Rescue plants

I'm a bit of a sale-shelf addict. I can't seem to resist the challenge of revitalising Pittosporums or flopped Buddlejas and so I have been lurking around the bargain plant bins again. Most garden centres and many nurseries have them: shelves of the wilted, the straggly and the frankly half-dead, knocked down to rock bottom prices, 50p here, a pound or two there. My local Homebase sometimes lets you take plants away for free if they think they can't charge anything at all.

There are some great bargains to be had here. Often the plants are just dried out from lack of water and will revive after a good soak. Others have lost their shape and grown straggly, but misshapen plants are welcome: a severe prune and then some TLC will usually see new shoots growing. Reduced price plants have often finished flowering for the season so once you have nursed them back to health you will need to keep them going until next year, but then they will frequently come back as good as new.

Having accumulated a collection of sale item plants that threatened to take over the garden, I had to start planting them out.. Those that haven't found an obvious home in an existing bed have gone into the dedicated rescue plant border: a 7m x 1m strip that is still very much a work in progress and which is being filled, bit by bit, by my bargain basement plants.

I have cheated a little bit by including not just cut-price specimens, but freebies: there's a fig tree at the far end which is a cutting from the mature tree in the garden, and the globe artichoke plants are offshoots from the older plants on the allotment. So far, though, I reckon the bed has cost around a tenner to plant up.

Buddleja are a staple of the garden centre sale shelves, and a couple of years ago I started collecting up Buddleja specimens, preferably with flowers in hot pink, crimson, or deep, deep purple, indigo and also white ... anything, in fact, except railway cutting mauve. This year I have had enough to plant up an informal Buddleja hedge, which should come back year after year and all, again, for around £10 in total.

I have become a bit more discerning over the years though: I used to scoop up the entire contents of the sale rail into my arms as though I was rescuing them from the Child Catcher. Now I am more discriminating about which plants make it into the trolley.

Firstly, I buy nothing that is actually dead. Some sign of life is required. Don't buy anything that is diseased: you don't want to bring spider mite, mildew, mealy bug or whatever into your garden and spread it around your plants. It is worth checking the rootball, if you can, to make sure a) the plant has enough in the way of root to revive and b) that there aren't any weevils or other nasties lurking in the soil.

I also don't buy bedding plants - towards the end of the season, what's the point? Or lavender, these days, since you can buy really good-sized plug plants at the beginning of the season for around £1 a plant. And you can take cuttings very easily in June. It feels a bit like a loss, though, because there is always lavender on the reduced price shelf.

No lavender - unless it's just 50p a plant, of course

Finally, it has to feel like a bargain. And you have to accept that some of the plants won't survive long-term and that they really were at death's door and not even worth the 50p asking price.

  

The joy of allotment flowers

Flowers are a joyful addition to the allotment, not just because they are easy on the eye, but also for the sheer pleasure of watching  bees and hoverflies dig deep for their nectar. The satisfaction of seeing bees heavy with pollen. The cosmos I plant in and around the globe artichokes and then forget about until I see them standing tall and colourful and dancing manically in the breeze. The sweet peas I plant everywhere because their colour and fragrance makes weeding nearby a pleasure. The poppies that burst through the wilderness at the top of the plot that I vow every year I will clear. The daffodils and the bluebells that need no care, no fussing over, but come up year after year under the plum tree and tell everyone who passes by that spring is here.

Once this year’s shallots were harvested in early July, I had an entire raised bed left vacant without a plan for filling it. And since nature abhors a vacuum, you can be sure the weeds were queueing up for the chance to settle in there. In something like desperation, I planted out a few spare chilli seedlings and, to fill the gaps, transplanted some nasturtium seedlings that didn’t make it into the vertical garden, and then flung in some eschscholzia which I sowed – way out of date, but hey, if they come up, they come up – in June and never really expected to come through.

Thanks to some lovely warm days in the last month, this bed is now in full bloom in mid-October – and as a bonus the chillies are fruiting like mad – which is hugely comforting as many of the other beds are coming to an end and waiting to be dug over. The bed has also sprung a self-sown buddleja, which I will transplant to somewhere more suitable, and the aubergine seedling is struggling out in the exposed open ground, but everything else is loving the warmed soil, autumn sunshine and increased rainfall.

I think there’s always a place on the allotment for flowers. Not least because so many are edible and can count as produce: chives, nasturtiums, violas, bergamot, for example. Then there are those we grow as companion plants: I have chives – way more than I would ever snip into a potato salad – and Calendula, to keep away a number of pests. I’ve also raised Tagetes in the polytunnel (Homebase was selling those polystyrene boxes at £1.50 for nine plants in mid-season for some reason) and we’ve had no white fly at all, although it’s possible we might not have had them this year in any case.

I have an area of about 3-4 poles to clear this winter and I’ve already decided that flowers will be a central part of this bit of the plot. There will be a buddleja hedge of many colours: deep blue, crimson, cerise, and white – everything except railway-embankment mauve, really. It’s a sunny spot so there will be sunflowers and more poppies and achillea and cornflowers, all designed to bring in the beneficial insects. Without the pollinators, the fruit and vegetables will be left high and dry and so really the flowers should come first.