October is the month for clearing up in the garden and almost overnight you find sunsets at 6 pm and then of course the clocks go back and you don’t feel rather sinful to be hunkered down in front of the TV at 6 pm !
October is also the best time for planting new spring flowering bulbs although you can still get them in the ground safely in November I prefer if possible to do it in October and at this stage with a mature garden I really only plant two types of spring bulbs , a miniature daffodil called Tete a Tete and a white crocus Jeanne D’Darc .
Colour in the Garden in October
I only use miniature daffodils now for the past few years as they flower early in February when you need a bit of a lift in the garden plus they stand up to the wind and although you can get hundreds of different type of crocus in all colours I prefer the single pure white colour that Jeanne D’Arc gives in early February … it doesn’t flower for long and can sulk a bit on dark days where the petals won’t open but when the sun shines Jeanne D’Arc positively beams and lifts the heart !
I wrote last month about the new patio in the front garden and how I had sourced the pots for the design from other parts of the garden . I select pots first for their size , colour and design and then select the plants that go into them depending on their place in the garden and whether they are in sun or shade .
Good unusual pots are hard to source and we are lucky in Clonmel with the Clonmel Garden Centre where Chris is also a pot aficionado and basically if you see a good pot buy it even if for the moment you don’t have a spot for it and over the years I have bought several pots on that basis and put them in places I knew were always going to be temporary until the right space came about .
Over the years Chris has on a yearly basis ordered some real knock outs and my favourite has always been these Greek amphora style blue pots which are stunning .
Like books pots need to be collected and like books you never acquire a collection overnight or from the one source and a collection of pots is built up slowly where you can find them and we always check odd corners of garden centres for that unique pot which are quite often on sale as they are either one off or quirky and are unloved until we come across them and I remember once in Clonmel Garden Centre in their walled garden area not open to the public I saw a terracotta Chinese lantern with a few chips off it obviously parked in an out of the way corner … a few words with Chris and it was ours and here it is now ten years later pride of place in the new patio area .
Pots are like life partners … when a good one comes along … grab it !!
You would think that this garden of all gardens being so wet would not need more gunneras however I saw these manicata variety gunerras for sale at Clonmel Garden Centre last month and couldn’t resist !
Definitely one of my favourite plants that I haven’t seen for sale for a long time , more than ten years in fact … Susan at the garden centre explained that this was because gunnera tinctoria is hugely invasive and is banned whereas the variety manicata is also huge but not invasive but because of the bad rap both vanished from the garden centres , case of throwing the baby out with the bath water !
I propage our gunerras every November by cutting chunks off mature clumps but it takes two or three years for these off shoots to thrive so it is great to be able to buy established plants that will take off immediately their first year in the ground .
I often engage in exchanges on Face Book that catch my attention usually in reply to some anti Israel posts and sometimes on the gardening forums about the use of round up against weeds just to annoy the tree hugger brigades or about the use of slugtox to annoy the keyboard eco warriors who only it seems buy hostas for the slug to eat … and sometimes out of nostalgia for my childhood like this one about my Mother , Anna , who was my protector and guardian angel when I was little and who was always MAM to me .
“ My Mother grew the best rhubarb in our back garden and her secret was to clean out the coal fire every morning and throw the cinders on the rhubarb throughout the winter.”
Kris Kristofferson
Kris Kristofferson passed away in October , only a passable singer but the best song writer that ever came out of Nashville and I well remember the first time I heard Me and Bobby McGee on the car radio in 1970 driving from Waterford to New Ross and who could forget the chorus Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose or the best heartbreak song ever in Loving her was easier than anything I could ever do again . I have always felt Kris never surpassed his first album in 1970 which had Sunday morning coming down , Me and Bobby McGee , Loving her was easier , Help me make it through the Night , and For the good times but those five songs were enough for several life times of writing .
My all time favourite singer / song writer , Leonard Cohen , wrote in 1970 that Kris Kristofferson had said that he loved Leonard’s Bird on the Wire so much that he was going to have it’s opening words carved on his tombstone “ Like a bird on the wire , like a drunk in a midnight choir ” and that he would be disappointed if he didn’t do it … well fifty years later I hope Leonard won’t be disappointed … RIP Kris .
Olive Oil Harvest in Gornja Podgora October 2024
Normally the local Olive Mill in our village , Gornja Podgora , opens around the 20th October and as we were returning to Ireland on the 15th I thought we would miss this year’s olive harvest and had arranged for Mate Srdic to collect the oil for himself but then the Mill opened on the 8th October , very early because of the anticipated bumper crop of olives this year along the Dalmatian coast so we booked a slot on Friday 10th October and started picking three days before .
Olive production is a tricky thing and while we have had the Olive Garden for six years now we have only managed three harvests in that time , 2019, 2022 and this year as various events such as drought at vital times , too much rain at pollination , olive oil fly infestation , can mean either a low or even no crop at all some years and our last crop was two years ago … long enough to forget what a back breaking , finger cracking , mind numbingly boring job olive picking is and that is not counting up and down on high ladders throughout the process where you take your life and limbs in hands to the point where you throw caution to the wind and end up like Tarzan hopping from tree to tree !!
I have to admit that Snezana worked like a trooper at picking the olives and that I , in her words to my daughter Claire , “ whined like a bitch ” throughout the entire three days process … not my proudest moment !
What made the picking harder was that this was the first time we had to pick on our own as Snezana’s Mum , Vera , wasn’t able to travel from Copenhagen and Vera is a powerhouse when it comes to olive picking … in the genes of course as Snezana claims they are pure Macedonian straight from Alexander the Great .
I gave a talk on Adriatic Gardening to the Clonmel Garden Club in March and the one detail everyone remembers is that of Vera high up in an olive tree without a ladder at eighty four years of age !!
The weather was great throughout , not too hot and no rain and we managed to pick our best yield yet , a total of 170 Kgs.of olives .
There are different traditional starting times for picking olives in Croatia and the earlier you pick the better the extra virgin oil is but you get less a yield as in our case where our early date meant a yield of eight to ten percent whereas two weeks later the yield would be eighteen percent … this is obviously important for the olive producers for whom volume is important and of course we are talking about a product that is widely abused with a variety of olive oils of an inferior quality being mixed to jack up production and eventual sale … you hear stories even in our little village where palm oil, vegetable oil or cheap supermarket olive oil is routinely bulking up sales of olive oil to tourists and I know local people who will only buy from a completely trusted source … is anything touched by commercialism safe from fraud these days ?
Rain is very important in the growing process and a drought will result in either olives like little bullets or not even worth harvesting which was the case last year but this year will break all records with olive oil production .
Because we picked so early our olives were all green not a hint of blue and a little blush as they call it is good for the taste but we had no choice in the picking date … you store the oil for a month or two after production to allow sediment to fall to the bottom and always in a dark place as sunlight is bad for the oil … we had a quick taste of this year’s production with some bread and it caught in the back of the throat … nothing subtle about the taste and a million miles from the taste of commercially produced olive oil !
During the picking season the hills are alive with whole families out picking each day and people living abroad often take their annual holidays to be home to help with the olive harvest and there is a real sense of family and friends out giving a hand .
When you arrive at the Olive Mill there is a sense of comraderie as everyone is interested how you got on as we would be the only foreigners growing olives in the village and while for us it is a cosmetic or vanity project but for local people this is deadly serious as whatever they have left aside from their annual consumption , generally fifty litres a year , they will sell at over twenty euros a litre … liquid gold !
We took our spot in the queue , our olives were weighed , washed , stripped of any leaves and into the crusher for an hour and then the magic moment arrives when you place your containers under the machine and your oil gushes out … our 170 kgs. gave eighteen litres .
No matter how many times I see that first rush of our own olive oil come out through the pipe it is still weirdly exciting and unique for us to have eighteen extra virgin oil going home with us !
Helen Dillon
I saw a rather sad article this week where Helen Dillon’s house and garden in Dublin is for sale as she has not been well and has moved to a nursing home … this is the house she moved to in 2018 after she sold her most famous house and garden in Ranelagh and then at seventy eight started from scratch to build a brand new garden … not many people of that age would have the energy or interest to do that and not only that she opened it to the public after two years .
Probably our most famous Irish gardener and certainly our best garden writer is Helen Dillon . Helen had a fabulous garden in Dublin which was world famous and rightly so and back in 2004 she scrapped the centre piece and focal point , a lovely lawn flanked on both sides by herbaceous borders meticulously planted and looked after , not a hair out of place … but she decided rip it all out and replace it with a formal large pool … a brave decision typical of her personality that if she set her mind on something she went for it all guns blazing .
The garden world was appalled and delighted in equal terms and to this day twenty years later the gardening opinion both in Ireland and internationally is divided over it … Helen didn’t mind , she wanted a change and she did it .
We visited the garden ten years ago in July 2014 and it was magical , almost a pilgrimage for me to see the Dillon Garden as I have read all her books and collected articles … before I visited I asked what is she like from a friend who knew both the garden and Ms. Dillon well … odd as hell was the answer , mightn’t be in the mood to speak to you so don’t approach her !
We must have got her on a good day as we got on well and indeed she brought out a spade and invited me to dig out a few baby tetraplanax rex when she saw me admiring her specimen in her border … not growing as well for me here but ten years on still growing and a great personal memory of the Dillon Garden .
Over the years since we have attended a few of her lectures but in recent years her health has declined and her husband died last year which is why she is giving up her garden … a sad event for such a brilliant gardener and vibrant personality but age comes to us all and I wish her all the best in the latest episode of an interesting life .
Helen Dillon is a marvellous writer and her two books and numerous articles, Garden Notebook and On Gardening are ones I dip in and out of constantly and they should be on every gardeners bookshelf.
Autumn in the Garden
A small tree often overlooked in garden lists of favourite trees is the Hazelnut , Corylus avellana and it is a favourite of mine …a native of Ireland which does well here and I go for the purple leaf variety which looks great throughout the year and has beautiful autumn colours … a no fuss tree that just gets on with the job with little need to feed or prune or even worry about location and a bonus here is that the deer don’t eat it .
Happy Halloween !
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