Before the fall. It’s the equinox tomorrow (a later one this year) so I think we can all agree autumn is here and summer over. Just see the hanging spiders, feel the dew on your shoes on an early-morning walk. There is a chill in the twilight, the sun’s no longer winning. For gardeners then, it’s the time to sow hardy annual flowers for spring while the soil still holds warmth.
We will be putting in a row or two of calendula, of course, and pondering love-in-a-mist (nigella). Autumn-sown gives a stronger, better start to spring at a time to pack most flower seeds away. My bookshelves at home are making Henri anxious with multiple bowls of drying flower heads. It will get worse yet.
Autumn gardening for me is about managing decline. It is a time of more urgent ruthlessness, never much my strength until it is almost too late. The sweet peas have mostly gone to give air to late, hopeful (maybe hopeless) climbing nasturtium. I might even get a few flowers before frost turns them into ghostly tendrils. We almost can’t eat at the speed the chard and other leaves are producing, so my daughter is taking the excess and our dinners are mostly vegetarian. The earlier-sown beets are being roasted; courgettes and shallots are going into baked ratatouille.
It is all about making room for the last-sown chard, the earlier radicchio. I am pulling the rusty red orache and hanging it off pea poles to dry to give smaller plants more chance. Kales are coming, puntarelle, too. They will need their share of dwindling light and dry air. I can’t yet contemplate taking down the sunflowers, still hogging needed space.
Leaves are dropping, conkers, too. Wasps are eating the windfalls. Pigeons swarming the last of the elder. The plot year turns.
Allan Jenkins’s Morning (4th Estate, £8.99) is out now. Order it for £7.91 from guardianbookshop.com
