Garden Centre

Monday, June 30, 2008

Garden SOS for beetles

Wildlife experts have appealed for gardeners to help in save one of the country's most endangered creatures: the stag beetle.

The stag beetle is harmless, despite its giant size which can cause some consternation when it is seen flying around at dusk, and its very existence is threatened by habitat loss – it has already become extinct in several parts of Europe. The larvae of the stag beetle (Lucanus cervus) thrive on a diet of rotting wood and decaying roots which they consumes for several years before turning into beetles which can grow up to four inches in length. Intense farming and new building in the South of England now put the great at risk of extinction here too. Males are most often seen in flight on warm summer evenings in their search for mates, and they are the ones with the impressive ‘antlers’ which are actually mandibles, while females are often seen at ground level, looking for suitable places to lay eggs. And it is this last part of the insect's lifecycle that experts are asking householders to aid. By burying buckets of woodchip and soil, gardeners could provide homes for stag beetles for the next six years. Here’s what you need to do: make holes in the sides and bottom of an ordinary plastic bucket and fill it with one quarter soil and three quarters woodchip, then just dig a hole in a quiet part of your garden and bury the bucket with the lip at ground level.

Male stag beetle courtesy of Neil Phillips

Labels: garden beetles, garden wildlife

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:05 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, June 29, 2008

Garden goodies

Look at that picture. That entire bonanza came from a couple of currant bushes, three raspberry canes and a tayberry that is as vicious as a starving vampire and keeps trying to take over the garden! The fruit is about to be open frozen to use in the winter.

I already have a full bag of raspberries, another of blackberries and half a bag of tayberries – and we’ve been eating as much as we freeze.

Soft fruit has to be one of the best investments for the small garden. The plants need little or no looking after: a bit of pruning, a bit of checking for disease, lots of harvesting and they like poor and starved soil: ours grow around the compost bin and near the barbecue in an area where nothing else but nasturtiums could possibly survive. They last a loooong time: I have a friend with a twenty year old blackcurrant bush, although I think that’s pushing the margins – fruit bushes will easily last a decade on minimum maintenance though. Finally, soft fruit is a luxury item to buy, but when it arrives in such abundance you can be totally relaxed about slapping it into pies and crumbles, making ice-cream, summer puddings and jellies and jams.

Labels: garden fruit, soft fruit

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:00 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Garden tasks for June

If you’ve got lilies in containers they will need support as the flowers start developing and adding a large amount of weight at the top of a single stem. The standard route is to set several canes into the compost around the edge of the pot, linking them up with string to provide stability. If border lilies are not supported by neighbouring plants, use stakes for them too. Remember to put clay or cane-toppers on them though, so you don’t poke your eye out! Look out for the pestiferous lily beetle too - it leaves slimy black gunk on the leaves in which its grubs are cunning hidden. If you find the beetle or the larvae, squash them!

I’m busy lifting and dividing my iris clumps. Iris behave rather oddly in my garden: every three years we get a fantastic show, and every three years they seem to fail completely one year, which means I go out and buy new bulbs, only to find the next year or the year after they all flower at once!

My neighbours are all putting out their summer bedding plants now but having made a resolution not to buy these plants any more, I am standing firm against the lovely trays of annuals to be seen in every garden centre and on every garage forecourt. I love these frost tender annuals but I’ve vowed to grow them from seed or do without, and so my home-grown lobelia are just about hardened off and my perennial wallflowers went out a week ago. I wonder if I’ll manage to stand firm against the lure of the petunias though?

My foxgloves are starting to look a bit tired, they don’t like this summer heat, being plants that prefer a rich soil and light shade, but the bees love them and as they self-seed, I can ignore them apart from giving them a bit of mulch to cool their roots, confident that they will spread and tower over the garden year after year, without my needing to do anything about it.

Foxglove courtesy of foxypar4

Labels: foxgloves, iris, lily, lobelias, petunias

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:16 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, June 22, 2008

Plants for shady corners in the garden

If, like me, you’re fond of Victorian novels, you’re probably familiar with the favourite Victorian garden venues – and they were never brightly sunny spots. The Victorian novelist favoured the shady corner: the ‘bosky glade’, the ‘secluded dell’ or the ‘shaded corner’ which was usually filled with some night-scented plant like honeysuckle, or was overhung with a similarly fragrant one like lilac – or as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it:

Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone ;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.

Shady corners were long outlawed in British gardens though. Instead we were encouraged to think of every space as needing to be brightly lit, full of sun and, if necessary, ‘forced’ into Mediterranean productivity with glass, mirrors and heating systems.

The shady corner is having its comeback though, particularly as people become more aware that sitting in the blazing sun may harm our health in the long term, and shady loving plants offer a world of quieter interest that are ideal for restful contemplation, whether it’s the delicacy of a fern’s lacy appearance, or the subtle shades of green and white that can be found in some hostas.

Here’s my favourite dappled corner plant: a blue-green hosta that has elegant straight veins and contrasts beautifully with the firework shaped grass beside it. I often go and take my morning cup of coffee to sit and admire these two when they are at their best in June, and they never fail to make me glad I have a shady corner to relax in.

Labels: ferns, hosta, plants for shady corners, victorian gardens

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:06 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

If you happen to spot a yellow sign declaring Garden Open in the next few weeks, and you can spare the time to enter the door or gate, you are in for a treat. The National Gardens Scheme, listing a selected number of gardens participating in the scheme in its ‘Yellow Book’ and that selected number is very select indeed.

Being selected is quite an ordeal – each garden put forward must offer the visitor ‘at least 45 minutes worth of interest’ and in most cases there has to be an adequate facility to provide teas (and usually very good teas too!). There is an entrance fee, which is a charitable donation divided between local charities and ‘national nursing, caring and gardening charities’. The judges are strict and the gardens that make it into the ‘Yellow Book’ are truly superlative. They may be miniature gems or country houses with a four hundred year pedigree, but what they have in common is superb plantsmanship and being private – these are not gardens open to the public on a regular basis. A visit to an NGS garden usually leaves me depressed about the state of my own plot, which is swiftly followed by a desire to improve it, and finishes with me investing money in plants that are being sold by the garden owner. This is actually a very wise decision, as the gardens I visit are usually within ten miles of my own and what thrives in them should thrive for me.

If you’re interested in a chance to view some of Britain’s best secret gardens, visit NGS and see who's made the grade near you.

Labels: national garden scheme, open-gardens

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:37 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, June 16, 2008

June garden roundup

An ariel view of the garden today – just to see how we’re doing. Well the lawn is awful, that’s the first thing to say, and despite all the best efforts of himself, it rarely looks better than adequate. It doesn’t trouble me, but he views it as a slight on his manhood! The problem is that when the previous owners of our house laid the lawn, they didn’t prepare the undersoil adequately – there are rocks and half bricks and who knows what about six inches under the surface. Our only recourse is to dig it all up, relay the underlayers, removing all the rocks, and lay new turf: for now we are putting up with it.

The palm tree which was three feet tall when we planted it five years ago is now over twelve feet! Obviously it likes its location, although it shouldn’t as it’s on the edge of the pond – we are wondering what will happen if we lop it down to three feet again: my instinct tells me that it will simply shoot up from the stump, but it’s a bit of a drastic exercise and I’m trying to find out whether anybody’s tried such extreme tree surgery. It has wonderful spikes of fragrant flowers this year, and it did last year too, so I wouldn’t want to lose that in the long term, but twelve feet is a bit much.

The knifophia that we relocated from the bottom of the garden to the top is doing magnificently – it makes a huge splash of colour right next to the steps and has the added advantage of stopping small inquisitive dogs trundling off the steps and into the undergrowth, hunting frogs. They don’t like its spiky leaves while I appreciate its showy flowers.

The most amazing thing though is that block of silvery foliage on the far left edge of the pond – it’s Lambs Ears and from a tiny cutting which had just two miniature leaves, it has, in two years, become – well even clump is hardly adequate terminology – it’s more of an array really.

Overall I’m happy with my June garden – I’d like to see more early colour, but there’s no bare patches (except in the lawn!) and, after eight years of constant change, there’s nothing I want to rip out.

Labels: garden june, garden palm tree, knifophia, lambs ears

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:44 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, June 12, 2008

Rain tasks

Things not to do when rain is forecast:

Hang out the washing
Plant out tiny tender edelweiss seedlings
Fill up the pond from the hosepipe
Leave your wheelbarrow out, right side up

Things to do when rain is forecast:

Set out thirsty plants for a quick drink
Check the downpipe is in the water butt
Cover up delicate and water sensitive plants and possessions
Take in the washing!

Guess which lot I did?

Yup, my wheelbarrow is swimming in three inches of water, the container of wildlife friendly slug pellets had its lid off and is now bluish soup, and my watch is fogged with water because I took it off to prune something and left it on the lawn.

But never mind! The garden needed the rain and during the second cloudburst I sheltered under the apple tree and gazed at the fatsia, which looked rather menacing and strange in the stormy light. Fatsia is an odd plant, but I like it, especially in the rain.

Labels: fatsia, june tasks, rain

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:20 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, June 6, 2008

Garden Visitors

I was showing a visitor around the garden today and she paused at my fig tree which has a lovely crop of figs this year, and said ‘Don’t you have a problem with birds?’

I shook my head. I don’t have a problem with birds. I knew what she meant which was that surely birds got into my soft fruit like hot, sharp knives through butter, but that’s not a problem for me.

We used to feed birds, religiously buying fat balls and winter seed and so on, and the more we got into it, the more complicated it became – was the bird food ethically produced? Were we creating dependency in feeding the birds? Did our food cover all the various kinds of bird and their needs? Then a bird-watching friend pointed something out to me – birds do not eat commercially produced bird food in their natural environment (apart from anything else, they can’t open the packets with their beaks). It was a revelation. Instead of buying bird food, we began to garden to provide naturally occurring bird food.

So we planted lots of native species, particularly berrying plants and those which set winter seedheads. We stopped dead-heading roses so that the rosehips could provide winter food and we focused on ensuring that our pond was an insect haven so that swifts and martins could take insects on the wing over it.

We do cage some of our soft fruit, but some we leave for the birds to strip. We don’t have a problem with the figs because there is always enough other natural food around for the birds to enjoy. And given the choice I’d rather have less figs and more robins, bluetits, starlings, sparrows, house-martins and thrushes, any day.

Bluetit courtesy of foxypar4

Labels: garden birds, garden wildlife

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:29 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, June 3, 2008

When you can’t not interfere

Well, I could not interfere, but himself, the greensward maestro, must have his flat green carpet of lawn or he feels he’s failed in life, or something. Actually it does seem to be very much a man thing, this lawn business and it does require constant staying on top of, which is why I don’t bother with it and would – as himself says – have a lawn like a mole’s playground. What’s wrong with that?

Assuming you agree with himself not myself, here’s a quick and dirty list of what you must interfere with:

1. Daisies – pretty flowers with yellow eyes and white petals, hated for their rosettes of oval leaves that hug the ground and are almost impossible to remove, daisy roots being notoriously impossible to get out. Organic gardeners may like to try the hot skewer method (heat a skewer and thrust it into the soil alongside the stem, leave for 48 hours, dig up plant) while non-organic gardeners can at least try a selective weed killer, but it will probably need a couple of applications.

2. Dandelions have straps-shaped but toothed leaves that form large rosettes, the flowers are bright yellow and become round seed-heads that blow across your garden and infest it. Obviously then, the first stage to dandelion removal is to cut off every head you see, so that the can’t become seeds. Dandelions have an incredibly long and easy to snap tap root which will regrow unless dug out completely or killed by systemic weed killer. The skewer method is possible for dandelions too, but pouring boiling water on your lawn is not a good idea – it does work on dandelions in cracks in paving but it kills grass long before it kills dandelions.

3. Buttercups have glowing golden flowers and a habit of taking over – they have to be dug out if you are organic but can’t resist standard weed killers, they do spread fast to act when you see them.

4. Clover is popular with bees but not lawn owners. In a drought year it may be the only patch of green in your lawn! It loves poor soil so feeding the lawn is a good idea, as it cutting off the clover head before they can set seed.

Daisy lawn courtesy of shaire productions

Labels: garden lawn, lawn care, lawn weeds

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:38 AM 0 Comments

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