What to do with a plum glut – GBBD Sept-16

Here in the South-East of England we have now clocked in exactly 2 months of amazing summer weather. I know it hasn’t been the same all over Britain, but here in my little corner it seems like we have been living in our own little bubble in terms of the weather. The yellow strip of dead lawn outside in the car parking area is a testament to how little rain we have had and I have had to water my garden practically every evening for the last 2 months. The amount of days we have had any rain at all can be counted on one hand – with spare fingers, and often the rain coming down has been very sparse. I can’t wait for a week of good, old British downpour!

Before I start my post today I have to give you all a big apology for being so absent in the blogosphere, I so appreciate all your comments and I read and treasure everything you write on my blog. In an ideal world I would have liked to visit all of you and commented back on all your posts too, as I know how much of an encouragement commenting is for blogging. Since I had my slipped disks back in May I have been struggling with recovery and I can’t sit with my computer for as long as I used to. In addition I have been battling the joy of getting adaptations done to my new house in order to get the house better suited to me – I have finally got approval for everything I need but it has taken since moving in last year to get there. Now phase 2 starts – getting the work done by the council, which probably isn’t going to be any easier or speedier from past experience. So between all this and watering my garden every evening to keep it alive it simply hasn’t been time to visit you all. I haven’t forgotten you, and some of you I have contact with on Facebook which for me is a quicker and easier way to make a short update. Please send me a friend request if you would like to keep in touch that way too, link to Facebook is right here on the left side.

And now to today’s photos, the first one is probably speaking for itself, but outdoor temperature is in bottom left corner, indoor temperature in the middle, photo taken Tuesday this week. And 33.8 degrees C is 92.8 F and 27.7 is 81.8 F - British houses don’t come with air condition normally, heatwaves like these lasts a few days or a week and then it is back to more manageable temperatures. We have had quite a few of these this summer though and I have really missed my old, Victorian house which had a very nice, cool downstairs all through the summer. It was 30 degrees this afternoon and almost the same indoors – living in a bungalow means there is no escaping the heat - the sun heats up the loft and acts like a duvet keeping the heat inside the house and I basically get almost the same  temperature indoors as outside.

The garden has been thriving in the nice weather (thanks to all the watering), and after a quick look at my GBBD post a month ago I can see that it looks almost the same – most of the plants in flower are the same. The lilies and agapanthus are finished and there are fewer roses, apart from that everything else from last month is still in flower. There are a few yellow leaves on the big tree next door, but that’s probably due to lack of water, apart from that, autumn has not started here.

The few times we have had any rain at all it has been a disappointing event, I took this photo Saturday 10 days ago, the last time we had any rain. This was the forecasted ‘A Whole Day Of Rain’ that I had looked so forward to. The photo is after 8 hours of on and off drizzly rain and you can see that it is still dry under the tree to the left and around the containers, not exactly bucketing-down-kind-of-rain! Maybe Friday’s forecasted rain will be any better? It is supposed to rain for 12 hours, some of it on the heavier side....but I don’t know, I have seen so many forecasts like that this summer and it just fizzles out before the actual day. We’ll see....but it is finally set to cool down a bit from now on, I am ready for some gardening work so I am fine with that!

OK, enough about the weather, I’m not really complaining, the last 2 months have been really good and I feel after a long, nice summer that I can meet the winter months in a better way and although the winter is short here, I am better prepared for whatever it throws at us. But first we are having a 3 months long autumn and the dahlias are the star of that.

The few dahlias that survived thanks to me being slow to get plants in the ground are looking good, these are all called ‘Happy Days’ and are bedding dahlias – meant to last one season and then thrown away. I am not very good at throwing out plants so I just kept them and they came back the following year. That’s 4 years ago and they are still happy in the pots.

I have finally got some echinaceas too - after failing spectacularly with the bare-root plants I bought in February I gave up and bought 2 pots in flower. They are still in pots (along with lots of other plants), but I hope to get them in the ground and fingers crossed, they might come back next year. Growing echinaceas in Britain is not easy, the winters are too wet and too mild.

These are ‘White Swan’ and ‘Magnus’ – the swan is a bit tatty at the moment but I am sure they just want to get their roots in the ground.

My experiment with cosmos in window baskets has gone very well, I grew them from seed and they are now much taller than me. Some are just growing and growing and haven’t started flowering yet, whilst the shorter varieties have been flowering for about 6 weeks. In front of them is my absolute favourite dahlia which returning visitors probably will remember from my previous garden.

This is Dahlia ‘Mary Eveline’. They used to be much taller in my previous garden, but there they grew in the ground. I will give them bigger containers for next year and hopefully that will make them a bit happier and make them less prone to drying out.

The 2 begonias I have are just starting to flower, they have been really slow this year and living up to their name ‘Primadonna’! I expect them to go on flowering until we get any frost, if we get any.

I have harvested the last of the plums, I don’t eat them myself because although I like plums it seriously upsets my stomach. Instead I have given the plums away to friends and neighbours and lately to anyone passing by in the street. I have had so many plums this year it has been unbelievable. I should have thinned out the fruit in June and July, but at that time I was mostly cooped up in bed in pain with my slipped disks so thinning plums was the last of my priorities. The result was loads of fruit, smaller than they should, but absolutely loads. (By the way....if you wonder....I haven’t forgotten how to spell my name, I sometimes write my name like that just to make things simple as this is what people here know me as – you see, although I usually write my name the Norwegian way, living here in Britain it is easier for everyone that I call myself Helen as no one can pronounce my name the Norwegian way anyway....so now you know ;-)

Seeing all the plums still left on the tree a couple of weeks ago, I got this idea that even though I can’t eat the plums, maybe I can DRINK them?? I don’t drink wine as I get migraine from any kind of wine, but I can drink liqueur and similar things – even though I must admit I rarely drink any alcohol at all and whenever I am asked about alcohol consumption when I go to hospital and doctors I usually have to think if I have actually had any alcohol at all the last year - and the answer is often no. Anyway, I did some research on the Internet trying to find a good recipe for plum liqueur and like most things there were many, widely different ones.

I chose a combination of several recipes and for the first time in my life I bought a bottle of Vodka – 1 ½ litres and a small bottle of dark rum, and the sugar I chose is light muscovado sugar. I thought this combination sounded nice, the result will be a long wait!

All the recipes I found said to leave the plums to ripen properly before picking them so I tried to do that. Big mistake. I am not sure what has happened with these last plums but I picked 5 kg plums and almost half of them were rotten on one side even though many of them were still slightly green on the other side. I am rather new to growing plums, but the ones harvested earlier on I picked while they were more orange than dark red and they were all fine. Perhaps they were supposed to be orangy-red then? Not sure what kind of plumtree I have as I inherited this tree. Or maybe it is because most of the last plums were all the small ones?

No idea, but the earlier ones were beautiful and looked like this and I tested several batches before giving them out to see that the stone slipped easy out – and I gave to family and friends who would have been honest and told me if they had not been good.

Anyway, from those 5 kg I managed to get the 4 kiln jars filled with OK plums, and I was happy with that. I made 2 kiln jars with just Vodka, one with Vodka and a bit Rum and one with Vodka, Rum, a cinnamon stick and 2 star anise. The kiln jars are stored in my larder and needs a shake every day for the next week until the sugar has dissolved. Then it’s just a matter of patience. After 2-3 months the plums can be strained off and discarded and the liquid tasted to see if it needs more sugar, and then bottled. The liqueur will apparently change in flavour over time, 3-6 months after straining it will be drinkable, but will possibly be better after a year. Considering how little alcohol I normally drink I might have plum liqueur for the next 10 years! Or alternatively – this might be another thing to dish out to friends and neighbours if my stomach fails the taste test....

OK, back to the garden photos – here are my incredible sunflowers, they look like they have been fed with steroids, but they haven’t actually been fed at all, and the watering has been minimal so I have no idea why especially one of them is so tall. One of my garden helpers climbed up a step ladder and attached some extra bamboo poles for me as I was afraid it would break and we measured it to just over 4m tall. That was 2 weeks ago. I have no idea how I am going to deadhead it until he comes back next time as I can’t reach it with any tool from the ground.

The sunflowers have lots of buds further down and I think I will simply ask my garden helper next time to cut the tops off so the rest can develop into flowers – although it would have been nice to see how tall it could grow into!

In the same corner of the garden is my Fuchsia boliviana and it is now developing fruit. I can’t wait to taste it for the first time, it is said to taste a bit like kiwis, just not as sweet.

I am still harvesting tomatoes, this is what I got today and there are still lots left to ripen. It has been a good year for tomatoes and I have many bags in the freezer and have given away heaps too.

Here is a photo from my front garden in late afternoon and I have still not decided what to do here so it is a bit of a pot-jungle.

Inside the fence there’s only one thing planted, a rose I inherited with the house. This will be a project to get started with when we have had rain for a while and the ground has got softer. I had another count of pots today as I haven’t done that since last winter. Since then I thought I had planted loads, but it turns out I have an incredible 504 pots and containers counting everything not in the ground – from the smallest cutting pot to the largest container. I wonder if my pots have found a way of making offspring on their own?? No wonder it takes such a long time to water every evening!

Back in the main garden there are still lots of things in flower, this is the pretty Alstroemeria 'Duchess Louise'.

The Cannas 'Magic Pink' has been the most pleasant surprise this summer, flowering for the first time. I have only seen cannas on TV, in magazines and online so having my own and realising that they just go on and on flowering has been just amazing – I didn’t know! They throw out these stalks with really big, blowsy flowers and before you can cut off the last of the flowers there is another set of flowers on the same stalk. These are the last of the flowers I think, but 2 months of flowers is really good - happy with that!

Also here in my tropical corner is my Zantedeschia aethiopica, which is enormously big and I cut off its last flower just a week ago. I think that was it for this year, but compared to last year it has flowered for much longer, I have never had flowers in September before. It might be a combination of the plant getting more mature and the good, warm weather. My Zantedeschia keeps most of its leaves over winter and just looks a bit tatty for a couple of months. Come March it will start to produce new leaves and by May it will be in flower again.

The tropical corner is next to the Woodland Bed which is rather green at the moment, but come next spring it will burst into action again in the flower department.

Only exception to that is the hardy fuchsia which was here when I moved in. It has been flowering since June and is a welcome addition to my garden which otherwise has no other fuchsias apart from the miniatures and the boliviana. Next year I will start to build a new collection of large flowered fuchsias and fingers crossed, I hope to avoid the dreaded Fuchsia Gall Mite.

Also in the Woodland Bed I have an absolutely fantastic aster. I have never been able to grow asters successfully, they just end up with mildew, but this Aster ageratoides 'Ashvi' does not get this issue. It thrives even in dry shade and I grew it in a pot in my previous garden. Here on the edge of my woodland garden I have planted it in the ground and it has really taken off, probably doubled in size from previous years.

Those pretty, white flowers are like little lanterns in amongst the otherwise green foliage in the Woodland Bed.

I have always wanted a wisteria. Yep, I know – you need a big house to grow a wisteria against, preferably a mansion or at least a 2 storey big house. Not a tiny bungalow. Failing that you could always have a really big, walled garden and grow the wisteria along the whole wall. I do have a wall, but it is not big and not long. But I really, really want a wisteria. I have never seen one, or smelled one in real life – as with so many things I have just seen them on TV or online. But I want one. So when I finally read about the American wisteria I thought; Eureka! That’s the wisteria for me!

So I bought one, and a nice plastic container to plant it in. Yes, a container! The American wisteria, Wisteria frutescens 'Amethyst Falls' grows very differently to the Japanese and the Chinese wisteria, slower and with less invasive root system, and crucially – it doesn’t grow for miles on end. It is apparently suitable for container growing. I have seen photos online of this wisteria growing in containers, but I don’t know how old those plants were when the photos were taken. I dithered for a long time before buying the container. Not too small, not too big.

I just have to show you this photo of the daughter of a friend of mine, testing out the size of the wisteria container. Perfect size for a toddler! Her name is Jetta and she is so cute standing in it, I just had to include this photo :-)

And here is the wisteria after I planted it, this plant was £19.99 and I felt I got a lot of plant for my money.

However, it was growing on a trellis, twined up and down and all around it – and I wanted to grow a straight stemmed wisteria tree like I had seen online.

I carefully cut away the trellis – and the result was this. I counted 7 stems, most of them quite long. How do I turn this mess into an upright tree?

By being brutal! It will never get a nice shape unless it starts out right.

I couldn’t get myself to cut away everything down to a single stem so I left the 3 nicest stems and twined them around a garden pole I already had. It is a plastic coated metal pole meant for plants and I might get a new one just a bit taller. Or I might just leave it at this height, not sure yet. It needs a cross at the top to carry the canopy because once the desired height is reached, whatever grows afterwards can be trained outwards to make an umbrella shape and from that, the flowers will form and hang down. That’s the idea at least. Once the umbrella is formed, all the leaves on the stems can be removed.

This type of wisteria flowers on new wood, and usually flowers twice a year from a very young age, mine has a couple of buds and hopefully I might get to see some flowers this year. This is also a very nice feature as opposed to the Chinese and Japanese wisteria, which apparently need to be a good few years old before you can have any hope of seeing flowers. However, after having received my wisteria I have dived into reading more about it and I realise there is some contention about the scent of the flowers. Some places it says they smell beautifully, some places it says they smell very little whilst other places it says they smell like male cat wee! I would really like to hear from anyone growing this particular type of wisteria to hear your view on the flower scent, just so I can mentally prepare myself for it!!

Here is the wisteria in place in my front garden, in the sunniest spot, next to my not-yet-flowering bottlebrush. Maybe the bottlebrush can pick up a trick or two from the wisteria and get on with flowering, it is about time!

I haven’t showed you any roses yet so maybe it’s about time? This is one of my £1 pot roses from ASDA, I think all the soses have been suffering from lack of water lately – or for the containers perhaps more the constant drying out and watering. Watering once a day is simply not enough to get them through to the next. At least I hope that’s the reason for the brownish outer petals on many of the roses, it’s certainly not rain damage. Hopefully when we get cooler weather and the plants get a more constant supply of water the roses will look better again.

I haven’t really had a big second flush of roses like I normally have, I am blaming that too on the low water table. I have prioritised water to all the pots and containers and even though I have given the roses in the ground some water I probably haven’t given them enough. This one is gorgeous as always though, ‘Scepter'd Isle’.

This is the unknown rose growing through the apple tree, still throwing out new buds.

And this is another pot rose, with larger flowers. This one is also suffering from brownish outer petals.

And finally, another photo of Echinacea purpurea ‘White Swan’ – with a little visitor. The bees really love these flowers and I can just sit down on my stool at any time I want to get a ‘bee on a flower photo’ – they will turn up in minutes.

That was the end of the tour for today, thanks for hanging in there, I know this was a really long post :-) My next post will be on the 30th September, with a movie from the garden.

I am linking today’s post to Carol at May Dreams Gardens, please visit her for many more Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day posts from around the world. I am off to try to reply to some of the comments you made to my previous post 2 weeks ago and I will try my best to make a round to you all this time.

Until next time, take care.


UPDATE:

Just to let you know, we got rain last night and today….and after a week of hot weather and the hottest day of September in 105 years last Tuesday, the build-up ended with post-heatwave storm which brought flash floods causing widespread disruption many places. I heard the rumble of thunder early this morning, but the thunder never came over my house. It has rained quite a lot, but not enough to cause any flooding or problem around here.

I placed my washing-up tray that I use for deadheading around the garden in the middle of the patio last night to see how much rain we might get, and as you can see we got a nice amount, there is almost 2 cm in the tray. More than we have had in any rainfall since June. I can see from the news that there are flooding problems many places with roads, schools and underground stations closed. The very dry conditions here makes rainfall like this a huge problem as the rain doesn’t seep into the ground, it just stays on the surface and has nowhere to go. It has stopped raining now and the sun is shining again. No more rain on the forecast for the next 10 days for my area.