Tag Archives: Abbie Jury

Grow it Yourself: courgettes (the final in this series)

This is a great crop for a beginner because it is so easy and productive. Rampant, but easy. Courgettes (French) are the same as zucchini (Italian), sometimes reshaped as scallopini (like flattened muffins) and also known as summer squash. They are a cucurbit, as is pumpkin. You probably only need two plants and they will need a good metre each in area. In under two months, they will drown you with such a deluge of produce that you will wonder why they are relatively expensive to buy. If you tire of the taste and texture, look up recipes for stuffed courgette flowers and nip them off in their infancy.

Courgettes are started in individual pots and planted out when soil temperatures rise around late October (or even later in colder areas). You can start seeds in pots under cover in September or just buy a couple of plants when you need them. The reason you start with individually potted plants is because they don’t appreciate their roots being disturbed.. Because they are such large and rampant growers, they need rich, well drained soils. We prefer to use compost to feed all our vegetables. Worm wee would also be a good option or you could turn to some of the off the shelf fertiliser options. Keep the moisture levels up through summer because these are plants with a very high water content. Keep harvesting every couple of days to encourage the plant to keep producing. The time between a desirable little courgette and a large, tasteless marrow is short indeed and if the plant is left with maturing marrows, it will stop producing baby courgettes for you.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Plant collector : Helleborus x sternii

IMG_9684

Helleborus x sternii

There are more hellebores than just the common H. orientalis and sternii is one we appreciate in the winter woodland. It has distinctive green flowers, sometimes flushed purple, and lovely glaucous foliage which is finer in appearance. Glaucous just means it has a blue or grey cast to the colour. It is more upright in growth and does not make as dense a clump as orientalis. In addition to that, it holds its flowers in a cluster above the foliage and many of them are outward facing rather than all nodding (or facing downwards). So it displays its flowers a little better than H. orientalis.

The x sternii means it is a hybrid – in this case a cross between H. argutifolius (from Corsica and Sardinia) and H. lividus (from Majorca). From those origins, you can guess that it is quite happy in hot, dry conditions and the information is often given that it is suited to sunny positions. In our garden, sunny positions are at a premium whereas we have woodland in abundance so we are always after plant candidates for shadier positions. Plants like this hellebore which are not at all fussy, are very handy to add winter interest.

Sternii can be raised from seed or by division. There are named selections of sternii around – the seed from these won’t come true so they need to be divided or increased by cutting if you want to keep their special features. It appears that many of the newer forms are extending the colour range into purer pinks, burgundy, slate and white – akin to the orientalis colour range. We only have the original green flowered forms and have not seen the other colours in this country yet.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Grow it Yourself: runner beans

Bushy, low growing beans are usually referred to as dwarf beans. Runner beans are climbing beans and there are both perennial and annual types. The traditional climbing bean in this country is the Scarlet Runner. It is a perennial plant so it goes dormant over winter and rockets into growth as soon as temperatures rise. Perennial beans tend to be better in cooler climates because they stop cropping as soon as the temperature rises over summer. When treated as an annual and sown afresh each year, they have more vigour so many gardeners prefer to do this.

You can build a permanent climbing frame, though this means you can not rotate the crop. We have used chicken netting secured to side posts as a frame. Others like the look of trellis but these days we find movable tepee constructions more flexible.

The annual climbing beans crop more heavily. These are direct sown in spring to a depth of about 2.5cm at 10cm spacings. Depending on the variety, you will be picking in 2 to 3 months. It is the usual soil story for most crops that grow above ground – full sun, well cultivated, well fertilised soils and mulch the crop to retain moisture. The plants will simply stop producing new beans if they come under stress from summer drought.

It is the over mature, older style runner beans that become stringy. Picking every few days encourages the plant to continue producing and avoids the fiddly strings that need to be cut out. Try Kings Seeds catalogue for a wide selection of different bean varieties.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Modern perennial plantings – more in the style of Braque than Mondrian

A simple but very pleasing combination of Helleborus niger for winter flowers, Calanthe arisarnensis for spring, some random dwarf narcissi - and interesting foliage all summer

A simple but very pleasing combination of Helleborus niger for winter flowers, Calanthe arisarnensis for spring, some random dwarf narcissi – and interesting foliage all summer

Last week, I wrote about the major makeover in the rose garden and mentioned the fun I was having with the perennials. While the rains have interrupted progress (it is difficult to dig and divide in waterlogged conditions), we have spent a great deal of time discussing perennials and their use here. Indeed, we even dedicated a gardening trip to the UK to look at techniques.

Traditionally, English perennial gardening has been dominated by the herbaceous border organised on what I had been calling the mix and match approach but which I have just seen described as tapestry gardening. And that seems appropriate – it is like building up an entire picture but from a multitude of different plants instead of coloured threads. At its best, it is magnificent but it is also very labour intensive and takes a lot of skill to put together well. Too often both the ongoing labour and the skill levels are lacking and it just looks a mess.

In the nineties when we saw the gardening scene hijacked by the landscape fraternity in this country, that sort of detailed gardening was thrown out. “The Look” became the dominant feature. Gone was tapestry gardening and any value placed on plantsmanship or plant detail. Now perennial gardening became “underplanting” and just as patterned carpets have been shunned in favour of the same plain carpet throughout the entire house, so too was underplanting to be a utility carpet, usually comprising only one plant variety. So rose gardens were carpeted with nepeta (catmint), or maybe stachys (lamb’s ear). Liriope was fine as long as it was en masse, or any other utility perennial that could form a reliable carpet. It is an approach to gardening that we have shunned as deathly dull.

Piet Oudolf’s rivers of perennials at Wisley were a revelation to us. Here was a contemporary take on perennial planting on a large scale. Each river or stripe is composed of three or four different plants, often repeated in other combinations elsewhere in the border. Tom Stuart-Smith’s plantings in the same RHS garden were a reinterpretation of the type of block planting first espoused by Gertrude Jekyll, especially with her later work when her eyesight was failing and she needed more defined form. When I use the word “blocky”, we are talking more freeform shapes than geometric, more Braque than Mondrian.

The upshot of this thinking was that when Neil Ross suggested I look to reorganising the perennial plantings in our rose garden to more contemporary blocky plantings with simple combinations, I had a mental framework to fit it into. While the area is hard landscaped into a formal design, I didn’t want formal geometric plantings. We strive for a spring and summer froth of pretties – roses and perennials – with touches of plant interest to extend the seasons into autumn and winter. So my blocks are random but nothing less than a square metre and nothing more than three square metres. And each block has three, sometimes four different plants in it. The fun has been in deciding the combinations block by block. It is a bit like creating a multitude of mini gardens and linking them together.

I have bought no new plants. All I have done is to lift, divide and recompose what I had in the garden. So they are just arranged differently. In each block, I have tried to combine plants which I think will be compatible in close company with each other – in other words nothing that is going to overwhelm its companions above ground by smothering them or underground by over-competing. I have considered the time of the season that each plant peaks to try and cover a good span of the year and also to get interesting combinations of foliage and flowers within each block.

A carpet of blue asters in late summer and autumn

A carpet of blue asters in late summer and autumn

Nothing is more boring than endless plant lists so I will just give a couple of examples. One block is the common liriope (grassy foliage and blue flowers in summer) with a taller, pure white Siberian iris (for spring flowers) and one of the strong growing, mat-forming Kippenberg asters with lovely blue daisy flowers in autumn. Elsewhere, I have another block which repeats the white iris but this time combining it with a compact bright blue campanula and a little pure white scuttelaria which flowers most of the time.

If one block doesn’t work, then it will be easy to address the problems in that section. Some will need lifting and dividing more often than others. The whole area has been dug over thoroughly so the plants are in friable and fluffy soil which most perennials appreciate and I have laid a mulch of compost on top. These are optimal conditions and, while the area is very new right now, I have planted divisions and plants close together so I expect rapid results as soil temperatures rise in spring. If it doesn’t close up and fill the beds with a riotous froth in time for our peak garden visitor season, I may have to be in there with emergency plugging of gaps but I hope that is not going to be required. I am also expecting that the self seeded annuals will also come away quickly and fill gaps. The pretty nigella (love in a mist), linaria pink and lilac, blue poelmonium (Jacob’s Ladder) and common old blue pansies are all welcome to stage a return wherever they wish, to soften the divisions between the blocks.

Now it is just a question of waiting to see the results.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.

Planted - patience is now required as I wait for soil temperatures to rise

Planted – patience is now required as I wait for soil temperatures to rise

Grow it Yourself – cauliflower

There is a finite number of vegetables and I am nearing the end of them in this column, which must be why cauliflower is still left. It is, I am afraid, amongst my least favourite of vegetables (palatable in cheese sauce with walnuts but little going for it otherwise). However, it has stood the test of time so clearly others view it more kindly. It is a brassica, like cabbage and broccoli, so in our milder areas, it is better to avoid growing the crop through summer when the cabbage white butterfly will wreak havoc and make the heads even less appealing. It will also bolt to flower too quickly in warmer temperatures. This means planting late winter and early spring to get through before summer (it can take up to 4 months to mature), or any time from early autumn onwards for winter harvest.

Because you only want a small number to mature at once, it is often easier to buy a few seedlings at a time from the garden centre though if you are an organised gardener, you could successionally sow half a dozen seeds in small pots each month or two. Being a leafy style veg, cauliflower wants rich soil full of nutrients. If you are using animal manure, make sure it is well rotted. We prefer compost to add nutrition and texture to the soils. Plant at around 50cm spacings to allow room to develop. Most modern varieties no longer require the heads covered to keep them white, as older varieties did, but it does no harm to bend over the top leaves to give some protection if you wish. If you actually enjoy cauli, there are trendy purple, golden and green options to try and there is some evidence that these coloured veg bring even greater health benefits to the standard white form.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.