Pumpkins and penny sweets.

Pumpkins can be fickle creatures at Hill Top, some years they grow like Topsy and threaten to take over the whole garden and other years they seem to just sit and sulk for weeks before reluctantly producing a few bowling ball sized fruits. This year hasn't been great, I only managed to produce two decent sized pumpkins, one of which was snaffled by Jess for the Wray Castle halloween shop display and another smaller one which I've left 'on display' in the garden too long and is slowly being eaten by slugs.

This years pumpkins - must try harder next year.

The pumpkins I grow at Hill Top are the French heirloom variety 'Rouge Vif d'Etampes which are yellowy orange 'cinderella' type and in a good year will produce 4 or 5 large fruits per plant. 
I usually sow the seeds in the greenhouse in May and plant the seedlings out in mid June but they can also be sown in late April directly in the soil. Either way it's a good idea to make a planting pocket by digging a hole about 30cm square and filling it with a mixture of compost or well-rotted manure and soil. Add some general purpose fertiliser too if you've got some. If you've grown plants in the greenhouse, make sure you harden them off before planting them out.
Once they're established, it's just a matter of feeding every couple of weeks with a high potash fertilizer once the fruits appear and making sure they have plenty of water. 
If you don't have a garden you can even grow pumpkins in a growbag.

Spooky spider's web!

The association between halloween and pumpkins and the rise of 'trick or treating' is, like Miley Cyrus, a recent (and some would say unwelcome) American import. When I was growing up in the 1960's only the really well-off kids had pumpkins, we had to make do with the more traditional hollowed out turnip (I'm not joking here - anyone under 40, ask your parents)! If you've ever tried hollowing out a turnip you can imagine the number of cuts and stab wounds which resulted from the combination of small children, sharp knives and rock hard root vegetables - never was the Blue Peter advice 'get a grown-up to help you' more appropriate!
Having hollowed out our turnips and bandaged our fingers, a string handle was attached, a candle placed inside and the turnip lid put on. This was invariably followed by the acrid smell of burning turnip as the flame from your Mum's 'power cut candle'  slowly cooked the turnip lid (tea lights hadn't been invented in the '60s kids).
The more entrepreneurial children would then set off around the estate stopping at houses and reciting the enchanting verse

"The sky is blue
 The grass is green
 Can you spare a penny for Halloween"

The 24p profit from an evening trudging round in the drizzle was spent the next day on Curly Wurlys, Black Jacks and white mice (again - under 40's- ask your parents) or sometimes a box of bangers to be let off well before bonfire night (don't do it kids, it's not big or clever).

Autumn colours

Anyway, I digress! Elsewhere in the garden the Autumn colours are in full swing. The Crimson Glory vine on the pub wall has been...er...glorious, as have the deciduous azaleas. The Eucryphia and the Enkianthus are just colouring up now but the Wisteria on the house is staying steadfastly green, probably kept warm by the warmth from the south facing wall.

Flower-wise, the Michaelmas daisies have given up and the soapwort is all but over. Rose 'Felicia' is still bravely flowering as are the Evening Primroses and the Pot Marigolds. My runner beans, still not killed off by frost, were blown over in the tail end of hurricane Gonzalo.

Glory-ous

Hill Top house closes on Sunday, although the garden and shop are open right through to Christmas eve, so with fewer visitors around, the hard work of cutting back the borders, lifting and dividing perennials and digging over the vegetable garden can begin. My fingers are crossed for a nice dry, frosty winter.

With all this talk of Halloween my musical link this week had to have a spooky theme so I could have gone for 'Walking With a Ghost' by The White Stripes or 'Ghost Train' by Elvis Costello or even the very obscure 'Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead by XTC but in the end I couldn't decide between the old school Halloween-ness of this or the rather tenuous Trick or Treatiness of this (skip the advert).

Happy Halloween and see you next time.

Words and pictures by Pete the Gardener

(Nothing but) flowers

It's been a good few weeks since I wrote my last blog post and in that time the garden at Hill Top has changed out of all recognition. It's gone from looking like this...

April 14th

...to this...

May 14th

It's a transformation that I've witnessed every year since 1988 and it still amazes me!

With the (slightly) warmer weather and an increase in day length the perennial plants almost explode with growth and even over a weekend the change is noticeable.
The aquilegias have been putting on a good show and both the white and blue wisterias have been as good as ever. 
One plant which always causes a stir at this time of year is Thalictrum aquilegifolium or Greater Meadow Rue. It has fantastic fluffy mauve flower heads and grows upto a metre tall.

The lilies are coming out too, the first one is always Lilium pyreniacum, just don't get that bright orange pollen on your cream chinos!

Unfortunately the burgeoning of nice flowery perennials is matched by a proliferation of nasty weeds and an almost unbelievable increase in the rate of grass growth which means it's a busy time for gardeners everywhere. Fortunately there isn't much grass to cut at Hill Top apart from a few bits in the garden and round the car park, oh, and the verges in the village which have somehow become my responsibility (why do I pay my council tax again)?

Speaking of village matters it was the Sawrey May Queen procession a couple of weeks ago and once again it fell to me to decorate the trailer which the children ride in from Near to Far Sawrey (I love it really).

The hawthorn blossom was at its peak so an early morning foray into the woods produced just enough to go round the trailer and a sprinkling of Rhododendron ponticum flowers from a friend's garden finished it off nicely.

That's about all for now, look out for a feature about Hill Top garden in the July edition of 'The English Garden' magazine, there's even a photo of yours truly (don't let that put you off though). And with all this talk of flowers my musical link this month was an easy choice, enjoy.

Words and pictures by Pete the Gardener

Why did the chickens cross the road...?

... to get to Hill Top of course! At least several chickens did this week.

I'm getting used to the unusual (if that makes any sense at all) in my job with the National Trust. This Tuesday was a classic with the call coming over the radio 'Car park to Jo, can you come down and help us catch some chickens please?' So off I went and found that the chickens who live opposite had decided to cross the road to visit us at Hill Top. Ken managed to catch a couple and return them, but they were doing a great job of entertaining our visitors and dodging cars! Normal service was resumed fairly swiftly with all chickens returned home safe and sound after their adventure.

One of Hill Top's more unusual visitors

There's always something new happening at Wray Castle, and this week has been no exception. Rose has been working with the Secret Windermere project to install an exhibition of sculptures made from the rubbish which was brought up from the lake. Your first thought might be that this sounds dirty and dreadful but it's exactly the opposite - it's fab! I loved it! A professional artist has worked with the materials and the local primary school to create all sort of creatures which could be swimming in Windermere. And it's amazing to see what some people have lost in the lake!





Come and have a look the next time you're in the area - the exhibition is on all summer through to September.


This is my favourite time of year at Hill Top, a time when I feel so lucky to spend my working days here in this beautiful place. It's no surprise to me at all that Beatrix fell in love with it and gained so much inspiration for her writing, her art and her conservation work. The garden always looks lovely, whatever time of year it is, but in my opinion, in late May to mid June it's at it's most colourful and best. So I've just been out to take a few photos of it to share with you. Hope you enjoy.


I love this purple wisteria which covers the roof of Pete the Gardener's shed. It's always out a bit later than the white wiseria and the smell is gorgeous




The white wisteria is so much better than last year, when it was very sparse



Although a bit past their best now, the azaleas have been lovely, despite being battered by the rain






And the veg garden is doing well too - especially the rhubarb

And finally, the path where Tom Kitten, Mittens and Moppet played, looking lush and lovely.

Hope you enjoyed that!

Jo

Petro Cuniculo?

They didn't do Latin at my school. I grew up in the industrial North-East and I guess there wasn't much call for it at British Steel or ICI. In any case, given the speed with which I dropped French I probably would have struggled with it. If I had been able to study Latin though, it would have come in very useful indeed in what I eventually chose as my career.

All living things; animals, plants, fungi and algae all have what is called a binomial or Latin name which consists of a genus and a species eg Homo sapiens (that's you and me), Rana temporaria (the common frog), Erinaceus europaeus (the hedgehog), Digitalis purpurea (foxglove), Balaenoptera musculus (blue whale) well, you get the idea.

The purpose of this binomial is to make it easy for scientists around the world to talk to each other without getting confused over common names and different languages (it also has the added bonus of making zoologists, botanists and certainly gardeners appear more intelligent than they really are). For example, in England what we call the bluebell is Hyacinthoides non-scripta, but in Scotland they call Campanula rotundifolia the bluebell which in England we call the Harebell, and in America and Australia the bluebell is something different again. Confused yet?


Bluebells (except for viewers in Scotland).

The other great thing about Latin names is that they often tell us a bit about the plant in question and its relations. For instance from the name Primula pulverulenta I know that the plant belongs to the primula genus which includes all primroses and that its leaves are coated with a creamy-white flour (technically known as farina), because pulverulentus means dusty in Latin.

Which brings me on to my 'Plant of the Month' the Wisteria. At Hill Top we have two of them, a white one on the house and a mauve-blue one on the gardener's shed and they are both coming into flower right now. Both of them are Wisteria sinensis but the white one is Wisteria sinensis 'Alba' (alba meaning white in Latin). The Wisteria part of the name tell us that it is in the same family as the other common wisteria, Wisteria floribunda (floribunda means free-flowering in Latin), and the sinensis bit means it comes from China (sinensis meaning Chinese).

Wisteria sinensis



The wisterias at Hill Top are more or less left to their own devices apart from cutting back the long growths in August and late winter and they thrive on our sunny (?) south-facing walls.

If you haven't got a suitable wall you can have complete control of your wisteria by growing it as a free-standing little tree in a pot. it's a labour of love but the results can be impressive (check out the internet for instructions), or cheat and buy one ready trained!

If your wisteria refuses to flower, there can be a number of reasons-
- not enough sunshine
-lack of feed (use a high potash fertilizer)
-incorrect pruning
-a non-grafted plant (might take thirty years to flower)
-not enough water
-too much water

If all else fails dig it out and go to the garden centre in May and buy one you can see flowering!

Oh, and my blog title this month? Peter Rabbit in Latin of course!

Words and picture by Pete the Gardener