• As you read this, we should be high in the air flying back from a few weeks looking at early summer gardens in southern England. Alas July is the most miserable month at home but at least we have a short winter in Taranaki compared to large parts of the world. It is already countdown to spring and within a few weeks the day lengths will be noticeably longer and temperatures significantly milder.
• We will be home to prune pretty much everything but those who heed our advice will be well ahead of us on the winter prune. Because we live in a mild coastal area, we prune hydrangeas at the same time as everything else. Those in cold, inland areas may wish to hold off on the hydrangeas until August. As with wisterias, do not cut off your hydrangeas at ground level and then wonder why they fail to flower. They flower on last year’s growth so you are taking out all spindly growths, anything too woody and ugly and then reducing the very long growths to the fat flower buds. If you look, you will see small buds and fat buds. The small ones produce leaves, the fat ones flowers. So cut back to the lowest fat buds you can find.
• As you work your way around the garden, get a good layer of mulch onto garden beds. This does wonders for your soils, encourages worm activity (as long as you use organic matter as opposed to inorganic weed mat, black plastic, gravel, stones or, horrors, tumbled glass), suppresses weeds and makes your garden look a great deal more loved and cared for. If you are in a summer drought area, you need to follow this up with another layer of mulch in spring to keep moisture levels up. Our preferred mulch is compost. Leaf litter is good. Pine needles work, especially around acid loving plants such as rhododendrons. Bark chip looks good and can be locally sourced. Calf shed shavings are good if you have a local source. Pea straw is a classic quality mulch but because we don’t grow peas commercially in our area, it is expensive and represents quite a hefty carbon footprint moving it here for you to buy when you can find local alternatives.
• Get your locally sourced New Zealand garlic planted soon, if you have yet to do it. It is a bit cold to be planting much else in the vegetable garden though sowing broad beans is fine.
• If you are getting cabin fever and you lack a glasshouse, cloches are worth investigating. Mark bought a Rolls Royce cloche last year. It takes a bit of putting up and down but greatly extends the planting opportunities. A cloche is relocatable and somewhat like a mini mobile poly house – support hoops that you move around and cover with clear plastic. As temperatures rise and the crop grows, the cloche is dismantled. A cloche will lift the internal temperature by several degrees, protect from frost and stop the worst excesses of rain from flattening tender young plants. The classic glass bell jar is Ye Olde English version of the protective covering for individual plants and you can buy modern repro bell jars. Cut off pet bottles are not as large and certainly lack any style, but will work to cover individual plants.
• If you are trying to make a hot compost mix, make sure you remember to turn your compost (it is what the garden fork is for, though to be honest we do it with the front bucket on the tractor here). You need to keep it aerated and ideally keep the cold rain off it. We cover ours with a heavy sheet of plastic.
How to dig and divide (hostas).
A step by step guide by Abbie and Mark Jury first published in the Taranaki Daily News and reproduced here with permission as a PDF.
New Outdoor Classrooms are uploaded fortnightly.
Flowering this week: the early snowdrops
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The “snowdrop” in NZ – leucojum vernum (left) The proper snowdrop – galanthus S. Arnott (right)
New Zealanders are vague on identifying snowdrops and often confuse the snowflakes that have naturalised in paddocks alongside daffodils with snowdrops. But people of English stock have no doubt at all as to what proper snowdrops are because they grow wild en masse through parts of the countryside, even bravely putting their heads through the snow. Proper snowdrops are galanthus and have three inner petals forming a dainty cup with an outer skirt of three long petals. The pure white flowers often have some green markings on them and they are simply the prettiest and daintiest things imaginable. Lacking snow, our snowdrops flower a little randomly and intermittently all winter but the main display won’t come for another month or so. We have several different forms of galanthus but in an area where we are marginal (they do prefer a much colder winter), galanthus S. Arnott is the most reliable form.
Snowflakes, by the way, are a different bulb altogether, being leucojums. They grow larger, have just the dainty cup flower without the 3 long petals, a remarkably long flowering season in spring, are easy and unfussy and are completely under-rated as a garden plant.
In the Garden June 26, 2009
• Enthusiastic gardeners will be chitting their potatoes so they are ready to hit the ground running when planting time arrives. Chitting taties involves standing them on their ends in a single layer in a warmish place (sometimes the old fashioned airing cupboard). This encourages the shoots to start growing.
• Seeds of Florence fennel can be sown directly into the garden at this time. Thin the seedlings after they have germinated to about 12cm apart. As an all round versatile vegetable that is still not well known in this country, Florence fennel ranks deservedly high. It appears to be pretty well untroubled by pests and diseases, is equally delicious roasted like a parsnip, shredded and stirfried or eaten raw in a grated or finely sliced form. It has a good texture and a pleasant flavour which is not so strong as to be dominant. It has nowhere near the overwhelming aniseed flavour of wild fennel plants on the roadside.
• Most of the flowering annuals we grow in our gardens (the pansies, cornflowers, nemesias and the like) are hardy so you can start them from seed in the depths of winter. You won’t gain anything putting them into the garden this early because they won’t want to do much growing until the temperatures start to rise, but you will save yourself a substantial amount of money if you start your own plants from seed now, rather than buying potted colour or even punnets later in the season. Seed trays need to be kept out of reach of slugs which remain active all winter. Try the barbecue table.
• On the pruning treadmill, you can safely continue cutting back roses and most deciduous plants. You can get away without ever pruning deciduous fruit trees such as apples and plums but a little care keeps the tree to a manageable size and shape and can improve the health of the tree. Take out dead, damaged and wayward branches. Cut out branches that cross others. Remove any old fruit still hanging on the tree to reduce pests and diseases. Shorten very long branches to three or four leaf buds, or spurs as they are called on an apple tree. The aim is to have good light and good air movement. If you want to keep apple trees small, buy them on dwarfing rootstock and keep pruning them twice a year (mid winter and again in summer). They are excellent espaliered and don’t even need a wall if you train them along metal pipes. After about 25 years, we removed the somewhat unsightly metal pipes and our espaliered apples are free standing, narrow plants where the fruit is at just the right level to pick as we pass by.
• Get a copper and oil spray onto deciduous fruit trees. It cleans up mildew, scale, brown rot and all manner of generalised nasties.
• On bleak and miserable days, wander around the house looking out the windows and plan for what you can be doing to lift boring areas of the garden. Good gardeners probably spend as much time thinking and planning as actually doing it and it is a good way to while away dreary days.
• The Curious Gardener’s Almanac tells us that it is something of an urban myth that a worm will be perfectly happy if you cut it in half. Apparently while it may continue to wriggle for a while, it will die not long afterwards. Only if you nip just a little of its tail end does it have the capacity to repair itself. It all makes better sense if you think about the biology of a worm’s anatomy.
Letter from England
Greetings from a Cornwall fishing village where we are currently in residence in an oh-so-cutsie-pie antique fisherman’s cottage, suitably renovated to bring it up to the level of comfort expected in 2009. The thatched roof has been replaced with slate tiles and actually I think thatching may be a great deal better in photographs than in reality. Not only does thatching have a limited lifespan and require a trained thatcher to replace (probably elderly, meticulous, speaking in a thick regional dialect but charging for the new millenium), it provides a cosy habitat for all manner of insect, rodent and bird life. Mark has even spotted a duck nesting on a thatched roof.
But I digress. We made this trip specifically to look and learn from English summer gardens and we placed a strong emphasis on private gardens of high quality, rather than the better known historic gardens. You will have to wait for another fortnight to get a more detailed analysis of what we have seen but suffice to say that we are abandoning that earlier plan and returning instead to an itinerary heavier on the known historic and estate gardens. We have been a little underwhelmed by the calibre of many of the private gardens that had been recommended to us. That is fine – it allows us to establish benchmarks and comparators – but now we want to see the best of English garden tradition and it appears we will find that in the trust and public gardens.
We have been particularly impressed by the country lanes where, thank goodness, glyphosate is clearly never used and hedgerows are valued. Of course many of our weeds in New Zealand are native to England (think of the Flower Fairy books) so completely at home in the natural environment here. And the lanes are natural wildflower environments. This is not territory for large cars or urban tractors and oft times, even very small cars such as we are driving have to reverse up to allow an equally small car travelling in the opposite direction to gain passage. Once away from the motorways and main arterial routes, the English summer countryside is simply charming. It makes our farming practices at home look very industrial and the green desert we inhabit is not environmentally rich in any way at all. We only get away with a clean green image because of a very small population and areas of considerable natural beauty, not because of any great sensitivity to environmental matters. Mark has long been railing against the District Council and Transit practices of spraying out wide areas of natural growth with weedkiller. It looks really bad and it is really bad practice.
Road verges along a Cornwall lane
So we are delighting in the hedgerows which team with insect and bird life and Mark is fast becoming very competent at identifying native birds and butterflies. And we also admire a society which has rediscovered the importance of allowing some of the natural environment to regenerate and where not everything in the countryside is sacrificed to the speedy passage of the internal combustion engine.
The current vegetable garden craze is by no means limited to New Zealand but in a society where dense population means that most people live cheek by jowl with minimal space, the allotment has taken on new importance and status. Allotments are areas of public land which are allocated on request. It appears that the right to allotment space is enshrined somewhere in law here, although the wait time in high demand areas can be up to 40 years. The line up of allotments down the road from our London hosts near High Barnet used to look very tatty and unloved when I first looked at them 18 years ago. Not so today. Now they are high producing areas much loved and tended by their leasees, in this case mostly Italian. It is a sign of the times, alas, that they are also surrounded by high security fencing. We spent a pleasant half hour chatting to Bruno, who was indeed Italian and in memory of his homeland, he had a fairly large number of fig trees, 18 as I recall. He also had every other fruit bush and tree (on dwarfing stock) that he could grow there, along with extensive crops of vegetables. I think he had managed to get down on a double allotment. It was from Bruno that we learned about the difficulty of gardening in competition with the squirrels. He had come down one morning to pick his pear crop, only to be disappointed. From being laden the previous day, there was not a single fruit left. He ferreted around the base of the tree and found a neat stack of pears, each one with tooth marks and damage, stored by the squirrel against winter famine.
Bruno in his London allotment
Here in Cornwall, we tracked down the allotments in nearby Gerrans where we chatted to a young German woman who now lives locally and tends her allotment. She told me that Germany also has an allotment system but, being German, they were subject to tight controls prescribing what proportion of land must be devoted to food production, rather than ornamentals, and the standard to which your allotment must be maintained. She much preferred the more relaxed English model. She was watering in her leeks as we chatted. This being the UK, the allotments in Gerrans had what was probably a million pound view – literally. It is part of the wonderful contradiction that is England – an overheated property market with extremes of wealth and historic country cottages that are under-used holiday homes way out of the financial reach of local residents. The local council responds by allocating allotment land and building subsidised affordable housing, as it is called here, on a prime spot of coastal land with an astounding view out to sea. In rural Cornwall, none of these allotments were fenced but clearly a code of courtesy prevails. While being extremely impressed by a crop of peas which eclipsed anything we have ever managed to grow at home, we were sufficiently well mannered to resist the temptation to pick one to eat.
the impressive pea crop in a Cornish allotment at Gerrans
Allotments are different to community gardens. The former are individually rented (about $50 per annum in Gerrans, $100 in London) whereas the latter are managed collectively, also on public land. Keen gardeners tend to like individual allotments, community minded people and do-gooders lean to the latter option. In our very own Waitara, as I recall, the residents in Battiscomb Terrace wanted allotment rights whereas Mayor Pete preferred the more PC community garden approach. But part of the identity of allotments (or indeed community gardens) is that aesthetics do not enter the equation at all. While there may be increasing pressure to keep a tidy, productive allotment and to go organic, it is fine to cobble together a scruffy old shed, plastic water butt, rough paths and piles of accoutrements which may at some point possibly be useful, or not, as the case may be. Frankly it would not appeal at all to the conformist types who wanted Battiscomb Terrace residents to have tidy and preferably matched front fences.
Allotments are not usually aesthetically pleasing.
Apparently being allocated an allotment is now a triumph worth boasting at dinner parties in Mayfair and even Ma’am is supervising the installation of an organic allotment plot at Buckingham Palace. Admittedly it is facing the wrong way for the sun, part shaded by a mulberry tree, hard up against a hedge and in less than ideal conditions, but it is the thought that counts and garden space is at a premium at The Palace.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 