Toby Buckland

Toby's Blog - Wildlife, weather and what an autumn!

It's been an autumn that just keeps on giving. I thought I'd be wrapping up tender plants and battening down the greenhouse by now, after what happened last winter. But no! I'm still picking fresh toms and potted strawberries from the polytunnel while the Musa basjoo and Echiums are still growing like they think it's September.

Echium pininana is a plant that does well (or at least did before last year) in Southern sheltered gardens. I have also seen it flowering as far north as Cumbria. The key is to get it through the first winter and then it will produce the floral equivalent of a Cathedral spire - a 12ft inflorescence smothered in blue stars that bees love. Mine are planted in front of the Victorian greenhouses, where they jostle with dahlias and grasses, and where - fingers crossed - they will thrive in the reflected heat of the glass. In summer, it will give something back too - luxuriating in the sun-baked southerly aspect and well-drained soil of the raised bed and providing a little shade to the plants inside.

If and when it gets cold, I'm going to give my echium the bracken treatment. This worked well for the outdoor bananas last year. I put a ring of five bamboo canes around the plant, then loosely pile bracken in around the stem and over the central crown, allowing the leaves to be free to photosynethesise. This should be enough to shed the frost from the crown and stop the stem from freezing.

Being my first year on the site, I have been amazed by the amount of wildlife - there's a bat roosting in the greenhouse, jays burying acorns, and this week even though it's December, flocks of red admiral butterflies were feeding on the nettles at the bottom of the paddock. Apparently a single jay can plant 5000 acorns in an autumn. Shame we're not an oak-tree nursery - I wonder if they can be trained to handle bare roots? There are wrens and robins picking off the grubs in the polytunnel and this week the redwings returned from Scandinavia and started gobbling up the holly berries. I've come across a couple of newts too - they like the moisture between the plant trays and the weed matting, and handily eat slugs and grubs.

If you're outside on a summer night and you suspect there is a bat about, you can get it to come in close by flicking up little stones into the air. The bats will swoop down close overhead in pursuit of what they think is a large bug, so you get a better look at them.

I know some areas have already had bad weather, but we've had only rain and drizzle and this has meant some of the paths have been badly turned over to mush, so if you can buy a bale of straw it's always handy to stop your boots slipping and protect the ground - ideal for muddy allotments. And on those days when the sun does come through, the scent of straw is unmistakably summery.