Hello My Dear Gardening Friends,

Another gorgeous week, time to spend outside and enjoy the flowers that are still blooming – what a wonderful summer we have had.

It is always warm and sunny when the children return to school. I well remember my daughter crying and saying that it wasn’t fair, she had to return to school usually on her birthday!

My beloved cousin has returned to England and now I have water running through new pipes, the outside taps are working once again – my plants are very happy about that because they have not had as much water as they should have all summer!!!!

I hear that his lawns need cutting and I am sure that he will have a lot of weeding to do as well – he did hear whilst he was here that his orchids had mealy bugs on them. Mine have done well during the heat and the humidity – how about yours??

I haven’t forgotten about the September calendar so here goes:

-Trim and Divide your Perennials
-Prepare and seed new lawns (if you must – new flower beds are so much better, less work!)
-Plant new evergreens
-Plant your spring flowering bulbs
-Plant new shrubs
-Renovate your old perennial borders
-Take cuttings from geraniums and coleus
-Bring in your houseplants before it gets too cold
-Fertilize and aerate lawns
-Sock the water to all your evergreens and shrubs; they have a long winter ahead of them. This is their way of stocking up before they hibernate.

I said for you to bring in your house plants, before you do so, check very carefully for creepy crawlies that would love to live in your house for the winter (like my chipmunk). Also check for worms, they have a habit of living in those wonderful plant pots.

I am determined not to bring everyone inside this year – I am torn between putting them at the top of the road or just taking them to friends?!? I did that last year and as the last pot was leaving I realized that I had given away all my big pots, so I’ll have to bag them up this year.

The Honeysuckle belongs to the Caprifoliaceae family (cap-ri-folia-ay-say) which is an endearing, sweet scented, twining and climbing plant, scrambling through hedges and woods.

Shakespeare speaks of it as gentle and entwining, but it can actually be quite a killer, as it twines itself clockwise around young saplings and squeezes them into a spiral.

It flowers usually twice a year, in June and again in September. If you visit it in the evening at dusk, its scent is very strong and very sweet.

It has two common names, honeysuckle and woodbine. Honey suckle because at the base of each floret you will find it holding nectar, and if you pluck it and suck it you can taste the honey – much like the present blooming phlox. Woodbine because of the way that it twines itself around its neighbours which can and does sometimes end in disaster, especially if the neighbour happens to be young, for it is literally a wood binder.

Woodbine, such a pretty old fashioned English name has been entirely spoilt for me and for my generation. At the time of the first World War a cheap cigarette was produced which was called Woodbine(s). In fact the word woodbine came to mean a cheap cigarette.

I think that she was having a spot of fun with us here!!!!

Like most avid gardeners I like to push the limits of our growing zone. Keith Squires (whom we have all met at some time or another) is a southern Ontario perennial expert who’s been known as a guru in his field since most of us were born. Mr. Squires maintains (and he says this with iconoclastic glee) that, “There’s no such thing as zones”. What gardener would really believe that? You’d have to scoff at that coming from anyone else other than Mr. Squires, but then he knows more than most of us put together (Just ask his daughter Cathy).

I consider this to be one of the most daunting gardening challenges I’ve ever encountered. What he means is that proper or special care can ensure the survival of just about anything. We can ignore conventional gardening advice by choosing an optimum site, by giving proper care during the growing season and, perhaps most importantly, by giving a plant sufficient protection against winter’s cold.

Fall, the season, may be an ominous portent of decline and fall. We have good reason to dread the coming season. But it’s filled, in the garden, with opportunities to plan, create and to preserve. In the midst of the decline, we are busy preparing for next season’s renewal.

Grass defies the general decline of the rest of the garden in the fall. It starts growing again!! Aerating is a very beneficial thing to do when your lawn is active in the early fall (September). The other important element of fall lawn care is fertilizing.

It is very common to fertilize incorrectly. If the fertilizer is applied too early, lush green growth occurs. This is actually a bad thing, I prefer to strengthen and prepare the grass for next year, not weaken it with excessive growth.

Timing is crucial and dependent on temperature. If you are using a standard chemical fertilizer, apply when temperatures are generally dipping to freezing at night, and rising to about 7oC (45oF) by day. With organically based fertilizers, apply when daytime temperatures are about 10oC (50oF), for you are much more likely to stimulate root growth than top growth at these temperatures and so will have a much better lawn next year.

The tomato plants are still producing lots of lovely red tomatoes. There are so many different ways to use them, I still like going into the garden and just plucking one off the vine and eating it whilst it is warm.

Tomatoes should really be harvested between ten in the morning and no later than 3 in the afternoon, this way you get the optimum flavour. This works for other “top” crops too. Nothing tastes quite like a bacon and tomato sandwich for lunch.

After you have preserved the best of your tomatoes, there are always those funny little not perfect ones left. I love to cook them until they are soft, stirring so that they do not burn. Then I put them through a food mill to remove the seeds and skins. Put the pulp into glass jars or freezer bags and freeze – when you need a good tomato sauce (around Christmas) or a soup, try adding some butter, salt and pepper and a spoonful of sugar, it makes the best soup – or add it to meat loaves, stews and a host of other sauces.

If you like egg-plant (I don’t unfortunately – they always look so beautiful) this is the time to enjoy them. Parsnips and Brussels sprouts should have a frost before they are harvested – in fact Brussels taste far better in the spring after a winter outside.

I love to harvest my potatoes around now, mixed with rutabaga – one third mashed potato, with boiled and mashed turnip or rutabaga – one eighth teaspoon nutmeg, some grated onion and garlic, butter, salt and pepper and thick cream – makes a dish fit for a gardener!

Did you know that radishes are a very ancient vegetable? It was one of the first annual vegetable that the first American gardeners grew? It was highly prized by the Ancient Greeks, and long before that by the Egyptians who believed that the radish was an aphrodisiac. An American seed catalogue of 1884 listed 26 varieties of radishes.

Radishes like soil enriched with plenty of organic matter, plenty of moisture and cool weather. Be sure to plant them under a favourable sign, such as Libra (October) Taurus, Pisces, Sagittarius, Capricorn (under the snow) or Aries and in the 3rd quarter, otherwise you will get merely tops and little root.

That's all for this week!

Lovingly, Beryl