- Sit back and enjoy the garden and visitors and family who may be around.
- If you want the garden to look good for visitors and have left your run rather late at least mow the lawns. If time allows for more presentation, in descending order of importance the following tasks will make your place looked cared for: define path and garden edges, sweep or blower vac sealed areas, leaf rake soft surface tracks, trim hedges in prominent positions and prune sludgy rose blooms. Removing any junk or large debris also helps. That is about all you can plan for in a short space of time.
- When bonding with family and friends gets too much, you can retreat outdoors and cut back spent flowers on annuals and perennials, water container plants if we get three days in a row without rain (faint hope), or thin out overcrowded spring bulbs while you can still remember where they are.
- Stay on top of the weeding. It pays to have a bucket or barrow beside you to put the weeds in, especially if you have that nasty little cress which can explode and spurt out seeds over a wide radius. Don’t put seeding weeds in your compost unless you manage it as a hot mix. Otherwise you will be spreading the seed next season with the compost. Putting seeding weeds in a black plastic bag in the sun to bake them first is a good precaution.
- If you have a hybrid clematis that has finished flowering, it can be cut back hard, fed and watered and it will take about six weeks before it delights you with a second flowering season.
- There will be no fresh raspberries in this household for Christmas. Despite best efforts, the cold spring just has not encouraged ripening in time. We have eaten all the fresh peas, dug all the first crop new potatoes and the strawberries are past their peak. Mark is feeling a failure and we will have to resort to the fruiterer or supermarket. He says we will at least be able to have rhubarb pie.
- This is peak time for pests in the garden. If you can’t be bothered making your own concoctions out of rhubarb leaves and soapy water, garden centres sell organic alternatives which are often safer or kinder than manufactured chemical sprays. If you use chemical sprays, watch out for the withholding period before it is safe to eat produce.
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
We subscribe to Sky TV for three reasons. It was a very expensive means of solving our aerial problems. Mark enjoys the sport (I only like watching cricket when we are winning and am not a rugby fan). But mostly we keep our subscription current for the gardening programmes on the Living Channel. Alas these tend to be in the middle of the afternoon and neither of us ever mastered the video recorder.
Currently Sky have two programmes running which show the very best and the very worst of English
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This week 15 Dec 2006
- If deadheading your rhododendrons has got away on you, at least do those which set seed. Some set so much seed that it can weaken the plant and kill it. The seed setters will usually show open seed pods from last year still hanging on looking like little wooden stars and they show no growth from that spent flower tip. These types of plants can tend to be leggy and spindly – they are putting so much energy into reproducing themselves that they forget to grow. At least try and deadhead these ones. It is not so critical to deadhead varieties which set very little seed although they do look better for your efforts.
- If you have water features, try and prevent invasive water weeds getting away on you. We have problems with water hawthorn in our stream which we extract with a rake head on the end of a long pole. Over the years, Mark has eliminated the unwanted oxygen weed (fine in fish tanks but not in waterways). And some of the water lilies can be so invasive that they cover all the water, which is a bit self defeating for a water feature. Best to get rid of the rampant ones and replace with better behaved varieties. Or thin the plant back to one crown.
- As the yellow primula heladoxa finishes flowering, deadhead it to prevent it spreading seed. This is another plant with weed potential and as it usually grown alongside water, it can spread some distance if it is a stream.
- Annuals such as asters, zinnias, snapdragons, stocks and Iceland poppies can still be started from seed and will give you good flowering in late summer and autumn.
- A bit of a typo last week when we advocated continuing successional sowing of broad beans. That should have been dwarf beans.
- Now is the important time to start getting winter vegetables into the ground, such as Brussels sprouts, celery and leeks. The seed of these will have been started some time ago to get good sized plants for you to plant out. If you want to do leeks from seed yourself, this is about as late as you leave it. Sow the seeds in situ immediately. They won’t get as large as the seedling plants but you should still be able to get a crop through.
- Mulch and feed asparagus beds. They are gross feeders. Compost and animal manure are ideal.
- Thin apple crops if it looks as if too much fruit has set. More is not better. Trees can overcrop and quality suffers. Shorten the spurs on apples and other fruit trees such as plums and kiwifruit. In other words prune back to two or three leaves on new growth. This encourages the formation of flower buds and fruit for next season. It is the same with wisterias, as mentioned last week.
This week 8 Dec 2006
- The run of bad weather has been most unkind to roses. Removing spoiled foliage and sludgy blooms will help reduce disease. Prune back to a leaf bud if there are no more flower buds and let the rose come again, hopefully in a sunny spell for repeat flowering types. Keeping air circulation around the roses also helps to keep fungi and bacteria at bay so try not to let other plants cuddle up too close.
- Wisterias need a summer prune to keep them under control and to maximise flower bud set for next spring. Work out which are the main leaders and remove all the rampant spring growth back to four or five leaf buds from the main stems. Don’t worry if this seems extreme – they will stage a comeback and need their winter prune as well. The summer prune is less precise and can be done with hedgeclippers if you are in a hurry. Keep an eye open for borer holes while you do this. Pouring a bit of cooking oil will smother anything down the hole or you can fill the hole with flyspray.
- The wisteria summer pruning regime also applies to apple trees. Hedgeclippers are better than nothing.
- Keep an eye on container plants. They dry out very quickly from here on through summer, especially if they are rootbound and it is very difficult to get the plant to absorb water if it dries out too much. Liquid feed containers and baskets which are full of hungry annuals or perennials. Shrubs which have been planted with slow release do not generally need liquid feeding as well.
- If you have any convolvulus, you should have sprayed it two weeks ago when it was starting to advance. But better now than leaving it. If it is around special plants, use Roundup but otherwise Banvine is the best option.
- If you are battling wandering jew, get in now while it is flushing and in full growth. Deal to it now before it becomes four times the size. Amitrol or Grazon are the best spray options. Roundup doesn’t touch it. If you are hand pulling it, you have to get every last piece out and load it in to a black plastic rubbish bag and cook it in the sun. Under no circumstances throw it over the bank. Every piece will grow again.
- Get in main crop potatoes now and plant pumpkins before it is too late. It is still all on to plant tomatoes, corn and runner beans while keeping successional sowings of broad beans, peas and lettuces going.
This week 8 Dec 2006
- The run of bad weather has been most unkind to roses. Removing spoiled foliage and sludgy blooms will help reduce disease. Prune back to a leaf bud if there are no more flower buds and let the rose come again, hopefully in a sunny spell for repeat flowering types. Keeping air circulation around the roses also helps to keep fungi and bacteria at bay so try not to let other plants cuddle up too close.
- Wisterias need a summer prune to keep them under control and to maximise flower bud set for next spring. Work out which are the main leaders and remove all the rampant spring growth back to four or five leaf buds from the main stems. Don’t worry if this seems extreme – they will stage a comeback and need their winter prune as well. The summer prune is less precise and can be done with hedgeclippers if you are in a hurry. Keep an eye open for borer holes while you do this. Pouring a bit of cooking oil will smother anything down the hole or you can fill the hole with flyspray.
- The wisteria summer pruning regime also applies to apple trees. Hedgeclippers are better than nothing.
- Keep an eye on container plants. They dry out very quickly from here on through summer, especially if they are rootbound and it is very difficult to get the plant to absorb water if it dries out too much. Liquid feed containers and baskets which are full of hungry annuals or perennials. Shrubs which have been planted with slow release do not generally need liquid feeding as well.
- If you have any convolvulus, you should have sprayed it two weeks ago when it was starting to advance. But better now than leaving it. If it is around special plants, use Roundup but otherwise Banvine is the best option.
- If you are battling wandering jew, get in now while it is flushing and in full growth. Deal to it now before it becomes four times the size. Amitrol or Grazon are the best spray options. Roundup doesn’t touch it. If you are hand pulling it, you have to get every last piece out and load it in to a black plastic rubbish bag and cook it in the sun. Under no circumstances throw it over the bank. Every piece will grow again.
- Get in main crop potatoes now and plant pumpkins before it is too late. It is still all on to plant tomatoes, corn and runner beans while keeping successional sowings of broad beans, peas and lettuces going.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 