Finally, fireworks

Before we get to floral fireworks, take a moment to admire this menu from The Hazelmere Bakehouse in Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria. Revel in the mention of a beesting, sigh over a Yorkshire curd tart and then exhale to the glories of a Cumberland rum nicky. I live in a city that is awash with (American-influenced) cronuts and brownies, triple-chocolate snicker doodles and salted caramel cheesecake – and whilst of course there is a place for all that, let’s not forget the glory that is traditional British baking.

The glorious menu at the Hazelmere at Grange Over Sands

The only thing that could improve this menu for me, lover of baked goods as I am, is an acknowledgment that the 18th century imports of cheap sugar and spice that popularised English fruited cakes and tarts was made possible not just because of trade with the West Indies (which they mention) but also because of enslaved labour; it’s an unsavoury truth of our culinary history that shouldn’t be ignored. The threads of the past feed into the present.

The trip to Grange was part of a few days in the Lakes as a replacement summer holiday; there was a steam train, a boat, lots of cakes, and of course a fair bit of drizzle.

Harry loved the heritage railway at Haverthwaite

I’ve mentally moved away from summer now. That may seem an odd statement, in the final week of October, but the seasons are so wobbly and in any case I always seem to be a few months behind everyone else. Our roses are deep into their second bloom and the raspberries are still cropping, their fruits the deepest, darkest crimson imaginable. This weekend I pulled a few carrots and parsnips, along with three plump pumpkins grown from seed gifted to me from my school friend Hannah McNeil, the variety a mystery.

First parsnips, carrots and three mystery pumpkins

Calling time on summer, in allotment terms, means starting the great clear up. Out have come the spent sunflowers and cornflowers; gone are the rotting courgette and pumpkin leaves. I’ve been ruthless, actually, and ripped out the cosmos even though they had a few weeks of flowers left; the wind had blown them horizontal over the path, which is both a practical hindrance but also a very visible reminder of my failure to do things (i.e. stake) properly. The rampant nasturtiums have suffered a similar fate but really, they are bullies with their tendency to spread and romp. Left to their own devices, I would have a plot made fully of self-seeded nasturtiums, grass and buttercups. After an hour or two of clearing, what remains is the morning after the night before: bare soil, tons of uncovered weeds, and occasional squares of flowers and brassicas given the reprieve.

The chrysanthemum square remains, leaving a palimpset of weeds and soil where the summer annuals once lived
The nasturtiums have taken over a quarter of the veg patch, so out they come

I enjoy a good clear out; to remove the remnants of summer is to let go of the past and, as I manure and cover the ground over the next few weeks, make the soil good again for next year. The writer Laura Cummings talks about ‘the redemption of Monday morning’ – the idea that every working week has a fresh start, the chance to put the excesses of the weekend behind you. Yes, I think, yes. October on the allotment is a little like Monday morning. Let go of the disappointments and reset again for next year.

Except there are some things that I’m not ready to let go of just yet, as they are just coming into their own. I’m talking of course of chrysanthemums, once the mumsy also-rans of the cut flower scene, and now (at least, I think) super chic. The smell of chrysanthemums instantly takes me to the churchyard in Hanley Swan, where as a child I used to help my Mum tend to my Nan and Grandad’s grave. That might sound a little morbid but it shouldn’t; to me chrysanthemums are smell of security and the countryside. I also love that Matt’s Granny and Grampy were semi-professional chrysanthemum growers; he has stories of how they used to protect their blooms from the rain with paper bags. There’s some serious legacy there to live up to.

My firework chrysanthemums are just coming into bloom now, which is absurd given that they were labelled ‘early’ on the catalogue. I have the Woolmans Starburst collection, for which I paid £12 for 5 seedlings in those innocent pre-pandemic days of January 2020. After a feeble start in my garden last summer, Mum kindly took cuttings and I now have an excellent, if excessively tall, patch for cutting. As ever I staked them badly and they are all wonky but I don’t care: I love them.

A mix of lime yellow, russets and carmine, in firework form
First proper cutting of this year’s chrysanthemums, along with dahlia and a few strawflowers

Next year I need to get more of the more traditional, fuller blooms to sit alongside the firework-style. Something like the Jewel Collection from Sarah Raven. Incidentally she recommends moving your chysanths into the greenhouse, root-ball and all, to extend the season, which I would love to do if only I had one. But as long a the weather stays kind, I’ll be cropping these for several weeks yet.

Also this week:
Harvesting: Chrysanthemums, dahlias, last French beans, first carrots, first parsnips, last raspberries, two tiny strawflowers (crop failure).
Planting: Planted tulips and alliums on the allotment. Won’t be able to plant tulips at home for weeks yet as the garden is still too abundant, such warm weather.
Eating and cooking: Cumberland sausage, chips and beer in the pub; Vanilla slice in Grange over Sands; Westmoreland tea bread; Autumn cooking at home now: proper deep filled apple pie; cauliflower cheese; beef ribs with red wine, cinnamon and star anise.

October is the new August

There is so much ‘stuff’ going on at the moment. My mind has been (still is) tormented by the outside world, by heinous crimes against women, by leaders who fail to lead, by the climate emergency, by the inequality I see all around me. This stuff is there all the time, of course, but usually it can be held at a distance. Sometimes however the walls come down; I can not be the only woman who cried in the last week for Sarah Everard, for Terri Harris and her children, for Sabina Nessa and their families. And I certainly hope that I am not the only one who has used their influence to write to their MP and other elected representatives to demand they listen to what women are telling them about domestic and sexual violence. If this issue speaks to you, you can do worse than pay attention to what the Women’s Equality Party are doing and saying: https://www.womensequality.org.uk

How can I think, let alone write, of flowers and vegetables at such a time? It turns out that I must, because this is where healing lies.

A basket of October: sunflowers, cosmos, dahlia, fennel, and you can’t see them but underneath the blooms are courgette, French beans and raspberries. Note the ripening pumpkin in the background.

October is the new August, or it least it is in 2021. After months and months of waiting, finally we have the annual courgette glut; we’ve had courgette with pasta, courgette with spicy tomato sauce, stir-fried courgette, roasted courgette, plus courgette that’s given away. I’m unusually grateful for the abundance of squash, for I thought it may never come. The varieties that I chose this year – Rugosa Fruilana and Genovese, both from Seeds of Italy – have been slow to turn to marrows and I particularly love the knobbly gourd-like appearance of the former.

Courgette are finally in glut territory…

Then there’s the raspberries. After a week away from the plot due to work, illness and childcare, I presumed that I’d missed the last of them – but not a bit of it. This is just one day’s picking and I think there’s STILL more to come.

…as are the autumn raspberries

The September and October cutting garden is a particular joy. It’s the time of the sunflowers, so majestic, but the smaller side-heads also do well in a posy-style arrangement with lime-green chrysanthemums and orange cactus dahlias. Yellow, orange, bronze, gold; it’s a table full of autumnal sunshine.

Orange, yellow and bronze dominate the colour spectrum now
The lime green chrysanthemum zap like fireworks

The cosmos plants got flattened in the late September storms, and so the flowers are now growing at an angle as they make their way up towards the sun. It makes for a floppy vase which actually I adore, the flowers twisting like snakes as they lobby each other for space.

Cosmos purity and dazzler with the last of the ammi visnaga

Fresh flowers are only half the story of course, for the sun room (aka the drying room) is now fill to bursting. Fennel stalks, with their starburst umbellifer flower heads, join the teasels, hops, hydrangeas, rose hips and cornflowers, waiting to fulfil their purpose in the winter days ahead.

The sun room is filled with drying flowers – hops, teasels, cornflowers, rose hip, agapanthus, fennel, hydrangea.

It’s harvest time but actually my head is already months ahead, thinking of next spring. An embarrassingly enormous box of bulbs was delivered this week, tulips, daffodils and crocus destined for the garden, for pots and for the allotment. There’s days of clearing and weeding to be done, and a pallet manure to collect and spread. It’s hard work but it’s good work; after the frustrations and urgency of summer, these tasks for autumn and winter allow for a more relaxed approach. We can celebrate success but also put away the failures, literally cover everything over, until we get another go, next time. Rest, renewal, redemption.

Also this week:
Harvesting: Courgette, raspberries, chard, French beans, cavolo nero, kale, last of the sunflowers, cosmos, dahlias, last ammi visnaga, fennel stems for drying. Also took home eggs from chickens at the house that Hannah is house-sitting for, including one still hot from the hen’s bottom.
Garden: Planted out back bed with narcissus actaea, ferns and alchemilla mollis. Potted up narcissi and crocus; will leave tulips for a few weeks more.
Cooking and eating: Speedy late night supper of courgette in spicy chipotle tomato sauce with eggs, smashed avocado and brown rice. Sticky sweet and sour sausages with plums. Pie and chips in Ludlow.
Also: Ludlow (sad to see that our favourite butcher has closed due to fire); Cheltenham Literature Festival (a joy after so long away from events); been ill again; work work work.

Chrysanthemums Illustrated

You may remember that last year my head was turned by an unlikely amour: the humble chrysanthemum. I loved the way that they burst into colourful life just as the cosmos and sunflowers were dying back, plus they have a whiff of retro nostalgia about them. I mean that quite literally: the smell of chrysanthemums takes me straight back to Hanley Swan churchyard, where my Mum would take me to lay flowers on my grandparents’ grave. The flower of choice was always chrysanths, no doubt because they last so extraordinarily long in the vase.

Then it turned out that Matt’s family had their own connection to these bounteous blooms: Granny and Grampy had their own cottage industry, growing and selling them by the armful from their front garden. Matt grew up surrounded by chrysanthemums and remembers plants covered with paper bags to protect the massive flowers from the rain. His job was to check each paper bag to see when the flowers were ready for picking.

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Matt’s Granny checks her blooms. We’re not sure when this photo was taken, though probably late 1990s/early 2000s.

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Black florest’s buckets filled the house in the autumn

Along with the carnation, a lot of people now loathe chrysanthemums and they have been ridiculously out of fashion for a long time. This for me is a good reason to grow them: it’s the job of us younger gardeners and allotmenters to shake things up a bit and come up with new garden aesthetics. They make a brilliant cut-flower, but whilst Matt’s grandparents encouraged single massive blooms (which were fabulous), I’m taken with the spray-style, mainly because they’re much easier to grow.

This year I have several square metres devoted to the chrysanth, using plants grown from cuttings from both Grampy’s plants and my own. Some of these began flowering at the end of July, which is ridiculously early: perhaps they were thrown off kilter by the warm start to the year. The others are just now coming into bloom and so we have oranges, yellows and burnished copper shades on the allotment.

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Grampy’s chrysanths are coming into bloom this week

Last month I came across this book from 1967: Chrysanthemums Illustrated, produced by the National Chrysanthemum Society. It’s full of very serious advice about how to perfect your chrysanths in readiness to win 1st prize at the flower show: they want perfect massive spheres and will go to any lengths to get them. And whilst I won’t be following every rule in the book, there’s a few gems to be learnt from these old-school growers.

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Chrysanthemums Illustrated (1967)

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With practice, maybe I can grow these?

The cycle for the chrysanthemum grower begins in autumn. Once the plants have finished flowering in November/December, you have to remove them from the soil, clean them up and trim them back to the bare stem, and then over-winter them in a cold frame or unheated greenhouse. The book recommends using tomato boxes to store the rootstock, noting that “any containers must be absolutely clean and it is advisable to use a wood preservative, but it must be emphasised that this should never be creosote.”

Note: creosote is the smell of my childhood, along with coal dust and roast dinners. Sadly the book is not so chemically aware when it comes to pesticides, recommending that we use DDT to guard against woodlice (this nasty chemical is now banned from use) and all kinds of noxious substances against slugs and other invertebrates.

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Storing the rootstock over winter, no creosote allowed.

They advise digging in plenty of organic material into the garden/allotment in the autumn (including hoofs, horn, bonemeal or manure) and then mounding up the soil, much as you would if growing potatoes. The rootstock is encouraged back to life “at about Christmas” with gentle watering, and then cuttings taken from the new shoots. The timing of this is apparently crucial, with each cultivar being slightly different. (This information is useless to me as I failed to note what variety my plants are: I would not make it as a champion grower.) The cuttings are then kept warm using a “mains voltage soil warming wire” set at 6 to 12 volts. A what?! It was presumably much colder in the 1960s.

Once rooted the little plants get potted on, hardened off and eventually planted outside at the start of April. The book, presumably written by a man with a head for straight lines, recommends using canes situated 16 inches apart to mark out a grid of where to plant. Bonemeal sprinkled onto the ground will do “nothing but good”. Suitably staked, supported and mulched, the emerging flower heads must be then protected from the weather with paper bags – just like Granny and Grampy used to do.

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Protecting the blooms from the weather, 1960s-style

The next bit of advice is curious: when picking the flowers, the book recommends bashing the stem with a hammer or pliers before placing it in water. If taking your blooms to the flower show by train, it is recommended that you secure the stems in hurdles and them place them in a wooden crate constructed for the purpose. And once at the show – that’s when you get your tweezers out to perfect your creation.

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At the show. Note that this seems to be an entirely male activity!

Now, it’s fair to say that I will never, never, never approach my gardening like this. It’s too stringent, too full of rules and straight lines…and perhaps I am too lazy. But I’ll persevere with my chrysanths and if I can achieve an autumn with a weekly supply of posies like this, I’ll be very happy. Here’s to a new fashion for the great unloved chrysanthemum.

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Pumpkin-shades sit alongside Grampy’s yellow flowers

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Burnished copper to take us into autumn

Chrysanthemum care

Today is a welcome respite from all the Christmas stress festivities. Presents are wrapped, the gammon is simmering (which admittedly is Christmas-related, but hardly difficult) and the TV is most-decidedly switched off. By some kind of miracle, this morning was gloriously sunshiney and so I headed to the allotment for an urgent task: chrysanthemum care.

Some background is needed here. Matt’s Granny and Grampy, now in their mid-90s, used to run a literal cottage industry growing and selling chrysanthemums. Their garden was heaving with them and come harvest-time the living room (so I am told) was filled with black florestry buckets overflowing with blooms. Apparently, when Matt was a boy, his job was to help put paper bags over growing buds to protect the saucer-sized flowers from the elements.

Knowledge of chrysanthemums is the Hunter/Foster-family legacy. It’s shaped Matt’s upbringing in much the same way that knowledge of coal and how-to-light-a-fire has shaped mine (my Dad and his father before him were in the coal trade).

So when Grampy heard that I had an interest in growing my own, he very generously offered a load of plants out of his garden. We arrived home yesterday with a tray full of soil, root and twigs, and strict-instructions for what to do with them.

The pressure is on.

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From October this year. In 2016 I’d like a whole lot more of this!

My chrysanths this year were brilliantly colourful, but I think slightly lacking in blooms. Next year I’d like to grow more and also see if I can extend their season, maybe bringing some indoors to protect them from the Birmingham winds.

Grampy told me that I have to dig up the faded plants, trim the stem down to a few inches, and put them in a shallow tray filled with compost. They will stay thus confined, in the greenhouse, until they start to shoot in the spring at which point we will take cuttings. Any signs of frost and they need covering with fleece.

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Grampy’s plants, trimmed and tray-ed

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They’ll over-winter in the greenhouse, ready for cuttings in the spring

I feel genuine pressure at being primary care-giver for these important plants – it’s a bit like being asked to cook for a really really good chef. Let’s hope we don’t let Grampy down.

Also on the allotment: Harvesting mustard spinach, mizuna, chicory, spinach, chard, leeks, parsnips.