- After a slight delay, Kings Seeds new catalogue is now officially available. This is simply the most mouthwatering line-up of seed choices from stock standard varieties, through gourmet vegetables, exotic crops, green crops, pretty annuals and even some perennials. You can send $7.50 to Kings Seeds, PO Box 283, Katikati 3166, Bay of Plenty, check them out on line at www.kingsseeds.co.nz or get your copy from Fairfields Garden Centre in New Plymouth. If you are not used to growing plants from seed, don’t get too carried away with your first order – half a dozen different packets is quite enough for most novices to cope with.
- Further to the avocado recommendation last week, buy Hass (or Reed as second option) and plant immediately. Avocados are particularly vulnerable to root disease and strongly object to any mishandling. They are not a plant to keep hanging around in a bag or pot waiting for you to find a spot in the garden.
- The fine, frosty weather this week has been ideal for getting out and pruning. Next week’s Outdoor Classroom will be on heavy pruning of elderly apple trees, which is happening here this week. Pruning can continue on roses, wisterias, hydrangeas, raspberries and most other trees and shrubs (except cherries).
- If you plan to do major pruning to renovate rhododendrons, you can start that now so that they will push out new growth as soon as temperatures start to rise soon. You will be sacrificing the flowers but some of them flower so late that pruning after flowering is risky. Pruning rhododendrons back to bare wood (the stump) is kill or cure. If the plant is weak in the roots, it will die but vigorous plants will usually push our fresh growths and you will get a compact bush again. If you don’t wish to be so drastic, taking out the dead wood and tidying up will help the look but it will not force a leggy plant to put out fresh foliage from the base.
- Summer flowering lilies have a fairly short dormant period so if you planned to dig any clumps, get onto the task now.
- If you are heartily sick of planting brassicas, you can at least be sowing carrots, onions, peas and broad beans – all done from seed. In frost free areas, the first crop of early potatoes can go in.
Author Archives: Abbie Jury
Flowering this week: Vireya rhododendron saxifragoides
Eight years of growth, maybe more, in good nursery conditions and R.saxifragoides reaches this size
We have a standing joke here about plants which we won’t part with unless the recipient passes both an interview and a test – saxifragoides is one of those plants. After a good eight years, maybe more, this plant is 6cm high and about 14cm across. We don’t want to waste a plant that grows so slowly on somebody who has no idea what it is or too little appreciation of what it takes for the plant to reach this stature. It is an odd little vireya species from New Guinea which makes a mounded cushion (generally a small mounded cushion) and which is far more tolerant of both cold and wet conditions than any other vireya we know. In fact it is often found growing in cold bogs in its native habitat (other rhododendrons will quickly give up the ghost and die if their roots stay wet for long) as well as in alpine grasslands. It is not as forgiving in our garden where I have managed to kill off two or three plants now. It seems easier to keep healthy in a pot.
The flowers are red and held singly (most rhododendrons have clusters or trusses). Sharp-eyed readers may pick the similarity in flower to the rather larger vireya hybrids, Jiminy Cricket, Saxon Glow and Saxon Blush. Yes, saxifragoides is a parent of these and gives the hardier characteristics and the leaf shape to its offspring. In the wild, saxifragoides will layer naturally (put down fresh roots from branches which touch the ground) and seed down. Very old clumps have been found which have even developed a woody rhizome below ground but in cultivation it is normally propagated from cutting – very small cuttings as you can perhaps imagine from the picture.
Tikorangi Notes: Friday July 9, 2010
LATEST POSTS
1) July 7, 2010: Vireya rhododendron saxafragoides is flowering this week – a distinctly obscure and different vireya species.
2) July 7, 2010: In the garden this week (and why citrus and avocado are essential home orchard trees here)
3) July 7, 2010: Bravely attempting to demystify rose pruning in our latest Outdoor Classroom.
4) July 7, 2010: Counting down to our annual Taranaki Garden Festival.
5) July 3, 2010: Camellia Diary number three where we celebrate Camellia Waterlily, a cultivar which I think could be described in the vernacular as an oldie but a goodie.
Rhododendron augustinii - a bit of a triumph in our climate
TIKORANGI NOTES
Probably the most exciting aspect of our gardening environment is the huge range of plants we can grow here. We have never been able to understand the mindset of those who favour mass plantings and the so-called restrained plant palette. Mark has been known to ask why on earth anybody would want to mass plant when there are so many interesting plants in the world to grow. So our mid-winter garden pictures this week are of Rhododendron augustinii and zygocactus.
The winter flowering chain cactus - more fun than polyanthus
I am not sure which form of augustinii this is (possibly the Medlicott form) and frankly we are just delighted that it is still alive with us because it much prefers a colder climate than we can give it here. On their day, you can not beat the species and augustinii is one of the loveliest species of all. The bronze beetle attacks the foliage (pretty well every leaf outside the photograph is notched all round), thrips can turn the leaves silver and there are smarter, neater garden plants but we rejoice when those lovely blue flowers appear each winter.
By way of contrast, the exotica of the chain cactus or zygocactus (schlumberga?) lightens up the dark woodland areas and is maintenance free and undemanding. We grow them as epiphytes, nestled into forks of trees or positioned on top of tree fern stumps. They have to be frost free and are generally grown in house plants throughout the world and they add a splash of cheering winter colour which I prefer to polyanthus.
In the Garden: Friday 9 July, 2010
Our citrus trees actually do save us money
- Avoid stomping around the garden or lawn where you have spring bulbs. It is a hard life already for a bulb, pushing through cold, wet soils without being stomped back into the ground. Even worse, some only put up one flowering spike and if you break that off, you are sunk for this season’s display.
- Prune and keep pruning. I am halfway through the roses but have finished the wisterias. The hydrangeas have been started. As luculias finish flowering, it is the best time to prune and feed them because their instinct is to spring into growth. It doesn’t pay to be too brutal with luculias – they can up and die on you. Regular pinching out or cautious renovation is recommended. They are not difficult to root from cuttings in late spring or early summer if you want to start afresh.
- Sasanqua camellias can be pruned and shaped as they finish flowering. This includes sasanqua hedges but it won’t matter if you leave it until spring.
- With our comparatively mild winters, we can lift and divide dormant perennials such as hostas all winter and spring. In cold climates where there is no growth over winter, recommended practice is to leave it until temperatures start to warm in spring (presumably divisions can rot in completely dormant, cold and wet conditions) – hence the different advice in books and TV gardening programmes from England. However it is wise to leave grasses, reeds, rushes and similar plants until they are growing again because they can be surprisingly touchy.
- You can at least be planting your fruit trees which are now available in abundance. Put in the sure-fire crops first and go to the riskier, more exotic options if you have space remaining. Apples, pears, plums and feijoas are extremely reliable whereas it can be hit and mostly miss with peaches, nectarines, cherries and apricots. In mild coastal areas, citrus and avocados are well worth a try – for us they are the crops that save us significant money. Only buy named cultivars of feijoas – the cheapie plants are patchy seedlings for hedging and may never even fruit.
- Get a winter strength copper spray onto deciduous fruit trees, citrus and roses as a winter clean up. This will reduce disease and lichen.
- I have a new definition of a gardening optimist – the person who googled “sub tropical fruits Southland”. Southland may be many things, but sub tropical is not one of them.
Countdown to Festival, July 9, 2010
At Paradiso in town, creative veg gardener, Denise Wood, thinks this may be her last year opening for Festival so is determined to make the most of it. She is preparing the ground now for sowing and planting as early as possible and her baskets in varied colours are coming along well. The new theme in her garden this year is pink flamingos but I don’t think we are talking real ones here. Denise donates all proceeds from her open garden to animal rescue.
I recall crowning Havenview’s Maree Rowe as the compost queen last year. She reports this week that she feels her life is compost, compost, compost, moving endless barrow loads of it around her fruit and vegetable plants. I think you can be pretty confident that she makes her own compost and it does not come in a heavy duty plastic bag from any garden retailer. She has just moved her chooks out of the second hot house where they had been happily scratching around, ridding it of bugs and pests while enriching it with their own contributions – she prides herself on good natural controls. Maree has now put in a layer of silage and compost and the house is ready for planting. She is also busy planting riparian plants along the areas of waterway on the farm and wishing the rain would stop for longer.
Around the coast, Vandys’ Maria van der Poel is highly motivated and out with her spade moving plants around. In fact, some have several rides in the wheelbarrow before she feels she has it right but the many clivias her sister in law gave her found a home immediately and filled a shaded area. They are such a convenient shade plant, are clivias, as long as you don’t have severe frosts. Maria is delighted at her new garden and storage shed, which freed her instantly from competition for space in the woodshed, and she is revelling in her new-found orderly storage. Next she is hoping that her new hot house is going to eventuate and make wintering over cuttings and germinating seed much easier. However, she is sad to see her favourite garden centre, The Girlz, closing down and says she will miss being able to pop in there on her way home down the coast.
At La Rosaleda, Coleen Peri is one of the first gardeners who are serious about their roses to report that she has completed the annual prune. In her own words: “… a fine day!!! Was out there and finished the rose pruning, such relief. This is always the time of year I question my sanity with having over 300 roses – I am battered, scratched and bruised, but satisfied! I tend to clear the bases of the roses and get rid of weeds in the immediate vicinity at the same time as pruning…. The larger roses are always the hardest – Sally Holmes is my nemesis this time of year, with 23 of them all along the pool fence, right at the back of the borders – I have to fight my way through the roses in front just to get to them, then manoeuvre myself amongst the very closely planted thugs – definitely not a task for the faint hearted. I used to really give them a good hard prune, but they have won the battle and now I prune fairly lightly just to keep them in check (size wise and to a nice shape), and to get rid of any significant dead wood. Oh well, come summer all will be forgiven!”
In Central Taranaki, Merleswood’s Erica Jago is feeling cheerful at the sight of spring bulbs appearing (her daffodil lawns are a feature) and with the shortest day now past, spring seems to be waiting in the wings. She spent a goodly part of June tackling her seventy metre hedge of the rugosa rose “Scabrosa”, pruning it and taking out all the dead wood. This was a much heavier prune and clean up than usual and she is delighted with the effect of freshening up the front garden and allowing views through to the mature rhododendrons behind. She comments that her snake bark maple, Acer Esk Flamingo is only now dropping the last of its autumn leaves and it has provided a spectacular autumn finale. This is a good example of how much better autumn colour is inland where the change in temperature is sharper. The Acer Esk Flamingo I can see out of my window is very pretty in spring but its autumn colour is non-existent in our milder, coastal conditions.
Here at Tikorangi, we have been enjoying a superior class of morning tea. Our neighbours, Chris and Lloyd, are doing food for our garden visitors during Festival weekends and Chris has been refining her recipe choices and trying them out on us. She is accomplished at baking and we think quite capable of holding her own in those ghastly TV competitions. The pumpkin and prune cake was particularly delicious though I also nurse fond memories of her Greek lemon cake which was a tour de force. I, alas, am not a good baker but at least we are an appreciative tasting panel.
