October 31, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

To be honest, we won’t be doing much in the garden this week beyond talking to visitors and whipping around with the blower vac and lawnmower. Like many others, we are entering our single biggest open garden week of the year. If you don’t have your own garden open, then get out and visit some who do. Even vegetable garden fans have a selection this year in an innovative move (check out the Rhododendron Festival programme for these). What is more, the veg gardens are free or donation only. There is no excuse for staying at home this week.

  • If you are tempted to buy plants (and Festival week is a big retail week) get them into the ground as soon as possible because dry and warm weather will come soon. We do not recommend teasing out the roots at planting. The only time the roots should be touched is when you can see a pot-bound plant has resorted to growing its main roots around in circles. In this case you need to liberate the roots or cut them because the poor plant will just stay with spiralling roots. Otherwise, it tends to do more damage than good to tease them out. Make sure you cultivate the ground well so that the young roots can grow out further, plant to the same level as in the pot, firm it down but don’t stamp it down vigorously and mulch it. You can add fertiliser if it makes you happy but we tend to rely on home made compost to feed the plants. Rhododendrons perform best with good drainage (never plant in heavy wet conditions), good air circulation (reduces pests and disease) and reasonable light levels (or they may not set flower buds and can get leggy). Sun for half the day is ideal.
  • Now is the optimum time to fertilise most plants. They are in full growth and the uptake of the fertiliser will be most efficient. Read the instructions on quantity – more is not better and you can burn the roots by over fertilising which can result in leaf scorch.
  • Deadhead pieris (often called lily of the valley shrubs) if you want good flower set for next season.
  • The great vegetable plant out continues. Give priority to crops which need the longest growing season (tomatoes, melons, kumara etc) and to crops which you plant in succession to ensure ongoing harvests ( green beans, peas, corn and salad vegetables). It is important to keep your vegetable garden soils light and aerated. Quick maturing plants don’t like heavy, compacted soil. Avoid walking on beds where you can and make the push hoe your friend.
  • Pumpkins can be started on a mound comprised of layers of soil and lawn clippings. The decomposing grass generates heat which speeds up germination and initial growth considerably. Don’t make the heap too big or you may cook the seeds. A metre wide by 60cm high is about the right size.
  • Shun hormone spray at this time of the year if you have planted out your tomatoes or have grapevines. Hormone sprays are often used on lawns.

The quote from the week is a thought to ponder while out garden visiting and comes from American landscape architect Thomas Church:

Style is a matter of taste, design a matter of principles.

Italian Seeds Pronto

It is always great to see new businesses come to town and even more so when they bring us Italian flavours with the requisite Italian panache and style. Italian Seeds Pronto are New Plymouth based but offer a national mail order service supplying seed of heirloom and heritage vegetable varieties sourced from Italy. They kindly sent samples of pomodoro tomatoes and basil seed packets and I can’t report on the growth and flavour until the end of the season. But if you have ever been to Italy and sampled their very flavoursome fresh produce (best tomatoes I have ever eaten were the ones I consumed there in May), you may want to look at their stylish catalogue. From Italian parsley through to finocchio (fennel bulbs are a favourite here), a range of tomatoes, lettuces, radicchio, Roman cauliflower, rockets, celeriac and more are all available in seed packets.

There is a section of certified organic seed all priced at $8 a packet while the remainder at $6.90 a packet and the catalogue tells you how many seeds you can expect for your money. These seem to be very generous so you can share with friends.

Their website is not up and running yet but they can be contacted at italianseedspronto@ihug.co.nz or phone/fax +64 6 758 4190.

October 24, 2008 Weekly Garden Guide

Labour Weekend is traditionally the big time for the vegetable garden plant out, unless you live inland in areas which get late frosts. Certainly in coastal areas, it should be safe now to get pretty well all crops and small plants out into the open. If you are taking plants out from covered conditions in a glasshouse, they may need some hardening off if by some miracle we have warm sunny weather. Give them a couple of hours in the sun and then cover them up with shade cloth or newspaper or any other light cover to stop the sun from burning tender foliage.

  • You can now sow direct into the ground such tender crops as melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkin and capsicum but you will get more growth if you start them off in containers in a glasshouse. Corn can be sown straight into the garden now and repeating this fortnightly through the season will extend the supply. It is the same with successional sowings of dwarf beans, peas and lettuces. Get main crop potatoes in and start the kumaras.
  • If you have veg plants in pots under cover, take care that they do not get stunted in their growth by getting dry, starved or too big for their pots. Crops like corn never fully recover from being set back and will respond to stress by bolting into flower early as small plants.
  • If you are planning to plant hedges, trees or shrubs, get onto it as soon as possible so the plants have a chance to settle in and make some new root growth before we get an extended dry period. We can warm up and dry out alarmingly quickly in early November, especially close to the coast. Ensure that the root ball of the plant is wet through and lay mulch on top of the soil to slow drying out.
  • All gardens will benefit from laying mulch. This needs to go on before the soil dries out, not after. A good mulch adds humus to the soil and stops it from getting parched and cracking.

If the weeding calls you, take note of Christopher Lloyd’s comments: Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find it a kind of soothing monotony. It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative’s latest example of unreasonableness.

In Praise of Pruning

The September issue of the NZ Gardener magazine had a profile of Palmerston North gardener, sculptor and retired florist, David Anyon. We have never met David that we know of, but several of our friends and colleagues speak highly of his skills so it was with interest that I read the article. The photos of his garden did not, we suspect, do it justice but it was his philosophy on pruning and shaping that particularly struck a chord.

To quote the article: “David emphasises that what he does isn’t pruning so much as shaping, to create mood and drama. He’s convinced that if more gardeners got stuck into a little clipping and shaping of their trees and shrubs from the outset, it would help to prevent mishmashed jungles.”

We first noticed this technique of picking out and shaping accent plants carried out to great effect a few years ago at Hollard Gardens in Kaponga. I can recall writing about it at the time. It acts like a punctuation mark in a garden, a feature which is a plant and not some placed object. It gives a degree of formality and a focus to what can otherwise become a melded mass of foliage and flowers.

Gardening conversations here can start as early as 6.30am with the pre breakfast cup of tea and for a while we mulled around the appeal of freshly planted young gardens. Owning and working in an old and very well established garden as we do, the appeal of a young garden is not part of our personal experience. But there is no doubt that there is something fresh and charming about newly planted gardens and Mark figured that it was because when you start with young, smallish and fresh plants, each one stands largely on its own, in its own clearly defined space and therefore has a distinct shape. As the plants grow and start to compete for more space, often intertwining and encroaching on their neighbours, the whole effect starts to meld into the mishmash referred to by David Anyon. A very different set of skills are needed to take the garden to its next level of maturity – lifting the skirts of larger plants to expose the trunks, creating layers, thinning, shaping, changing some of the underplanting to meet different conditions for starters. But New Zealanders tend to be great at creating young gardens and too often we have seen the response of trying to recreate the juvenile charm by either starting again and repeating a similar planting from scratch or by taking plants such as camellias and evergreen azaleas back to stump level so they will rejuvenate and look as if they are young and fresh again. Too few garden plants are ever allowed to reach maturity in this young country of ours.

David Anyon was articulating a different approach. And, as he pointed out, going against the prevailing ethos of the 1960s which still prevails to some extent today, where clipping is seen as fine for formal hedges but rather naff in other contexts. Personally I don’t want a garden where everything is clipped and restrained, which is just as well because we would need a small army of clipping minions to manage our seven acres. We saw too much of that in Italy where very little was ever allowed to grow naturally. But shaped and clipped accents have their place in gardens both large and small – probably even more in large gardens which can become jungle-like or rambling over time.

I spent Saturday afternoon pondering this as I was up and down the ladder cloud pruning Camellia Mine No Yuki. Even though Mine No Yuki is now in her third year of this treatment and I was just going over old ground, it still took me the better part of five hours to recover her allocated form. At the time I was wondering if devoting so much time to one plant was justified when we are feeling the dreaded weight of pressure to get the entire garden groomed up to the level we like for our upcoming festival. But when I had finished, I decided it was definitely worth it. It provides a key point, a feature to arrest the eye in what is otherwise a rather formless and featureless area of garden. The controlled formality makes the surrounds look natural by contrast, rather than unkempt.

In that Gardener article, David Anyon also refers to what he calls ‘defuzzing’ – removing little twiggy bits and dead bits from branches of larger plants. He sees it as making for cleaner, more attractive trunks and framing small spaces and vistas in the garden. I couldn’t agree more. This defuzzing is, I decided a while ago, one of the most satisfying and fun aspects of gardening. You can’t defuzz in young, juvenile gardens- there is not enough to defuzz. But it has a most rewarding impact in an older garden.

I am thinking of requesting a new ladder for Christmas. Our ladders are OSH hazards and need care. But we do at least have decent tools here. There is nothing more off putting than blunt or stiff hedge clippers, secateurs that won’t keep an edge, pruning saws that are blunt and bent or loppers that no longer lop cleanly. Mark is adamant that he won’t teach me how to use a chainsaw and they terrify me anyway, but I have learned that I can achieve a great deal with a good pruning saw. Gardeners with small hands or arthritis may like to treat themselves to grape snips as well. They are pretty cheap, as I recall, and pleasant to use as well as being light enough to carry easily in a pocket. I tend to wreck them by trying to cut through wood that is too thick but we bought a dozen pairs a couple of years ago and I still have a couple of brand new sets waiting hidden in my drawer. Mark favours a lightweight and small set of secateurs which were very expensive to buy but much easier to use than heavier and cheaper brands. If you are a serious gardener, buy quality.

The sky is the limit when it comes to pruning, shaping and tidying individual plants in a large and mature garden but I am really looking forward to having more time to indulge in this aspect of gardening. I certainly would not claim to be in David Anyon’s league (taking everyday plants and turning them into unique works of art, according to the writer of the article) but I would certainly like to get there. It is a great deal more creative than weeding.

The Faber Book of Gardens

ed: Philip Robinson
Faber, RRP$59.99
ISBN 0 571 22420 2

As readers of our regular In the Garden column will know, Mark and I have a penchant for quirky little garden books which are anthologies of quotes and hints. Sadly this Faber book is not quirky, is not little and despite sitting on the coffee table for weeks on end, it failed entirely to capture our interest. It is, however, an anthology of quotes and poems arranged by time periods from Eden to AD400 in chapter one through to modern times. But it is generally dry and worthy stuff, more reminiscent of a text book with hardly a heading and no illustrations at all. Many of the quotes are quite lengthy. Some of them are quite interesting so if you don’t your mind your reading unleavened, you may quite enjoy this book to browse. But it is not a reference book, it is unlikely to inspire, has little in the way of quirkiness and is more likely to sit forever in our bookcase, failing to excite any further interest.