- If you have box hedges surrounding garden, root prune them when you are trimming them. In other words cut along the garden perimeter a small way out from the hedge with a sharp spade. Buxus have big matted root systems which will reach in to the garden and compete with other plants. But they are also hardy so will take root pruning.
- Dead heading annuals and perennials greatly extends their flowering. The plant’s instinct is to set seed to ensure its perpetuity so if you prevent it setting seed, it keeps putting up flowers to try again.
- Clematis are on the move and need something to climb up. One cheap option is bamboo teepees to prevent them choosing their own host and risking strangulation.
- Check for any infestation of mealie bugs, particularly on clematis and grapevines and any plants under cover. It may be necessary to resort to an insecticide spray to prevent them getting out of control. Mealie bugs are a white aphid and you can see infestations as clusters of white threads and webs. Confidor appears to be the current recommended insecticide for the home gardener with Conqueror Oil added at summer strength.
- Mulch ornamental flower beds now to retain moisture and suppress weeds.
- Labour Weekend is the traditional magic date for many activities in the vegetable garden. If you follow this time honoured ritual you will have no spare hours this weekend but readers in cold, inland areas may want to delay another couple of weeks. It is time for the first direct sowings of corn. Plants of tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, pumpkin, melons if you have your plants all ready – these can all be planted into the garden now. Keep successional sowings of peas going before it gets too hot. Main crop potatoes are planted now and even kumara plants if your runners are prepared. Get carrots in now if you haven’t planted them yet.
- We have been enjoying the mesclun salad mix sown into a seed tray at the end of August. Kept in a glasshouse, we started cutting it after thirty days. It is a clean crop, tasty and it keeps growing if you cut it with scissors. Even if you don’t grow other vegetables, mesclun mix is worth a try and may actually save you money if you buy it from the bins at supermarket. It is a great way of bridging the salad gap in early spring but can be grown any time. Misome, a Japanese green, is a similar tasty leafy veg ready in 30 days and edible raw or lightly cooked. Kings Seeds sell both.
Author Archives: Abbie Jury
This week 13 Oct 2006
- Resist the temptation to be too ruthless cleaning up after spring bulbs which have finished flowering. They rely on keeping their foliage as long as possible to build up strength for next year’s display. It is best to leave the foliage until it turns brown.
- If you have bulbs which are charming but threaten to seed everywhere (attractive weeds, really) it pays to deadhead them into a bucket.
- Clipping box hedges as soon as they have made their fresh growth is the best way to keep the hedge dense and compact.
- Camellia hedges are putting on their first growth now so it is the time to clip them.
- Feed roses.
- It is still too cold to direct sow corn, melons, cucurbits and kumara in to the garden but tomatoes can be planted out now in mild areas.
- Keep raking the soil in the vegetable garden to stay on top of the germinating weeds. Think of it like vacuum cleaning – best done frequently.
- Continue with succession sowing of brassicas, lettuces, peas etc. Mark advises protecting early lettuces from pesky sparrows which he wishes had been left in their Northern Hemisphere home.
Gardening in Greece
Greek gardening. Now there is an oxymoron. Combine arid, poor, stony soils, six months with no rain at all during very hot summers and some islands with no fresh water – the range of plants that can be grown is pretty limited. That is not to say that people do not surround themselves with some foliage and flowers but it hardly warrants the term “gardening”.
In late September, the flowers were almost exclusively oleanders (I recall admiring these in flower in Gisborne one January), bougainvillea (I hadn’t seen the golden orange form before but I remain unconvinced that it is of great merit), hibiscus, jasmine and geraniums (99% the common red one). Second Daughter, who was travelling with me, commented that she had never liked the red geranium before she went to Italy and now Greece, but it is wonderfully evocative of Continental summertime. If my memory serves me right, prominent Taranaki gardener, Gwyn Masters, used red geraniums in terracotta pots in her Italianate garden created in a disused swimming pool. It helps to have the panache of Mrs Masters to avoid it merely looking cliched or tatty in our gardening environment.
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This week 6 Oct 2006
- If you are on the case with slugs and snails, remember that it only takes one bait to kill several and you do not need to use bait like fertiliser. Slug bait is not particular pleasant material. Wash your hands after handling it.
- It is a good time to fertilise vireyas now.
- If you have rhododendrons (or indeed camellias though it is less common) with silver leaves, the culprit is a little sucking thrip. You can’t turn the silver leaves green again but you can stop the fresh spring growth from going the same way by the use of insecticide a little later in spring (we will advise when). In the meantime, opening up around the plant to increase air movement and to reduce heavy shading will also assist but if the plant is totally silver and sick, it may be best to take it out and replace it with a higher health variety. There are selections which are a great deal more resistant to thrips.
- Keep an eye out for bitter cress, a small weed which can germinate, grow alarmingly fast and pop its seeds everywhere if you are too late removing it. It appears with a small flat rosette of leaves and can take as little as three weeks from germination to ensuring its immortality with its first explosion of seed.
- Dwarf beans and runner beans can be direct sown into the garden now.
- Melons (rock and water) can still be started now in containers. The annual challenge for Mark here is to get a good melon crop through. Timing is important because melons need a long growing season and we are only hot enough for a relatively short period of time. They need to be established in containers and planted out in to black polythene around Labour Day. The black poly is to get extra heat and to keep the foliage clean and reduce disease.
- With the warming weather, if we get a dry spell keep an eye on container plants and start watering before they get too dry. It is difficult to get water absorbed once the root ball has dried out too much.
This week 29 Sept 2006
- Evergreen azaleas are a shrub which will take heavy pruning, almost back to ground level, yet still come again. The time to do this is as they finish flowering because they will then put on their growth spurt.
- Vireya rhododendrons can get very leggy. Where they have put on a single shoot, if you cut that back, the plant will usually respond by putting out three new shoots which gives a bushier shape. As they are just starting to put on new growth, now is a good time to go around and rub out single leaf shoots. You can prune back vireyas hard but it will set back flowering for the following year.
- Like evergreen azaleas, most camellias will accept cutting back to ground level and shoot away again. If you have an ugly old bush and feel the need to rejuvenate it, you can resort to this drastic action at this time of the year. However, do not cut back to ground level with a grafted plant, a very weak plant or with reticulata camellias (the ones with blooms the size of a lunch plate). Roundup does not touch camellias so you can spray right up to them, but you can’t kill out an unwanted camellia stump with it unless you use it undiluted.
- Ideally, September is the last month for planting trees and shrubs. We know most of you will ignore this and continue planting well into summer and we are lucky in Taranaki that we don’t dry out too quickly and you can get away with late planting. But the sooner you can get them in, the better.
- If you have a really warm and sheltered spot, you can plant out tomatoes and courgettes which have been started under glass.
- Corn can be started in pots under cover to be planted out at the traditional time of Labour Weekend. (When we lived in Dunedin, Mark did this and it snowed two days later. We put the house on the market and moved back north).
- If your broad beans are well established and setting, take the tips out to stop them getting too leggy. The tips are delicious to eat when treated like fresh spinach or used in stir fries. Those who live in nice sheltered places will no doubt be starting to pick their first broad beans. Homegrown fresh broad beans bear no resemblance to the tough specimens you may buy at the supermarket or the frozen varieties. They are simply delicious when young and tender.
- Now is the time to start sprouting kumara plants if you want to start your own. They can be sprouted in damp sawdust in a sunny, warm room.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 