Garden Centre

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Violas – unsung summer beauties

When the showier flowers are doing their thing, it can be difficult to see the smaller, more modest summer bloomers that give the garden its air of complex bounty.

One of my favourites, this year, has been the violas I grew from seed. They are F1 hybrids, which means any offspring they have won’t come true to the parent, but I still think for the subtle colours they’ve produced, it’s worth having them, even if they won’t reproduce truly for future generations.

Because they are so low growing, violas are often neglected, but they are ideal plants for some of those places where nothing else will grow. I’ve put mine as an underplanting below my winter jasmine, which is in a concrete trough on a north-facing wall – the jasmine takes most of the moisture and there is probably less than ten minutes of sun a day for the flowers to bloom on, but they are still doing a sterling job, sturdily getting five or six flowers a plant out there and as long as I dead-head, they will give me gentle colour right through until September.

I haven’t decided yet whether to treat them as annual bedding or give them perennial status – so few flowers have coped with this hostile situation that I’ve got used to planting the trough as summer bedding only, but somehow I think these violas may thrive where others have suffered.

Labels: violas, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:37 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, February 20, 2009

February Greenhouse Gardening

I’m starting to watch the calendar, wondering when our last frost date will be this year. It’s reckoned to be around late April, but often those last frosts in Sussex, or at least in my bit of it, are only air frosts, not ground frosts.

It doesn’t matter so much this year, because I’ve got my greenhouse! I’m just starting to realise how valuable it is going to be. Instead of having to guess the latest possible frost date and count back in weeks to work out when seeds can be planted indoors so as to avoid frost when they begin hardening off, I can relax, knowing that the seeds will be frost-safe, in their polycarbonate home.

So this weekend I’m starting off some more sweet peas, as the ones I planted under glass in October didn’t germinate as well as I’d hoped (the seed was donated by a friend who obviously hadn’t kept it in the best conditions). I’ve also got viola nauticalia, which are F1 hybrids that I got free with a magazine – it says they are cool ‘watery’ colours, which doesn’t sound too appetizing, but hey, they were free!. And there are marigolds to be started as companion plants for my tomatoes as the marigolds are said to save the tomato plants from whitefly attacks and I’ve got some new nasturtiums, because our self-seeding ones have all reverted to mustardy-orange, and I like the dark orange and red ones too.

I’ve also got some cucumber seeds to start off. We’ve never grown cucumbers from seed before, so that will be exciting.

But I’m starting to wonder if there’s enough room in the greenhouse for all this, and the alpine strawberries I’m growing from seed, and the peas that are already shooting up from their toilet rolls, and the hardy trees I’m growing from seed …

Labels: greenhouse sowing, nasturtium, peas, sweet pea, trees, violas

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:52 PM 0 Comments

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