Garden Centre

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Well, it’s done. There’s nothing in it but gravel and a piece of staging donated by a friend, but there is a complete greenhouse at the bottom of my garden.



Established greenhouse users look away now, as I’m going to be a bit dense. When it was all done and I stepped inside and closed the door, I couldn’t get over how much warmer it was than outside. Yes, I know that’s what a greenhouse is FOR and I know that every other greenhouse is exactly the same, ie warmer than the outside temperature, but this is MY greenhouse and I never really believed it was going to work. But it does.








Now I am going to fill it up. What with, I’m not sure, although I already know it won’t be big enough, because everybody tells me that greenhouses never are.

My greenhouse courtesy of me, real greenhouse courtesy of jmurawski

Labels: greenhouse, greenhouse installation

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:15 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, November 27, 2008

More Greenhouse Advice

First and foremost – if you want to buy a greenhouse and install it yourself, don’t pick November as the month to do it. There are three reasons for this:

You will have to dodge rain, hail, sleet and snow to get out there to do it, and once out there you will slip and slide around on mud and frost, causing potential damage to the greenhouse and actual damage to bits of yourself.

You will find that whatever form of greenhouse you’ve gone for, it is impossible to tighten nuts, fit tiny fiddly fixings and install large fragile panes of glass or large flyaway panes of plastic, in November winds.

Your marriage will be begin to crack under the strain, even if the greenhouse glazing doesn’t.

I think July is probably a good time to put up a greenhouse – that way, even if it is fiddly, time-consuming and frustrating work, you’re out in the fresh air in the lovely weather and you have long hours of daylight to work in.

Putting in sliding doors by torchlight in a force nine gale is not fun. Trust me. I know. The only thing that’s keeping me going is the idea that one day next year my greenhouse will be filled with the aromas of heirloom tomatoes and orchid blossoms – if we ever get it finished, that is!

Labels: assembling a greenhouse, greenhouse, greenhouse installation

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:21 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, November 24, 2008

Protecting your Plants in Winter

More and more of the plants we are offered in nurseries and garden centres are not winter-hardy in our climate. Now the weather has turned icy, we’re seeing the effects of bitter weather, wind, rain and chill, on those plants. Some of them can cope with a few hours of chill but not a prolonged cold spell, while others won’t even survive one night of below zero temperatures.

There are a number of ways you can protect plants that aren’t fully winter-hardy:

Tender climbers against walls can be protected by fleece tacked onto light wooden batting to act as a frame. This is good for hibiscus and other tropical region plants but may not keep them safe in full cold – really they need greenhouse overwintering.

Tender bulbs and herbaceous plants (ie those like peonies that die back) should always be given a thick covering blanked of manure or old leaves to prevent the soil around them from freezing. In the spring, new shoots can be protected with a loose layer of straw – don’t use straw in winter though, as it’s insulating properties are lower than a lot of people think.

Even evergreens can suffer and Monkey Puzzle trees are a case in point. Like many other mild zone evergreens, they will thrive better if given a layer of mulch around their root areas to keep the soil free from freezing. This protects the roots and also allows the tree to take up moisture from the soil – because such trees come from regions that don’t freeze, they need more winter moisture than evergreens from colder regions.

Really tender plants are best grown in containers so that can be taken inside during bad spells of weather. It’s a good idea to take cuttings from any potentially tender plants that haven’t been grown in pots so that if the worst happens, you have a replacement plant to take over from the one you’ve lost to the winter.

Choose outdoor pots that a fully frost proof or they will crack. Move unused containers into the shed or greenhouse and if there are any that can’t be taken in, put them on feet or lift them from the soil to stop waterlogging.

Labels: bad weather gardening, tender plants, winter garden tasks

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:28 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Garden Flowers - Planning for Christmas

I’m wandering around the garden this week with secateurs in hand and a gleam in my eye. I’m planning my Christmas decorations.

There are a number of ways you can guarantee fresh flowers for Christmas without paying a fortune to the florist for them. You can force bulbs like narcissus and Amaryllis, and I intend to be doing that next year when the greenhouse is finally installed or you can grow flowers that will be at their best in December, which is a lot easier than it sounds, because Winter Jasmine, Witch Hazel and Tinus are all lovely hardy shrubs and trees that simply thrive on bad weather. Finally you can preserve flowers, leaves and seeds by a variety of means. I have taken seed heads from some plants and hung them upside down in the shed to dry and in the next few weeks I shall be giving them a light spray with gold paint and using them to make wreaths and place settings. I’ve also got a number of palm leaves in mind to cut fresh from the palm tree to use as backgrounds for smaller decorations to be hung on the internal doors of the house - they will have dried ivy leaves stuck to them, with a centre of bright poinsettias.

What I’m doing right now is preserving the last summer flowers with glycerine. You have to buy special liquid glycerine from a craft shop and heat it according to the directions which can vary. Then you slide the stems of mature branches or flowers (note mature – young growth doesn’t have enough fibrous interconnections to work with this method) into the liquid and leave for up to three weeks. You end up with perfectly preserved and pliable flowers – often a little darker than their original colour but otherwise as natural as if you’d just picked them.

Dried flowers courtesy of Elizabeth Tritippo at Flickr

Labels: christmas decorations, garden flowers, preserving flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:01 PM 0 Comments

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Saturday, November 15, 2008

All Seasons Garden - Tropics in November

It’s been a while since I did one of these, and because I happened to be walking past a town-house in a rare moment of sunshine a couple of days ago, and peered into the garden to see what was there, I got the shock of my life, in a good way. I really couldn't believe my eyes!

A couple of things to say about this: first there is obviously a micro-climate around this particular area of South London (here’s a surprising tip – colleges of adult education and public swimming pools often create micro-climates where frost rarely happens because they are heated at night and chuck out enough warm air to stop ground frost for nearly a quarter mile radius, assuming the area isn’t windy) and second, the house-holder or (more likely) the house-holders gardener, has very green fingers.

Even so, this is impressive, it could be a garden in July. My fuchsia is still flowering but with nothing like the intensity of this one, and that stunning structural plant as a key feature make the whole garden seem tropical in the extreme.

Most of us can’t get away with such large tender plants, but palms are hardy right up as far as Norwich now, while everybody can have a bit of winter colour from heathers, even when there’s snow on the ground.

Labels: structural plants, town garden, tropical garden

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:21 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Gardening failures

We all have them, don’t we? Although it seems that they are something nobody likes to talk about: like stress incontinence and affairs outside marriage!

A recent survey claims that people don’t just buy Marks and Spencers food and pass it off as their own dinner party creation, they also buy similarly ‘expert’ plants and con their friends that they grew them. I do know one lady who can’t produce blue hydrangeas in her garden because the soil is alkaline. On the rare occasions when she is visited by her overbearing mother-in-law, she actually goes out and buys a blue hydrangea plant and sticks it in her shrubbery – there’s a space left just for it. So why does it have to be a blue hydrangea, I asked her? And the answer was that she personally hated hydrangeas in any colour, but her mother-in-law loved the blue ones and couldn’t grow them either, so she thought the investment was worthwhile to make the other woman green with (blue) envy. And as she’s given away all the hydrangea bushes as soon as mother-in-law leaves, and I’ve got two of them, I have to say that her failure is my success!

But the bulk of our failures result from having big plans and small skills. We invest in orchids or cactus or tender alpines or rampantly invasive water plants ‘because they look lovely’ and then, when we don’t put in the time necessary to maintain them, the result is failure.

But however bad we are at what WE do, this picture should make us all feel better. Somebody put that ladder up there to prune that Virginia Creeper, once upon a time … at least we’re not that bad!

Labels: alpines, cactus, hydrangeas, orchids, virginia creeper

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:57 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, November 9, 2008

Mulching autumn beds

There are several tasks that should be done in November, no matter how little we like the idea.

Where you have empty flowerbeds, you need to mulch them for winter, because even the best and flattest of beds can experience soil erosion in the wind and become compacted under the pressure of rainwater and snow. Mulching prevents both these things happening and also adds organic matter to the soil.

It’s also time to terminate the adventurous weeds that have germinated as a result of autumn rains because getting them out with a hoe right now is fifty times easier than trying to hand weed them out in spring when the are out-competing the plants you want to preserve.

Cut back your peonies all the way to the ground (even if they are having a last flush of flowers) – especially if you live in a frosty area and then mulch their crowns so frost can't get in and kill the plant. It's also good to prune late summer and autumn-flowering shrubs like Buddleia and hydrangea now, because if you don’t get round to them you’re going to have to wait until late February to cut them back. Roses should be taken back to around two feet so that winter winds can’t whip their stems and cause damage.

And my least favourite November task: pulling up the snapdragons and nasturtiums that have begun to die back, because it’s the final admission that winter is really here!

Labels: autumn mulching, autumn shrubs, hydrangeas, peony, roses

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:53 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, November 6, 2008

Greenhouse update (not)

I wish I’d bought my greenhouse from somebody else- because then I might be able to show you a picture of the finished building, not a picture I've borrowed from somebody luckier than me – but I was seduced by the fact that I’d been given a nice big gift voucher and ended up buying from a major chain of DIY stores that shall be nameless. And what a mistake that was!

I have now had three different greenhouses delivered – and three different bases and three different sets of glazing. But never has this major chain managed to the right base and the right glazing to arrive with the right frame – and not until this week have they mastered the fairly basic skill of only collecting the wrong items and leaving the right items to be matched up to the next delivery. Oh no! Their idea of customer service is to take everything away each time so that it turned into a kind of lucky dip conducted by delivery van: take three random huge cardboard boxes from the back of the vehicle, unpack them, and call the store to complain that once again, the wrong things have turned up.

Sigh. So finally, this week, I have the right three elements to create a greenhouse. But now I don’t have the free time to put the dratted thing together.

Take my advice – buy your greenhouse from a company that has good customer service: it doesn’t matter if it costs a bit more, it will be worth it in the end!

Peaceful greenhouse courtesy of orin optiglot

Labels: greenhouse

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:37 AM 1 Comments

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Monday, November 3, 2008

November garden tasks: get those suckers!

Yes, it’s that time of year. Both fruit trees and ornamentals (those purchased for their blossom or beautiful autumn leaf colour) are prone to producing suckers from their roots and stem bases because the chosen variety was grafted on to the roots of another robust, disease-resistant variety that is now making a bid for dominance via the suckers. Wisteria are prone to base suckering too, which is great if your wisteria is a wall covering but less great if it’s climbing a pillar. In either case, November is the time to prune the suckers neatly back to the base of the main plant with secateurs or a sharp knife.

It’s also leaf-fall month.

I do get fed up with picking up leaves, although I tell myself it’s great aerobic exercise and anyway, the sound of a leaf vacuum is one of the least pleasant garden noises, so I would never have one, even if I could afford it. And I tell myself that lots of leaves mean lots of leaf-mould. To make leaf mould for yourself, make a few holes in the base and sides of a robust black bin liner and then rake or collect your leaves and pack them into the bag - it's best to do this on a dry, non-windy day or you simply double your work.

When the bag is full, sprinkle the leaves with rainwater (it’s softer than tap-water and therefore more likely to help the leaves break down) tie the top of the bag with string and shake well. Don’t, as I once did, shake the bag before tying it, as you will almost certainly let go of it and have to collect your leaves all over again! Put the bag a shady, wind-free spot (or tie the string to a hook in your shed, which is what we do) and in a year the leaves will have become a sort of chestnut brown oat-textured material which makes a superb mulch. Either use them like that or tip two bags into one (they will have shrunk a lot by now) to make room for that year’s fresh leaves and let them rot for another year, by which time they will be an almost black granular material which is a fantastic soil conditioner.


Autumn leaves courtesy of Dominic's pics

Labels: leaf mould, November garden tasks, suckering plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:52 PM 0 Comments

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