The first frost of the year is forecast. Managing the greenhouse and conservatory is always a juggling act between providing good airflow, to combat mould and botrytis, and keeping the plants warm, but tonight the doors are closed, and I've shut the louvres in the greenhouse walls, and dropped down the glass side panels that have been propped up since May.
I brought most of the dahlia pots inside. I was going to leave them until the first frost had blackened the leaves, as Rosy Hardy said in her lecture, but it got too difficult trying to guess how much space to leave for them in the greenhouse. Half the stems had died back naturally, and I compromised and cut the other half to leave stubs several inches long. I'll be keeping the pots dry over the winter so there's little risk of water getting inside the hollow stems to rot the tubers, and I told myself that the stubs were not so very different to what happened in the growing season each time I dead headed them. Probably the stubs don't make a blind bit of difference.
I moved the last fuchsia in too. It only got left out until now because I switched to doing other jobs, and while the weather was so mild and the plant was still in leaf there didn't seem any rush to cut it down. I left the dwarf pomegranates outside deliberately in the hope that they would naturally defoliate before it got really cold, to avoid them dropping their leaves in the greenhouse. They obligingly did, and all four are now safely tucked up under cover. I grew them from seed, and they flowered pretty well this year, and even produced a few small fruits that I didn't attempt to eat but which looked pretty.
They seem susceptible to root aphid, alas, and all received a dose of vine weevil drench at the start of the summer, which improved their health visibly. I checked them again before putting them back in the greenhouse, and one was lightly infested so got another drenching. As the evidence against neonicotinoids grows I don't know what the horticultural world is going to do about insect pests on roots. I keep bees, I am well disposed to wild insects and I adore my garden, so I'm torn. I don't want to cause harm to bees, but I don't relish the idea of being unable to raise or keep plants in pots due to root aphid attack. The active ingredient in Provado vine weevil drench is thiacloprid, and gardening will get much more difficult if it is withdrawn from sale. Treating foliage pests with a fatty acid or similar is easy enough, and anyway if you have plenty of birds and ladybirds insect pests on leaves aren't usually a problem, but insect pests on roots are another matter, and potentially a big issue for commercial growers. The herbaceous plants you buy from your local garden centre or DIY store have probably been potted in a compost containing a vine weevil killer.
There wasn't room under cover for all the pots of hardy perennials. Being hardy, they should survive the first few frosts, but I don't really want to leave them outdoors all winter. Life in a plastic pot, freezing solid and with only the holes in the bottom of the pot for drainage, is tougher than life planted out in well drained soil, and hardy is as hardy does. But after leaving myself the merest sheep track of a path down one side of the greenhouse I really am running out of space. I'll just have to keep madly weeding and clearing in the meadow so that I can plant some more of my stash.
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