As summer’s blooms start to fade, autumn might seem like a fallow period for flower growers. Although the year’s floral productivity is gently winding down, the list of jobs for the following season’s harvest is just revving into gear. Once the August bank holiday is over, a certain focus descends over the flower farm to prepare for the next year. Embrace it, and accept it is virtually impossible to ever prepare as much as you aspire to. Whatever hard graft you do put in through autumn will pay dividends in a season full of flowers from spring onwards.
In addition to starting our hardy-annual seed sowing, early autumn is when we start thinking when to chit corms, dig up and divide dahlias, plant bulbs and mulch. There’s often a sense of time dissolving away as autumn progresses and days get shorter, colder and wetter.
All through autumn is when we focus on potting on our healthy seedlings, pinching out leading stems before planting out into their final growing positions.
In autumn we plant out hardy annuals inside the glasshouse and in outside beds. The key to successful overwintering is healthy well-established plants which will be best equipped to withstand the winter elements and marauding wildlife. Once we’ve potted on our seedlings, we allow them a month or so to grow and establish, planting from mid- to late autumn, depending on the weather and how much growth the plants have made. We don’t have a hard and fast rule for a final planting deadline. Ideally plants will have a few weeks of temperatures comfortably above freezing to establish before winter sets in. Before planting out, we leave the plants outside in a sheltered spot for around five days to acclimatise to being outside after their cosy glasshouse beginnings. Many gardeners advocate gradually building up their tolerance to the elements by taking them in and out over a few days but we never have time to manage this, and a sheltered spot seems to work fine.
When planting out, always water your young plants and give them a handful of compost. Remember how traumatic it is to move house? Your plants feel this trauma too, so look after them and give them a large enough hole for the compost and the roots to sit in, then anchor them in place by pressing down firmly around the base of each plant so they can grow straight and strong. Staking won’t be necessary until early spring.
Autumn is the time to plant narcissi, tulips, fritillaries, alliums, muscari and any other spring bulbs. All bar tulips can be planted from mid-autumn, but wait another month to get your tulips in to ensure the ground is cold enough to avoid tulip fire and other diseases. Plenty of gardeners have admitted to planting tulip bulbs as late as midwinter, but they do need a cold snap over winter.
You’ll always need more bulbs than you think. If you’re low on budget but want a real show of spring colour, consider planting up pots and troughs in the garden which you can move to the forefront to enjoy them in bloom rather than aiming to fill a flowerbed, which can get expensive very quickly. If you’re growing in your garden, plant in blocks of at least 15-20 for maximum impact otherwise they can look a little lacklustre. Daffodils are perfect for naturalising, but tulips will generally degrade in size and quality year on year. At WLFC we treat tulips as annuals and pull the entire stem up when harvesting including the bulb, which gives us taller stems.
In our first season at WLFC we enthusiastically dug trenches for our tulips, we shovelled London clay for hours and felt incredibly satisfied once we’d managed to tuck all the bulbs up for the winter. Several seasons on and tonnes of organic matter has been added to those beds, making the soil crumbly and easy to work, but trench planting still means a lot of shovelling. Instead we mainly plant tulips into raised beds or crates. Crates mean mobility: you can move them into the shade or just out of direct sunlight if you find all your tulips opening at the same time. With raised beds we tend to find that the soil levels will have sunk dramatically during the season so we can pretty much lay the bulbs straight on the surface of the compost and then cover with new compost. It uses a lot of compost but takes a fraction of the time of the other planting methods.
How to Grow the Flowers: A sustainable approach to enjoying flowers through the seasons by Marianne Mogendorff & Camila Romain is published by Pavilion Books.
