A love affair with poppies

I am very partial to poppies. At least to some of them. My mother was an Iceland poppy fan. While she was an accomplished gardener, I doubt that she ever deliberately grew an annual in her life and the Iceland poppies (papaver nudicaule – from the Arctic regions) were the only flower I ever remember her buying in bunches. From memory, they are a cut flower that you buy in the bud stage, burn the stems and then they open in the vase.

I don’t wish to be disloyal to my mother but I don’t share her fondness for the Iceland poppies – the predominance of orange, salmon and yellow colours don’t do it for me. It is the corn poppies and the Himalayan poppies that are bringing me pleasure at this time.
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This week 24 Nov 2006

  • If the rain ever stops, consider giving outdoor wooden furniture a protective coating to prevent mould growth, cracking in the sun and complete dehydration. You can buy product from hardware stores which is excellent but I find rather expensive (well, very expensive if you have lots of wooden outdoor furniture). I use a mix of somewhere around one third to one half raw liniseed oil to two thirds or one half turps, brushed on with a paint brush. The turps makes the oil spread more easily and stops the wood from being sticky for long. It should make outdoor furniture last longer. It certainly makes it look better.
  • Fertilise, fertilise and fertilise. This is the optimum time of the year to feed everything and hopefully the worst of the rain has passed so any topdressing won’t wash away.
  • Shape, prune and feed rhododendrons now as you deadhead them. They are in full growth so will recover faster from heavy pruning.
  • Stop picking asparagus now and give them a good feed, if you have not already done so. If you keep picking the spears, you will deplete the crown and weaken the plant for future cropping. After you eating all its early shoots, the plant now needs the chance to put on some foliage and build strength over summer.
  • If your new potatoes have succumbed to blight, as ours have, dig them promptly in case the blight travels down in to the tubers and save some for seed for a late autumn crop.
  • Keep the successional sowing of corn, peas and salad vegies going.
  • With all the recent rain, staying on top of the weeds has been difficult but take any opportunity to hoe and rake the vegetable garden and to handweed flower beds.
  • Botrytis is a problem with grapes in the current conditions. A spray with a suitable fungicide which targets botrytis (such as Bravo) may be advisable. It shows up as brown patches on the leaves at this time of the year and will seriously affect fruit set. Keep vines open by removing excess foliage, thin and unwanted growth along with removing all laterals until the fruit is set. Once this has happened, you let the foliage grow to strengthen the plant.

Buying some controversy

Isn’t it wonderful that the Fringe Festival was apparently so successful? Thousands of people turning out to see the gardens, all priced at $2 or less. I am not kidding. Anything that promotes gardening and gets people out enjoying gardens is great. And there is clearly a market for often low key gardens with added attractions such as the The Liquorice Lady and the Rawleighs salesperson, knitting and pickles for sale. A yearning, perhaps, for the nostalgia of the church fete or the early days of the Rhododendron Festival two decades ago.

But now that the Fringe organisers have proven they can do it, perhaps they should no longer be fringe and they should find their own time of the year. How much better to have two separate garden festivals at two different times of the year and have two bites at the cherry? There really is no reason why they should be run at the same time, the very same dates in fact.
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This week 17 Nov 2006

  • Clematis are rocketing away. Make sure they have something to climb up, especially the more rampant varieties which may smother an inadvertent host plant. The same applies for other strong growing climbers, particularly wisteria and tecomanthe speciosa which have the potential to rip the spouting off your house if you turn your back for too long.
  • If you are laying mulch on your garden, it pays to get rid of the weeds first. Mulch has to be super heavy duty to kill weeds which are already growing.
  • Continue deadheading rhodos.
  • Watch for nasty greeblies on your roses, ranging from blackspot to aphids. If you don’t spray roses, you need to ensure they have good air circulation around them and remove diseased foliage and slushy blooms to stop disease and insect infestation getting away on them.
  • Last chance to plant celery this season in order to have it ready for winter.
  • Now is the time to plant out brussel sprouts, either seeds or plants. Brussel sprouts are one vegetable which is significantly nicer picked fresh from the garden rather than them making a long detour from grower through the supermarket to your kitchen. They do better in a cold climate where they would have been sown in September but in our warm(ish) conditions there is still time to establish good strong plants.
  • Plant leeks now if you want good strong plants for next winter. It is the last chance for starting them from seed. If you leave it any longer you will end up with micro veg or baby leeks (which are possibly easy to cope with than baby brussel sprouts).
  • Now is the time to plant those kumara plants you have already started under cover.
  • Spray grapes now for mealie bug. Confidor and oil appear to be the recommended spray. Orthene is very good if you still have it but you now need a chemicals licence to buy it.

This week 10 Nov 2006

  • If, like us, you have had your garden open take some time out to drink coffee, tea or wine and enjoy your own garden. You can pick flowers now without feeling you are stripping the display. My celebration is usually to pick an armful of roses.
  • Start deadheading rhododendrons. It makes them look tidier but also stops them setting seed and encourages them to set flower buds for next season instead. They set their flower buds on the new growth. If you want to prune old plants back very hard to rejuvenate them, now is the time to do it but you are unlikely to get flowers next year.
  • Deadheading perennials, annuals and roses encourages the plants to extend their flowering season.
  • If you are still planting trees and shrubs, try and plunge the whole rootball into a bucket of water (with or without the pot on) and leave it until bubbles stop rising. Despite the rain, some end of season plants can be a bit root bound and once they dry out, it is very difficult to get them to absorb water.
  • If you are growing strawberries, they need to be netted in if you want any sort of harvest. As soon as they start showing red, the birds will find them faster than you.
  • Continue picking asparagus but you only have a few weeks left.
  • Successional planting of summer vegetables such as lettuces, peas, dwarf beans and corn should be continued but you are probably too late now to get peas in for Christmas dinner.