Garden Centre

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Mistletoe – a kissing crop

This year Britain has a massive mistletoe glut – and that’s good news for anybody who’s hoping to get romantic this Christmas! Good mistletoe harvests depend on mild winters and damp summers, so very few people actually desire the right weather to grow this strange parasitic plant, but given how much it costs, even in a glut year, you might want to try growing your own.

Traditionally mistletoe grows in orchards, and the two trees on which the average gardener might manage to produce their own crops are apple trees and limes.

If you want to grow mistletoe, don’t try planting your Christmas crop, because it won’t be ripe and therefore won’t germinate. The berries are actually mature in March and so you need to spot a suitable clump of the plant in a tree you can actually reach, and wait until spring to cut your berries. Bear in mind that birds like mistletoe too, and you might need to cover your clump to keep them off while it ripens.

You also need to take care when harvesting the berries, as they split easily and then the seeds inside harden, which makes germination much more difficult. And once you’ve cut your germinating specimen, remember that it is most likely to grow on the same species of tree as the original plant came from. Your tree also has to be at least fifteen years old, preferably twenty, and the branch you put your seeds on needs to be at least four inches in diameter.

It’s a really odd plant to grow as you need to cut some shallow grooves into the bark of the tree, then squeeze the sticky seeds out of the berries and insert them under the bark flaps which should be covered with fine net to keep the birds off. You need to get quite a few seeds into each branch, as you need both a male and a female plant for berry production and there’s no way of telling which seeds are which in advance.

Then be patient – as the seeds germinate and the mistletoe develops, you’ll see the branch swelling but it takes five years for a mistletoe clump to be big enough to set its own berries.

And a little known fact is that girls who refused a kiss under the mistletoe were said to be destined to remain single!

Labels: apple trees, mistletoe, winter interest

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:21 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, October 13, 2008

Edible garden in October

Just when the major work of the garden is winding down, the edible part of it goes into overdrive – the pears and apples all need harvesting, the crab apples are falling to the ground and even the autumn raspberries have gone for a second surge of fruit.

And even if that didn’t force me to spend all day either up a ladder or in the kitchen, there are the nasturtiums.


I love nasturtiums for their no-nonsense colours, their tendency to spill over every path and boundary and their willingness to grow in the poorest soil, but I also love them because you can turn their unripe seeds into poor man’s capers. All you need to do is pick the green nasturtium seed pods after each blossom falls off and store them in the fridge until you have enough to make the capers.

Boil and cool:

1/s litre white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon pickling salt
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1/4 lemon, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon pickling spice
1 clove garlic, crushed
4 to 6 peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon celery seed

Add the green pods and seal. Keep the mixture refrigerated and use the nasturtium pickles in sauces, dips, casseroles, soups and stews.

Labels: apple trees, nasturtium, october fruit, october garden tasks

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:07 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, July 6, 2008

July apple tasks

After all the fun of garden visits, it's down to earth with a bump, or rather, up in the air and hoping not to have a bump!

As regular readers will know, we ‘bonsai’d’ one of our two, extremely ancient, apples trees in January. As a result, there’s nothing to do to that tree this year, it’s just a mass of sappy, suckery branches and although we had some blossom, we won’t be seeing any fruit.

The other tree is a different matter – it’s about eight feet too tall (yes, more than twice the height it should be) so all maintenance has to be done up a tall ladder (damn the previous owners for never pruning the apple trees when they owned the house!) and our main job in July is going to be thinning out the fruits, because left alone, particularly on an old tree, all you get is a huge crop of tiny, bitter, woody apples and probably nothing at all in the following year because the tree is exhausted.

So now the fruits are set, which means you can see tiny apples actually starting to form, we have to get out the ladders and remove the middle apple from each cluster: we start with that one because it will tend to be of the lowest quality and by being squeezed by its outer neighbours often ends up being misshapen. Then we take off any other already blemished and oddly-shaped fruits.

In August we look at the tree again and see if any more thinning is needed.Because our trees are so big and old the branches never need supporting (you could actually hang a swing from them, which is an appalling state for a fruit tree to have got into) but on younger trees it may be necessary in August to support heavily-laden branches with props or get really ruthless with the thinning!

Apples courtesy of Eamonn

Labels: apple trees, july apple tasks, thinning apples

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:52 AM 2 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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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Gardening in February – weather, tasks and diaries

It’s possible you have fruit trees in your garden – if so, take this as a cautionary tale. The people who owned our house for a decade or more before us must have looked at these apple trees every day, and done absolutely nothing about pruning them! Admittedly the trees were probably oversized by the time they (the previous owners) moved in, but even so, to ignore them for so long was daft behaviour. I know what any tree surgeon would tell me, ‘They’re too old, too big and too badly shaped to do anything with. Take ‘em out.’ But the tree surgeons reckon without ‘himself’ who is mortally opposed to cutting down any tree, even one that’s three times the right size and produces only two apples a year and has diseased leaves. Himself gets up in the trees every third year and cuts them. I can’t says ‘prunes’ because that implies some kind of logical work that results in a desired outcome – all we manage is to stop the trees shading the garden entirely. But while they may not be pretty, or good croppers, they are a superb wildlife resource – this tree has a woodpecker that visits (I have pointed out to himself that woodpeckers are not a good sign for trees, but he ignores me) and the other apple, which is in a sunnier position, attracts many solitary bees. So, in February, we get out the ladders and try to make the trees reasonable for another year ….

At least this year the weather cooperated. Last year we had an unseasonal frost the night before we intended to prune and it was bitterly cold work – this year ‘himself’ took his T-shirt off, it was so hot in the tree. But the poor old frogs are frisky and it won’t do them any good, their frogspawn, assuming they lay it before the weekend, will get caught by next week’s cold snap.

And I’m starting (again) my seed diary. Every year I say I’m going to write down the dates I sow various seeds and every year I get to about April and forget to continue the plan, so I can never remember when the last frost date really was, or when I planted the begonias or salvias last year … I wish I knew a foolproof way of keeping track.

Labels: all-year gardening, apple trees, sowing seeds, winter pruning

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:27 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, September 8, 2007

Today’s garden

Looks a bit of a mess – the apple tree has had drastic remedial surgery and the whole garden looks like it was hit by a hurricane. The skip is filled to the brim, the compost bin ditto, and the idea of clearing all this up is enough to make me want to emigrate. But things WILL get better.

Of course it feels awful to hack the tree down so hard, but it’s a kill or cure scenario – this year it produced exactly four apples and it shades two thirds of the lawn for most of the day, meaning our grass has become weak. Apple trees aren’t meant to be giants – the rule of thumb (that good old gardener’s rule of thumb that gets called on for everything from planting to composting) is that you should be able to reach the highest apple on the highest branch from a stepladder. You couldn’t reach the highest branch of our tree (not that it had any apples on it) from a two level scaffold! In addition, the trees are old, probably sixty years old, and elderly fruit trees have a tendency to rot from the point where the largest branches join the trunk, meaning that they can be very unstable – large unstable branches are not a good thing to have in a garden that copes with gale force winds!

Still, I keep telling myself it will be okay, in six months we won’t recognise the poor thing, but I wince every time I step outside and see it …

Labels: apple trees, summer pruning

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:19 AM 0 Comments

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