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 "No warmth, no cheerfulness, no helpful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member,—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—November!"
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NOVEMBER may not be as gloomy as Tom Hood—who sang the
Song of the Shirt—has painted it; but it has never been a popular month,
least of all to gardeners. For the perennial border may look bedraggled and
the vegetable plot untidy and a bit sombre. We may have some promising
looking beds of winter greens to reassure us that there will be no hungry
gap in the early part of next year. But we shall miss the colour and
interest associated with our runner beans and peas, out beet and carrots;
while our fruit trees will be "bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds
sang."
We shall miss the bees—our pollinating allies. We shall miss the
butterflies—at least the beautifully coloured sorts. |
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There is nothing to fear from them: in fact, some of them are
beneficial: for instance, the Small Tortoiseshell, Red Admiral and Peacock
thrive on stinging nettles. But we shall be glad to see the back of that
beastly pest the "Cabbage White" butterfly, for this year saw the biggest
invasion from the Continent since 1940, and one Lincolnshire schoolboy of
eleven alone killed about 3,700 with a branch of a bush.
Well, there's very little we can do this month about the vegetable
plot, except to do a spot of tidying up; ordering our farmyard manure—if we
are lucky enough to have a source of supply—and getting on with digging such
bare land as there may be; and checking up on our stored crops to make sure
they are keeping well. But given the right sort of weather we can do some
useful work on the fruit plot. |
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