the autumn tidy up continues

I gave up waiting for frost to blacken the leaves of the dahlias, and started cutting them down.  After last night's rain, the ones in pots are as wet as they need to be before going into winter storage under the greenhouse staging, and it feels like time to put them away for this year.  Cutting the string off the supporting stakes, chopping down the dahlia stems and weeding the tops of the pots and the dahlia bed by the greenhouse, is another step towards winter.  Though it still doesn't feel like winter.  I'm trotting around the house with my bare feet shoved into a pair of clogs, and wandering outside to put the recycling out in a T shirt.

The Iris unguicularis are starting to put on a good show, not just the odd bloom but approaching a full display, so they are working by the calendar and not the thermometer.  Down by the septic tank, the ivy shaped leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium have expanded to almost cover the ground, another winter plant on the move.  The flowers have been and gone by now, but the leaves are a good feature in their own right.  I've bought a few more plants each year for over a decade to build up my stocks, always choosing ones with good leaf markings as well as selecting for flower colour, and they are starting to seed themselves around, so that while not there yet I'm getting closer to the sheet of cyclamen effect I've admired in various gardens open to the public.

We had 12mm rain last night, enough to soften the ground surface, though it has not penetrated very deep.  I've begun cutting the lawn edges around the paving slab path that leads across the back garden.  Over the course of the summer the grass has crept across the surface of the slabs, so that by now some of them are barely visible, just smudges of Marshalls Heritage in line across the turf.  Paving slabs dropped into lawns are somewhat retro, but a very practical way of getting hard access to the bottom of the back garden.  On frosty mornings I want to be able to go out there and look at the winter flowers without leaving footprints across the grass, to reproach me for my carelessness for weeks afterwards by going brown where my weight has damaged the frozen grass blades.  It's impossible to see where the edge of each slab is, so I make a rough guess, probing with the lawn edger, and shifting a centimetre further out if I touch concrete until the point where the blade slides down into the earth.  It looks smarter at the time not to cut too far away from the slab, though the lawn advances back quickly enough.

I've been coaxing fallen leaves off the gravel too, a fingertip job to avoid picking up stones as well as leaves.  I've collected red leaves from the Japanese maples, yellow leaves from the field maples and hazels, and big brown leaves from the Malus tschonoskii.  This is a useful tree, with a vase shaped habit and an ability to tolerate vile soils and transplanting at a large size that make it ideal for public landscape schemes.  I bought it for its excellent autumn colour and because I needed a relatively narrow tree in that spot.  I've never met any gardener or tree enthusiast who raved about Malus tschoniskii.  It does a job, but doesn't seem to inspire love.  Poor tree.

The Systems Adminsistrator collected chestnut leaves using the leaf vac, and has promised to go after the leaves from the 'Tai Haku' over the weekend, when more have fallen off.  It's tricky knowing when to start with leaf collection.  Too early and you end up raking over every bit several times, but too late and they have blown away into inaccessible places.  If you just wanted them off the lawn that might be fine, but I want the leaf mould.

This will be a working weekend for me, so no more gardening until Tuesday.  We need more rain, but please let it rain in the night.  I lost half this morning to some heavy showers.  Tidying dahlias and leaves is all very well, but I need to get out the heavy equipment, and make a start on the hebes that need to come out, to be replaced by box, and the big bed along the boundary.

a fortunate toad

I trimmed the edges of one of the beds in the back garden.  I am not as conscientious about doing the lawn edges as I should be, since keeping them defined is probably the single thing that most makes a garden look cared for.  As we were told on a Writtle trip to Wakehurst Place, if the edges are neat most people don't really notice what's going on in the beds, so if you've only got time to do one thing, do the edges.  I don't like them too nerdily sharp, since everything else is a bit shaggy, and the odd stem overhanging onto the lawn is fine by me, but there is a middle way between obsessively tidy edges and a marginal fringe of long grass complete with seed heads.  I'm trying to find it.  Edging a bed each time I'm out there before moving on to other tasks is one way.

As I was shearing a little patch of longer grass under an overhanging rose bush, that the lawnmower had swerved around, I had a close encounter with a toad that has to be the luckiest creature still alive in the garden.  Brushing up the grass I'd just cut I found it flattened into the turf.  I couldn't see any blood, so gave it a gentle and experimental prod with one finger.  It very slowly raised itself up, and eventually hopped away into the safety of the bed.  If I hadn't stopped to pick up the fallen grass at that point, and shuffled another pace forward to continue cutting, I'd have knelt on it.

I like toads.  I found another later on, that emerged while I was weeding in the gunnera bed.  They have such ancient, fathomless faces.  If you disturb other creatures they run or fly away, but toads believe the thing to do is to remain very still, presumably hoping you won't notice them if they don't move.  I found a couple in recent days while weeding the gravel in the front, pulling up a large clump of unwanted vegetation each time to reveal the toad sitting resolutely underneath.  Sometimes I have picked one up to move it out of harm's way, cupping it between my two palms, and when they wriggle they are surprisingly strong.

A space appeared in the front of the gunnera bed.  Trying to remember what used to be there, I think a Rheum died in the winter.  It was looking pretty poorly last year, and I don't think previous winter did it any good, so 2010-2011 must have finished it off.  Rheum die down completely in the summer after flowering, so are not really great plants for the front of a border anyway.  Further back it would be easier to hide the gap.  The space provided a home for a rather smart Thalictrum I bought months ago at work, which has been hanging around for quite long enough in its pot, and some sad-looking Lobelia I raised from seed last year, which have definitely spent too long in their containers, plus some Geum rivale 'Lemon Drops', also from seed, which are the survivors of a vine weevil attack in the greenhouse.  Vine weevils are very partial to Geum (also Primula and Heuchera).

Addendum  The grey tabby has had a crooked back and walked oddly for years.  We don't know what she did to it, but it hasn't been right for a long time, and now aged 12 she can not longer manage to look after her fur, which is long, extraordinarily crimped, and always charged with static (the sort of fur that sticks to the walls and has to be vacuumed off).  Very unpleasant knots had begun to form over her flanks and tummy, and for some days I've been combing these out.  She seems to understand I am trying to help, and purrs loudly while also wriggling and tottering around the kitchen table (I do disinfect it before cooking).  Today she took a swipe at my hand with her claws, and drew blood along half the length of my thumb.  If she could I think she would be one for throwing telephones at her assistant.

more about bees and lawn edges

The porter bee escape had almost worked.  There were a few bees left in the super I wanted to take off, so I used a trick that works well for small scale hobby beekeepers who are only trying to take one super.  I had a spare super with no frames in it in a wheelbarrow about 10m from the beehive, with a spare covering board over it.  I removed the frames one by one from the super on the beehive, shook them to get the bees off, rushed them over to the barrow and put them in the empty box, then scarpered promptly with the barrow.  I only had to evict one bee from the kitchen.  Obviously if you are keeping bees on a commercial scale this is not tenable, but I believe professional beekeepers have other tools to help them, like chemical smoke to drive the bees down out of the supers.

I have just finished extracting the honey.  It is dark and strong flavoured, as any crop here in later summer is.  There are a couple of large chestnut trees in the wood, and chestnut honey is dark, so there's probably a fair bit of that in mine.  I'm sure the honey was ready for harvest, as the bees had almost finished capping it, but after a day in the kitchen with the aga it was extremely runny, trickling down the outside of the comb as I cut the cappings off, and it went through the sieve almost like water, whereas the previous lot clogged the sieve and was slow to run through.  This dark honey often stays liquid for a long time before granulating in the jar.

The inspection of the number two hive was inconclusive.  There were two queen cells only, no eggs, and the bees had begun to store nectar in the brood area suggesting they aren't expecting more eggs to be laid any time soon.  The bees were extremely buzzy, although they are normally placid, and I went through the brood box as briskly as I could while knowing the bees weren't going to give me the chance of a second look.  I didn't see the queen and am not sure if she is still there, so I left the queen cells, as I don't want to drive this colony queenless.  It was an inconlusive end to the swarming season, and shows how helpful the artificial swarming method would have been, if I hadn't messed it up last week.

The number three hive, that lost its queen over the winter and made a new one from eggs out of another colony, had built up strongly and urgently needed more space, whereas a couple of weeks ago they weren't using a third of the brood box.  I went and fetched them a super, feeling very pleased with myself that I'd remembered a queen excluder to go with it, and then realised when I began a quick inspection of the frames that I was wearing the wrong glasses to see eggs easily.  Fortunately it was good light and the hive has new clean frames, so I managed.  The bees were very quiet throughout, which shows that the pissy behaviour of the number two hive was not just because it was a hot and fairly humid morning.

The swarm are still in their nuc box, and I gave them some more sugar.  And that's the drama over for another summer.  I can't do anything more to stop my own bees swarming without risking sending them queenless.  I might pick up another swarm.  There might be some more honey, depending on swarming, weather and nectar flow.  But that's basically it for now.  Next will be autumn feeding, varroa treatment and woodpecker-proofing, but that's not for a while.

In the garden I have been mostly cutting the lawn edges.  There are a lot of edges in the back garden, just because it is a large garden.  I keep them to a minimum by having a few big borders, not lots of little ones, and by keeping to clean sweeping lines and not niggly wiggly in-and-out ones.  With everything else there's been to do, some edges had got very shaggy indeed, and as I trimmed I told myself I must cut them more regularly.  It's a quicker job when they aren't too long.  I use hand shears and not a strimmer, which no professional gardener would do, because I don't get on with strimmers.  Can't start them, don't like the noise, don't want to risk chopping the legs off the toad population.

The treatment of the edges influences the mood of a garden.  I try to keep clean lines, because curves that are pinched and wrong, and lines that are meant to be straight but wobble, are annoying.  I'm not too worried if they get a little bit whiskery and romantic, because so is the lawn half the time.  I don't mind a few shrubs growing out over the lawn and killing off bits of grass, as long as they don't impede circulation, because that looks relaxed and abundant whereas faced-up chopped off shrubs look depressing and car-parky.  I remember being told at Writtle that in Regency gardens edges were deliberately left long (I haven't gone and checked that fact because it's late and I can't be bothered now).  There was a garden in Essex, very fine in many ways but no longer open to the public due to the owner's ill-health, that had desperately sharp lawn edges.  They were cut with scalpel precision and a neat gully carved between the lawn and border, and no plant was ever allowed to stray over the divide.  It was a widely acclaimed garden done with skill and knowledge and with much to admire, but I didn't warm to it myself, and it was largely the edges that put me off.  They were very...cold.  I couldn't imagine walking around a corner and finding myself face-to-face with the god Pan in that garden.