September always feels like the start of a new gardening year,Summer crops are all ripening and you need to collect and store them but also the new seed catalogues are arriving and we need to get ready to plant those veg that we get through the Winter
Its also the perfect time to get some work done on your growing beds before the weather turn cold and the ground becomes harder to cultivate
In this late summer update Benjamin Ranyard from Higgledygarden shows us just how much colour his hardy and half-hardy flowers are producing,some fantastic Zinnias and Scabious which along with the cosmos have been a fantastic source of food for the numerous bees and hoverflys,which i believe have had a massive effect on the bumper crop of beans in the veg garden next door
Without doubt the highest yielding vegetables you can grow in the garden and really invaluable for Winter use dried these Butter beans and Borlotti beans are growing in a tiny No-Dig bed in my mums small urban back garden and the soil preparation is now really paying dividends
The Butterbeans I am growing are FAGIOLO DI SPAGNA which are the only ones I have ever had much success with and the Borlotti are LAMON both from seeds of Italy
I have always believed that with something as fundamental to our well being as the food we eat, and the fact that it is a necessity, makes total sense to me to concentrate on the taste and provenance of the things we grow or buy. With something as simple as salt, you would at first glance think there was no difference, in fact there is all the difference in the world and I firmly believe that naturally harvested sea salt whether from the Ile de Re or the Guerande in France really is worth seeking out and using.
Although having a wonderfully exotic taste musk melons and their derivatives are no harder to grow than a cucumber. Easy to grow outdoors as they will scramble across the bed, a better use of space in the greenhouse to grow them up supports. If you do this you will really need to support each individual melon and this film shows you a simple way to do this.
