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!

Battening down the garden for summer

After a brief flurry of distinctly warm days a few weeks ago when Mark and I were lured into the swimming pool for the first time this season, we appear to have cooled down again and have had plenty of grey days since. But unlike some places, we can be confident that summer will arrive here and at some point we will get a protracted period of bright light, comparative heat and dry…

Unlikely though it seems to us here, there are parts of the world where you put your garden to bed for winter because there is a period of some months when the ground is too cold to work and the days are too short. Most of the UK falls into this category, as do inland areas in Europe, the US and Canada where the ground can freeze or remain under a blanket of snow and ice. Not so here. Winter in Taranaki is a pretty busy time for gardeners and we are so mild that even the grass continues to grow. Instead, summer is the time when we batten down hatches and prepare for harsher conditions. But only relatively harsher. My late mother used to hate summer. Her beloved Concert Programme got taken over for interminable cricket commentaries and there was very little she could do in the garden. Boredom set in for her and she couldn’t wait for the cooler temperatures and autumn rains.

Forget planting trees and shrubs now. All you will do is stress them badly and it can take quite a while for stressed plants to pick up lost growth. You can dig and divide clumping plants (perennials, grasses and the like) as long as you water them in well but it is best to do this after a bit of rain or they can wilt and sulk and look very sad.

Forget sowing lawns, even if you think a sprinkler is justified. Wait for autumn or spring for this activity.

There are few plants that are best pruned in summer. While roses benefit from constant light pruning, cherry trees are the big exception to the winter and spring pruning rule. In fact, the time to get out and prune your cherries is right now. Where you have patches of dense foliage, it is likely you have witches broom and the entire section needs to be removed. You won’t get flowers on witches broom and, left unchecked, it will take over the whole tree. Beyond that, you can summer prune to shape plants and to remove dead wood, but be very careful not to remove too much foliage because most plants only make a spring growth and are more likely to die if you leave them hacked about at this time of the year.

Container plants will need watering every single day, and more than once a day if they are overplanted hanging baskets or congested pots where it is difficult to keep the required moisture levels high. Don’t be fooled if you see water running out of the bottom of a dry pot – it does not mean you have soaked the plant. All that is happening is that the water is finding an easy path straight through and the roots and potting mix can remain bone dry. If it is really parched, you need a surfactant to encourage the water to penetrate. A squirt of dishwashing liquid will suffice. Unglazed pots such as terracotta and wire hanging baskets dry out even faster and will need more attention. Repotting root bound plants to larger containers makes it easier to keep them watered but make sure you soak the root ball until it is wet through before you pot it. I have put most of my pots to bed for summer – brought in under the nursery irrigation system. I will get them out again in autumn. Lacking an automated irrigation system, home gardeners may have to resort to moving their container plants to shady positions, preferably near a garden tap so that it makes watering easier…

You should have had mulch laid on your garden six to eight weeks ago. Mulch works both ways – it retains existing moisture levels but conversely, if your soil is already dry, it stops any moisture penetrating from above. So there is no point in mulching dry garden beds. And if you think a good soak with the garden hose will get the soil moist enough to lay mulch, try it in one spot and then excavate to see how far the water has gone down. In most cases it will only be a few centimetres which is nowhere near enough. Consign the idea of mulching to the “must-do-next-year basket”. Good gardeners mulch. It is not exciting. It is not spectacular but it is good routine practice.

Experienced vegetable gardeners know that soil which is worked to a fine tilth holds water better than compacted soil. While the top layer will dry and form a crust, it is protecting the moisture levels underneath. It should be possible to develop gardening practices which avoid the need to pour on large quantities of water to the vegetable garden in all but the sandiest of soils. Enriching your soil with humus encourages water retention. Raising beds so that you can flood narrow channels between the rows directs water to the roots where it is needed. Always remember that it is the plant’s roots that need the water, not the foliage. And because you want the roots to go deep, rather than stay on the surface, you want to direct water deeply and not just wet the top which does little more than keep down the dust.

There is some amazement right through the nursery and plant retail industry at just how vegetable gardening has taken off this year, along with the planting of fruit trees. Sure some more desultory gardeners may fall by the wayside, but others will now be enjoying the fruits of their labours and finding that it is enormously rewarding to be able to wander out the back door and pick fresh herbs, vegetables and fruit. It is by no means a certainty that it will save you money, especially not at peak times when there is a glut on the market. You need some experience to be able to work your way into a position where growing produce at home seriously impacts on the food bill. And you need time – quite a bit of time if you are going to do it on a larger scale or to aim for self sufficiency. But the rewards are well and truly there for the converted and the ever increasing number of books on home produce and self sufficiency are an indicator of growing interest in this wholesome activity.

The good news is that at this time of the year, vegetable gardening dovetails in nicely with ornamental gardening. At a time when there is not a great deal to do in the flower garden beyond ongoing weeding, deadheading and general light maintenance, the veg garden is calling loudly. This is a time for intensive input with the start of the summer harvests and the preparation for winter crops. In our household, the call of the vegetable garden always gives Mark a perfect excuse for escaping from the house (sometimes, horrors, even from guests) and hiding out, all the while still feeling busy and virtuous. I wonder if this has any bearing on his recent expansion of the vegetable gardens to two further plots a goodly distance across the property?

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.