Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 604
Autumn Gardening
Hello Everyone
Gardening has been called the English yoga.
Well, it certainly is very good for you. All that bending and twisting and stretching is doing exercise without even thinking about it. You are focussing on what you want to get done and before you know it, hours have passed.
Being with nature calms you – and energizes you too.
And if you are lucky, after all your efforts you have a beautiful oasis of calm to sit in, and maybe some fresh produce to eat too.
So all in all, gardening is very good for your feeling of well-being.
Gardening is for all ages; it is for people with large estates and tiny balconies.
Lots of people put their gardens ‘to bed’ for the winter because they don’t want to spend too much time out in the cold weather.
But you don’t have to give up gardening through the winter at all, if you don’t want to.
Lots of plants can be left in the borders to create interest.
Grasses and quaking oats, seed heads from plants like allium and rudbeckia can look beautiful in the frost and low, winter light.
Wildlife appreciates a garden being left not too tidy too. lnsects find crevices to hide away in, and birds can eat seeds and berries.
Around this time of year, if you are feeding your plants, switch from using a feed high in nitrogen to one high in potassium. Something like tomato fertilizer will do. This will fortify (strengthen) their leaves against the cold and help them survive better through the winter months.
lt is a good time of year to take cuttings because a lot of new vigorous growth from this summer has ripened and this means it will dry out and die back much more slowly – so this gives your cuttings a chance to develop roots quite quickly.
Choose any plant you think may not make it through the winter. Some of your cuttings may not take, but at least you will have tried. lf your efforts work, you will have more plants than ever next year.
Choose any shoot that does not have a flower or flower bud on it and always cut with sharp tools because you want to cut not crush your plant material. You may need an adult’s help with this.
Collect the cuttings in a plastic bag to stop them drying out and get them into a pot of compost as quickly as possible.
Of course, take nothing without permission.
Or you could buy some end of season plants in a sale and try increasing your stock by making many plants from one.
Your cuttings should be about 10cm/4 inches long. Take off the lower leaves so you just have four small ones at the top.
Your cuttings will only need oxygen and water to root. They will not need feeding yet. Perlite is a good medium to give you the conditions you need, or you could use cork.
Use a dibber like an old biro to make a hole, and tuck the bottom half of the cutting gently into the compost. You can put several cuttings into one pot around the edges – for some reason cuttings seem to root better when they are next to the sides of the pots.
Water the pots well and don’t let them dry out completely. This means that you will have to nurture your new plants all through the winter. You can mist them with a spray bottle – but be careful what else you are soaking with the spray! Never spray near electrical things.
Keep the plants in a cold frame or greenhouse so that the frosts can’t attack them.
You will know if you have been successful, and your cuttings have rooted if you see new shoots growing at the top – that will not happen until new roots have grown.
The cuttings will need to be pricked out in March. That means they will need to be transferred into a pot of their own. Then they can be put out in the garden after the last frosts of winter – which is roughly at the end of May.
You can also be planting out plants this time of year; plants that will produce flowers in spring.
You could choose to plant common primrose that like living under trees because they are a woodland plant or cowslips that like to grow in open grassland with good drainage and lots of sunshine. So which kind of garden have you got? ls it shady or sunny?
You can sow hardy annuals ready for next spring. They will be sturdy plants by the time next growing season begins.
Sprinkle your seeds evenly over a seed tray full of seed compost and keep them warm and moist.
lf not every seed germinates, and you end up with plants of different heights, don’t worry, you have done nothing wrong. Uneven germination can happen to the best of gardeners.
When your little plants are four to six weeks old, they will be about 7cm/3 inches tall, and they will need to be pricked out so that they have more room to grow. Handle them by a large leaf not the stem in case you accidently break what you hold. They will survive leaf damage, but not stem crush!
Take as much of the root system as possible as you ease it out of the compost. Put each plant into an individual pot and store them in a cold frame. They will need watering from time to time because the rain will not get into the cold frame.
You can put your plants into plug trays or individual pots and plant them out in the spring when the ground is soft enough to dig.
Another important job to do at this time of year is to collect in all of your harvests. Apples can be collected right to the end of October. You know when they are ripe to pick when they just lift off the branch in your hand without any tugging.
lt is also a good idea to do some weeding and put a coat of mulch on the soil like a warm cover for the winter.
You can put up your bird feeders again.
You can continue to grow herbs on your window sills.
And lastly, think about what colour you would like to put into the garden for over the winter.
Would you like to plant up a cheerful pot or colourful flowers to put by the front door to see every time you get home from school?
Or maybe you have a window box that needs to be cleared of summer bedding plants and you are thinking of a more Christmassy theme with dark green evergreen plants and red berries and maybe even the odd ornament and pinecone?
You can choose to plant sedums, winter flowering pansies, cyclamen, rosemary, ivy, miniature evergreen trees and winterberry.
lf you can’t do any of these things because you don’t have a garden, there are plenty of lovely house plants that you can keep over the winter instead.
Bye bye everyone – don’t forget to subscribe to my blog!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bill: lf there were no herbs in the world, the buses couldn’t run on thyme.
Bob: That is a very sage comment Bill.
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
Jerusalem cherry is a popular winter house plant
(But is toxic to pets)
Primrose
Cowslip
Apples can be stored for months
Pansies
Sedums grow all year
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
This week, Captain Jack and I were summoned to Auntie Alice’s garden to help her with some jobs that needed doing.
The children had gone back to school, and she wanted the garden tidied up so that she could push the lawnmower around more easily.
Actually, she got me to push the lawnmower round in the end.
Anyway, we put away the hammocks and archery set.
Then we put the trampoline away in the shed.
Nobody wants a trampoline blowing around in a winter storm causing havoc!
Did you know that grown-ups have trampolines too sometimes?
They call them rebounders.
Funnily enough, although grown-ups are bigger than children, their trampolines are smaller than those that children play on.
They use them for what they call high intensity interval training – HIIT for short.
They often have a small session on them first thing in the morning before they fill their tummies with breakfast.
They don’t jump very high on them, so they can have them indoors as well as outdoors – because they are unlikely to hit their head on the ceiling.
Bouncing up and down on a rebounder gets the blood moving round and this is good for your brain, eyes, lungs – and every part of your body really.
Then we all picked some apples – and collected up a lot of windfalls too.
Any apples that were really bruised or beginning to rot, we left for the birds to eat, but there were still a lot of apples to take to the kitchen – and there will be more to come as the autumn progresses.
We all sat round the kitchen table to chat while we worked.
We wrapped the best apples to go into store.
We cut the bruised bits off some apples (those bits got wrapped up in newspaper and were taken out to the compost heap) and all the good bits were cut into pieces and piled up in bowls to be juiced.
Captain Jack did that job, and the juice was put into large milk containers that Auntie Alice had been saving up especially.
Most of the juice was going to be put away in the freezer to be used over the winter one bottle at a time. Every bottle will taste a little different because different types of apples were mixed up together in different proportions.
You cannot fill the container up to the top. This is because when the liquid freezes, it will expand, and so it needs a gap at the top to expand into.
We had quite a fast production line going so that the apples were juiced and bottled very soon after they had been cut up.
The garden looks a lot tidier now.
It is much easier to work outside before the cold weather hits.
It always pays to think ahead.
*********************
*********************
Quick Quiz
Do you know what these words and phrases mean?
- humus
- a pan
- a bean trench
- crop rotation
- seasonal vegetables
- companion planting
- green waste
- beneficial insects
- leaf mould
- a pergola
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO MAKE A LARGE TOTE BAG FOR A 12” DOLL
This bag matches the sweater on Blog Post 594.
BACK AND FRONT (KNIT TWO)
Using 4mm knitting needles and dk yarn cast on 17 stitches
Knit 12 rows of stocking stitch
Knit 2 rows of moss stitch – as follows:
Slip 1 (knit 1, purl 1) repeat the last 2 stitches to the end of the row
Repeat the last row
Knit 2 rows of garter stitch
Cast off
Crochet 30 chains into a length of yarn to make a shoulder strap
TO MAKE UP
Sew a tiny bow onto the front of the bag
Using over-sew stitching and with right sides together sew along the bottom and sides
Fasten the strap into the two top corners
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- humus – the top layer of soil that holds water
- a hardpan – a hard lump of soil underground that water cannot penetrate and plants can’t get their roots into very well
- a bean trench – a deep trench lined with water retaining material like newspaper
- crop rotation – putting different types of vegetables in a piece of land each year
- seasonal vegetables – vegetables that are ready to pick at a particular time of year
- companion planting – plants that help other plants to flourish
- green waste – garden waste like grass clippings
- beneficial insects – insects that help gardeners like pollinating flowers
- leaf mould – decaying leaves
- a pergola – a structure like a roof that you can grow plants up
