Author Archives: Abbie Jury

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About Abbie Jury

jury.co.nz Tikorangi The Jury Garden Taranaki NZ

The New Zealand gardening style

It was straight back to work here as soon as the statutory holidays were over. And by work, Mark and I refer to the nursery. We don’t generally describe gardening as work – that is our leisure and our pleasure (mostly). The nursery is the bread and butter which earns the money to keep the garden and the family going. And it is the time for cuttings. Usually we aim to have all deciduous cuttings in by Christmas (we rarely make that deadline so the over run is early in the new year) but several factors conspired against that this year. Not that it has mattered – the season is so late and so cold so far that we are effectively dealing with cuttings of the same maturity as usual.

But while I have been out in the nursery doing tasks which require little brain power, I have been pondering what makes New Zealand gardens different. At this time of the year, we get a trickle of overseas garden visitors and several of late have come because the British Royal Horticulture Society published an extended article on New Zealand gardens recently. It is with some pride that we note that on their top ten list of NZ gardens, they rate three of us in Taranaki.
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This week 29 Dec 2006

  • It is time for cuttings. Some plants root much more easily than others (camellias and rhododendrons are difficult without a propagation set up). But perennials, fuchsias, hydrangeas and vireyas are very easy. Find new season’s growth which has just hardened (in other words it does not snap easily when you bend it). Make a clean angled cut across the base, take a sliver off the outside of the stem for a couple of centimetres (two sides for vireyas), cut the leaves in half with a pair of scissors (it prevents excessive drying out) and stick in a pot filled with a free draining potting mix. Place in the shade and water gently on a regular basis. Rooting hormone will help but is not absolutely necessary for easy cuttings. Handle rooting hormones with care and make sure you wash your hands thoroughly afterwards.
  • If you have an accident with spray at any time and get it on your skin, wash it off with copious amounts of cold water. Hot water opens the pores of the skin and increases the risk of absorbing the chemicals. So remember the cold water rule.
  • You can still sow seed of practically everything in the flowering line from ageratum to marigolds to zinnias to give you late summer and autumn colour.
  • Otherwise it is a maintenance time in the ornamental gardens – deadheading, weeding, staking but it is not likely that watering will be required.
  • Summer feed roses. In case you haven’t noticed, roses have pathetic little root systems considering the terrific amount of seasonal growth and the mass display they put on so a bit of feeding assistance helps them. If you are into spraying roses, they will almost certainly need a dose of Shield now.
  • You can still sow most plants from seed in the vegetable garden, from beans to tomatoes. The tomatoes will develop and crop through the autumn and into winter in mild areas. Keep successional plantings of sweetcorn going. Corn is another vegetable that is infinitely superior picked from your own garden – all the sugars have not turned to starch and it is sweeter and more tender than cobs picked days before for market.
  • It is the important time to spray citrus trees with copper and to fertilise if you haven’t done so already. Copper prevents all sorts of nasties on citrus trees.
  • Powdery mildew is the dominant disease at the moment on tamarillos, citrus, apples, even clematis. If you have to spray, there are several sprays which are the equivalent of Bravo and Topsin mixed – Taratek (a Taranaki product) or Greenguard are two to look for.

This week 22 Dec 2006

  • Sit back and enjoy the garden and visitors and family who may be around.
  • If you want the garden to look good for visitors and have left your run rather late at least mow the lawns. If time allows for more presentation, in descending order of importance the following tasks will make your place looked cared for: define path and garden edges, sweep or blower vac sealed areas, leaf rake soft surface tracks, trim hedges in prominent positions and prune sludgy rose blooms. Removing any junk or large debris also helps. That is about all you can plan for in a short space of time.
  • When bonding with family and friends gets too much, you can retreat outdoors and cut back spent flowers on annuals and perennials, water container plants if we get three days in a row without rain (faint hope), or thin out overcrowded spring bulbs while you can still remember where they are.
  • Stay on top of the weeding. It pays to have a bucket or barrow beside you to put the weeds in, especially if you have that nasty little cress which can explode and spurt out seeds over a wide radius. Don’t put seeding weeds in your compost unless you manage it as a hot mix. Otherwise you will be spreading the seed next season with the compost. Putting seeding weeds in a black plastic bag in the sun to bake them first is a good precaution.
  • If you have a hybrid clematis that has finished flowering, it can be cut back hard, fed and watered and it will take about six weeks before it delights you with a second flowering season.
  • There will be no fresh raspberries in this household for Christmas. Despite best efforts, the cold spring just has not encouraged ripening in time. We have eaten all the fresh peas, dug all the first crop new potatoes and the strawberries are past their peak. Mark is feeling a failure and we will have to resort to the fruiterer or supermarket. He says we will at least be able to have rhubarb pie.
  • This is peak time for pests in the garden. If you can’t be bothered making your own concoctions out of rhubarb leaves and soapy water, garden centres sell organic alternatives which are often safer or kinder than manufactured chemical sprays. If you use chemical sprays, watch out for the withholding period before it is safe to eat produce.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

We subscribe to Sky TV for three reasons. It was a very expensive means of solving our aerial problems. Mark enjoys the sport (I only like watching cricket when we are winning and am not a rugby fan). But mostly we keep our subscription current for the gardening programmes on the Living Channel. Alas these tend to be in the middle of the afternoon and neither of us ever mastered the video recorder.

Currently Sky have two programmes running which show the very best and the very worst of English
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This week 15 Dec 2006

  • If deadheading your rhododendrons has got away on you, at least do those which set seed. Some set so much seed that it can weaken the plant and kill it. The seed setters will usually show open seed pods from last year still hanging on looking like little wooden stars and they show no growth from that spent flower tip. These types of plants can tend to be leggy and spindly – they are putting so much energy into reproducing themselves that they forget to grow. At least try and deadhead these ones. It is not so critical to deadhead varieties which set very little seed although they do look better for your efforts.
  • If you have water features, try and prevent invasive water weeds getting away on you. We have problems with water hawthorn in our stream which we extract with a rake head on the end of a long pole. Over the years, Mark has eliminated the unwanted oxygen weed (fine in fish tanks but not in waterways). And some of the water lilies can be so invasive that they cover all the water, which is a bit self defeating for a water feature. Best to get rid of the rampant ones and replace with better behaved varieties. Or thin the plant back to one crown.
  • As the yellow primula heladoxa finishes flowering, deadhead it to prevent it spreading seed. This is another plant with weed potential and as it usually grown alongside water, it can spread some distance if it is a stream.
  • Annuals such as asters, zinnias, snapdragons, stocks and Iceland poppies can still be started from seed and will give you good flowering in late summer and autumn.
  • A bit of a typo last week when we advocated continuing successional sowing of broad beans. That should have been dwarf beans.
  • Now is the important time to start getting winter vegetables into the ground, such as Brussels sprouts, celery and leeks. The seed of these will have been started some time ago to get good sized plants for you to plant out. If you want to do leeks from seed yourself, this is about as late as you leave it. Sow the seeds in situ immediately. They won’t get as large as the seedling plants but you should still be able to get a crop through.
  • Mulch and feed asparagus beds. They are gross feeders. Compost and animal manure are ideal.
  • Thin apple crops if it looks as if too much fruit has set. More is not better. Trees can overcrop and quality suffers. Shorten the spurs on apples and other fruit trees such as plums and kiwifruit. In other words prune back to two or three leaves on new growth. This encourages the formation of flower buds and fruit for next season. It is the same with wisterias, as mentioned last week.