Garden Centre

Friday, May 9, 2008

Dividing plants in May

Today I’ve been taking advantage of the early rain and later sun (a perfect combination) to lift and divide snowdrops. They are an exception to just about all the rules in the way you treat them – they are much better split when their foliage is still green, and extremely difficult to establish once the bulbs dry out, so if you don’t have snowdrops in your garden or need more, this is the time to buy them from specialist nurseries who sell them ‘in the green’ or beg them from neighbours who have established clumps. They should be divided every four years, or sooner if they start to look congested and you don’t need to sort them by size or plant them individually, break them into clumps about the size of your palm and bung them back in – they’ll do fine!

And of course the other job at present is hardening off which means a lot of carrying pots and trays around: while some plants like to come out of the greenhouse or propagator straight into the sun, others like to ease into outdoor life in a shady, but not chilly, place. In the former group are tomatoes and pelargoniums, and in the latter, celery.

Labels: celery, dividing plants, pelargonium, snowdrops, spring bulbs

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:07 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Garden colour schemes for May

Here’s a question for you – do you like complementary or contrasting colours? I notice that many gardens in may offer the former kind of display – forget-me-nots with pink tulips for example. I tend to prefer the contrasting colour approach: these bluebells are lovely on their own, but even more impressive, to my way of thinking, when backed by the acid yellow of the perennial behind them – and if any reader can remind me of the name of that sherbet-lemon yellow, slightly prickly, clump-forming plant, I would be grateful, as it has completely escaped my mind.

What’s happening this month? Well sometimes it feels like everything is! There’s very little time to stop and admire colour schemes, because everything is shooting up, needing to be planted out, or demanding a prune.

By now I’d usually have cut back the flowering stems of my hellebores, which I usually do as soon as the flowers have ‘gone over’ – pruning back to the base so that new shoots come up strongly for next year, but this year even the hellebores were a little slow to appear, so I’m giving them another week to finish flowering. I’m also leaving two stems of the helleborus niger to set seed, as I’d like to produce some plants to give away to friends.

I need to set some canes to support my raspberries, and also to help a new weigela get the idea of what’s required of it – weigelas are often described in old plant books as being ‘of lax disposition’ which always suggests to me that they have problems getting out of bed in the morning

And the weeds always, always, need to be hoed over, or pulled up by hand. May is definetly not a quiet month in the garden.

Labels: bluebells, hellebores, may flowers, may plants, weigela

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:40 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, May 5, 2008

Bamboo Heaven

The garden today is full of things we are seeing for the first time this year: mayflies around the pond, tadpoles (not very many this year, the late frosts caught most of them, I fear) huge swathes of fully open bluebells and the new green tips on the bamboo.

We have three different bamboo plants in the garden, one of which was here when we arrived and we’re still trying to get rid of! They are an incredibly invasive plant, you cut them down, dig them up, spray them with chemicals that would melt concrete and lo and behold! next spring they reappear. That’s the minus side. The plus sides are many too: they make a fantastic screen and once they establish are largely maintenance free, they come in a range of colours and heights to suit you (we have a black bamboo with emerald green leaves that is incredibly impressive, it looks as if we polish it with ebony boot polish and a soft cloth every day). One of the best things about bamboo though, is the noise that it makes – a constant susurration of whispering sounds that is as calming as water.

Labels: bamboo, bamboo problems, may plants, spring growth

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:08 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Composting

This time of year causes compost! Vast huge amounts of compost ingredients are generated as we cut lawns (often for the first time this year) and trim hedges, not to mention cutting back all those deciduous shrubs that need to be pruned after flowering, like forsythia and buddleia. And that means that canny gardeners will be able to do what we’ve done, which is dig out a large bucket of last year’s twiggy prunings to go in with the green stuff.

It sounds a bit convoluted I know, but after years of watching our compost go through a stage of being slimy, vile-smelling and wet, we’ve finally worked out how to stop it. All the gardening books will tell you that your compost will not do this (it’s called becoming anaerobic) if you turn it often enough. Poppycock! If, like us, you have to rely on plastic bins for composting, there’s every chance it will happen for several reasons:

The bins have no side ventilation to allow air in and moisture to evaporate out
Their sloping construction means that they concentrate weight downwards, pushing the air out of the contents, and also making it impossible for you to get to the bottom outer edges of the bin to turn the contents adequately
Their lids tend to form airtight seals.

Anaerobic inactivity happens because the oxygen is squashed out of the compost – if you put a lot of wet greenstuff in (like grass clippings and soft hedge clippings for example) and then it rains (like now and for the foreseeable future) you’ve got the worst conditions for making good compost.

Your choices are to get in their with a hoe, hook or fork and turn it, as best you can, or to do what we do, use an ounce of prevention to save a pound of work. Each winter, as we prune the hard twiggy plants in the garden, we stand the prunings in a really big bucket which lives through the winter in our shed. Come April, when we’re inundated with greenstuff, we cut those twigs to one foot lengths and layer them with the greenstuff – the rule of thumb is that we scatter the twigs to about the same depth of each layer of greenstuff we put in. The green will distribute itself through the twiggy material, which keeps lots of oxygen in the bin, and means we don’t have to go out in the rain and turn the compost all the time!

Compost by chika

Labels: garden compost

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:32 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Apple blossom time

This is one of my favourite sights – apple blossom. It annoys me that I have to crane my neck to see it in my garden, because even after three years of remedial pruning, you can’t reach the apples in my garden without a ladder. Infuriatingly, the previous owners didn’t prune the trees for over a decade and ten years is a long time for a tree to grow unchecked! We actually reduced their height by nearly half, but they are still too tall and the branches we are working on are bigger round than my thigh, so there’s little hope of getting them any shorter.

There is a lot of confusion about “dwarf” apple trees. What makes an apple tree dwarf? Why would somebody want a dwarf apple? How dwarf is dwarf? Apple varieties must be cross-pollinated to set fruit. This means that apple flowers must have pollen from a different apple/crab apple variety in order to set fruit. This is why you have to plant two different apple varieties - unless you have a crab apple nearby because they pollinate anything.

The seeds produced in the apple will be a hybrid of both parents but the fruit will always be the same as the parent tree so you can’t plant seeds from an apple and have it bear the same fruit. To propagate a named apple variety, a branch from the desired tree is grafted or budded onto a rootstock. There are many “dwarfing” rootstocks that will reduce the size of the apple tree – some to as low as ten feet, some to around fourteen. Of course, you still need to prune them.

How tall are my apple trees? Twenty feet plus!

Labels: apple blossom, apple trees, pruning fruit trees

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:59 AM 1 Comments

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Friday, April 25, 2008

Loving up my summer bulbs

I find some summer bulbs do well in my chalk and clay soil, others just vanish without trace (rotted, or eaten by grey squirrels) but that doesn’t stop me buying and planting them every year!

To give them the best start you have to choose bulbs that are plump and firm, and usually heavy for their size, rather than shrivelled or soft. If you are planting out bulbs you overwintered in a safe place, get ruthless now – remove any rotten or hollowed out bulbs, or any with evidence of fungal growth, because planting them will be a waste of time and may actually infect other nearby bulbs with their problem whatever it may be.

Most prefer well-drained soil in a warm spot, although Zantedeschia, (which we all know better as Calla Lilies) prefer damp conditions and some lilies like dappled shade. The basic rule, with your average bulb, is to plant with the pointy bit up and set the bulb about twice as deep as the bulb is tall! I put a handful of sand under each bulb too, because of the tendency to rot out in my clay soil.

If you have pets, especially young cats, who do like to wander through your flower borders, think about planting lilies in pots rather than directly into the garden. Lily pollen, especially that of Stargazer, can be very toxic and there was a case last year in which a cat died after brushing against a Stargazer lily and then licking the pollen of its fur. It is unusual, as most animals will stay well away from pollen, but remember that small children don’t have the same instincts and are likely to have strong reactions to the toxic elements in the plant if they get it on their skin.

Calla lily courtesy of robbie jim

Labels: calla lilies, lilies, planting bulbs, summer bulbs

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:22 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Time to plant summer bulbs

Late flowering bulbs are the best way of extending the British growing season past the intense flowering periods of May and June, through to the first frosts. Bulb means all kinds of things, by the way, the white onion-shaped bulbs we all think of, but in summer bulb terms we’re also talking about corms (gladioli), tubers (dahlias), rhizomes (irises). And we’re also talking about plants that were considered a bit ‘vulgar’ a few years ago, such as the dahlia and the Edna Everedge-style gladioli.

Also included in this list are crocosmia, cannas, calla lilies, gloriosa and nerines - all of which flower from July onwards, by picking the right combination of bulbs you can have flowers right through to November. Amongst my favourites for this period are:

Tigridia pavonia: The tiger flower, which is an odd name, as you might expect it to be called the leopard flower (it’s spotted or blotched, not striped) and even more confusingly, aka the peacock flower although it doesn’t come in blue or green as peacocks do! Colour range includes orange to pink, red, yellow or white flowers from July to October if planted in good soil and sheltered conditions with plenty of sunlight. Sprinkling the ripe seeds around in autumn seems to produce a good range and rate of new bulbs too.

Cosmos astrosanguineus: The small brownish burgundy coloured flowers don’t look that special, but they do smell of milk chocolate! Needs a dryish spot in warmth and flowers from July to October.

Tigridia courtesy of Rodnei Ferrato

Labels: cosmos, crocosmia, gladioli, late summer flowers, summer bulbs, tigridia

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:45 AM 0 Comments

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