Sandgate Community Garden Team Diary Entry for 13th October: A spectacular show of colour.
There was no sitting about enjoying the sunshine this week, although there were plenty of opportunities, just not when it was our formal gardening sessions on a Wednesday and Saturday morning. Unfortunately we had to cancel our session on Saturday because it just rained all morning even though the weather apps kept promising it would brighten up any time soon.
The clear night skies gave the chance for many of us to see the Northern Lights again this week and there have been many photographs of the locality on social media bathed in a spectacular show of colour for the past couple of nights. Some people pay a small fortune to travel northwards to catch the Northern Lights, and here they were in our own backyard!
We did manage to start the job of laying down more wood chip paths, and continued the work of clearing some of the finished summer crops such as the dwarf beans and summer squashes. However we still have plenty of ground work to be getting on with and it will be keeping us busy for a few weeks yet.
The few strawberry plants we left under the soft fruit shrubs have had a great time spreading out and invading other parts of the plot, so their removal was started, although it will take some time to take out the lot.
The purple sprouting broccoli has been slowly growing under the netting but we noticed that they were starting to look a bit chewed to say the least and on inspection it was clear the netting was protecting vast quantities of cabbage white caterpillars from being picked off by any predators, and so it was our job to lift the netting and remove as many as we could to be relocated to the sacrificial nasturtiums where they could continue to develop.
The autumnal days have brought out the spiders in our houses and gardens as this is the mating season when the males in particular will go on the search for a mate before they die. Female spiders, usually larger, can live longer, and the photo below is of a particularly huge garden specimen which has been hanging about making a massive new web every day suspended between a fence post and a fruit tree for about a week now. As much as such a beautiful creature can be admired for the patterns both on her body and those she creates with her web, it would indeed be terrifying to be that much smaller and caught up in the sticky trap – what a way to go!
What’s next?
- Continue laying wood chip paths
- Put fresh compost in the top of the potted plants
- Put down fresh compost on the cleared beds
- Clear the rest of the strawberries
This weeks update from the Sandgate Community Garden Diary.