conditions.

The big blue ones here, Camassia leichtlinii Caerulea from North America,

and there is also the shorter white form which is later flowering.

Then that very delicate little grass which forms wonderful tussocks, Luzula nivea,

very, very animated in a breeze.

Then we've got a wonderful little wetland plant, it's a British native, Geum rivale.

This particular one is Leonard's Variety which is a selected form

which gives you that pink flower,

then all of the others are lychnis, ragged robin.

The idea is just to let them move around, let them mingle and marry with one another

and see where they take themselves.

What happens to them in the winter?

They'll all die back down and you can then just either strim or scythe over the top.

Treat it like a meadow. Don't mow it as hard as this.

Allow it to go a bit tussocky, then in spring, they'll all come back through.

-Maybe one or two cuts a year and you should end up with this wonderful, informal tapestry.

-Lovely. Thank you.

Back in the veg patch, it doesn't matter how careful you think you've been with the weeding,

there's always one that you miss.

There is a thing called fat hen.

That is a monster of a weed. If you let that seed, it will be all over the place,

so go over the rows of peas and get rid of it.

This row of peas is fine, but up here, something has happened.

They've disappeared. It's a different variety.

Either we didn't sow them, which I don't think is the case,

or something has got to them and I think it was the mice

because there were little holes in the top of the ground where you could see they'd gone in for the seeds.

Luckily, in true Blue Peter fashion, we have some over here.

Same variety, successional sowing. That's the benefit of it.

You can always replace them when there's a disaster, so I'll get on and plant these.

-Jim, what are you up to over there?

-Well, playing catch-up.

We've been away for a fortnight. We want to get round as much of the garden as possible.

I, too, am in the vegetable plot, amongst the potatoes.

First, you'll notice there are ups and downs all over the place.

There are 16 varieties, only half a row of each variety,

so there are changes in foliage, colour and height and growth, but they're looking well.

They're not quite meeting in the drills yet, so I'm going back through with the hoe,

tidying up, taking out the weeds and keeping the tilth going.

George tells me, in the north of Ireland, they've already had a blight warning.

We don't want blight on here because they are looking so well.

The only thing we can use at this time is copper oxychloride, a preventative spray,

when we hear the blight warnings for this area.

Some varieties are substantially free from attack by blight. Here's one of them. This is Blue Danube.

You can see almost a bluishness in the petioles of the leaf.

The flowers are gorgeous. It's a plant that could stand on its own in the herbaceous border.

On a similar theme, under that fleece are maincrop carrots.

Here we are, third week of July.

By the first week of August, we're getting the second generation of carrot fly.

These are the maggots that, when they hatch, they drill into maturing roots and make a real mess,

so they're back on with the fleece, cover them up, make sure that we don't have a damaged crop at all.

I'm not so worried about the brassicas. They're looking good.

The weather has suited them. We've got some nice crops on hand there.

George, while I'm talking pests and diseases, you're right by the broad beans. Any sign of blackfly?

No, there's nothing on them yet. Yet!

We're likely to get an infestation of blackfly,

usually right up on the tips, isn't it?

I think we should just nip the tops out of these.

I would take a bit off the top, leave six or seven trusses of flower and that should be enough.

-We'll do that and we won't throw these away.

-No.

-We can eat them.

-Edible.

-Absolutely.

-Good man.

-You can eat them raw or you can steam them or something like that.

-I'll get on with this. Carry on, sir.

-Plenty work to do.

I'm in the beautiful Findhorn Valley at the walled garden of Panny and Alastair Laing at Logie House.

Four years ago, they closed the garden and undertook some major re-landscaping.

It re-opened a year ago, so I can't wait to see how it's changed.

It's great to be able to show you all the changes we've made here.

-You've made huge changes.

-Huge changes, absolutely.

This burn was completely piped under the garden from...

We saw a very little bit of it over there, but not very much of it.

-Water makes a garden.

-It just brings a bit of life.

-Beautiful plant combinations.

Yes, it's fun, isn't it? The corydalis coming up through the Rodgersia is just gorgeous.

-A beautiful blue, absolutely stunning.

-It's stunning, isn't it?

Then you obviously like iris. This black iris is beautiful.

They do well here and then we've got these ones here, the drier type, the bearded.

What's so extraordinary about them is that you can see that one with the purple flowers and the white bit,

that seems to come out first, then we get the yellow ones and this pinky-purply thing,

-then the blue ones and they organise it themselves.

-That was just a coincidence?

-Yes.

-That's gardening.

-Exactly!

-Now, the drystane dykes are really striking.

-They are. They really make the garden.

-So many people have said, "It looks as if it's been like this for ever."

-It does. It's beautiful.

Ewen Manson works for us and he was a time-served drystane dyker before he came

and he was very integral in the design of the whole garden too.

Gavin Dallmeyer, a good friend, and I started on a piece of paper and then came down here

and we had to tweak the line a bit.

-Do you have to watch the angles?

-You do. You can't do it too tight. It just doesn't work.

We had to get between the tree and the viburnum and do a bit of a wiggle

and get out over there by the big tree.

-So, it was important to save one or two mature plants?

-It was.

Especially as we'd made a bit of a micro-climate down here. You could grow all sorts of different things.

You say all sorts of things. In particular, herbaceous?

Yes, I do love herbaceous plants.

They do so well here. They die down and disappear over winter, then come back twice the size the next year.

-This is lovely.

-Nepeta subsessilis is wonderful. The bees love it too.

What I'm amazed about as well is this is only the second year of the planting and it's filled.

We were very lucky last year and the year before that it rained and rained and rained,

so we could plant virtually every day and move things and I put them in the wrong place!

-It's worked well. This is a real contrast.

-Yes, it makes you stop which is so nice.

Gavin said to me, "I know what you'll do. You'll plant every square inch of this garden

"and it will be very fussy, so we need to have a calm bit." He's right.

-It is nice and, in a way, it kind of draws your eye to the orchard.

-It does.

-And when you're over there, it looks good over here.

-You can sit there.

-Yes, absolutely, on the focal point.

-In the sun, it gets lovely and warm.

-Then I spy the meconopsis.

-That is a stunning blue.

-It's a wonderful plant.

It's particularly good in a woodland situation.

Here it struggles a bit because the blue fights with the geraniums and we had bluebells earlier.

It's not quite so good with that.

That's really interesting, so avoid other blues around it in herbaceous planting?

It's such a stunning blue, but it's just tricky to place.

The aquilegia here, that's an unusual colour.

-Isn't it gorgeous? It's sort of demure.

-What is it?

Oxysepala, it's called, and I just love having the species

because you know what you're getting, they come true from seed and so often they're rather better.

-And the bees enjoy that too.

-They do. They work hard in this garden.

And a real focal point in the garden is the giant redwood.

Yes, it's lovely. We really see it now.

Before we did the changes, the garden shed was attached to the bottom.

You didn't see the tree because you didn't see the bottom of it.

-It really shows it off now.

-It's lovely.

This area used to be the vegetable garden from right over there to right over here.

-We've retained one or two things such as the tree onions which are fun.

-They're lovely plants.

Yes, they're great. And we've even got a tattie still peeking out the ground here.

-You always get the odd row which is so annoying, but the alliums are beautiful at the moment.

-Yes.

It gives it a lift. This is a late border. It's not very interesting at this time of year.

-And it just gives it a bit of colour.

-The plants look so healthy. What's your secret?

-Rock dust and mulch.

All the topsoil went out and sat on a mountain for three years,

so when it came back, the bugs and the system wasn't working very well,

so rock dust and leaf mould and all that sort of thing.

-OK, so lots of trace elements, you think that helps?

-Definitely.

-Definitely works for you?

-Yeah.

I know the revamping of the garden took you slightly longer because we had those two bad winters,

but do you not think this season has been quite kind to us?

Absolutely. After a mild winter, we've had a steady increase in temperature in the spring.

Although it's been cool, it's been very steady with no extremes.

We didn't have, like last year, the heat then the freezing cold.

-Yes, it was late, but the good thing is so much blossom on the apples and pears.

-Absolutely.

-Lots of insects for the pollination, no frost.

-I think there's going to be a good crop.

-This garden is open all year round, so I need to come back later on.

-You certainly do.

-That was a colourful garden.

-This is quite colourful too, George.

This is your wildflower mixes. They were sown last year. You've got five lots of perennials.

-These ones there with the gowans in it, the moon daisies.

-Oxeye daisies.

The ones along the side of the motorway, brilliant at the moment.

-This is pretty.

-This is a really good one with the wonderful yellows through it

-and good crested dog's-tail grass.

-They look great.

-These ones, we've got a honeybee and a butterfly mix.

-There's not a lot of difference.

There isn't. What's helped is the clover. They're really looking good, but it's the clover that's helped.

Clover belongs to the legume family, it's nitrogen-fixing in the root, so it gives a bit of nutrition.

OK, what can we say about the annual ones then? Where are the poppies?

Last year, we had poppies, we had cornflower, we had corncockle, we had corn marigolds,

so it was blue and red and yellow and it was just bee heaven, the whole thing.

-They were strimmed down, then you put the seeds back into the ground. Is it the weather?

-It could be.

We cut these, let the seeds fall to the ground and the resident weeds have smothered everything.

-Too much competition?

-I think that's what it is.

You have green manures which are dug into the ground to help the soil.

Yeah, we're improving the soil structure by doing that.

We've got phacelia, the blue one,

and that is one which we'll dig in, huge amount of fibre above ground,

but the root system will give a lot of fibre addition to the soil.

That will be dug in as well and it adds to the whole organic matter content of the soil -

-maybe better crops next year.

-Yeah.

Phacelia, I think, is rather bonnie.

-I think we should get rid of the annuals.

-Yes, please.

-Let's see the Award of Garden Merit vegetables.

-Yes.

Here we are, George, with the Award of Garden Merit vegetables.

What we're looking at is AGMs, as opposed to non-AGMs.

The AGMs have been selected because they're pretty well disease-free.

-They're consistent and generally available, so they're all-round better performers.

-Supposed to be.

This is interesting. Here we've got the leaf beets or the rhubarb chard. This is the AGM, Bright Yellow.

-It's starting to bolt a bit.

-It's starting to go. We've got a flower shoot coming up already,

-whereas on that one, nothing at all.

-It's Vulcan, a different colour, but it looks really good.

-We could crop that and use the leaves.

-We could.

-The lettuce are fine.

-They look fine.

The radish, we've already had a look at these. Look at the size now!

-This is the non-AGM Prinz Rotin.

-That's right. This is the one that we tested before, Scarlet Globe.

LOUD CRUNCH

-That's brilliant.

-Do you think that's OK?

-It's OK.

-That's all right.

-OK, the spinach...

You've been cropping yours at the allotment, haven't you?

-That's right. I grew Picasso.

-Can you speak?

Yeah. I grew Picasso and Emilia. Emilia is the AGM variety.

Picasso germinated better. It cropped earlier.

-This one has as well.

-I did total cropping.

-What happened was that I got two pounds, 13 ounces.

-OK.

With this one, poorer germination, fewer plants.

-But larger leaves.

-Much bigger leaves.

-I thought, "This is a disaster," but when I cropped this and weighed it, two pounds, 13.

-The same amount.

-So we've got some cooked here.

-Here's one we produced earlier.

-We don't know what's what.

-Right.

-Hmm, that's delicious. Swap bowls.

-Mm-hm.

-I like that one best.

-I prefer this one as well.

-That's "E".

-That's Emilia.

-So, AGM wins.

-Well done, Emilia. LAUGHTER

This is an important plant if you're trying to establish a wildflower meadow. It's called Yellow Rattle.

It's parasitic on grass, so it suppresses the grass growth

and lets other wildflowers and interesting plants get going.

These are our cut-flower chrysanthemums. Top end of the bed are Spray, multi-headed.

And at the bottom end here, we hope to have single stems with a single big flower at the top.

We missed the time when we should have been taking the tops out.

I've taken them out there and one out there and I'll come down here and take that one out as well.

It seems pretty harsh, but that's because we missed the boat earlier.

We'll get some nice stems up here and these will flower up at this height.

When you've done successional sowing of vegetables, remember to keep thinning them.

We sowed these turnips three weeks ago. We have to get them thinned.

I want to look at our fuchsias. We're making them into standards.

This one is a quarter standard and nice and bushy at the top because we keep pinching out the side shoots.

This one will be made into a full standard.

That means we're going to have three foot of clear stem and we're ready to nip out the top.

There's no going back now.

-This bog garden is looking really plumptious.

-No' half, eh?

-Especially the carnivorous plants, the sarracenias, cos they're in flower.

-Brilliant.

-Jim, you're not happy.

-I tell you what took my eye this time - these cherries in the greenhouse.

-I've got them counted.

-Oh, dear!

The thing I really like today is that digitalis Illumination, the RHS Plant of the Year last year.

-It's a fabulous colour, brilliant thing.

-Is that its finished height?

-I hope so. It's a perennial, so it will really make an impact.

-I like the colour combination.

More information about this week's programme is in the factsheet

which you can access online.

We're on Twitter and Facebook as well.

We're not back for a fortnight. Next week, we've to take a week off because of the golf.

-Last time, it was two weeks for tennis. Gardening's more important than the pair of them!

-Yeah.

His nibs is off to Colonsay to do a community garden with a veritable harem of assistants.

-But we're in the garden.

-We are, in a fortnight. See you then.

-Bye.

-Bye.

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