clearing the decks

I have started clearing away the pots of summer bedding.  Some still have a scattering of flowers, but many have finished so that the overall effect is slightly dismal.  I thought at first that if I removed the worst of them, like the Tithonia which have well and truly given up the ghost, then maybe I could group the others together and salvage something from the display for another couple of weeks, but extracting the shabbiest ones has simply exposed the failings of the others. The wet, dull August can't have helped, the fuschia gall mite certainly didn't, and I don't think Tithonia can be suited to pot culture.  I did fall for them after seeing them in Monty Don's garden on Gardeners' World, which is in Herefordshire with clay soil, a high water table, and moister air than coastal Essex.  Still, I tried, and have now got Tithonia envy out of my system.

The Nicotiana mutabilis are still going strong by the front door, or at least their lower leaves are rather puckered as if some sap sucking insect had attacked them, but there are great sprays of pink and white flowers up top.  They have spent all summer with an east facing aspect, so clearly thrive in less than full sun, which could be useful to know.  The Arctotis and Gazania have had full sun, and are still flowering.  They ought to in mid September, since that was when I was first smitten by Arctotis 'Flame' at the Hillier gardens.  But the dahlias are running out of oomph.  I should probably have fed them more, and next spring I shall repot them all and move this year's new plants into bigger pots.  They did jolly well, though, when you think that they arrived as rooted cuttings in April.  When I went to the garden club lecture on dahlia growing in February of last year I could not entirely believe the photograph of a flowering plant a couple of feet high that had come from a cutting taken that season, but they are incredibly vigorous when young.

I've also started to clear the tomato plants out of the greenhouse, picking the last of the ripe tomatoes plus those green fruit I think might ripen given a bit of luck and a whiff of ethylene, and consigning the vines to the compost heap.  As long as it remains dry I will delay starting to pack the pots of tender plants inside, as damp and fungal infections are a bigger risk than frost at this stage, but I should like to have the space freed up so that I can get them under cover fairly quickly when the weather turns.  The dahlias ought to wait outside until they've been touched by frost, which since the garden club talk I know is to stimulate the tubers to seal themselves off from the stems before cutting them down, since the hollow stems of dahlias can act as a route for infection.  It's a bit of a nuisance, as I should like to put the dahlia pots around the edge of the greenhouse, and the things with tender stems further away from the glass, in case the thermometer drops precipitously one winter's night.  And the salivas are tender, but need to go near the door to get as much air as possible on days when I open the greenhouse, because they are the most susceptible to botrytis, except that they mustn't go right by the little path I leave myself because their stems are brittle and break easily if knocked into.

Really I need a larger greenhouse.  Or perhaps fewer plants.