Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

In the Garden: Friday December 31, 2010

• There is a rumour that now Christmas guests have mostly headed home, summer is going to return. There were hollow laughs of disbelief from our house guests when we talked about the drought, the earlier hot temperatures and the fact that we started swimming in late November. Personally, I lean to the theory that it was the disaffected surfers from down the coast conspiring to keep the best points of Taranaki secret, lest we be inundated by fans. At least the drought is over and our lawns are green again.

• All the rain means high humidity levels which encourages every nasty fungal spore to multiply. Keep a very close eye on your tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, courgettes and the like and take action immediately you spot blight. We don’t worry about mildew (seen as white powder) at this time of the year because the plants will generally grow out of it. You can get a certain distance taking off the affected leaves and stems but remove them entirely from the site. It is safer to put them out in the rubbish than to trust your compost, unless you know you make a hot mix. Cold composting doesn’t kill the fungal spores and you will merely be spreading it. Keep conditions as open as you can around the affected plants. A spray with copper is the recommended treatment for blight (follow the instructions on the container), and you can use baking soda for mildew if you wish (a teaspoon to a litre of water).

Clematis - pretty as a picture but junk those that are prone to mildew

Clematis - pretty as a picture but junk those that are prone to mildew

• Given that we usually have high levels of humidity in our area, we are leaning to the removal of some ornamental plants that consistently turn a silvery colour, indicating powdery mildew. Some clematis are far more vulnerable than others. We have given up persisting with ones that get affected every year and have dug them out in favour of varieties that show good resistance. The same goes for roses.

• Seed sown vegetables will probably need thinning in the veg garden. Most of these thinnings can be eaten as micro veg and they are delicious at the juvenile stage. If you don’t thin the rows, there won’t be sufficient space around individual plants to allow them to reach a decent size.

• Mark was amused to read a recent column in our local paper where the writer mentioned summer employment jobs in his youth. One was separating the Greenfeast peas from the Onward variety. Despite the fact that the writer’s university days were a long way back, these two varieties of peas remain Mark’s recommendations as the best to grow here. Over the years, he has tried many other varieties but now falls back on the tried and true. The bean crop here has not been up to its usual standard but the pea harvests have been abundant – far more than even I could ever eat raw from the garden. That said, it is the wrong season to plant peas now. Wait until early autumn to sow the next crop. Mildew will hit summer pea crops hard.

• Outdoor Classroom next week will be on the topic of summer care of apple trees, in case you are puzzled by what to do with yours.

Plant Collector: Lilium regale

Lilium regale - often called the Christmas lily in New Zealand

Lilium regale - often called the Christmas lily in New Zealand

There seems to be a little confusion as to whether Lilium regale or Lilium longiflorum is the Christmas lily in New Zealand, but I can’t see that it matters. My guess is that florists may refer to the latter as the Christmas lily because it commonly comes with pure white flowers and is a reliable standby for picking, much favoured in floristry. But many gardeners associate the regal lily with this festive time of year. It too has the wonderfully fragrant white trumpets but usually with deep red or purplish markings on the back of the petals. L.regale comes from the Szechuan area of China whereas L.longiflorum is from Japan.

There is nothing too difficult or rare about either. L.regale gets to just over a metre tall and generally we get away without needing to stake it, especially when it is grown in the rose garden and has some taller plants around it to prop it up if it starts to list too far. If you have both sun and good soil, you are fine and it should reward you with eminently pickable flowers to adorn the Christmas table. Like most lilies, the bright pollen falls off rather freely and will probably stain the white damask Christmas tablecloth. Apparently you can brush the pollen off the stamens if you are working in dry conditions. Alternatively, nip the tops off the stamens but leave the anthers in the centre. Don’t harvest the flower stem right back at bulb level. It needs some length left because the stem contains both leaves and flowers and the bulb needs its energy replenished through its foliage or it will waste away.

Tikorangi notes: Friday December 24, 2010

Latest Posts: Friday December 24, 2010

1) Lilium regale is flowering this week and is often referred to as the Christmas lily in New Zealand.

2) The DIY Christmas tree with a Polynesian flavour – Outdoor Classroom.

3) In between the excesses of Christmas eating and drinking, the garden still calls – tasks for the week.

Kevin, Sharon and our Christmas tree

Kevin, Sharon and our Christmas tree

Construct your own Christmas tree (version one)

1) Inspired by a tree she saw in London, presumably made with pampas plumes, Camilla fancied trying an alternative to the traditional pine branch or the tacky tinsel alternative. As pampas is now banned in this country, we used toetoe plumes. Gathering the toetoe was the most difficult part of construction, especially with all the recent rain.

2) We were fortunate to be given a permanent metal base in the shape of a pyramid but you could construct your own from bamboo or a similar material. It needs to be fairly stable to work with easily. You need five or six vertical struts in order to be able to achieve a circular effect. Do not make it too wide if it needs to fit through a conventional door to get it inside when finished.

3) We wove additional horizontal supports into the frame at 20cm intervals using flexible lengths of old grape vine prunings.

4) Starting from the base, tie groups of about three toetoe plumes at a time, forming the bottom layer of the skirt. It needs to be sufficiently dense not to see through. We tied firmly with neutal coloured wool, securing the plumes to the frame and the rings of grapevine.

5) Layer additional skirts on top. Trim the surplus stems of each layer. It took us four layers to reach the top.

Kevin, Sharon and our Christmas tree

Kevin, Sharon and our Christmas tree

6) When it came to decorations, we decided less was more and just adorned our tree with a Trade Aid angel, the historic Jury family Christmas lights which need rewiring each year to work and the red and silver Spotlight reindeer (known here as Kevin and Sharon) at the base.

Postscript
I recall the “Christmas is over in London” photo blog our daughter Camilla wrote as she wandered the streets of Maida Vale recording the slightly sad sight of Christmas trees put out for green waste collection. I found “Christmas is over in Tikorangi”. Mark said he would dispose of the carbon content of the toetoe Christmas tree. It looked disturbingly like a dead sheep when I came across it.

The second model DIY Christmas tree using the same frame but covered in grape vines is less inclined to moult and lacks the Pacifica charm of the toetoe, but is a more durable option.

In the Garden this week: Friday December 24, 2010

• Dear Santa, thank you for the pre-Christmas gift of rain. But enough is enough. Water tanks are overflowing, the grass is growing again and we really could do with a return to sunshine and warmer temperatures for the Christmas and New Year break.

• Watch for an explosion of fungal ailments in the humid conditions, especially on tomatoes, cucurbits and potatoes. Roses will also suffer but they can grow out of it whereas vegetables can succumb entirely. It will almost certainly be necessary to get a copper spray on when the weather dries out. If you would rather try baking soda, a level teaspoon per litre is the recommended dose. The big problem with baking soda is that you have to spray a great deal more frequently – probably weekly.

• The wet weather means that you can still lift and divide many clumping perennials even now. Most of them are in full growth, so as long as you make sure they don’t dry out, they will recover quickly. Replant into well cultivated, tilled soil enriched with compost.

• Grapes need thinning out. We keep to one bunch per side branch. More is not better and you can over crop grapes, leading to inferior fruit. Trim back laterals. If they get too heavy, they can break away too easily and you will lose your bunches of fruit. You also want the plant to concentrate its energy on the fruit, rather than the excessive leafy growth.

• If you have not mulched your garden beds and were alarmed at the recent dry spell, this week’s rain has probably raised the moisture levels sufficiently for you to get a layer of mulch on now. We much prefer vegetative mulches which break down and get incorporated into the soil over time – compost, leaf litter, bark or shredded wood waste and the like. Inert mulches like stones, gravel or lime chip do work to keep the soil moist and suppress weed seeds to some extent but they are not suitable for gardens that you want to dig over or replant at any time and they certainly do nothing to add nutrients or texture to the soils. They are best for areas you don’t actually garden and even then, they are a bit of a mission to keep clean unless you have a handy blower vac.

• Keep up with deadheading (basically anything that has finished flowering) and try and stay on top of the weeds which will have been triggered into rapid germination and growth by the rains.

• If you had a problem with silver leaves on rhododendrons last year and haven’t sprayed this spring, check underneath the leaves for something that looks like dirty threads. These are the thrips which suck the chlorophyll out of the leaves. Photinia and honeysuckle both harbour thrips too. If you are going to spray, it needs to be a systemic insecticide so the plant sucks it into its system (as opposed to a contact one which only kills insects where it touches). Bands soaked in neem oil secured around the trunk are getting good reports. If you want to make your own, soak a strip of old woollen carpet in neem and then secure it around the main stem with the carpet pile inwards. Thrips don’t usually go away of their own accord. You either need to change the growing conditions, kill the insects or remove the host plants altogether.