Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

July 18, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

We are told that while it is certainly true that apricot trees do not generally perform at all in Taranaki, there are two exceptions – one in Hawera and one in New Plymouth. The latter tree is available on the market under the name Apricot Fitzroy (guess where the original plant is growing?) and has performed well for many years. We intend to plant one here. We have yet to track down the Hawera tree.

  • Continue the winter pruning round in the ornamental garden – roses, hydrangeas, wisteria, clematis, deciduous fruit trees and the like. As the autumn flowering sasanqua camellias finish, it is the time to clip and shape them.
  • Be very cautious when pruning the roses. They harbour some really nasty fungi and bacteria and most health professionals will have tales of severe infections as a result of wounds incurred when pruning roses. Older people are particularly susceptible so take even minor scratches and splinters seriously. Rose prunings should be burned, as should the fallen leaves and debris under them. Most people do not have compost that heats up sufficiently to kill the unwanted greeblies. Roses need full sun, lots of air movement and will stay healthier (without spraying) if you keep the ground clean and mulched beneath them. If you are not into meticulous rose pruning, lay an old sheet below them to catch the debris and give them a pass over with the hedge clippers. It does not look as tidy initially but once they come into leaf, the results are usually fine. If you are more into the detail, cut out all dead wood, all spindly growth and branches which cross. Then cut back the remaining branches to an outward facing bud. Hard pruning is the order of the day with roses.
  • You can get a jump start on spring vegetables by starting them now in pots for planting out later. All the brassicas, lettuce, spinach, salad veg, even peas can be started now.
  • Plan to rotate crops in the vegetable garden. Medieval gardeners knew what they were doing with crop rotation and one fallow year. You can get away without leaving the ground fallow by planting quick maturing green crops and using compost but the rule is not to keep planting the same type of vegetables in the same bed every year. A four to six year rotation around the area will reduce the build up of diseases. Deal in plant families, not individual veggies. So an area which grew potatoes, capsicums, aubergines or tomatoes last season (all solanums) may be planted in brassicas (caulis, cabbages etc), legumes (peas and beans) or root crops like carrots or onions this year.
  • If you have yet to plant your garlic, get it in this weekend. This is a crop worth growing. The product is infinitely better than the imported stuff often sold in the supermarket. There is a world of difference between good garlic and rather tasteless, cheap bought stuff.

A wry thought to finish, from the Curious Gardener’s Almanac:

Don’t send me flowers when I’m dead.

July 11, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

There we were last week, contemplating another week of dreary wet weather and instead we have had bright sunny days after some alarmingly frosty mornings. Such frosts are a good reminder to place frost tender material carefully.

  • It is time to contemplate the major winter pruning round. Roses, wisterias, fruit trees, grape vines, most clematis and even hydrangeas in coastal areas can be pruned now. Take wisterias back to about three or four shoots from the main branch structure. Don’t cut wisterias or hydrangeas off at the ground unless you are planning a one-off major renovation because they flower on last year’s growth and you won’t get any flowers if you level them. Most clematis can be cut back to ground level but don’t do it to Clematis Montana – the rampant pink (or sometimes white) one that flowers first in spring.
  • If you are planning to plant fruit trees this winter do not delay on buying them. The word from garden centres is that they are selling at an astounding speed and if you leave it too long, you won’t find any. Apples, pears, feijoas and plums are the most reliable croppers in Taranaki, with kiwifruit, tamarillos and citrus in warmer, coastal areas. Peaches can be marginal, nectarines even more so and cherries and apricots are rarely worth the space here.
  • Be careful of stomping on bare patches in the garden where you have plants which are currently dormant. Some will be pushing new shoots towards the surface already. Also take care around the emerging leaves on bulbs, especially if you are weed spraying.
  • Hostas can be dug and divided now. It is easiest to dig the whole clump and hose off all the dirt so you can see what you are doing. Divisions need both roots and growth shoots, preferably plenty of both.
  • The first snowdrops are flowering here, although fortunately we don’t get the snow. These are a bulb that can be dug and divided when in full growth, if you have some of the little charmers.
  • Early spring is the busiest time in the vegetable garden and experienced producers are preparing their garden beds now so they are ready to meet the spring challenge. But you can be planting broad beans now. Asparagus crowns are available bare rooted in the shops now. You will have better success with asparagus if you start the divisions off in trays or pots and delay planting them out until are well established. Asparagus is a permanent plant and because it needs to be planted deeply, if the divisions are small or weak they can fail to reach the surface and grow.

As you start the winter pruning round, console yourself with the words of that great British gardener, Vita Sackville West:

The true gardener must be brutal – and imaginative for the future.

To which Anonymous may have replied:

Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts.

The Vireya Family

I recall some years ago having two conversations in a short space of time where people regaled me with tales of coming to buy plants from Mark in the early days of our nursery. Both shared a similar experience. “It was at least 20 minutes,” said one, “before I was confident that I was going to be allowed to buy a plant.” Readers who know and like my Mark will be smiling at this point, recognising the likely truth in these accounts. He, himself, sees humour in the retelling but retorts slightly defensively that of course he was right. There is no point in selling elite and difficult plants to people who will fail with them. It will only backfire all around. It is a philosophy of retailing to which I am forward to returning.

I have one plant here which I insist on an interview before allowing anybody to buy it. It is very slow to grow, scarce as hens’ teeth and likely not available anywhere else, expensive and I don’t want to waste precious plants on unsuitable people. It is a tiny vireya species, saxafragoides. After about five years, you get a little bun of a plant measuring around 7cm across. It is reported to be the most cold hardy of the vireyas (it is in fact the mother of hybrids Jiminy Cricket, Saxon Glow and Saxon Blush) and also the most tolerant of damp conditions. But not only is it very slow to grow, I have also not had great success with it in the garden, despite, I thought, giving it optimum conditions.

A decade or more ago, vireya rhododendrons were all the rage. A fashion plant of the day, it was predicted by some that these sub tropical rhododendrons would supplant the hardier, traditional rhododendrons in areas where they could be grown. Mark even heard one self proclaimed expert claim that vireyas were as hardy as maddenii rhododendrons. They are not. Nor are they as easy to grow well in the garden as many of us hoped. In fact as we go through the process of winding down the nursery, vireyas are the crop that we most often agree we will not be sorry to farewell out of commercial production.

Don’t get me wrong. We are vireya aficionados. They are a wonderful family of plants and we would not be without them. Our association with vireyas goes back to the mid 1950s when Mark’s father collected a form of R.macgregoriae in New Guinea and brought it back here to Tikorangi. In those days border control was considerably more lax. That plant still survives in the garden here and mass flowers every year without fail. It was the start of a father and son plant breeding dynasty which has seen more than twenty five different hybrids named and released on the market over the years and is still continuing.

Sweet Cherry

Vireyas are deceptive because they are very easy to put roots on, as we say. In other words, even home gardeners with no special facilities can have success with cuttings (although the aforementioned saxafragoides may be a challenge). They grow quickly (except for saxafragoides). Because they come from the equatorial areas where day length is pretty standard all year round and seasons are not defined by temperature change, they don’t have the set growing season that other plants show. So if plants are relatively warm, they will put on growth spurts most of the year. They also have the endearing habit of flowering randomly and often over many months. Indeed some are almost never without a flower and if you have enough plants in your garden, you can pretty well guarantee something in flower for twelve months of the year.

The down side is that they have pathetically little root systems and even well established plants can up and die on you when your back is turned. Being sub tropical, they are frost tender (any touch of frost will burn them and more than about three or four degrees of frost will kill them). With such small root systems, they are also extremely vulnerable to wet conditions and many soil fungi can take them out.

Readers who have lost vireya plants will be heartened to hear that it may not be their gardening skills at fault. In nursery production, we have always had a better cuttings take on vireyas than any other production line. But from then on, it is mostly an up hill battle. We always have a much higher death rate in the finished crop of vireyas than any other plant line we have grown over the past twenty five years. It can be very disheartening going through and pulling out the deaths. And we work harder to get bushy, well shaped plants than any other plant line. I figured this year that they are easily the most under priced crop we grow and were we staying in production, I would want a much higher wholesale price to justify the effort.

Compounding all this is that, of course, it is the highly desirable varieties which are the hardest to keep alive. Many if not most of the fascinating species are difficult. The named hybrids with big, luscious, scented trumpets are also more vulnerable whereas the utility toughies are more reliable but less coveted. Ain’t that always the way?

If you want to try taking vireya cuttings, select a stem of new growth which has hardened sufficiently to be firm. Make a clean cut across the base and then take a sliver off the outer green stem layer for about 2.5 centimetres from the base on two sides. It is very important to take it on both sides because this is where the roots are formed on vireyas. Reduce the cutting to two leaves only. If you have rooting hormone, it will increase success but you can manage without it. Stick the cutting in potting mix and place it somewhere warm but not in direct sun. You can cover it with a loose, clear plastic bag or a cut-off plastic PET bottle if you want to keep it warmer. Keep the potting mix damp but not saturated. You may see roots forming in about six weeks or so but they are best left undisturbed for three or four months.

Well grown vireyas are a delight and a great addition to the garden. But as a plant family, they are just not quite as easy and bullet proof as some of us hoped back in their hey day. They are great container plants and excellent for people who like to make a fuss of their plants but are certainly not an easy care option for the garden in the way that their hardier cousins are.

July 4, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

Given that the current round of very wet and dreary weather is forecast to continue for some days yet, we doubt that anybody is going to be doing much in the garden this week. We see our peers giving advice in other publications that this is the time to tend to your tools, oil the handles and sharpen the blades.

Bah, humbug. Good gardeners have generally learned to look after their tools all the time and not just in winter. Novice gardeners generally learn quite quickly that cheap tools are not worth having, especially as far as secateurs, spades, forks and trowels go. Buy quality and look after them. Don’t leave your metal wheelbarrow full of debris out in the rain or it will rust. We speak from experience here.

  • If you are suffering from cabin fever, get out your gardening books. You can at least use winter to gather fresh ideas and gain some inspiration.
  • When the weather is really bad, real gardeners have a shed where they hide away and sow seed and repot their treasures.
  • It is fairly early, but Mark has been pruning his grapevines which are under cover. Cut back all last year’s growth to one or two strong buds from the main trunk and thin out weak stems. Drastic but necessary. In moments of creativity or boredom, you can weave creations from the grape prunings. In the past, Mark has made some most attractive teepees for clematis by splitting giant bamboo lengths into four at one end only and weaving lengths of grape vines to hold the lower ends asplay. We need to refine the process of anchoring them to the ground (they tend to blow over) but they look a great deal more folksy than the cheap metal supports you buy which then rust out.
  • Think about a hierarchy of flowers. Doing a random net search on myself (as some of us do in moments of boredom), I found a new piece on the Yahoo d*hlia chat room accusing me of having no more class than a petunia. Moi? The irony of a d*hlia fanatic accusing me of having no taste or class does not escape me. But what did the poor petunia do to warrant having such aspersions cast upon it? While I quite like petunias, I did feel that my first love of magnolias might rank slightly higher up the social scale of flowers than the dreaded d*hlia.

Geoffrey Charlesworth wrote in 1988:

What do gardeners do in winter? They accumulate fat.

Oscar Wilde gave us memorable dialogue in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Cicely: When I see a spade, I call it a spade.

Gwendolen: I am pleased to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

In the garden 27/06/2008

We were certainly right predicting that the weather could well turn to custard straight after the shortest day and it is unlikely that anybody but the hardiest of gardeners is going to feel motivated to be outside until matters improve. You can however look at drainage patterns and areas of ponding which fail to drain quickly and resolve to take action. Only bog plants like wet feet for long periods.

  • In coastal areas at least, the depths of winter only lasts about six or eight weeks. We warm up remarkably quickly by the end of August and real enthusiasts will be preparing garden beds now for the spring planting of vegetables.
  • If you are planting fruit trees, remember that they will perform best if you give them optimum conditions of good soil, space, protection from wind and all day sun.
  • Now is the traditional time to sow garlic and shallots but if you have followed our advice earlier, yours will already be shooting.
  • If you have fires, save your ash for the garden (as long as you have not used any tanalised timber or burned any plastics or polystyrene) but make sure that you spread it very thinly. The ash from wood burners can be concentrated. You can put the ash through the compost heap but make sure that the ashes are cold first. Wood ash is a fertiliser which can be used on lawns and in the vegetable garden.
  • Winter is the time to prune deciduous trees while you can see the shape and the tree is dormant.
  • If you plan a brutal prune on rhododendrons, do it now. You will lose the flowers this spring but cutting back to bare wood means that as the plant comes into growth in spring, you will get a much rejuvenated plant. It can be a bit of a kill or cure method but if it is a strong plant with just tufts of leaves at the end of its stems, it will usually shoot again well.

Mark Twain opined that a cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education. He may have written this prior to the popularity of broccoli and certainly prior to the appearance of broccoflower, both of which are commonly ranked even further up the social scale of vegetables.