Those of you with heavy clay soil, like myself, will probably have had a difficult summer on the potager. The year started well with plenty of rain in the spring and early summer, and in my garden I had good early crops of broad beans, French beans, lettuces, broccoli and cauliflower.  However the long period of drought and high temperatures in mid to late summer meant that the soil dried to concrete and crops of tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes and squashes were poor although peppers did very well.

However all is not lost and now is the time to plant winter and spring vegetables to take advantage of the many rain showers.  Although it is a bit late to sow most crops, you can still find plug plants of winter lettuces, winter and spring cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli, Romanesco cauliflowers, Chinese cabbages and fennel in garden centres.  You can also sow broad beans to provide an early crop next year.

The rest of the garden is really benefitting from the rainfall and you can almost hear the plants breathe.  Roses are flowering again and although I have lost several shrubs and even some young trees, I am hopeful that most plants will recover over the winter.  Next year, I will be making even more use of mulches and compost to try and preserve moisture around plants and in the potager beds.

If you have not already done so, now is the time to buy or order spring flowering bulbs.  You can plant daffodils, crocuses and other small bulbs now but wait until November to plant tulips to avoid disease.  You can also plant up pots, window boxes and hanging baskets with winter pansies, violas, cyclamen, heathers and small bulbs.

Once the leaves start to fall onto lawns and drives you can store them in wire containers or heavy duty plastic bags with holes for aeration, to make leaf mould.  This is a great source of material to improve texture of both thin sandy soils and clay soils.  You can however leave the to rot down on flower beds as they provide important food and shelter for insects and indirectly for birds such as blackbirds.

Don't be too hasty to cut down herbaceous plants in the autumn/winter as the seedheads provide food for insects and birds and can often look attractive over winter.  Then you can cut down and compost the dead brown growth in late winter/early spring.

I leave my main rose pruning until February but cut off very long growths now to avoid the plants rocking in winter winds and damaging the roots.

Chris

Excerpt chosen by Dawn Kidd

This month the Bergerac group is reading Station Eleven, a post apocalyptic book which I originally read in 2016.  Given the premise it was interesting comparing and contrasting  ( listen to me my essay days are coming back to haunt me!) with what actually happened in 2020.  Today it sounds like Covid is making itself felt again, that's if you can get past Russell Brand. I wonder what you think looking back. It's easy to criticise the Government, hindsight makes us all wise, but what would you personnel have done differently? More importantly how prepared do you feel now to cope should we need too.   I'm still eating some of the pasta so maybe I'll rethink that.

STATION ELEVEN

by  Emily St.John Mandel

Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies. He started with water, filled one of the oversized shopping carts with as many cases and bottles as he could fit. There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart—was he overreacting?—but there was a certain momentum now, too late to turn back. The clerk raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

 “I’m parked just outside,” he said. “I’ll bring the cart back.” The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forced the impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a long ramp down into a small park-like arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow at the bottom of the ramp and slid sideways into a planter.

It was eleven twenty. The supermarket closed in forty minutes. He was imagining how long it would take to bring the cart up to Frank’s apartment, to unload it, the time required for tedious explanations and reassurances of sanity before he could return to the grocery store for more supplies. Could there be any harm in leaving the cart here for the moment? There was no one on the street. He called Hua on his way back into the store.

 “What’s happening now?” He moved quickly through the store while Hua spoke. Another case of water—Jeevan was under the impression that one can never have too much—and then cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf, pasta, anything that looked like it might last a while. The hospital was full of flu patients and the situation was identical at the other hospitals in the city. The ambulance service was overwhelmed. Thirty-seven patients had died now, including every patient who’d been on the Moscow flight and two E.R. nurses who’d been on duty when the first patients came in. The shopping cart was almost unmanageably heavy. Hua said he’d called his wife and told her to take the kids and leave the city tonight, but not by airplane. Jeevan was standing by the cash register again, the clerk scanning his cans and packages. The part of the evening that had transpired in the Elgin Theatre seemed like possibly a different lifetime. The clerk was moving very slowly. Jeevan passed her a credit card and she scrutinized it as though she hadn’t just seen it five or ten minutes ago.

 “Take Laura and your brother,” Hua said, “and leave the city tonight.”
 
“I can’t leave the city tonight, not with my brother. I can’t rent a wheelchair van at this hour.”

 In response there was only a muffled sound. Hua was coughing.
 
“Are you sick?” Jeevan was pushing the cart toward the door.

 “Goodnight, Jeevan.” Hua disconnected and Jeevan was alone in the snow. He felt possessed. The next cart was all toilet paper. The cart after that was more canned goods, also frozen meat and aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape.

 “I work for a charity,” he said to the girl behind the cash register, his third or fourth time through, but she wasn’t paying much attention to him. She kept glancing up at the small television above the film development counter, ringing his items through on autopilot. Jeevan called Laura on his sixth trip through the store, but his call went to voicemail.

 “Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn’t want to make eye contact with the clerk.
 
“Jeevan, where are you?” She sounded slightly accusatory. He handed over his credit card.
 
“Are you watching the news?”
 
“Should I be?”

“There’s a flu epidemic, Laura. It’s serious.”

“That thing in Russia or wherever? I knew about that.”

“It’s here now. It’s worse than we’d thought. I’ve just been talking to Hua. You have to leave the city.” He glanced up in time to see the look the checkout girl gave him.

“Have to? What? Where are you, Jeevan?” He was signing his name on the slip, struggling with the cart toward the exit, where the order of the store ended and the frenzy of the storm began. It was difficult to steer the cart with one hand. There were already five carts parked haphazardly between benches and planters, dusted now with snow.

“Just turn on the news, Laura.”

“You know I don’t like to watch the news before bed. Are you having an anxiety attack?”

“What? No. I’m going to my brother’s place to make sure he’s okay.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“You’re not even listening. You never listen to me.” Jeevan knew this was probably a petty thing to say in the face of a probable flu pandemic, but couldn’t resist. He plowed the cart into the others and dashed back into the store. “I can’t believe you left me at the theatre,” he said. “You just left me at the theatre performing CPR on a dead actor.”

“Jeevan, tell me where you are.”

“I’m in a grocery store.” It was eleven fifty-five. This last cart was all grace items: vegetables, fruit, bags of oranges and lemons, tea, coffee, crackers, salt, preserved cakes. “Look, Laura, I don’t want to argue. This flu’s serious, and it’s fast.”

 “What’s fast?”

“This flu, Laura. It’s really fast. Hua told me. It’s spreading so quickly. I think you should get out of the city.” At the last moment, he added a bouquet of daffodils.

For details on the DLCI Book Clubs please go to the Book Club area by scrolling down on the home

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Sainte Foy Book Club

Details of our latest reads can be found on the D L Book Club Facebook group.

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Lin Green at: Lin.green100@gmail.com

Bergerac Book Club

We will be posting our evaluation and marks out of ten on the DL Book Club Facebook group.

For more information please contact Dawn Kidd at: Dawn.Kidd24440@gmail.com

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Best wishes and take care.

Dawn Kidd Organiser Bergerac Book Club

Lin Green Organiser Sainte Foy Book Club