Garden Centre

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Getting the best from summer bedding plants

Summer bedding plants are those annuals which offer complete and constant billows of colour all summer long. While they appear in nearly all hanging baskets and containers, and grace our municipal parks, they are a wonderful addition to garden borders too, excellent for plugging a gap between a summer and autumn display by providing shots of brilliant colour and dense carpeting growth. Busy Lizzy (impatiens) and begonia semperflorens are both fantastic, doing their duty in tubs and baskets or filling the borders, come rain or shine.

I love petunias, their large trumpet-shaped flowers are always impressive and because they have an immense colour range you can make lively displays for a very low cost. This year they have been outperformed by the impatiens because their large flowers get damaged by rain and have to be deadheaded more often, but even so, they really do look wonderful. All summer bedding needs to be fed and deadheaded regularly but you are rewarded by more flowers than you could shake a stick at!

Labels: begonia, busy lizzie, impatiens, petunias, summer bedding

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:50 PM 0 Comments

---

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Garden tasks for June

If you’ve got lilies in containers they will need support as the flowers start developing and adding a large amount of weight at the top of a single stem. The standard route is to set several canes into the compost around the edge of the pot, linking them up with string to provide stability. If border lilies are not supported by neighbouring plants, use stakes for them too. Remember to put clay or cane-toppers on them though, so you don’t poke your eye out! Look out for the pestiferous lily beetle too - it leaves slimy black gunk on the leaves in which its grubs are cunning hidden. If you find the beetle or the larvae, squash them!

I’m busy lifting and dividing my iris clumps. Iris behave rather oddly in my garden: every three years we get a fantastic show, and every three years they seem to fail completely one year, which means I go out and buy new bulbs, only to find the next year or the year after they all flower at once!

My neighbours are all putting out their summer bedding plants now but having made a resolution not to buy these plants any more, I am standing firm against the lovely trays of annuals to be seen in every garden centre and on every garage forecourt. I love these frost tender annuals but I’ve vowed to grow them from seed or do without, and so my home-grown lobelia are just about hardened off and my perennial wallflowers went out a week ago. I wonder if I’ll manage to stand firm against the lure of the petunias though?

My foxgloves are starting to look a bit tired, they don’t like this summer heat, being plants that prefer a rich soil and light shade, but the bees love them and as they self-seed, I can ignore them apart from giving them a bit of mulch to cool their roots, confident that they will spread and tower over the garden year after year, without my needing to do anything about it.

Foxglove courtesy of foxypar4

Labels: foxgloves, iris, lily, lobelias, petunias

The All Seasons Gardener at 10:16 AM 0 Comments

---