Garden Centre

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Knowing what you're doing

If you plan to garden outdoors and grow anything more than grass, you need to have a basic understanding of the conditions of your plot. This understanding includes:

1 The condition of the soil
2 The light, wind force and direction and temperature throughout the year
3 What grows well locally.

And ideally should also encompass what’s grown in the soil before you arrived. This last can be a tough one to find out and isn’t essential, but the other three are.

Let’s assume you want to grow potatoes, calla lilies and heathers. Well, you’re in trouble for a start because potatoes like loose, well-drained soil high in organic matter, as do callas, but your heathers will demand light, slightly acid soil and a cool, moist climate, so something has to give way! Trying to grow too many plants with varying and competing demands is one way to wear yourself out and achieve nothing – I’d either put those heathers in pots, where you can give them special ericaceous compost, or find something else that will harmonise with your overall garden planting.

To know your soil you have to look at it in more than one part of the garden, at more than one depth, and at different times of year. For example, at the bottom of my plot, the original owner had glasshouses and I’m forever digging up bits of her footings and foundations. Laying a lawn over that kind of rubble would result in bare patches, so I’ve chosen to pave it and put in perennial shrubs whose roots will cope with the occasional half-brick or bit of concrete. Once you know where your soil is rich and poor, waterlogged or free draining, you need to turn it. Turning the soil reveals what’s underneath, aerates it so that bacteria and worms can do their job of enriching it and breaks up clods that are anaerobic which means they don’t allow water or nutrients to penetrate easily and so are an inert on non-growing medium. I’m very fond of kit like this, which allows lightweight gardeners like myself to turn the soil without killing ourselves. And once the soil is turned, allow the weather a chance to break up those clods and lumps before you begin planting.

Labels: garden tasks, garden tips, garden vegetables, garden-tools

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:11 AM 2 Comments

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Monday, May 28, 2007

What the world needs now ...

Is not love, sweet love, but people willing to take on heritage vegetables. I’m perfectly serious about this – if you’ve ever wondered what you can do about global warming, there’s actually a very positive and exciting step you can take, if you have a small garden and the basic gardening skills of digging, watering and weeding. You could even help to save the planet.

One of the most dangerous things that happened to the world in the 1960s and ‘70s went almost unnoticed – the development of monocultural vegetables. What this means is that the corn grown across the USA came from one of three varieties. The tomatoes grown in England were reduced to four varieties and the wheat crop became just one literal monoculture. The danger should have been obvious: one variety, exposed to a disease or predator it couldn’t fight off, meant no crop. But we went ahead with it anyway.

The hidden danger was the one we face now. The world has changed, and is changing, much faster than anybody expected. The climate has changed, the seasons are shifting and our agriculture must keep up or we will all starve. This means we need to experiment with many more varieties of each crop, to find the ones that cope well with current conditions and to make notes on the others because in a few years the ones that are pretty feeble now may be exactly what we need for the next stage of climate change.

And our ancestors had a much better handle on this than we did. My grandfather grew seven kinds of bean (and most of them tasted better than the ones available to me when I first started gardening) and five kinds of potato and he saved his own seed and grew next year’s plants from last year’s crop.

These are what we call ‘heritage plants’ – nearly lost to the world because they weren’t the high cropping, perfectly regularly (very pretty but usually almost tasteless) varieties that ‘the market’ decided we wanted a few decades ago. Yellow tomatoes, striped beetroot, white and purple peas, brown fleshed potatoes and my favourite – red broad beans – all fall into this category. They may love heat or cold, crop early or late, store well or badly. Some are great for drying, others have to be used fresh – but much of this information has been lost to us, and we are in danger of losing these varieties too, if we don’t take action.

This year I’m growing red broad beans because I love the colour and flavour. I also have some purple podding peas, which I’m growing to keep the variety alive, because if the seeds aren’t renewed every year, when we decide we need them there will be no viable seed stock around.

If you want to help save the planet, or just have fun with your vegetables, you can adopt a rare vegetable through the Heritage Seed Library, or contact that most elegant of seedsmen, Thomas Etty Esq, or if you’re a seed fiend, like me, then the best place in the world for you is Chiltern Seeds.

Please remember though that there are good reasons you can’t import or transport some plants and seeds to some parts of the world, so always take advice from the seed company or your own local agricultural office or government department before buying – Japanese hogweed was once a pretty pond plant, but in Britain it is now a dangerous weed; be a plant conserver, not a vegetable vandal!

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:46 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, May 24, 2007

When Size Matters

Those are supposed to be miniature summer Savoys. In other words, you should be looking at some small, tightly-packed cabbages, a bit bigger than a cricket ball, but not much. As you can see, that’s not what we’ve got! They are still nice cabbages, but they haven’t formed hearts and they seem likely to continue growing until they come up to my knees and are as big as footballs.

Because of this unexpected growth, we’ve had to lift the mesh lid, because the snails were just using it as a convenient browsing system, crawling out onto it to munch on the leaves as they pushed the mesh up. They actually have less chance to eat the cabbages without the lid, because they have to crawl up the outside of the plant and traverse the tough outer leaves to get to the tender inner ones, instead of picking the best leaves to eat by zooming across the mesh as they were until a couple of days ago.

Here’s what we did wrong:

Germinated the seed too early
Put the plants in a soil that was too rich.

But at least they haven’t bolted, which would have been rather sad.

It’s a good problem to have, in a way, better too big than too small, as long as there is still a real flavour to the crop, but it’s something to remember for next year. We haven’t grown cabbages here before, and next year I think we’ll start with the full size plants anyway and firm them in much harder in poorer quality soil.

The mesh wasn’t to keep snails out (obviously) but a Falco preventative. That’s Falco in the bottom left corner: the Cairn who eats everything. Actually, not absolutely everything. He can’t be bothered with cabbage for example, and lettuce without salad dressing is not worth the effort, but he’s got his eye on the carrots next to the cabbages now that I've had to lift the mesh, and as soon as they are big enough, he’ll dig them up and eat them! We have a tayberry at the bottom of the garden, and every year he eats every berry he can, and I find the bush is denuded of fruit, even to the point of his being able to reach the bottom half of some fruit but not the top, so he nibbles them and leaves the top half of each fruit hanging just out of reach!

Labels: garden tasks, garden tips, garden vegetables

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:13 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, May 17, 2007

Yet another 'what is this?' moment ....

Except I’ve managed to find this one out. It’s odd really, I think of myself as being a pretty competent gardener – I can do Latin names and all that stuff and plant identification is an absolute doddle for me, but when it comes to the birds and the bees (and the butterflies and the moths) I’m actually pretty useless. I can tell blackbirds from other birds by their call, and I can just about tell the various forms of tit apart (don’t giggle) blue-tits, coal-tits, great-tits (I said don’t giggle) etc. Neglected education I suppose, which makes me wonder – I grew up in the country and if I can’t name common butterflies what hope is their for our urban young people to be able to recognise and appreciate such beautiful creatures?

Anyway, this is a Holly Blue – ‘The larvae of the Holly Blue have two preferred food plants. In spring, the larvae feed on the flower buds and berries of Holly while in late Summer, the buds and young berries of Ivy are preferred (odd, as this picture shows it making itself comfortable on my bay tree, another evergreen but not one of the preferred food plants, both of which grow all over my garden). The larvae are up to 15mm in length and are generally green in colour with a pale yellow line along each side and a small jet black head which is generally unseen because it spends much of its time deep within a flower bud or berry feeding. The adult Holly Blue emerges early in spring. Unlike other blues, the Holly Blue tends to fly high up around trees and bushes in full sunlight. The males can sometimes be found at ground level taking salts from dried up puddles in summer.’

An excellent site for butterfly novices or nuts is British Butterflies from which I cribbed the butterfly description above.

And this is one baby I can feel completely happy about – it can eat ivy and holly to its heart’s content – as far as I’m concerned they are both just wallpaper plants that provide a background to the garden, and to get this gorgeous blue beauties flitting about, a few nibbled ivy leaves is a small price to pay.

Labels: General, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:42 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, May 11, 2007

Spring in is the air ...

But water is on the ground! What happened to the sunshine? A couple of days ago we were basking, now we’re floating!

So this might seem like a very odd time to be inviting you to consider hoses and accessories but on the other hand, this is the perfect time to do some of the fundamental things relating to water that will improve your garden no end.

First, walk around your garden and see where the water is pooling and gathering – if it’s on the flowerbeds, those are the places that need to be built up, or have the soil improved to give better drainage. Apart from anything else, water that falls regularly on your precious plants will damage their growth and can kill them. If rather than having problems with your flower beds, you find the water is collecting on the paths or patios, decide whether you need to relay those areas on sand, and slightly elevated, or just buy at mop or squeegee to push the water out of the way whenever this happens.

Second, look at where rain water drips and descends – you can consider placing water butts in these areas for use in later, drier periods, or you can run guttering along areas that drip, like sheds, garages and gazebos to collect the water and direct it into butts.

We all know that rainwater is much better for our plants than tap water, and of course it’s better for the environment if we recycle this gift from the skies instead of using mains water which depletes the reservoirs and leads to – yes, you’ve guessed it – hosepipe bans! You can get systems that run rainwater through pumps so that it is under pressure and can be used in a variety of ways or just use drip irrigation to water your garden.

Finally, while the weather is so rotten outdoors, you can sit in the shed and work through the final part of your ‘water’ strategy, which is making sure your hose doesn’t leak and has all the attachments and nozzles you need. Consider getting a coiled hose tidy or some sprinkler systems to allow you to spend less time on mundane tasks and more on the valuable and rewarding ones, like weeding, cutting flowers for the house or just sitting in the garden with a long cool drink – assuming, of course, that it ever stops raining long enough!

Labels: garden tips, garden tools

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:41 AM 3 Comments

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Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Flowers from the garden

Okay, this week’s flowers are not scented, so I’m falling down on my claim that most of the year I can fill a vase from the garden with things that look good, and smell good. But be honest – do they have to smell nice when they look this fantastic?

Arum Lily - Zantedeschia aethiopica

Arum Lilies are one of the most dramatic garden flowers and they are astonishingly easy to grow. They enjoy moist to wet conditions, and shaded areas. If you grow them in pots, don’t ever let them dry out, and plant them in something like manure or compost, or even good old garden clay (like mine) but never peat, because if it dries out it's a bugger to get it wet again! They can get nipped by late frosts, or even chill winds, but if that happens, just cut of the browned flowers and the plant will throw up loads more very swiftly. They are great in water, but if you grow them in or near a pond, as I do, make sure their roots are deep in soil or well underwater to save them from frosts. And buy some of these - really special gloves - to help you pick your blooms!

Believe it or not, this beauty is considered dangerous in other parts of the world

“Sales and trades of the popular arum lily are to be banned throughout Western Australia from September 2006 under changes to the State's Declared Plants list. The ban extends an existing ban on the invasive and poisonous plant already in place in parts of the South West including Albany, Bunbury, Busselton and Jarrahdale. The ban includes the trading or selling of arum lilies at weekend markets and other casual outlets such as fetes and means movement of the plants or their seeds are prohibited throughout Western Australia. The declaration will not require home gardeners to remove their arum lilies, but they will no longer be allowed to plant more.”

Why? Because in this part of Australia, the arum lily has invaded thousands of hectares of pasture paddocks, forest and wetlands, requiring massive efforts by property owners and communities to clear it.

Labels: garden flowers, garden ponds, weeds

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:07 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, May 4, 2007

What a difference a month makes ...

In the four weeks since I started this blog, my garden has changed considerably. Everything has grown, despite much of it being cut back in the interim, and most of it has become very much greener – and these are the hallmarks of the late spring garden – growth and greenery. Comparing this to the April photograph, the really noticeable thing is that the blaze of yellow from my neighbour's Forsythia has gone and the whole picture is basically a landscape of greens. Of course it looks lovely, and if you’re keen on words, as I am, then ‘verdant’ is the one that comes to mind, but don’t be fooled, there’s nasty stuff going on under the surface that the canny gardener will be aware of.

To begin with, there are the weeds – it’s not just the plants that are racing into new growth now; the green tips on the bay tree and the laurel are matched by horrible new rosettes of dandelions and fresh ground elder leaves. The only way to deal with these monsters is to get in there and dig them out, taproots, suckers and all. While weed-killers remove the evidence of pernicious perennial weeds, they often fail to eradicate the root, which means in a few weeks the thing is racing away again, and if you don’t notice, it’s got dozens of offspring all over the garden before you can say ‘rake, hoe and dibber’.

Then there’s all that sappy green growth. It needs to be staked up or tied in now, before the flowering season is in full sway. My broad beans are doing their best to become sunflowers, and several of my climbers have grown eight to nine inches in the past week, with the perfect weather, which is great, but taller plants overshadow those that don’t get away so fast, and can make lower or slower growing neighbours into weak and sickly specimens, so keep an eye on them.

Making more of the green bits

And all that green can be a bit boring, to be honest. As the spring bulbs go over, and the early summer flowers aren’t even in bud, it’s all rather monotonous – this is the time to look at the role of water and statuary in your garden to add some interest to the leafy green period.

Labels: garden ponds, garden tasks, garden tips, weeds

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:03 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, May 2, 2007

National Garden Scheme

Every year NGS gardens across England and Wales welcome over half a million visitors. Most gardens which open for the NGS are privately owned and open just a few times each year. Few people realise that through this more than £2 million each year is raised for nursing, caring and gardening charities. Most of these 3,500 gardens are privately owned.

The NGS has a long and worthwhile history - in 1859, a philanthropic Liverpool merchant, William Rathbone, employed a nurse to care for his wife at home. After his wife’s death, Rathbone kept the nurse on, but asked her to help poor people in the neighbourhood. The local need was so great he bean to raise funds for the recruitment, training and employment of nurses to enter deprived areas of the city.

This was the beginning of District Nursing. By the end of the 19th century, the idea had been taken up across the country and, with the help of Florence Nightingale and the warm approval of Queen Victoria, the movement became a national voluntary organisation responsible for setting standards and training nurses.

By 1926, the service, now renamed the Queen's Nursing Institute (QNI), set up a new fund invest in more training and to give pension support to retiring nurses. A Council member, Miss Elsie Wagg, came up with the novel idea of combining our national obsession with gardening with raising money for this valuable work.

Labels: garden secrets, national garden scheme

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:09 AM 0 Comments

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