Six on Saturday – 26/9/2026

I don’t seem to have done much gardening over the last couple of weeks. A couple of weeks back I mentioned that I was working on increasing my water storage and that is what I have been working on. I have no more openings, it can all just slide gently into autumn without me obsessing about weeding or watering. I’ve been sowing seeds, veg in cells to go in my tunnel and some cover crop items to go in to a couple of spaces that will become clear too late to direct sow.
The summer drought is not a distant memory in my mind but the degree to which most of the garden plants have put it behind them seems extraordinary. I have no lawn in the garden but around my allotment the grass areas are rich emerald green and growing strongly. There must be a higher than usual level of nutrients in the soil, available now that there is moisture to dissolve in. At least most of my allotment has growing plants in it which will take those nutrients up and stop them getting washed away in the winter.
OK, enough waffle, I need to sort out six things for my Saturday six. You’ll mostly be familiar with this bit, post a blog about six things in your garden this Saturday, put a link to it in my comments down below. There’s a guide here if you care to take a look.

One.
I was going to repeat Liriope from a couple of weeks ago since it’s further on and looking really good but in the picture I took it looks almost the same. Another of my revived Dahlias then. Why this is called ‘Purple Gem’ I have no idea. Perhaps there’s a ‘Pink Gem’ alongside which it looked purple, perhaps the raiser was colour blind.

Two.
Back in July I did a six just on insects, mostly butterflies. Small tortoiseshell was not among them because compared to several others, they have been conspicuous by their absence. I managed to get a reasonable picture of one this week, even without my long telephoto lens. The insect numbers are declining now but there are still quite a few around to take advantage of the refreshed displays of Salvias and Dahlias.

Three.
Nasturtium seems to be well established in the garden now and comes back from self sown seed with no help from me. I get an awful lot of invasive leafy growth and far fewer flowers than I’d like but there are always nice surprises in the range of colours and patterns that appear.

Four.
For years I wanted to have Woodwardia but denied myself on the grounds it was just too big. Somehow I seem in just the last year to have acquired three of them, under three different names but perhaps only two species. This one has a label saying Woodwardia prolifera, which makes sense though I haven’t done my homework to check that it’s correct. What do you suppose my chances of resisting growing on some of those little plantlets are?

Five.
Fuchsia magellanica ‘Arauco’ is about middle ranking in terms of how it has fared this summer compared to our other Fuchsias. At least the flower buds are developing to the point of opening, if not fully. It may yet improve and hopefully by next year there will be water enough to keep it it in better shape. It is at least free from gall mite so far, unlike a number of others that are badly affected. The one metric by which it wins hands down is the number of flowers.

Six.
I’m pretty certain that Salvia curviflora was given to me by a fellow gardener but I am ashamed to admit that I don’t recall who. It has taken a couple of seasons to really perform but is well worth the wait and the effort to keep taking cuttings for overwintering insurance. I was given Salvia stolonifera around the same time and have failed miserably to get it to perform even passably. Like Fuchsias, because most of them are very easy it is tempting to think they must all be.

That’s the last six for September, next week takes us into the final quarter of the year. It’s an in between time of year, too early to get stuff in for winter, too late to do anything much for this year, running out of time to take cuttings for next year. Seed orders, bulb orders still to do.