Garden Centre

Friday, April 24, 2009

Wildlife Gardening: planting for butterflies

In the past fortnight, as well as the overwintered Peacock butterfly that decided to sit on my husband's hand and prevent him doing any mowing, I’ve seen two Wall Brown butterflies in the garden, along with several Holly Blues. As we like butterflies, I’ve been looking at what it is that attracts them to the garden. There are two areas the Wall Browns seem to like:– the first is around the pond, where we have pebbles and stones in an area that borders the lawn and is very sunny, and their other favourite spot is near the ornamental currant. Their first spot certainly makes sense as they are said to lay eggs in open grassland where the turf is broken or stony. They eat a lot of grasses and in the pond area we have several carex and sedges that they are probably enjoying as a habitat if not a food source.

The Holly Blues are always in the same place – the fatshedera - which they adore. They lay their eggs on it and as it grows in one of those corners of the garden that will support almost nothing else: it’s between an ancient and unproductive apple tree, and a shady wall, only a yard from the shed, I’m very happy for them to have their share of the plant. It’s worth it to see their pale blue flutterings in that dank and rather sombre corner of nothingness.

Both species spend a lot of time hanging around the lavender bushes too, which suggests that they are using it as a food supply.

We try not to tidy up too much in winter, as the best way to increase the butterfly population, after planting things they will use as a food source, is to leave the areas where the pupae or overwintering caterpillars can rest undisturbed. We also have a wall covered in ivy, which is a natural winter home for tortoiseshells and peacocks.

Labels: carex, fatshedera, garden butterflies, lavender, peacock butterfly, sedge, wall brown butterfly

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:40 AM 1 Comments

---

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

April Garden Tasks: Strawberry beds

I love home-grown strawberries – and if you have clay soil or suffer from late frosts, mid April is a better time to plant new plants than in September, which is the traditional time. The reason for spring planting is that in clay, newly planted roots can become waterlogged and rot because they aren’t in active growth. And frost is actually a big killer of strawberry plants, so you need to work out where to plant them to protect them from late frosts. Funnily enough the plants will cope just fine with winter frosts, it’s the early production of flowers that is damaged, because they are so close to the ground that they have a very high risk of having flowers completely blighted by unseasonal weather. This means higher ground or raised beds are a great idea.

On the other hand, you can have alpine strawberries in almost any situation that doesn’t get waterlogged – they are really hardy and although they don’t have anything like the productivity of ordinary strawberries, half a dozen plants will produce enough tiny berries to top a bowl of cereal every day for weeks on end.

Another point is that strawberries should never be planted where members of the nightshade family: peppers, tomatoes and potatoes have previously been grown because they can harbour verticillium wilt which causes strawberry plants to die.

And if your strawberries are established, this is the time to lift any runners you don’t want and snip through them, cut off all the old brown foliage and damage leaves and make sure you remove any old fruit that hid from you all winter and has become dry or mildewed, as it can transfer mould and blight to other plants in summer. I have got some runners I separated last year to plant into a new bed this year, and this week I'm tidying them up and getting them into the ground.

Labels: garden strawberries

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:54 AM 0 Comments

---

Monday, April 20, 2009

April Garden Flowers: Bluebells

If you’re one of those people, like me, who loves the sight of a woodland full of bluebells, then I’m afraid you have to accept that your desire will either have to be fulfilled by travelling to a public park or stately home where the spring ‘blue haze’ can be fully appreciated, or you’ll have to drastically overhaul your garden to make it a place that bluebells can thrive. And that’s the rub – once bluebells are thriving, then not a lot else will be!

If you read any gardening book, it will tell you that bluebells need woodland – not strictly true. Bluebells do thrive in woodland, but the three conditions they actually need are dappled light, reasonably damp soil and something to provide summer cover that stops grass establishing. Grass is the enemy of bluebells which is why woodlands have become their natural habitat, but if you have a border in which there are large and large-leaved shrubs that tolerate a dampish soil, you can get bluebells to take hold very easily. Under a cotoneaster is usually a bit too dry, and below hydrangeas is often a bit too hot, but mine are happy enough on an ornamental pond margin which they are sharing with a prostrate rosemary, some hellebores and a Continus (smoke bush).

One reason that the bluebell thrives so wonderfully when it does get established, is that it contains a toxin that the plant uses to fight off potential pests like slugs and snails – scientist are trying to work out how to extract this or create it commercially in laboratories so that we can use it to protect tastier plants, but until that happens, it’s always worth thinking about whether you can help preserve a particularly lovely plant or shrub from predator attack by cutting off the access to it using plants like bluebells, or the many members of the onion family who are equally unpopular with slugs and snails.

Labels: bluebells, cotinus, hellebores, prostrate rosemary

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:42 AM 0 Comments

---

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Colour in the April Garden

April, May and June are the months when British gardens often look their best. March is a bit variable (ie gardens are often under snow or invisible through driving rain) and July is frequently too parched for a really good display of garden-wide flowers: Cosmos, Cape Daisies and sunflowers will be looking great but a lot of the border will be tired and showing its age, and lawns can be a bit bald, so these twelve weeks or so are the real glories of the British gardening summer.

One of the things that often disappoints me is how little use some gardeners make of the colour range available to them at this time of year. Once the snowdrops and crocus have gone over, and the camellias are fading, many gardeners seem to have nothing much to show for their labours until the roses flourish in late May and June. This is such a waste! In a clement climate (that’s posh speak for damp and cool) you can have colour every week of the year and when there are long hours of sunshine without too much heat, that colour can be really glowing, varied and sustained.

One of my favourite spring displays is this bank of lungwort (Pulmonaria) set against the variegated Euonymus behind it. The daffodil is a bit of a bonus – it’s usually gone over before the lungwort is at its best, but this year the double daffs came a few days later than usual and gave an added zing to the planting scheme. See how honest I am? I could have pretended I planned that …

Anyway, this kind of planting, where you use a stable year round colour (the cream and green of the Euonymus) to offset a range of short-lived contrasts is a really good way to get your garden performing well. Later in the year, the Crocosmia, which is to the left of the lungwort, will come into flower and its fiery orange display will work just as well with the cream and green as a backdrop. Neither flowering plant would have nearly so much impact against a plain green background. But if I’d planted red hot pokers (Kniphofia) instead of Crocosmia, it wouldn’t have worked so well, because their red, orange and yellow combination would have been too much of a scatter of colour – solid blocks of colour work better with variegated plants.

Labels: euonymus, garden borders, lungwort, spring colour, spring garden

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:41 AM 0 Comments

---

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

April Garden Showers

Not the lovely baby-shower type showers but the chilly, hearty, English summer type showers. And – for Pete’s sake, give me a break – showers accompanied by slugs!

I suppose it could be worse, it could be showers OF slugs, but really! On the very first night that I put my seedling alpine strawberries out to harden off, in trays, with clear plastic covers that I thought fit rather snugly, they had not only the showers but the slugs to contend with. To be fair, there was no choice, the greenhouse is full, the cold-frame is full, there was nowhere else for the baby plants to go, but how the Dickens did the slugs get into the seed trays?
I discovered the answer at about 11 am, while I was still trying to find enough level spaces in the garden to set out all the seedlings that need hardening off: ie leeks, nasturtiums, sunflowers, celeriac and native trees.

The answer, of course, is that just as it’s the time of year for baby plants, so it is the time of year for baby slugs. I found a slug under a piece of gravel. This was rather like ‘miniature world’ – usually you find a slug under a stone but the scaled down version is miniscule slug under miniscule pebble. I was heartless and threw both gravel and slug into the pond, where the big lazy goldfish will find the slug floating and have a happy snack. But as it was as thin as string, I do understand how it, and its evil siblings, got under the plastic lid.

For tonight I shall sprinkle salt over the table they are spending the night on, as well as using some of the slug pellets that I loathe, even if they are supposedly wildlife friendly, but I need to find a better long-term answer than this.

What’s good in the garden in April?

Today what looks wonderful is my later-flowering Mahonia – the early one has gone over: it’s at it’s best in February, but the later one is scenting the whole area beautifully. The hellebores are fading and the bluebells are just not quite there yet, so the Mahonia has the garden largely to itself for a few days. Not that anybody is complaining, mind you. At this time of year, the sight of any flower is still a surprise and when that flower has a heady scent as well as a glorious appearance, it's actually rather nice to enjoy it in its solitary splendour. Between heavy showers.

Labels: alpine strawberries, assembling a greenhouse, coldframe, garden slugs, mahonia, seedlings

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:40 AM 0 Comments

---

Friday, April 3, 2009

Garden tasks for April

The one thing that I always tend to forget at this time of year is to prune!

Honestly, it’s my biggest weakness in spring. I never forget to weed and I usually remember to lift and divide clumps of spring bulbs, but somehow I forget that shrubs need some tender loving care too. What I ought to be doing is pruning back my winter-flowering jasmine so that it looks as good next year as it did this. It’s on my list, but (sad confession) I tend to only get around to giving it a prune every third year, instead of every year.

Also needing to be brought down to ground level are my dogwoods – actually they should have been cut a couple of weeks ago, but it won’t do any harm to cut them now, even though they are just starting to come into leaf. If I don’t hack them back, they won’t have jewel-bright winter stems last year.

My neighbours are planting out dahlia tubers now, and as long as they are covered in a few inches of loose soil, they should be okay. In northern regions it might be best to wait until the end of the month. I don’t grow dahlias, but I do have lily bulbs in pots that I’m hardening off now. The reason I grew them in pots is that we’ve got the hideous red lily beetle (Lilioceris lilii) in our garden. Because the larvae overwinter in the soil and can eat a lily bulb to the ground in a matter of a few days, I’ve got into the habit of repotting the bulbs in sterilised soil at the end of each flowering period, after carefully dusting off the bulbs to ensure that no horrible larvae are lurking. So far so good!

And although we don’t usually have hanging baskets, this year somebody gave me two empty baskets for Christmas, so I’ve decided to make them into salad chandeliers, featuring nasturtiums and other pretty but edible crops. I planted the seedling nasturtiums in them this week, and I’m also going to have orache, and dwarf marigolds and variegated sage to add colour.

Labels: april garden tasks, april pruning, dogwood, lilies, lily beetle, nasturtium, sage

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:10 AM 3 Comments

---

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Wildlife Gardening

This is the month when the garden really comes into its own in wildlife terms. The fish are frisking in the pond; the frogs have stopped being frisky and are ignoring the growing frogspawn; the first cabbage whites are fluttering around and I saw three bumble bees this morning.

We garden for wildlife by providing a range of resources that suit insects, mammals, birds and amphibians. For insects we have a log pile that we hope might one day be inhabited by stag beetles, although at present it probably only hosts earwigs and woodlice. Did you know that stag beetles can spend as much as seven years as larvae and as little as two weeks as beetles? Amazing.

We also have bee logs: short lengths of tree-trunk with holes drilled into them at downward angles – solitary bees love to nest in them and it seems to be working as our bumble bee population is definitely growing. The downward angle is to stop the hole filling up with rainwater and drowning the bee larvae that is developing in it.

We have a pond, which has goldfish, frogs and lots of mayflies and we grow plants that should provide food throughout the year, so native daisy type flowers in summer and autumn, berrying plants like rose bushes, cotoneaster, pyracantha, berberis and viburnum in winter and mahonia in early spring. In summer the beans and sweet peas attract lots of bees and other pollinators. We no longer put out bird food: instead we leave the dead heads on roses to provide rose-hips, ditto sunflowers, and use the berrying plants and the log pile to provide seeds, berries and overwintering insect life to feed birds.

Am I a gardening April Fool?

This is a picture of my greenhouse, taken from the outside. The top polycarbonate panel has been painted with one of those products that is supposed to cut out the sun. It does seem to work, if you compare it to the lower panel.

Here’s the question though: the product is supposed to be transparent when it rains, so that it allows what little light there is to get through – which is a great idea. But it’s also supposed to be ‘easily removable with water and a cloth’ to quote the instructions. But how do you know? If it’s transparent while wet, how do you know if you’ve managed to wash it off? Or am I being too complicated …

Labels: garden ponds, garden wildlife, greenhouse, Wildlife Gardening

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:49 AM 0 Comments

---