Every time I’ve moved into a place with a garden, I’ve arrived at the wrong time of year. There’s a huge privilege to gaining access to land that you can actually grow in, of course, so it’s a minor grumble, but we arrived at our last house in the dying days of a July heatwave, and this one in early August last year.
I’ve now seen three seasons unfold here, accidentally following the old adage to wait a year and see what comes up – in this case, mostly green alkanet and a rainbow of spring-flowering trees in the neighbouring gardens – and I’m finally feeling green fingered. But, as any experienced gardener will tell you, it’s a bit late, really.
Most fair-weather gardeners emerge around the late May bank holiday, dust the cobwebs off the furniture and descend on the garden centre, but I prefer to plant things between September and April. And yet, here I am again, frenziedly checking the weather forecast to see when it might rain so I can bed in my latest haul from the local community greenhouses.
I’ve felt late to everything this year, which, if I’m honest, is how things tend to go in my gardens. I nearly always plant bulbs in December, take cuttings into October and, this year, was scattering annual seed mix in May. This causes me the same kind of stress as trying to persuade my three-year-old to put his shoes on when we have six minutes to catch a train, but history would attest that things generally turn out all right. The things that want to grow, grow. The train is held at the previous station. Life moves on.
With that spirit in mind, I’ll be sowing nasturtiums in my very sad containers. Sad because anything halfway decent has been transferred to the garden (in autumn and winter, and nearly everything has settled in nicely, aside from the Emily Brontë rose, which is broodily sulking, as one might expect) and I haven’t had the mental space or depth of pocket to fill them up again. Hungry for a bit of joy and colour, and refusing to go to the garden centre, I’m going to be scattering nasturtiums over the lot.
I love nasturtiums. Astonishingly quick and easy to get going, they actively prefer poor soil (so leftover, nutrient-low pot compost is fine) and they seed so prolifically they’ll keep popping up for years. You can also eat the entire plant – leaves, petals and seeds – in salads or pickled.
Sown now, they can flower until November. Don’t dismiss them as just being orange: I’ve got some older packets of the dirty pink ‘Ladybird Rose’ (pictured) and scarlet ‘Red Troika’, while ‘Milkmaid’ and ‘Tip Top Pink Blush’ offer pretty pale yellow, and ‘Black Velvet’ reads aubergine.