Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

In the Garden: July 23, 2010

The cloche, not as Spike the dog briefly thought, a dog agility tunnel

The cloche, not as Spike the dog briefly thought, a dog agility tunnel

• In response to the many search engine terms I see coming through on line most days, if your buxus (box) hedge is looking brown and the leaves have fallen off, it is dead. If it is still in the mid stage with extensive browning and many areas with no leaves, it is dying. In the vast majority of cases, the problem is buxus blight. It can be treated in its early stages by repeated spraying but you will have to continue spraying because it is a fungus that does not go away. There is no point in replacing the dead sections with more buxus because they will just get infected too. That is it in a nutshell.
• It is time to address problems with lawns. If you insist on using hormone sprays (and some common lawn sprays are hormone based), get it on straight away. If you delay too long, you risk causing severe damage to deciduous plants just breaking dormancy. It doesn’t matter how careful you are – spray drifts invisibly and the slightest whiff can damage other plants at critical times. Our next Outdoor Classroom topic will be on renovating a tired lawn but often all lawns need is a minor bit of attention. Fill hollows and dips with top soil, over sow bare patches, dig out flat weeds, use a garden fork to lift compacted and solid soils.
• Mark is particularly brassed off at the sparrows which have destroyed his freshly germinating peas. He is constructing a moveable frame from split giant bamboo to be covered in netting in an attempt to beat the critters.
• A cloche in the vegetable garden is particularly valuable at this time of the year to protect young crops. Our microgreens are doing very well under cover, though Spike the dog had a brief time when he found the ends unsecured and thought that the cloche resembled an agility tunnel.
• The advice for the ornamental garden is the same as it has been for weeks on end – prune. Time will start to run out for heavy pruning soon. You want it all done before the plants start their spring spurt. Then dig and divide overgrown clumping perennials.
• Onions can be sown now. These are generally done from seed (except for shallots which are grown from segments). Onions are gross feeders and the usual rule of thumb is to plant them where you had a green leafy crop which was heavily fertilised last summer. Where space is limited, any onion types other than spring onions or shallots are probably a low priority because they are cheap to buy and widely available. However commercial onions are usually one of the more heavily sprayed crops so if you are shunning sprays, you may like to give them space at home. Red onions are easy to grow but have a shorter storage life.
• It is time to prune grapevines. We covered this in Outdoor Classroom last year.

Tried and True – heucheras

Heucheras - burgundy and lime shades

Heucheras - burgundy and lime shades

• Widely available in garden centres.
• Evergreen and generally hardy.
• Interesting range of colours and foliage markings.

Heucheras have gone through something resembling a makeover in recent years, thanks mainly to American plant breeders, and are now a stock line in every garden centre. I have never heard them go under a common name in this country, but they are the clumping perennials with frilly, maple-shaped leaves often with mottled or frosted markings. They do flower but the tiny blooms are secondary to the wonderful foliage. Being native to North America, heucheras are reasonably hardy, even though they are evergreen. It was the lovely burgundy and purple shades which made most of us take notice of this plant genus here. Since then there have been a range of amber, gold and almost ginger shades as well and there is a lovely little lime green.

Heucheras in autumn tones

Heucheras in autumn tones

It took me a while to learn how to grow heucheras successfully. It was a little irritating to admire them in other people’s gardens and to have their owners smile smugly and say that they had no difficulty with them, all the while seeing my own plants get smaller, not larger. The secret, which they did not tell me at the time, is that heucheras are not a perennial that you can plant and leave for years. They thrive on being lifted and divided regularly (late winter to early spring is the best time for this) and replanted in well cultivated soil with plenty of humus added. I also find they do better in a colder, open area of the garden where they get plenty of light but they are not baked in the summer sun. In good conditions, the divisions reward you by making satisfyingly big clumps within the season with foliage which keeps its colour well and is generally untroubled by pests and diseases.

Winter pruning apple trees: step-by-step guide Abbie Jury and Colin Spicer

Apple trees benefit from a little attention in winter and in summer – easy care summer strategies for apples.

1) This dwarf apple tree has not has not had any attention other than a light haircut in winter and again in summer for many years. It is congested and overgrown and while it still fruits, the quality of the crop will improve in better conditions.

2) Select the branches which will give the tree its framework. Keep the main leader in the centre of the plant and choose branches which are well spaced to allow for air movement and maximum light. Remove all surplus growth not needed for this framework, including branches which cross each other. We are pruning for a tree which is more or less an espalier shape – two dimensional with height and width but little depth because it grows in a narrow border beside our driveway.

3) Now that the basic shape of the tree has been restored, thin out the clusters of fruiting spurs. Apples will continue to set fruit on old spurs for several years, but best results will be on growths from one to three years old. Where a spur is cut off, the plant will usually push out a fresh growth in spring.

4) This shoot shows two years of growth. The lower half was new growth made in spring two years ago and the upper half is growth from last spring. You can see the fruiting spurs forming on the 2008 growth. These will flower and set fruit this year. If you make the mistake of always pruning by trimming off the long whippy new growths, you are cutting off all the fresh fruiting spurs. Try to get a mix of fresh spurs and already established spurs so that you are encouraging gradual replacement.

5) Sealing the cuts is optional but strongly recommended by our visiting pruning expert. He applies Bacseal which is an antibacterial sealant. Avoid getting this on your hands and always wait until you have finished all the pruning to avoid brushing wet surfaces with your skin or clothing.

6) A spray of lime sulphur will clean up the heavy lichen infestation. Follow up with a copper spray at winter strength in three weeks time to get the tree into a much healthier state. Follow the instructions on the containers for dilution rates for both sprays.

Tikorangi Notes: July 20, 2010

The first flowers of the season are opening on Magnolia campbellii

The first bud on Vulcan to show colour

Tikorangi Notes

Magnolia season is just starting. Of all the plant families we love, the ten weeks or so of deciduous magnolia flowering is the highlight each year. Magnolia campbellii in our park has opened its first few flowers. These flowers are quite some distance up from the ground. Vulcan is just opening the first red bud in the nursery but has yet to show colour on the trees in the garden. A few of Mark’s early season seedlings are opening and he is waging daily war on possums and rats which can attack the flower buds of plants, particularly those planted near our bush. Not to be left out, the earliest michelias are also opening the first flowers. This signals the time we re-open the garden to visitors at the start of August when the magnolias are really coming on stream.

Tikorangi notes: Friday 16 July

Latest posts
1) Early, frilly and fragrant – one of the first rhododendrons for this season is R. cubittii.
2) Exotic trees versus native plants – Abbie’s column (spare me from politically correct ignorance).
3) Cranberry update
4) In the garden – tasks for this week.

Our magnificent Podocarpus henkelii will see the nursery capillary beds surrounding it both come and go in its lifetime

Tikorangi update:
I was listening to a radio interview last weekend with Peter Arthur, a keen dendrologist and NZ’s foremost retailer of garden and plant books. In a country where it is currently quite difficult to sell any plant which is not a vegetable or a fruit tree, he was asked to predict what the next big gardening craze will be. He didn’t hesitate: trees. A return to trees.

I thought of Peter’s comment as I looked at a beautiful specimen of Podocarpus henkelii. When Mark established the nursery here, he worked around existing trees on site so we have tended to have obstacles – a citrus tree amongst the vireya rhododendrons with the overhead shade cloth cut around to fit, an eriobotrya in the hosta block – and this magnificent African podocarpus set amongst the capillary beds. Now the day has come, as we wind up the nursery, that the capillary beds will go and the P. henkelii will be accorded the status it deserves as part of a planned new garden. It will have to share the limelight with the planned Palm Walk but it has at least four decades on the palms and will no doubt retain its status as the senior plant in this new area for our lifetime. I hope Peter Arthur is right and we will see a wider appreciation of the magnificence of trees. A utility apple tree is not, I think, a match for our P. Henkelii.