Garden Centre

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Sweet peas and beans for the small garden

The way I grow sweet peas is to mix them with runner beans and (this year at least) climbing French beans. I do this because (a) I’m greedy and like to have food to eat as well as flowers to admire and (b) sweet peas are a lovely cut flower but not, to be honest, the most beautiful climber. Essentially, if you want to keep your sweet peas in flower for as long as possible, you have to cut flowers every day, so they don’t become very floriferous (to use the proper word) simply because if you have a sweet pea covered in flowers, within three or four days you will have a sweet pea covered in seed pods and then it won’t flower any more!

So … what I do is I fill a trellis with runner beans, planting White Lady, which has white flowers and straight, large beans, and Scarlet Emperor, which has red flowers and curving, but very tasty beans, and which has previously been planted with a mixture of pastel sweet peas for colour and the old fashioned matacuna (the one with the purple and magenta flowers) sweet pea, which has the strongest fragrance of all.

I started my sweet peas in January in the greenhouse. No, I’m never going to get fed up with saying ‘greenhouse’ I promise you! But the beans are going out as seeds this weekend. This way the sweet peas ‘get away’ by being in the ground for a month or so before the beans are ready to join them. The sweet peas are hardening off by being placed outside in the garden every day but returned to the cold frame at night. A cold frame is better for hardening off than a greenhouse because I can leave the lid open a crack, to ensure that the plants don’t ‘soften’ again but also protecting them from any stray air frosts that might sneak up.

You then have the chance to pick flowers and harvest beans every day, giving you a lovely flower display to look at as you munch on your very fresh beans!

Labels: climbing french beans, greenhouse, runner beans, scarlet emperor, sweet pea, white lady

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:15 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Frugal Gardening Tips

I’ve been scouring the web to try and find ways to make better use of the water that we have, and in the process I came across a lot of ideas for being frugal in the garden. Some of them are second nature to most of us, but others were new to me, so here’s what seemed most interesting to this gardener:

Coffee grounds contain natural minerals and low levels of potassium and nitrogen which are key to healthy soil – use them as a mulch for established plants rather than mixing them into the compost heap, but don't put them around seedlings in case you scorch their fragile roots.

If you spot a flower or plant that you like, maybe at a friend’s house, ask them if you can take a cutting as opposed to spending money on a new plant. I’d add to this, if you see an expensive plant when you’re out with friends or on a horticultural group outing, club together to buy it, with the one who pays half getting the original plant and others who divide the other half of the cost between them, getting rooted cuttings or seeds – you may have to wait a year but so what, if the plant is worth it (nb F1 hybrids don’t come true from seed)

Plants will not object to old bathwater being used on them – well, I’m not sure this is entirely true because (a) in an organic garden you could be adding all kinds of non-organic substances from bath products and (b) while most vegetables won’t care, some flowers are extremely sensitive, for example, to oils in water which can damage petals and scorch tender leaves. So either ensure your family bathes with biodegradable and organic toiletries, or save (cooled) bathwater for things that don’t care, like established native shrubs, and trees. As an aside, we invested in a thing that was supposed to siphon bathwater in a tube from the bathroom window to the garden – it never worked!

Old containers make great new planting schemes – can’t disagree with this, we’ve used old baths, old sinks, tyres turned inside out, old packing chests and even a typewriter, to make lovely floral displays.

Labels: bargain gardening tips, cheap gardening tips, frugal gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:44 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Garden Water Issues

It rained for about ten minutes yesterday – granted it rained torrentially, the kind of rain that hurts the top of your head if you’re not wearing a hat – but that was the first rain we’ve had since January and we could do with some more.

I’ve been using the rain butt in the garden to water the seedlings in the greenhouse, but it’s almost empty and now that things like wallflowers are ready to be planted out, I’m a little worried that there won’t be enough water if we don’t get some more rain soon. I can always water the garden from the house, but as we live in an extremely hard water area, this can be a different kind of a problem – not all of my plants like the hard water that they get from the hose!

There are things that can be done to conserve water, and some of them are already habitual for me (we had a hosepipe ban a few years ago) such as:

• Only watering the lawn when it needs it – in fact, I never water the lawn! All I do is throw the cooled washing up water over it at night and it thrives perfectly.
• Water during the early parts of the day and not when it's blowy – although this can be more difficult that it sounds, given that I live on a windy coast! Early watering reduces water evaporation and has the added benefit of cutting down on slug depredation as slugs like damp conditions so night watering gives them a playground. Windy weather carries away a lot of water as vapour, which is wasted.
• Mulching with organic material to improve absorption and water retention.
• Planting drought-resistant shrubs and plants.

But I’m now having to think about getting extra rain butts and seeing if we can conserve more water from the various roofs in the house and garden. I wonder if there is anything else I can do to harvest water or cut down on its use?

Labels: autumn mulching, garden water, rain, rain butt, wallflowers, water conservation

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:56 AM 2 Comments

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Saturday, March 21, 2009

Greenhouse gardening March

I really don’t know how I coped without my greenhouse. Six months after I cursed it roundly and retreated to the house to make tea and treacle tart for my other half – who then spent two days putting the 471 piece monster together while regularly being fortified with said tea and tart, I spend at least an hour a day in it.

Here’s what I’ve got going on:

• Three trays of broad beans
• One tray of native trees - a sort of goody bag of who knows what? So far what = one seedling ...
• One tray of passionfruit seeds (an experiment – can a passionfruit vine be grown from the seeds of a supermarket passionfruit? We’re going to find out …)
• Six pots of sweet peas
• Thirty-six pots of nasturtium seedlings (don’t ask, other half got carried away with himself)
• Three pots each of Love-lies-bleeding, sage and dill, which will be the nucleus of my new herb bed
• Twenty-four pots of seedling alpine strawberries
• Twenty transplanted celeriac seedlings
• Thirty-six pea seedlings in toilet roll inners
• Three over-wintered fuchsias
• Two tubs of wallflowers

The passionfruit is going to be interesting because if they do grow I shall probably have to give them all away, not having a single south facing fence that isn’t already covered with: jasmine, winter-flowering clematis, pyracantha, Iceberg rose and fig tree. All the people I’ve spoken to say that the secret to growing passionfruit is heat and freshness of the seeds, and as these went straight from fruit to pot in about forty-five seconds, I’m confident that freshness isn’t an issue.

There is a bit of an issue in the greenhouse though – I can’t actually turn round in a hurry because if I do, I end up knocking something to the floor. I just hope that the weather remains gracious so that I can start planting things out next weekend!

Labels: broad beans, fuchsia, greenhouse gardening, iceberg rose, march greenhouse, passionfruit, peas, wallflowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:55 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, March 19, 2009

Cottage Gardening - Aquilegias

My columbines do not survive. Even if I label them with the proper Latin name of aquilegia, they never appear after the first year. I buy them from garden centres, I buy them from plant stalls, I buy them from specialist growers. I grow them from seed, I buy them as mature plants. They flower, they die down, and … they never come up again.

Aquilegias, or columbines as I prefer to call them, are the quintessential cottage garden plant. Their dainty flowers are supposed to be a bit of a nuisance as they self-seed everywhere (except in my garden) so I have been trying to find out what might be the problem. And everybody says that columbines suffer from few problems: mildew might be an issue in dry years and they can be attacked by sawfly and leaf miners – but don’t worry, say all the experts cheerily, ‘These things are almost never life-threatening, especially if the plants are in reasonably moist soil and growing vigorously, just cut the plant back hard to ground level immediately after flowering. This encourages a new burst of foliage.’ Actually, I think it just encourages the plant to die a bit quicker, at least in my case.

So rather than admit defeat, I’m going to indulge in the final resort of all gardeners – container growing. That way I can control light and shade, moisture, soil drainage and pH, and if I can’t grow them after that, I really shall give up!

Columbine courtesy of TieGuyII at Flickr

Labels: aquilegia, columbine, container plants, cottage garden

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:34 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, March 13, 2009

Greenhouse Gardening – Fuchsias

The fuchsia is a beautiful plant, which can be found in a wide range of colours but predominantly a mixture of pinks, purples, whites and reds.

All fuchsia flowers have three parts: the upper tube, the sepals beneath it, which are a bit like wings furling outwards and the corolla or skirt-like growth underneath the sepals. Each part of the blossom may be different colour which is one of the things that gives this shrub its appeal to the gardener. There are two basic categories: hardy ones that can be left outside all year, some of which are particularly good for hedging, and the tender kind, which may either be bushy or upright and grown in pots, or as a trailing plant for hanging baskets.

Now I have a greenhouse, I can start to invest in tender fuchsias, most of which are prone to frost damage but can be grown outside from June to early autumn in the UK, at which point they need to be taken into a frost-free greenhouse to over-winter.

I’m buying young plants which means I will be spending the early spring pinching out young shoots to encourage the plants to stay bushy and because it’s a waste-not-want-not world these days, I shall be using those cuttings in a pot of quite gritty potting medium with a bit of hormone rooting powder, to make new plants.

I’ll stop pinching out in late spring or the flowering will be delayed. To flower well, fuchsias need humidity in the warmth, and this can be given by mist-spraying the plants, never letting the pots dry out while the plant is in flower and avoiding the full intensity of the noon sun.

Once the plant has given its glorious blossoming, say around mid September, I shall have to cut back on watering so that the wood hardens a little – this helps it get through the winter and by October, the plants should be kept almost dry – at which point I shall take them into the greenhouse and stop off any really leafy areas so that I don’t need to water any more. Through the winter I shall only water if the plant is utterly bone dry and the growing medium is cracking, and I shan’t prune until early next spring, when I can see the new shoots coming up from the base and then I will cut off all the old wood and re-pot the plant.

Fuchsia courtesy of Tanakwho at Flickr

Labels: fuchsia, greenhouse gardening, tender perennials, tender shrubs

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:45 AM 2 Comments

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

March tasks – slug control

I don’t know if it’s just me, but when the first green shoots are poking through the ground, I don’t get even a moment to appreciate their beauty, because the slugs are there, munching away like nobody’s business and somehow managing to get a good feast in although there are still sharp frosts that could, with any luck, wipe them out.

So it’s time to fight back – but if you’re like me, you’re never sure how to do it.


• Natural slug and snail control methods are growing in popularity. One simple approach is to sprinkle slugs with salt, which causes them to dry up – is that cruel though? Another approach, used by many a hard-hearted gardener in my area, is the pruning shears system, which involves snipping the blighters in two. I’m afraid I lack the coldly calculating hatred this requires, although I have been known to tread on smaller slugs if they are on a hard surface and I am wearing nice heavy boots, because I assume that must be an instantaneous death, rather like having a building drop on you
• Slugs are attracted to stale beer, so if you leave some in a shallow bowl, the slugs will slide in and drown – you do still have to clean the bowls out though, and the smell of drowned slug in beer is pretty horrible if you’ve forgotten to empty the bowls after a couple of hot days though
• You can gather slugs at night by hand using a torch and some gloves to pick them up with – then you can put them in a bucket and drown them or whatever you choose
• Barrier methods help protect favourite plants; sand, copper bands and ash all keep slugs away tender leaves and stems
• You can use wildlife friendly slug pellets, although some of us worry about even their cumulative effects on pets or birds.

Slug courtesy of photogirl17 at Flickr

Labels: garden slugs, slugs and snails

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:24 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, March 6, 2009

Growing from Seed

A couple of people have pointed out in emails that I haven’t ever covered the basics of growing plants from seed and of course, we all have to start somewhere! If you were lucky, doting parents gave you a packet of seeds when you were a tot and you got the bug to garden almost before you could walk and talk, but if not, don’t despair, it’s very easy.

Hygiene is actually the most important part of seed germination – if your pots and trays are clean and well ventilated and your growth medium is sterile, you should be fine. There are loads of ways to sterilise pots and trays that have been used before, but I use the sterilising tablets that you get for baby’s bottles and plunge my pots etc in a huge bucket of hot water with the tablets dissolved in it. That guarantees no lingering disease or bacterium can be hanging around waiting for a chance to wipe out my plantlings.

There are four basic kinds of seed - annuals are sown, flower and are removed from the garden all in one year (although clever people sow annuals in the autumn and carry them through the winter with some weather protection so they start earlier in the next year), biennials are sown in one summer but produce in the following one, perennials are sown once and should be around for years and years and half-hardy annuals can be sown either in winter or early spring but require physical protection such as being indoors or in a greenhouse until the frost risk is past.

I use a mixture of John Innes #2 and ordinary (sterilised) potting compost for all my seeds. John Innes is great for starting seeds, but rather expensive, and potting compost is cheaper but gives less good germination, so I mix them 50/50.

You can find out how to grow almost any plant from a good gardening book, or – when all else fails, plant half the seeds on the surface, half their own depth under soil cover and hope for the best! This is the route I use when somebody gives me seeds and can’t remember what the plant is they came from. If I can’t identify them myself, the half under, half on top method will usually get something to germinate.

Labels: autumn seeds, germinating seeds, growing from seed

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:17 AM 2 Comments

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Tuesday, March 3, 2009

March Garden Tasks

This is the time to start feeding and repotting houseplants, which is something that can be carried out whatever the weather outside is doing.

If you have container-grown citrus trees, report them now, before the warmer weather causes them to start growth, but don’t feed them for another month or so so that their roots reach out into the soil and fill the pot.

This is also a good time to prune your roses, cutting out dead, diseased or damaged stems. And if you have early flowering mahonias, cut back one or two of the flowering shoots from really large plants after flowering to bring on replacement shoots from the base. You have a choice of cutting them right down to ground level or staggering the height to give a more varied shape. And you can also cut back dogwoods, willows and hardy fuchsias by the end of this month too.

Assuming, like me, you have recently come in for a deluge of rain, or even snow, try to avoid walking on the wet soil in the garden – if necessary lay down some old planks to walk on, especially to protect the lawn.

And of course, you’re already germinating the warm season vegetable and flower seeds you want to grow, aren’t you? This can be done on a garden windowsill or in a greenhouse.

Labels: David Austin roses, fuchsia, houseplants, lawn care, mahonia

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:06 AM 0 Comments

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