- Only mad dogs, Englishmen and dead keen gardeners are doing much in the ornamental garden at the moment. But do stop weeds from going to seed if you want to save yourself a great deal of work later. If you catch them before the seeds are set, you can push hoe them or just pull them out and leave them to frazzle in the sun. But if you can see seed heads formed already, you will have to gather them up and either put them out in the rubbish or hot compost them. Weed seeds will survive baking in the sun and indeed survive most people’s compost heaps which don’t get hot enough to sterilise. If you have rubbish collection, the wheelie bin is the safest option for seeds.
- While you can’t be doing much planting in the ornamental garden, you can at least summer prune, limb up, tidy up and deadhead. We tend to be spring garden specialists in this country and can look rather dull, green and tired in full summer. A grooming round can freshen it all up considerably.
- We summer prune the roses constantly, trimming back to leaf buds where possible, deadheading and generally tidying up the bushes. If you don’t spray your roses, this is an important process to look them looking half way decent. The books all recommend watering and feeding too, but we don’t tend to get around to this.
- Most clematis which have finished the first flush of flowering and which may now be sporting an unfashionable powdered white look (powdery mildew) can be cut back to a few centimetres of growth. Feed them, give them a good drink and they will spring back into fresh growth and even flower for you in about six weeks. You can not do this to all clematis, but most of the hybrids that you buy will respond to this treatment.
- In the vegetable garden, harvest continually to encourage the likes of beans, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and courgettes to continue producing fresh crops.
- Even though we have had little real summer yet, the end of January signals the time to get late sowings of corn in to carry you through to early winter. Planted after that, they are unlikely to mature in time.
- Basil is best pinched out to encourage bushy plants.
- Most garlic will be ready to be harvested and alas after a bumper crop last year, we are going to be lucky here to have sufficient to keep the vampires at bay. Store in cool, dark conditions with good air movement – in other words plait them in traditional style or recycle mesh onion bags.
- If you enamoured of the Brussels sprout, you need to be getting in plants right now if you want to be confident of a harvest later. Keep up with sowing fresh salad greens – a little often is the key.
- The new gardening programme on Prime (Sunday at 7.00pm) is all about learning to veg garden but unless you fit the demographic (urban dwelling female, under 40, upwardly socially mobile and probably drinking skinny milk decaf latte and driving a people mover), it may not inspire you.
Author Archives: Abbie Jury
Gathering seed: a step-by-step guide with Abbie and Mark Jury
A Major Mission in the Rockery
The refurbished rockery looks a little barren in places but below the mulch are many bulbs waiting to spring into fresh growth
My current activity started in a very minor way. I must thin out the Cyclamen hederafolium and nerines in the rockery, I thought yet again but this time I had my timing more or less right. The nerines look fantastic in flower in autumn but the clumps had become so large that they had forced themselves up out of the soil and the foliage hangs on right into late spring, swamping treasures around them.
What I did not realise when I started was that the task was going to be so major that I would spend eight hours a day for several weeks, taking apart the contents of the rockery pocket by pocket. It has become a Major Mission.
Cyclamen hederafolium is the autumn flowering species, formerly known as neapolitana. It is a gem which flowers over a period of months in white and, more commonly, cyclamen pink. After many years, decades even, they sure were overdue for thinning out. They grow from flattish, round corms and a large one is about 10cm across. Some of ours were closer to 25cm across and as I gently excavated, I found them up to three deep. In fact, my thinning exercise yielded up around 60 litres of surplus corms with which Mark plans to carpet woodland margins and add to his naturalised bulb hillside in the park. That is six 10 litre pots, in case you are wondering how I arrived at the 60 litre figure.
Having started, I found that the English snowdrops and black mondo grass which share some of the same rockery pockets were also in desperate need of thinning. And while I was about it, I figured the heavily compacted soil could do with aeration and a light dressing of compost. Then the rocks needed some of the lichen and moss scraped off them and some of the pockets had soil levels which overflowed. In fact a complete spruce-up seemed in order. And of course the areas which I did looked so fresh and clean that I felt I had to continue. I am still not finished but I am a driven woman and will not desist until I have done the lot. I have uncovered rocks and divisions in the pocket beds that we did not even know existed.
Rockeries are not in fashion these days, not at all. Ours is a 1950s style rockery using raised beds in island formation. There are a lot of rocks, brick and concrete in it and it must have been a major exercise to build. I had not noticed before that the largest rocks are in the beds closest to the drive. The further you go from the vehicle access, the smaller the rocks get and the more freeform concrete construction there is. I can understand why. Some of the largest rocks must have been very difficult to move.
The basic rockery concept is to emulate the conditions of an alpine meadow. We can’t do alpine, though we have tried. We lack the winter chill and are a great deal too humid with rainfall evenly spread all year. Alpine meadows are cold deserts kept dry in winter by a coat of snow and ice. So our rockery plants are by no means traditional. No gentians or edelweiss here. But what it gives us is a section of garden which is highly detailed, where the pictures are small and individual and baby gems can be admired in close up view. It is entirely different to the big picture style of garden where form, colour and flow are what dominate. Bulbs rule in our rockery, especially those of a miniature or dwarf persuasion. We use cycads, venerable dwarf conifers and some smaller growing perennials so the area is not totally bereft of woody and herbaceous plantings but they are merely the backdrop.
Best guess is that there are well over 500 individual pockets in our rockery. And the skill that has my gardening ability stretched to its absolute limit is the creation of differing combinations in at least some of those pockets. So one may contain nerines for autumn colour, moreas (peacock iris) for early spring and a small perennial such as a prostrate campanula for summer interest. I can not claim that I get triple layering in them all. I wish. Alas some will be bare during parts of the year because they are too small or I Iack the material or skills to plant in layers. But the structure provides the year round interest and does not demand to be filled to capacity twelve months of the year. Some bulbs will only flower for one or two weeks but in that time, they are the daintiest and most ephemeral of delights which would be lost entirely in larger garden beds.
Mark’s parents both loved the rockery. Stepping out from the house, there is always something different to view. Day to day maintenance is relatively easy. We have always worked to keep it weed free, to restrict the occasional invasive bulb (it is why one has separate pockets to keep those with wandering ways in a confined area) and beyond the occasional light mulch and ongoing tidying, it is not generally labour intensive. With most of it being raised, it is not back breaking either. Many bulbs are happy to continue in an environment which is relatively poor. But there comes a time when the soil is so impoverished and compacted that treasures start to go back and thugs multiply so much that the competition is to survive, not necessarily to flower well.
Bulbs are not gross feeders so we like to spread a thin layer of compost on top to mulch and give a light feed only. Not every plant is precious and that realisation has been wonderfully liberating. Some plants are past their use-by date. Some are just in the wrong place. Some have multiplied too well so there are too many of them. Going though centimetre by centimetre has been like a voyage of discovery. I have worked out that I can average about four square metres a day if I stick at it. With about 100 square metres of rockery, it is a mere 25 days work.
Some people like to garden in containers to keep little treasures apart and to be able to give different conditions. Despite my current intensive effort, I think the rockery concept takes less work overall for more aesthetically pleasing results. Maybe the rockery will stage a fashion comeback. If the thought of assembling, placing and securing all those rocks defeats you, there is an alternative in what we call the carpet garden, but for more thoughts on that garden genre you will have to wait.
Flowering this week: Gloriosa superba
Summer glory in Gloriosa superba
Commonly called the glory lily, flame lily or climbing lily, this plant should be recognised by all ex-pat Zimbabweans and some Indians. Oddly enough, it originates in both areas and is the national flower of Zimbabwe and also accorded special status in the state of Tamil Nadu in India. It is only a very distant relative of the lily, being a member of the colchicum family and because it is full of the chemical colchicine, all parts of the plant are poisonous. Colchicine is used to double the chromosomes in plant cells and is highly toxic in concentrated form. Not that I have ever seen anybody want to eat gloriosas.
The plants grow from V shaped tubers which will survive in very dry, sandy conditions so we use them in the narrow dry house border facing north where very little else but succulents will grow. They are winter dormant and never get watered, even in summer. The tubers find their own required depths and can end up quite some distance below ground.
Gloriosa is a good cut flower, lasting well in a vase though the pollen can stain. But look at the flower shape. It opens conventionally enough but then the petals reflex entirely (in other words they all bend backwards) leaving the anthers and stamens completely exposed. Sometimes the petals can be so recurved that it looks like a full crown with fringe. The colours are always in the yellow/orange/red spectrum and the most desirable forms tend to be those with the sharpest yellow and dark red contrast. It is not particularly rare in this country, so you should be able to find gloriosas if you want them and they are an ideal plant for sandy, coastal gardens.
In the garden this week January 15, 2010
- Mark is keeping an eagle eye out for the nasty potato and tomato psyllid which has made an unwelcome arrival in this country. A call from a Central Taranaki gardener describing psyllid-like symptoms had him searching the internet for additional information. The psyllid is a bit like a white fly but it will destroy crops if left untreated. It injects a bacteria into the plant in the process of sucking the sap and that bacteria weakens the host. Alas it has been found already in Taranaki. If your potatoes or tomatoes have symptoms which don’t look quite right for standard blight, seek out additional advice. All garden centres have apparently been circulated with information on this pest from Crop and Food. It appears that the psyllid may be easier to control than whitefly and can be treated with a pyrethrum but early action is essential. Plants can grow out of it if you get onto it early enough.
- It is time to get a summer copper spray onto citrus trees. Whilst mostly easy care, the occasional preventative spray on these can pay dividends in avoiding premature fruit drop.
- Winter firewood needs to be felled without delay if it is to dry in time. This is by way of motivating you to get out and prune your cherry trees now. Cherry wood burns well.
- Now is also a good time to get out and carry out summer pruning and limbing up on evergreen trees and shrubs. Cleaning out the accumulated debris from dense conifers can reduce the habitat for slugs and snails and keep the plant in a healthier state with better air movement.
- • Do not let your vegetable garden dry out. Most vegetables put on a great deal of rapid growth and adequate moisture is essential to sustain that.
- Keep mounding up the earth around potatoes. This protects the tubers from the sun which is what turns them green and there is a school of thought that says it leads to a heavier crop but we have not seen proof of this.
- Continue planting successional salad vegetables, green leafy veg, corn, beetroot and dwarf beans.
- The article on the food pages on Tuesday listing edible flowers missed out courgette flowers (divine stuffed with a ricotta mixture – pumpkin flowers can also be used) and day lilies. If you don’t mid sacrificing the flowers, day lily buds are surprising tasty and can be a good addition to salads.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 