Garden Centre

Friday, April 27, 2007

Problems with Bulbs

Some bulbs take over the world – as is shown in this photograph. These woods are noted for their bluebells, but even so, if this happened to your garden you’d probably be a bit peeved. The only thing that stops it happening – if you have bluebells – is the fact that their rampant spread does require clear soil (so they romp away under trees, for example) and dappled shade (which the trees are good at providing too) and most gardens don’t offer those conditions. You may find you have blue spikes emerging in your lawn or round your sundial, and the only thing to do is life the bulblets and hope the parent plant gets discouraged.

Digging up bulbs? This will help ...

On the other hand, some bulbs never seem to get going. In my garden, there is ‘The Mysterious Case of the Crocus that didn’t Flower’ – which isn’t actually that mysterious at all. Like many gardeners who try to encourage wildlife, I wrestle with the issue that the wildlife I want and the wildlife I get are two different things! What I get is grey squirrels, and what grey squirrels really enjoy, come winter, is digging up my precious crocus bulbs, all stuffed with starch and sugars to serve their flowering season, and having a good munch. The past seven years of Crocus Patrol have revealed some interesting results:

1. white, cream and lilac bulbs taste best to squirrels. Yellow and dark purple bulbs are usually left in the ground.


2. a squirrel can dig up a crocus bulb and run off with it in the time it takes me to open the back door and charge across the lawn.


3. squirrels like to sit on the fence and eat crocus bulbs, just to annoy the dogs who bark like frenzied lunatics and hurl themselves at the fence until (a) they get concussion, (b) the neighbours come out and complain, (c) I drag the dogs inside by their collars


4. a good shot with a garden hose can hit a squirrel amidships from about twenty feet away


5. if you manage to squirt the squirrels often enough, they just come back and dig up the bulbs at night

Labels: bulbs, garden tips, garden-tools

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:14 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Why have a garden?

Not a lot of people seem to ask themselves this question, which always surprises me. Of course, we don’t always get a choice, we buy a house and hey presto! it comes with garden attached whether we like it or not, and we have to make the best of it, but even so, understanding your purposes in gardening can help you gain pleasure and save money.

For me, gardening has lots of purposes – including stopping me going mad by pounding the keyboard all day. One of the other reasons I garden was inspired by one of my gardening gurus – Beverley Nichols. You might vaguely remember his name; he had a column in a women’s magazine for several decades. He was a complex, often unhappy man, and a keen gardener who could write about plants in the way other people write about food or sex, making the reader want some for themselves! He had a few advantages over me – like being a much more successful writer and being able to afford Georgian mansions and gardeners to do the dirty work, but one thing he said struck me so firmly that I’ve never forgotten it. He said there was no reason for a person with a garden to be without flowers for the house, no matter what the time of year. He was right too.

I’ve made it a bit of a crusade to have some kind of flowers in the garden all year round, and I’ll be posting pictures of what’s in my vases every few weeks. But it’s not just any old flowers – I added my own twist to this claim; I want most of my pretty things to be scented too, because I’ve never really understood why people want flowers that don’t smell as good as they look. So today’s offering is a native British posy: lungwort (known in posh as pulmonaria) and lily of the valley. The former is prettily shaded in pink and blue, and the latter has a heavenly scent. And the table – well, there’s a story to that which I’ll tell one day.

Labels: garden flowers, garden secrets, General

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:06 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, April 23, 2007

Pest or Pleasure?

It's always a problem, isn't it? Most of us love birdsong, glow worms, hedgehogs and mayflies … those are the things that make gardening worthwhile. But we’re not so keen on slugs and snails, cabbage whites and aphids!

The difficulty arises because nature is a complicated creature. The reason we hate aphids and cabbage whites so much is that they aren’t particular about what they live on (cabbage whites will eat just about everything when the eggs hatch, although they do like cabbages a great deal) and so they thrive in our gardens. More sensitive creatures, like glow worms, require a complex set of conditions that even scientists don’t understand yet, and so they become ever rarer at the same time as the pestilential cabbage white becomes more common.

So what do you do. Well, the All Seasons Gardener tries to be as inclusive as possible. Our garden uses a range of techniques including mesh over our vegetable beds, wildlife friendly slug pellets, and predator encouragement to try and keep the garden in balance. So we have a variety of trees and nest boxes in the garden and the birds that visit are pretty good at keeping down crane flies. We have a bee log for our solitary bees, and as they pollinate our peas, beans and sweet peas, we think we get a better crop, so we don’t mind too much if we lose a few plants to caterpillars. The pond is home to fish, newts and frogs – and the frogs are very keen on picking off flies and other nuisances, and that complete ecosystem means that we get lots of mayflies and even dragonflies – no glow worms yet but we live in hope …

And that brings us to the moth. I’m not entirely sure what it is, moth identification not being one of my strengths, but it’s very beautiful. And it’s on my broad bean plants. I should have scared it off, of course, but in the end I pretended it wasn’t there. If our broad beans are eaten to the ground when is caterpillars hatch, then ‘himself’ can just say I told you so.

Labels: Pest control, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:17 AM 3 Comments

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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

What’s your biggest garden fault?

Labels: garden flowers, garden tasks, weeds

The All Seasons Gardener at 11:48 PM 0 Comments

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Monday, April 16, 2007

Tie me daffodils down, Sport (or don’t, as the case may be)

Do you do this? I’ve got to admit it looks very dainty. The daffodils in my garden are an untidy lax mess by comparison. The thing is, go where you will, and ask whom you like, everybody will tell you this is a very bad idea – looks nice, serves no good purpose, in fact.

Why? Well because it’s a question of nutrition. When any bulb has put out flowers, it will have shrunk to a tiny size, as a bulb is essentially nothing more that a warehouse holding flower-making components, when the job is done, there’s nothing left of the bulb. But we want it to flower again next year, and for this to happen, the warehouse will need to be replenished with food – which in bulb terms, comes in the form of starch. This is the purpose of the leaves, making food to build up the bulb to a decent flowering size. If you cut or mow down the leaves too early the bulb will not have stored enough starch to get it through next year’s flowering season. This is also why we leave bulbs in the ground after flowering, even if we’re going to have to lift them before winter, like freesias and gladioulus – it gives them a chance to build up their stores. Although tying the leaves together makes them tidier while they die down, it simply reduces the amount of light they receive, which means the photosynthesis is reduced and that means there is less work going on to feed the bulb. To extend the metaphor, we’ve reduced the warehouse staff to one man and his dog, who aren’t going to be much good at filling the shelves, and next spring we’ll be wondering why the flowers are so wimpy.

Regularly removing the dead flower heads, on the other hand, is beneficial to next year's flowering as the daffodil does not put energy into seed production. If you are a fussy gardener, like ‘himself’ then restrain yourself for six to eight weeks after the final daffodil flowering and you can cut off the withering leaves. For this task I use tree loppers which mean you can cut at ground level while standing up and then rake the leaves up with a light rake, no stooping or crawling around in the borders. Okay, it’s not the purpose for which loppers were created, but then, daffodils weren’t born to be tied either, were they?

Labels: garden flowers, garden tips, spring

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:51 PM 2 Comments

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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The All Seasons Gardener’s Garden

The All Seasons Gardener’s Garden

You know, one thing that annoys me about gardeners who appear on garden programmes is they all seem to have a couple of acres. ‘Oh here,’ they say, ‘we’re building a bog garden. It’ll only be about a quarter of an acre …’

Oh yes? Most of us don’t have a quarter of an acre if you include the house, the front garden and the bit of pavement before you get to the road! As for bog gardens, that’s what we get when it rains a lot, isn’t it? Just as an arboretum is the elderly scabby apple trees planted by a previous owner, and a lawn is a partly bald patch of grass which acts as a combination football pitch and sunbathing area when the weather allows.

So The All Seasons Gardener’s Garden is a real garden – as you can see. It has a washing line and a rather sinister shed. It is yomped over daily by two Cairn Terriers and a cat with a hole-digging fetish. It has to accommodate a barbecue, a hammock, flowers, trees, shrubs, vegetables, herbs and a pond. It is looked after (or neglected) by the ASG, aided and abetted by ‘himself’ aka ‘the lord of keeping things tidy’, and ‘the boy’ who is fifteen and seems to have developed an aversion to sunlight.

The All Seasons Gardener works from home, so her garden really ought to be a shining example. It isn’t – because working from home means eight hours pounding the keyboard, with only sporadic trips outside to pull up groundsel and chase starlings out of the polyanthus. And it’s not one of those wonderful organic Edens either. We do try, but ‘himself’ likes to pour liquid plant food over everything, and the All Seasons Gardener loves her wildlife-friendly slug pellets, without which she would have no vegetables. So we compromise, like most gardeners, most of the time – and if that sounds like you, then I hope you’ll come and tour The All Seasons Garden and share our highs and lows over the year ahead.

Labels: General, welcome

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:02 AM 2 Comments

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