Category Archives: Seasonal garden guides

Weekly garden guide, In the garden this week, In the Taranaki garden

In the garden 02/01/2009

Not so much In the Garden This Week as New Year’s resolution time for the garden this year. You may like to resolve all or some of the following:

  1. Keep a garden diary. They are genuinely useful to refer to in the future and the more detailed, the more use they are in avoiding repeating mistakes and in getting timing right.
  2. Stay on top of weeds and prevent them getting large enough to seed. One year’s seeding really can lead to the next seven years of weeding.
  3. Curtail the routine use of chemical sprays and fertilisers and only resort to these when absolutely necessary. Replace plants which you have to spray regularly to keep looking good.
  4. Plant at least one good long term tree or gift same to somebody with more space if it is not practicable for you. Planting many good long term trees is better, but one is a start.
  5. Plant a fruit tree at home for both yourself and future residents.
  6. Compost your own green waste at home. Spare the landfill, save money and enrich your soil with your own compost.
  7. Resolve to lay mulch on your garden this year to nourish the soil and to reduce water loss.
  • If you have yet to try your hand at vegetable gardening and are wondering where to start, now is the time to prepare a patch for sowing winter crops. Make sure you have an area with maximum sunshine all year, good drainage and preferably not too exposed to wind. Start digging. If it is currently in grass, you need to remove the layer of turf completely (you can compost it) or all the grass will just grow again and choke out your little vegetable seedlings. Once it is dug over, push hoe all the first flushes of weed seeds which will germinate rapidly. Don’t rush this first stage of soil preparation. If you have a well cultivated patch to plant in to with at least some of the weed seeds dealt to, your chances of success are much greater and you still have plenty of time to get winter veg in.
  • There is time to sow seed of summer annuals for late summer and autumn colour. You will have more success if you sow the seed in trays and keep watered for planting out in a few weeks time when they have some size. Gaily broadcasting dry seed onto the garden beds is much easier but generally a waste of time.
  • If you have a problem with thrips on rhododendrons (the leaf sucking critters which turn leaves silver), you can get a really good hit rate by spraying now. If you use a systemic insecticide, the plant sucks it in so you do not need saturation coverage. If you use a contact insecticide, you need to get good coverage underneath the leaves where the thrips hide because it will only kill where it touches.

To close, some advice from Anne Raven:

Don’t wear perfume in the garden – unless you want to be pollinated by bees.

In the garden 26/12/2008

  • We find it difficult to believe that many people will be undertaking extensive gardening activities this week, though some may be hiding out from visitors with push hoe in hand. The most important priority is to stay on top of weeds at this time of the year and to prevent weeds setting seed. If you push hoe in the early stages, you can leave them to shrivel in the sun but if seed heads have already formed, you will need to rake up the weeds and remove them. A properly managed compost heap heats up sufficiently to kill the seeds but few people actually manage this and it is more likely that if you put your seed heads in the compost, you will be spreading them far and wide through the garden later in the season. Unless you are good with compost, putting seed heads in a black rubbish bag laid in the sun will be more surefire death.
  • Boiling water poured on weeds between concrete pavers works a treat as long as you are careful carrying the jug. We have a friend who boils up all her husband’s spent cigarette butts and uses that to kill weeds, but we have never tried this ourselves.
  • Living in the country, we have major problems with flies at this time of the year and Mark is very dubious about the practice of installing fly huffers indoors which mean you are constantly living in a mist of insecticide. The active ingredient in most fly killers is synthetic pyrethrum (the real McCoy is extracted from pyrethrum daises) and while it is touted as safe, we err on the conservative side and prefer to avoid constant exposure. This year we are trialling one of the bucket contraptions which sits outdoors and its distinctly pungent aroma attracts the flies. It is working a treat and every fly which is trapped in fly heaven is one fewer that comes in our windows but we need at least three to cover our ground floor more effectively and it is rather aromatic as you pass by. It is genuinely all natural, though.
  • If you are in to picking flowers from your garden, it is best done first thing in the morning when the flowers are freshest and with the highest level of sap in their stems. They flop far more quickly as the day progresses. In your new gardening diary, you may like to remind yourself to plant Christmas lilies for next year – they come into the shops in late winter.

We had some charming garden visitors in this week who told us that they had Rhododendron Christmas Cheer but it was not going to flower for them this year. They had bought it from a Wanganui garden centre who had assured them it would flower at Christmas. Ah, no. Even in its Northern Hemisphere place of origin, it flowers in March. Here it flowers in July. We like to think that Taranaki garden centres give better advice than that!

In the garden 18/12/2008

  • Give roses a summer feed. These are plants which put on a simply astounding display of flower power based on pathetically little root systems and they appreciate a helping hand. While some rose enthusiasts maintain a traditional and rigorous spray programme, if you are less than enthusiastic about this dodgy environmental practice, take stock of which roses are still looking good in your garden and which ones are looking poorly, diseased or starting to defoliate. Our advice is to take out and burn the latter and nurture the former. Roses vary hugely in disease resistance and we strongly advocate picking the varieties which will stay acceptably healthy without chemical intervention. If readers wish to email us with recommended varieties which they have grown without sprays, we would be happy to disseminate the information. Contact us on jury@xtra.co.nz
  • Keep a weeding bucket on hand so that as you pull out weeds, you can dump them in the bucket. Weeds tend to be hardy survivors by definition and can still ripen their seeds if you leave them lying on the garden.
  • Set the lawnmower height a notch or two up so that you are leaving more length… Scalping the lawns is never good practice and stresses the grass even further as the heat and dry of summer hits. It is a fallacy that cutting the lawn very short reduces the time between mowing. It just kills the grass and allows weeds to get away instead.
  • It is all go in the vegetable garden with planting out salad veg, beans, corn, carrots and peas. Leeks can be started now from seeds or plants, in preparation for winter harvest. Keep pinching out the laterals on tomatoes and giving them a copper spray. They will need this after the recent rain to keep blight at bay. Grapevines also need attention, thinning out the laterals and reducing the young fruit to one bunch per stem (or lateral). You will get better flavour if you sacrifice quantity for quality.
  • Thin apples if you have a heavy fruit set. Give the plants a light summer prune. This can be done with hedge clippers.

Quotes this week courtesy of the Macbird Floraprint calendar which arrived in the mail (all from that prolific Anon):

Lawnmower: a magic wand for making teenagers disappear.

Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it.

When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.

In the garden 12/12/2008

  • Roses need regular deadheading to keep them healthy and to encourage further flowering. Give them a light prune at the same time to encourage them to stay bushy and to put on new growth in the right places. If you keep a cardboard carton at your side and cut the prunings to fit, they will dry out quickly so you can incinerate them in a few days. Never put rose prunings in the compost heap.
  • Primula heladoxa is the common, vigorous yellow primula which has now finished flowering. If you have them planted on the edges of waterways, make sure you deadhead them to prevent spreading the seed. While you may like them, your neighbour downstream may not and Regional Council certainly won’t.
  • As citrus trees finish flowering, get a copper and summer strength oil spray onto them to keep disease at bay.
  • If your hostas look really tattered and holey, you can give them a radical haircut, feed them and give them a good drink and they will produce new growth. However unless you take steps to reduce the slugs and snails, they will just eat the fresh leaves again.
  • As hybrid clematis finish their first flowering, you can cut them down almost to ground level, feed them and water them and they will spring into new growth and flower again for you in six to eight weeks time.
  • Keen brussel sprout fans will be sowing their seed now. We are not brussel sprout country (they prefer colder, drier climates) but we grew Maxim last year and it did very well for us.
  • Keep up with sowing corn, green beans, lettuce, leeks and carrots. All can be done from seed at this time of the year which is a great deal cheaper than buying plants.
  • Keep pinching out the laterals of your tomatoes to encourage the plants to be bushy. They are growing like mad at this time. You can still put in plants of tomatoes (and cucumbers) for a late crop.

The closing quote this week is from the inimitable but late Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter fame:

There is a psychological distinction between cutting back and pruning. Pruning back is supposed to be for the welfare of the tree or shrub; cutting back is for the satisfaction of the cutter.

December 5, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

  • Potted colour (flowering annuals which are sold in larger pots rather than in small punnets) are often ridiculously cheap and can give instant flowering oomph to gardens, but it pays to be severe and cut off all flowers, flower buds and any spent flowers as you plant them if you want them to be more than a one week wonder. They can then recover from the stress of being planted out before putting their energies into flowering and setting seed.
  • Be very cautious from here on about planting out woody trees and shrubs which can suffer from terminal stress over summer. If in doubt, heeling the plant into well cultivated soil such as the vegetable garden over summer may be wise. You can then relocate to its permanent position when autumn arrives.
  • The really successful harvests here at the moment are the strawberries and the broad beans. Shame about the missing lettuces… Mark blames the rabbits but I think it would have helped to have planted them in the first place.
  • We make no apology for offering our annual advice to deal to convolvulus and wandering jew now. If you are not organic, Woody Weedkiller or Banvine is an effective option for the former and Shortcut, Amitrol or Grazon for the latter. Glyphosate does not touch wandering jew and is not particularly easy to use on convolvulus because it kills the host plant as well as the vine. If you are organic, you are probably going to have to hand pull these weeds and then place them in black plastic rubbish bags to cook in the sun. Every piece of wandering jew that you do not cook will grow again.
  • Our first crop of peas has now finished but if you continue to sow them, you can still get in one or two more crops before the heat of summer. Make sure your main crop potatoes are in and Mark is planting kumara runners now. It is the last chance for kumara. Yams and pumpkins should be planted by now but you can still get a crop if you plant them now. Use plants, not seed.

Beverley Nicholls (so-named before the feminisation of his Christian name) wrote in 1932: I had never “taken a cutting” before….

Do you not realize that the whole thing is miraculous? It is exactly as though you were to cut off your wife’s leg, stick it in the lawn, and be greeted on the following day by an entirely new woman, sprung from the leg, advancing across the lawn to meet you.

Writing as ones who have taken many hundreds of thousands of cuttings in our time, the magic of such activity has long ago escaped us but it would be safe to say that Mr Nicholls’ perspective is not one which has ever struck us before. However, Mark lives in hope. And a neighbour has given a new perspective on this. He put his hydrangea prunings through the mulcher, spread the mulch and now has hundreds of budding young hydrangeas in his garden. Micro propagation? Who needs to try cuttings when you have a mulcher?