Garden Centre

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

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Monday, December 15, 2008

Growing your own plants - stratification

One of the great mysterious processes of seed germination is stratification. Basically, all this means is that where perennial plants are from temperate climates, their seeds will probably need a period of both soaking and chilling before they will germinate. This is because the natural conditions in which they would germinate are that they would spend a winter on cold, often wet, ground. So that’s the process you need to recreate in home conditions to get your seeds to understand that its time to grow. Without the stratification process, they don’t get the message and remain dormant.

For plants from the Australias, stratification often involves heating, to mimic the forest fires that allowed seeds to grow where mature plants had been destroyed.

So to work out how a seed may need to be stratified, consider where it comes from.

This week I’m stratifying Alpine strawberries. They grow in extremely cold areas, so I’m going to give them at least a month of cold – normally this would be in the fridge, but as the Alps are under snow cover for much of the winter, I’m putting my seeds in the freezer! And although the process is usually both moist and cold, because of the extreme cold of the Alps, I’m giving them a month of dry cold (frozen in a plastic bag) and then two weeks of moist cold (in the fridge on some damp paper – that should give the impression of the ‘spring melt’ that they need to get their seed cases cracking and the embryos inside growing.

It feels very good to be starting to grow something in December, even if the growing process does begin with a period of chilling.

Frozen fruit courtesy of mindluge

Labels: alpine strawberries, growing plants from seed, stratification

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:13 AM 0 Comments

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