Eimear Hutchinson: A reflection on the past growing season

I LOVE a bit of reflection, and as the summer draws to a close and the hectic months of gardening are almost behind me, it’s nice to look back on the learnings of the year.

We are so lucky to have the space to play around with and I’ve come to really enjoying the process of gardening, for me it is a great way to switch off but yet be productive, which is the modus operandi that suits me best.

I made a plan early in the year to be better prepared for spring next year so my order of bulbs from Farmer Gracey arrived just after the girls went back to school.I want to expand the colour I have early in the year because for me there is nothing as rewarding as seeing the pops of colour that herald the arrival of spring.

I have some daffodils and grape hyacinths already, so I bought tulips, narcissuses, crocus, anemones and alliums to add to the garden next year. These need to be planted before the end of the year so I feel very prepared, a feeling I don’t experience often!

This year, I tried my hand at propagating flowers - it’s a no brainer really in terms of cutting cost around the garden. For me, thus far, it has been a hit and miss enterprise.

The cuttings obviously require a bit of attention in terms of watering, attention I was not in a position to give much of this year between coming and going. There are some plants, like fushia, that you can propagate well at this time of year so those are on my to do list.

The two things I did manage to propagate this year were hydrangea and catmint. A friend gave me some cuttings off her hydrangea Annabelle and I managed to root five out of the six cuttings. I popped them in a pot and left them outside the door of the polytunnel where they were nicely sheltered. I kept them watered and after about two months (gardening is the long game!) they started to sprout. I have them planted out now so I’m excited to see what they will be like next year. They are an expensive plant to buy in the garden centre so I was particularly thrilled with that success.

Another job I have added to the rotation this year is saving seeds. I have never done this before and I have no idea if I will have any success with the seeds I am saving, but it’s worth a try, especially for the plants that I enjoy and know I will do again.

I have a small wildfower patch and I have saved various seeds from the flowers there, poppies, calendula and some others I don’t even know the name of. I also saved seeds from the honesty plant, snapdragon, lupin and sweetpea. It’s not going to save me hundreds of euro but I love the idea of keeping the garden circular and creating from within going forward.

Usually, I am a divil for buying plants and throwing them in wherever they will fit in the flower beds, with little regard for soil type, location or shade, but this year I have been very refined and bought only plants that I researched and felt would fit the various spaces.

I am trying to have the vast majority of plants in the garden perennial so that it requires a little less attention year on year. The only thing I really added to the garden this year were grasses which will add colour and volume to beds in the winter where other flowers have been cut back.

Of course, no article about the end of summer in the garden for me this year would be complete without some reflection on the polytunnel we built. Probably the most valuable lesson was learning what plants work best in there and which take up valuable real estate inside the tunnel but could be elsewhere, like strawberries and courgette. The strawberries were too densely planted and therefore I struggled to get enough air flow around the plants so most of the strawberries turned mouldy before we could get to them.

It was great to start the courgette plants in the polytunnel, but they do well enough outdoors in Ireland that I didn’t need a plant in the polytunnel taking up all the space that they do.

Next year, I will probably do more tomatoes because, honestly, they are the most rewarding plants to grow. They do require attention in terms of watering, feeding and pruning, but the amount of tomatoes you get from one plant is incredible. A punnet of tomatoes is relatively expensive to buy in the shops so it makes it a really worthwhile plant to grow if you like tomatoes.

I don’t have anything planted for the winter months in the polytunnel – I did a little research but time got away from me and that’s OK too. It might just become a very useful place for drying clothes for the time being!