Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

Grow it Yourself Vegetables, by Andrew Steens.

In that great surge of garden books on growing edible plants, it is a relief to see one from an author who is doing more than just documenting his or her first year of trial and error, or relying on other people’s research. Andrew Steens brings experience, enthusiasm and qualifications right across the spectrum of gardening and horticulture, focussing in this case on growing vegetables. Readers of the Weekend Gardener will recognise him as one of the panel of fortnightly contributors charting activities (of the fruit and veg persuasion) in their own home gardens. That level of hands on experience does shine through. He has written a book which will pretty much tell you what you need to know about how to grow vegetables and which crops to grow and how to manage your productive garden in a sustainable way. Unusually, he has also given his personal picks for top performing selections by name which is helpful.

On the downside, it is by no means the sharpest designed reference book I have seen. It is a little busy and cluttered which makes it harder to use. There were times I felt that more rigorous editing would have sharpened the writing and cut out some of the extraneous detail which includes preaching to the converted. The author’s recent experience is from Point Wells, north of Auckland. Writing a book to cover all of NZ, which has huge climatic variation, is a big ask. He has made a good fist of it, but I think that southern gardeners may pick more holes in it than we spotted. The big problem that Mark noticed immediately is that the diagrams showing sowing times for marginal crops are way out. If you sow your melons or aubergines in December and January here, you won’t get a crop. They need a long growing season. This appears to be another design flaw. If you read the detail of the text, Steens is absolutely correct when he says they need to be sown from seed and started in small pots well in advance for planting out when the soils have warmed. But that is not what the dinky diagrams on each page tell you because they fail entirely to differentiate between sowing seed direct into the garden or using plants that you started under cover two months earlier.

Despite those reservations, this is certainly one of the better recent publications on the topic full of practical advice and a useful reference.

(Published by Bateman; ISBN 978 1 86953 761 6.)

Planting an easy-care hanging basket of succulents: step-by-step with Abbie Jury and Chris Sorensen

If you are an admirer of other people’s hanging baskets but lack the resolve to feed weekly and water up to three times a day in the height of summer, you may enjoy constructing one from easy-care succulents.

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1) You can use solid plastic hanging baskets or you can chose to use wire baskets with a coconut fibre lining which allow you to plant all around the basket surface. You can even tie two hanging baskets together to create a round ball. It doesn’t matter whether your pieces of succulent plants have roots or not but if they are just cuttings, it can help to cut them a day or two early and let them dry

2) Cut slits or holes at random intervals all over the basket lining. Turn the basket upside down for planting.

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3) Poke the stems of the succulents through the holes. If you have rosettes without stems, bend flexible wire to make hoops around 8cm long and use these to skewer the rosettes into place. Smaller rosettes are not as heavy so are less likely to fall out.

4) Supporting the plants with your hand, turn the basket up the right way and gently hold it in a suitable sized bucket. Fill the basket with a free draining potting mix containing slow release fertiliser. Succulents can survive in poor, dry conditions but they will grow better with food and water. However be mean, rather than generous if you are adding the fertiliser yourself.

5) Plant the top of the basket with some trailing types of succulents so they can hang over the side. You may wish to include one or two flowering plants such as impatiens to add seasonal colour.

6) This basket was planted about three months ago and already looks well furnished and healthy.

Finally, as a modern postscript from 2017 (because I see people are still looking at this post), I give you the succulent display to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the new glasshouse at RHS Wisley Gardens in the UK. Not exactly a hanging basket but showing a similar basic technique.

Plant Collector: Magnolia Lanarth

Magnificent in its purple splendour - Magnolia Lanarth

Magnificent in its purple splendour - Magnolia Lanarth

It is magnolia time and Lanarth is always one of the early bloomers and still sets the standard for pure stained glass purple colouring. We have yet to see a modern hybrid match the colour, flower form and size of Lanarth. So it is a bit of a shame that it is hard to propagate, so rarely offered and not that easy to establish so there can be a fall-out rate amongst those that are produced. On top of that, it takes a few years to flower (sometimes a decade or so), it makes a fairly large tree and the flowering can be short-lived. Get a storm at the wrong time and the season is pretty much over not long after it began. But in full bloom, it is a magnificent sight and that is why it is a collector’s plant.

Its full name resembles a stud animal – Magnolia campbellii var. mollicamata Lanarth – but it is usually just referred to as Lanarth, sometimes with the mollicamata in front to impress. Lanarth refers to where the seed was raised which was a garden in Cornwall. Intrepid plant collector George Forrest collected the seed in North West Yunnan in China back in 1924 where it was growing at a fair altitude of over 3000 metres. Only three seeds were grown and Lanarth was selected as the best of them. The usual pink and white campbellii magnolias come from the more westerly areas of China, Tibet and Burma whereas the mollicamata variants come from the more easterly side of that magnolia habitat.

Tikorangi notes: August 13, 2010

Magnolia Lanarth

Magnolia Lanarth

LATEST POSTS:

1) The wonder of Magnolia Lanarth in flower.
2) Hints for tasks in the garden this week as we race headlong into spring.
3) Beware the bangalow palm – our deep reservations about the weed potential of Archontophoenix cunninghamiana (Abbie’s column).
4) Tried and True for autumn colour where space allows – tree dahlias.
5) Counting down to our annual Taranaki Rhododendron and Garden Festival.

Magnolia campbellii in full flower this week

Magnolia campbellii in full flower this week

TIKORANGI NOTE:
Magnolia time here is our absolutely favourite time of year. At this stage, the spectacular performers are M. campbellii and Magnolia Lanarth, with Vulcan just starting and some of Mark’s unnamed seedlings putting on an early show. With the dwarf narcissi also at their peak (the snowdrops are largely over), there is something particularly delightful about the big and small pictures running simultaneously. The big-leafed rhododendrons in our park are opening, the earliest michelias are flowering and our garden visitor season started this week with an early visit from a local garden club. The pressure is on to get the garden groomed up and the planting out up to date. The pressure of spring is upon us.

In the Garden: August 13, 2010

Prunus Pink Clouds - bringing in the tuis

Prunus Pink Clouds - bringing in the tuis

• Spring has certainly made her presence felt this week and our tui have returned to the flowering cherries, including one distinctive golden brown tui in its third season here. It is the campanulata or Taiwanese cherries in flower at this time which attract the native nectar feeders. Try and buy sterile, named forms if you are planting them because some can seed too freely.

• With the warmer weather, there will be an explosion of germinating weed seeds so be vigilant and try and eradicate this crop before they get established and seed further. Spreading a thick enough layer of mulch will suppress weeds as well as retain moisture levels for when drier weather sets in but lay your mulch after you have done a weeding round, not on top of existing weeds.

• Slugs and snails are also getting more active. If you are looking for alternatives to poisonous baits, you can try baker’s bran in reasonably thick circles or mounds (irresistible to the slimy critters who then get picked off by the birds). Alternatively, ring plants in sand, grit or masses of crushed egg shell – it is not bullet proof but it helps discourage them. Or make traps from the time-honoured hollowed out orange skin or half empty cans of beer – but you do have to go round and squash them after you have encouraged them to congregate. Getting out with a torch at night, especially after rain, can show up quite a number of them too.

• Spare a thought for permanent container plants. They need their potting mix replaced every two years and they need feeding at least once a year in spring. You may need to hose all the old mix off the roots and trim the roots to fit back into the same pot. It is less stressful to the plant to do it now rather than when it starts to look very sad in summer.

• I read a hint in a gardening magazine to trample down green crops before you dig them in to the vegetable garden. The crushing process hastens the breakdown. It seems to make good sense. Get onto digging in any green crops without delay.

• If you still plan to plant fruit trees this season, get right onto it now. The sooner they go in, the better chance they have of getting established. The same applies to all trees and shrubs for the ornamental garden.

• And a bouquet this week to Todd Energy who have started the process to put in screening plantings to block their Mangahewa-C well site from public view. Living as we do in green countryside peppered with ugly, albeit small, industrial sites, we applaud this new move and hope that other energy companies will follow the lead. These sites can be rendered almost invisible to ground level view by simple plantings but it has taken a long time before one company has decided that this is an appropriate priority. By planting the right species, they can contribute to the environment as well.