Orto di Casa Cecconi

My first allotment, and then one thing leading to another…

L’orto di Casa Cecconi Plants Recipes Me & Kew One Year at Wisley

  • It’s Christmas time

    Christmas is approaching fast, so all the trainees have been invited to help with decorating the glasshouse, while receiving some induction into the process of growing display poinsettias (Euphorbia pulcherrima) and Chrisanthemum spp.

    Poinsettia Christmas tree

    It turns out Christmas time starts in March for the display flower grower: that is when one needs to put in an order of your chosen cultivars, before they run out! They are propagated in May, poinsettias, and they come in by the end of June as 2 in plugs that need potting up on a heated bench (under some fleece for a week or so to speed establishment). Pinching straight afterwards to 5-6 pairs of leaves helps the plant bush up, and a very strict regime of watering 3 times a week follows. Poinsettias are short day flowering plants that would normally start changing colours in September: too early for Christmas. To delay the process, during August and September they are exposed to night-break lighting (with energy saving bulbs) at 10 PM and 2 AM, so the bracts only start changing colour at the end of October. There is a video going in the glasshouse, that demonstrates the whole process.

    That’s how one gets such perfect looking plants for the Christmas tree, made of poinsettias on a special metal frame.

    Standard poinsettia towering above the rest

    At the end of the season, some of the poinsettias are saved for propagation, and some are grown on as standards. They go through a dormant season in which they do not like water much: it is an art to get the balance right so as to keep them alive!

    Christmas chrysants

    Chrisanthemums go through a very similar propagation process, starting in June when cuttings come in. This year the chosen cultivars are from the ‘Perfection’ collection, which is bred locally to Woking. Potted four per pot, they are grown to get a single flower per stem, so thinning is required: 5 times during the growing season!  P&D are always a problem in the enclosed environment that greenhouses are, but chrysants are a particular concern because, on top of whitefly they suffer from white rust. Also, they are subjected to growth regulation treatment to get uniform height and to stiffen the stems that must bear such heavy flowers: perfect displays demand the adoption of rather extreme measures…

    Anyway, we all helped decorate the various sections of the glasshouse, where kids activities for Christmas will be inspired by the Narnia world, and I specifically worked arranging the chrysants’ display.

    The team was impressed how the look and feel of the place changed by the time we finished, and we definitely all left in a Christmas spirit!

    Chrysants display taking shape

  • Post savers

    Have you ever noticed that when a post or pole rots it does so generally at soil level?

    Step 2
    Step 4
    Step 5
    Step 6

    Apparently, it is in the topsoil where soil organisms in the organic matter, moisture and air combine to cause the most damage. So someone invented “polesavers”, sheets of bitumen on plastic sleeves that can be applied to poles around soil level. That apparently doubles their lifespan, so we are increasingly using them in the department.

    Today we were taught how to apply one with the use of a blow torch. Very useful things blow torches, but rather scary, so first thing it’s risk assessment.

    Leather gloves, eye protection, a stable stand to keep the blow torch when not in use, a stable stand for the pole, that allows for rolling it. Working in an open environment with no flammables around, and fire estinguishers to hand.

    Then we where shown how to cut a piece of bitumen sleeves and heat them on the pole.

    1. Clean the pole from any soil. Try to go for smooth surfaces so the bitumen sticks more easily
    2. Cut a slice of bitumen sheet 
    3. Measure down to 6 feet/1.83 cm which is how tall we usually have our posts
    4. Apply a slice of the sleeve (must be big enough to overlap a little) around the expected soil level on the pole, some 15 cm above it, and let it hang around the post
    5. Heat one side until it wrinkles, which means it is adhering
    6. Move to the other side, heat it, and with leather gloves press the side edge on the pole
    7. Go back to the initial side and finish heathing the sleeve, rolling the post, until you reach the other edge
    8. Press the othes side edge so it sticks well
    9. Roll the pole while heating the top and bottom edges, and press them into place
    The finished posts

  • The forage garden

    Behind the Model Fruit Garden and on one’s way to the orchard, there’s an area that’s left wilder, with some tall trees and some brash, whose redevelopment has been undergoing for the last few years into a forage garden. Some edibles I find rather intriguing already grow in there: Arbutus unedo, Hyppophae rhamnoides, Lonicera caerulea, Aronia melanocarpa, a range of Rubus…

    One of the hollies that we removed

    … but the area still needs some improvement, and I am glad my colleague thought of me to work on removing some hollies (Ilex aquifolium) and sloes (Prunus spinosa), as I have missed brash clearing from my days as a volunteer with the National Trust on Ashridge Estate.

    Holly layering itself

    It was hard work, and I really enjoyed the sawing away, and the digging out of stumps as we removed two hollies (they do layer themselves under leaf litter, as I learnt!),
    three sloes and a hazel stump.

    Sloes halfway through the clearing Hazel stump

    There was one more reason why I was particularly keen to work on holly at this particular time of the year: Christmas wreaths. Since my days at school when we were thought by our German teacher how to make them, I have enjoyed this festive activity.

    One of the wreaths at home

    So I asked permission to keep some of the branches, and, armed with those metal hangers they give you in drycleaners (which are easily turned into a round frame on which to work), some colourful ties and baubles, I have since made two for home, one for my student accomodation and one for the office.

    While we were busy hacking away, we received an unexpected visit from a colleague with a surprise: he had found a flatworm, and he know I might be interested to see one.

    There are two species of flatworm that are not natives of the UK: the New Zealand flatworm (Arthurdendyus triangulatus), and the Australian flatworm (Australoplana sanguinea) and it is an offence under Section 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to release any of those in the wild once they have been found. It is not exceedingly good news to find these two flatworms anyway, because they feed on earthworms, one of the soil’s best aerators.

    We identified our find as the Australian ‘offender’ so we boxed it up for sending to our P&D lab for further action. It is important not to touch the flatworms as their mucus can be irritating, so here it is in its full glory on my glove (and then again in its box), for anyone that might be interested to see one.

    Australian flatworm (Australoplana sanguinea)

    Australian flatworm (Australoplana sanguinea)

  • Divided about rhubarb

    RHS Garden Wisley holds the National Collection of Rhubarb and today we were taught how to divide and replant crowns.

    Autumn is best, because if you plant rhubarb in the spring, you are then required to keep watering the new plant to help its establishment.

    Adding manure to the hole

    The first step in the process is to dig a suitable hole and fork into the bottom a good amount of manure, as rhubarb is a rather hungry crop. As rhubarb likes best a 6.7 pH, spent mushroom compost (manure + lime to take the acidity) is ideal.

    Then one has to decide whether to lift a crown or only slice a portion off: that depends on the size of the crown itself. A large crown will tend to die and produce weaker buds in the centre, so you can slice an external portion, including one or more vigourous buds, without lifting the whole lot. But a smaller crown needs lifting before dividing – that might also be the case if you have to check for pests in between the roots, i.e. weevil grubs.

    Clean the crown of any broken roots

    The crown is best divided to some 20 cm, with more than one good bud, so that the new plant does not take too long to establish to a good size. Once you have divided it to the right size, you need to clean the fleshy roots (in autumn all of the fine roots will have died down and you are only left with the storage roots) to be sure you take away any broken bits. In fact, those will rot in the ground and may affect the health of the new plant. If you are lifting a crown to split it, it might be worth to save any spare buds and pot them up as a spare plant. But never leave it the pot more than one year, as rhubarb roots like to spread.

    Give the plant a good shake
    Firm  the soil

    Rhubarb does not like to sit in water, hence replanting needs to be done so that the buds are above ground. To achieve that successfully, you need to plant in the new hole, then shake the plants inside it to fill any air pokets, then firm the soil without burying the buds.

    Job done! The next thing is to mulch the soil just as they break bud in the spring, to keep moisture in the soil. That’s a delicate job: too early and you trap cold in the soil, too late and the leaves coming out will now allow you to mulch to the ideal distance from the buds: 15 cm or so, so you won’t retain enough moisture where it is needed.

    But down to my rhubarb meditations.

    Rhubarb’s fleshy roots

    I love rhubarb on my plot at home. A plant that was originally cropped for its roots: for medicinal purposes and to make a yellow die, it is now used as a commercial crop in the UK for its leaves’ petioles (the leaves are rich in oxalic acid and therefore toxic, so they are discarded straight after picking). I like them best made into jam with lemon juice, or in a rhubarb cheesecake. When rhubarb bolts, the flower scapes are very architectural, and rather beautiful.

    So I should be happy that in the Cottage Garden there are several rhubarb plants, 7 or so, in two different places. However, they take up a lot of space, as their leaves can grow to 1 m (which is also the ideal planting space). How to get them to fit into the new design nicely?

    Should they be together in one place, and would it look good enough, a large patch of rhubarb, in the summer and as it gradually dies back in the autumn? Should I interplant with some bulbs, for spring colour while the plants are still dormant? Or if I scatter them in the area, would that look better?

    I am still divided about it.

  • Plans taking shape!

    Another great day’s work in the Cottage Garden as I got our intern and one trainee to help too.

    My proposal for a new path was accepted, so I marked it out with bamboo canes and string and we dug in (literally) first thing in the morning. By teabreak time, we had already finished the outline. We had then to spread the extra soil, which was very useful to raise the ground level where a tree had been planted too high, and to fill in some dips here and there.

    Some plants were in the way of the path, namely a couple of Agapanthus and 3 of the 4 blackcurrant (Ribes nigrum) shrubs in the area, so we had to move them. It is not ideal time to move Agapanthus as they are tender perennials and they’d rather be left alone over winter and only moved in spring, but we decided to go ahead anyway as the plants, should they die, are easily replaced – that might not always be the case, hence careful early planning might be needed. Sometimes trees are root-pruned one year in advance of moving them after a year, so that they have enough time to put up new growth of fine roots (which will enable better establishment) before the operation takes place.

    Ribes nigrum flowers

    It was good enough time to move the blackcurrants, though, even if the season has been exceptionally mild and they are not fully dormant yet. I love blackcurrants with their unassuming but prettiest of flowers, delicious and nutritious berries and, most of all, fragrant foliage that releases on the lightest brushing against the plants. Because of that, we have now replanted them alongside the paths, so that visitors can enjoy them close-up.

    Divided Sedum crown
    Sprawling, low to the ground Sedum on the left,
    on the right, Sedum that received the Chelsea chop

    Three people can work rather fast together, so we also managed to prune back the Sedum that was too sprawling: my colleague last year had experimented giving some plants a Chelsea chop, which had a rather marked impact on the affected plants, which have remained compact and tidy. The ones that were used for comparison, however, needed trimming back – you can see why in the picture on the rightm taken earlier in the month. We then lifted and divided them, ready for next year, when I want to interplant them with a vegetable crop, which I’m not going to reveal now…

    After a good tidy up, we could take some pictures of the result: I loved it and was so thankful to my colleagues that made it possible so quickly.

    View from the main path: before
    View from the main path: after
    View from the inside: before
    View from the inside: towards the end

     

    As I had taken a panorama picture from the same spot on the main path one month and a half ago, I can now make a comparison of the wider view. There is now closer access to the blackberries, the chuckleberries (a cross of redcurrant, gooseberry and jostaberry ), the two Malus that flank the path on one side and the Asimina triloba (or pawpaw, a rather interesting tree too) on the other.

    Panorama view from the main path: 3 Oct

    Panorama view from the main path: 21 Nov

  • Fig dressing

    The preparations for winter continue, and today it was the Model Fruit Garden fan-trained fig’s turn to be put to sleep.

    The fig, ready to go to bed

    The first step was pruning the tree, untying it from the frame.

    Syconium inflorescence, with inward looking florets and fruits

    Figs (an inflorescence called syconium giving origin to a multiple, accessory fruit) form in the leaf
    axils at the tip of new branches, so it is necessary constantly to generate new material through replacement pruning.

    Cutting back to stubs

    This consists in taking back some of the older branches to stubs – the only case (together with Dutch
    cuts) where leaving snags after pruning is not frowned upon for plant’s health reasons. To preserve the shape of the fan, and keep branches to an appropriate distance of some 10 cm, one also has to cut some branches back to their origin, but one has to make sure to preserve enough branch tips to get fruiting the following summer.

    The pruning regime for trained figs also consisted of pinching back new shoots to 5 leaves before the end of June, so they produce shorter sideshoots, that have time to ripen before the frosts.

    The fig is planted in a concrete pipe section to restrict growth and improve fruiting (one could use concrete slabs, as I do at home), but roots have a habit to run out on the surface and away, so we did some root pruning too to bring them back. As figs layer quite easily, the lowest branches also needed pulling outof the ground and pruning back where they had rooted.

    The pruned fig

    Wood turning mature (still part green)

    Figs are hardy plants, when the wood is completely mature, but in the UK it is best to give them protection so as not to risk losing branch tips that are still not completely ripe.

    So the next step was to cover the tree with bracken, a material that does not soak in water, so helps keep the plant dry as well as warm – it comes with a minor health risk, though, as bracken spores (relased mostly on hot dry days in late summer) may be carcinogenic if inhaled, so one might want to wear a face mask if doing this often.

    We train our fig against a screen, so we put bracken between the tree and the frame, and then secured some netting along the whole widtht and height in front of the tree and stuffed bracken in between there too.

    There is a best way to stuff bracken by pulling leaflets from the stems (that will be discarded), bunching them up all in the same direction (fronds down) and using them like that, nice and tidy.  The reason is so that you can take it out without too much effort in the spring… if you get to take it out, that is! This year we could not do it in spring because a robin nested cosily into it, and we had to wait for the fledglings to leave the nest.

    Steps in the covering of the fig
    After one trailer full of bracken, we just needed a bit more for the front
    Fig in pots under cover

    To complete our education on figs, we were taken round to the fig collection we have in pots under
    cover in the greenhouse: they need free draining compost but regular watering and feeding, because in their natural dry habitat they spread far and wide to look for their nutrients.

    There is plenty of information online to grow figs both outdoors and in pots:

    RHS fig plant profile
    Grow your own figs

    I am fascinated by stories, and the one that caught my attention most today was one about there being volunteer figs around the country, outside bigger towns, on riverbanks, dating back to Victorian England. Apparently, dried figs were a popular festive food and they came seeded – the seed ended up in the sewers and were discharged in the rivers, where they germinated in the warmer microclimate.

    Pollination and seed formation in figs is a very complex thing, for one the flower are enclosed in the syconium, so they are not easily accessed. But tiny – 1mm – wasps have co-evolved with the plant in its natural environment to enter through the fig’s ostiole (the opening opposite the peduncle) and pollinate it while using the syconium as a breeding pod. That’s amazing and if you want to read more about it I found some great sources.

    Seeds?

    But what I have not been able to check out is the statement that only figs from their native environments contain (viable) seeds because there are no suitable wasps in the UK.

    I sliced open one of the figs we removed from the tree while working on it, and I can see what look like seeds. Are they?

    Some of the fig cultivars we grow in the UK are parthenocarpic: does that mean they produce no seed or unviable seed?

    I could not find a precise answer. If anyone knows and wants to put me out of my misery… 🙂

  • Digging

    Digging. An activity I have traditionally quite enjoyed for the pleasure of physical exercise and that I have regularly undertaken on my plot, which is ridden with perennial weeds (couch grass, bindweed, creeping buttercup). It is also an activity I started to question when studying soil for my level 3 exams, the reason being it disrupts earthworms tunnels (which I gather they dislike) as well as the habitat of the rest of the microbiota, severing those all important micorrhyzae.

    So I’m still undecided what is best: digging that organic matter into the soil (some say deep down through double digging so as to make the soil more porous and make life easier for roots, especially on heavy soils, like my plot’s is) or layering it on the top, suppressing weeds and leaving worms and biota to do their thing, as it would normally happen in nature, with fallen leaves and other organic debris (as deep roots are mainly for stability awhile shallow roots get most nutrients)?

    Vegetable plots are rather artificial environments anyway, the soil is compacted and weeds (especially ruderals) abound of bare ground, so digging has traditionally been recommended to bury the weeds and aerate the soil while breaking any pans.

    Correct size of spade

    First of all, after making sure one is safe and properly equipped (especially boots), one has to find a spade adequate to one’s own height, roughly to the top of one’s hip. I understood why I had only seed long handled spade in Italy: outside the UK, a spade is not generally a digging tool. In Italy they use a tool called “zappa“, which is apparently harder to work as you use it as a pickaxe then twist it with the soil in.

    Step one: fill a barrow

    Then one needs a barrow, where they will store the first row
    of digging, which needs to be a spit dip and a spade width’s wide.

    Any matter that needs diggin in should be spread before starting usually to the rate of one barrow every 2 sqm (but never mix manure and lime because they release ammonia, which is a polluting gas and which takes away all the nitrogen; you need at least three weeks between one and the other).

    The next step is to find how much soil you can comfortably lift, and dig linear strips, every spadeful roughly the same amaount of soil, filling with it the trench ahead of one (the first one being that which went into the barrow). And so on until the end of the area that needs digging, finishing by filling the last remaining strip with soil from the barrow.

    A perfectly done, and a less skilfully dug bed side by side

    I and my fellow trainees had a go. It was really clear that my technique fell short of the perfection our teacher possessed: in fact, his finished bed was even, without dips and bumps, while mine was rather rough, because I could not calibrate the amount of soil I lifted evenly enough. That will require some raking before sowing… and I will need more practice! That is why I’m here, after all.

    Wisley has rather a sandy soil, which can be dug throughout the winter, from October and through to March. Heavy soil are best dug earlier on, up until November, so that rain and frost break up any lumps. But I also find bare ground over winter a heresy myself: you should see how all the topsoil is washed away on my plot, every year in the winter, leaving behind a sea of white stones, the chalk and flint on the surface. It is quite a disconcerting sight…

    We were also instructed that some crops like carrots dislike recently disturbed soils, so planning in advance is certainly a takeaway for me.

    About earthworms, I found this very interesting blog post

About Me

M.Paola M.Paola, that’s me

I got my first allotment in the UK in 2007 and started growing my own food. Learning as I went along was not enough, so I studied horticulture. Faced with the horticultural warfare, I became a conscientious objector: I use no chemicals and support organic principles and regulations.

Brexit gave me a new life in the Netherlands, three new plots by a nature reserve and an MSc in sustainable food systems.

I write in my personal capacity and, as a language perfectionist and a non native speaker, I keep reviewing my entries’ text for clarity.

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