A step by step guide by Abbie and Mark Jury first published in the Taranaki Daily News and reproduced here with permission as a PDF.
New Outdoor Classrooms are uploaded fortnightly.
Tag Archives: Abbie Jury
A Worm's Tale
Presumably called tiger worms because of their stripes, not their size or ferocity
Mark has been having fun with tiger worm jokes. Tiger worms are what you commonly have in your worm farm and they are voracious devourers of vegetative waste. But we found in Radio New Zealand’s archives an interview from last year where Kim Hill interrogated her gardening guest on a range of topics including aforementioned tiger worms. Said guest was badly out of her depth although she knew a smidgen more than Kim (who is clearly no gardener) so she survived on a degree of bluff. But the suggestion that you want to try and keep your tiger worms in your worm farm and that if they escape to your garden they may eat your root vegetables (as in, they may have eaten Kim’s missing radishes) had us snortling in derision. Yes snortling – that is a combination of snorting and chortling.
Mark has taken to issuing warnings. Round up your tiger worms now and corral them back to the worm farm. Tiger worms are so-called because they have jaws with sharp teeth. The reason why you should never put meat in your compost is because the tiger worms develop a taste for it. Haven’t you heard about the elderly gardener who tripped and fell by her worm farm and all they found was a skeleton after the tiger worms had finished? Licences are about to be issued before you are allowed to have tiger worms on your premises and an inspector will ensure that you have them suitably housed and restrained.
The bottom lines are that while tiger worms are entirely suited to worm farms, they can be found elsewhere in the garden. Worms only process dead and decaying matter, not living plants. They have no teeth and jaws to chomp into your root vegetables. Slugs, snails and weevils will attack your plants but the faithful garden worm will not. There are many different types of worms and some, like the tiger worm or Eisenia foetida, are designed to accelerate the process of composting. Others prefer to live deeper in garden soils and these are the ones who help to aerate the ground by burrowing. A garden full of worms is a sign of good soil health and to be valued. If you spot the somewhat striped tiger worm in your garden soils, it is more likely to be an indication that you have a humus-rich layer of mulch on top.
I am sure it is a hard enough life being a worm without being accused of eating the vegetable crop. It is, by the way, apparently a myth that if you cut a worm in half, both halves will survive. They merely wriggle and die. While a worm can survive losing a bit off the end of its tail, it is not quite as resilient as many of us were brought up to believe. Oh dear, I wonder how many humble earth worms we gardeners sever in their prime or are we liberating them from life’s mortal coils?
The perils of the monochromatic colour scheme in gardening
A random stranger in blue beside the blue and purple border at Sissinghurst
Back in the days when I first started writing this column and we were in the grip of seven day a week retail and mailorder plant supply, I used to despair at the numbers of well-heeled women in search of plants for their white garden. Mostly from Remmers, dear, and most had been to the ultimate white garden – designed and planted by Vita Sackville West at Sissinghurst in England. It was seen as the benchmark for restrained style and class and all wanted to emulate that standard. So all plants had to have white flowers and preferably be scented. Yellow stamens were permitted and cream was allowed but no other colour in the flowers. Fading out to white fell short and white flushed pink flowers were usually rejected as impure.
There were rules for foliage too. Green was fine, silver foliage even better. Variegations were acceptable as long as they were white and green with no yellow or red.
Apparently the secret of the white garden is revealed at night when all those pure flowers light up under moonlight to glow with ethereal beauty. Experienced gardeners realise instantly that this means it needs to be a summer garden because who wants to go out in winter or early spring to see the glowing white rhododendrons and camellias but not many white garden devotees of the early nineties were experienced. I recall reading a critique at the time that far too many of the white gardens were thrown together solely on the basis of colour. As long as it was white, it could be included. Gardens were criticised for the lack of thought given to planting combinations and inappropriate conditions for many of the plant subjects.
When we finally visited Sissinghurst, I was excited at the prospect of seeing the ultimate white garden put together with skill – where plant composition, shape and foliage combinations rule supreme, without the distraction of colours beyond white and green. Alas I was underwhelmed, disappointed. It rather looked to me like plants selected solely on flower and foliage colour bunged in together. So much for setting the standard. It may well have been different in the original days of Vita Sackville-West but in 2009 it didn’t quite cut the mustard.
Colour and flowers hide a multitude of sins. The purple border at Sissinghurst was far more successful on the day we were there and that in part could be attributed to the huge range of tones in blues and purples. There is not a lot of variation of hues of white and cream so it is harder to get visual oomph.
I suspect that monochromatic garden schemes are often the refuge of less experienced gardeners but in fact they require considerable knowledge and skill to get them looking good. They are not actually monochromatic because gardens have green as a base colour but that is generally treated as colour neutral. If you garden only with foliage or with foliage and only one additional colour, then form and texture are your tools and the plants you chose to complement each other and to fill the picture become critical. At its best, it is a restrained and disciplined approach to gardening which can be very restful to the eye. More often, alas, it is a hodgepodge – sometimes a pretentious hodgepodge – or downright dull.
In the garden: May 21, 2010
• I read in Monday’s paper that the average Brit spends six months of his or life discussing the weather. I wonder if that could be doubled for gardeners everywhere? Last weekend’s rain and fresh coating of snow on our mountain is a timely reminder that the chill of winter is just around the corner. Make the most of the milder autumn weather still lingering on.
• If your dahlia plants were too big, fell apart from the middle and flopped over this year, it is probably a sign that there are too many tubers. In cold climates, dahlias are lifted every year and over-wintered under cover. Here, where most of us just leave them to their own devices, often as roadside plantings, that lifting and thinning process does not happen. Be ruthless. As they die off for winter, lift and thin. You will get a much better display next summer and autumn.
• It is a good time to lift and divide day lilies (hemerocallis) which respond well to a bit of attention occasionally. If the clump is very congested, it is often the outer part which contains the greatest vigour and strength so discard the middle.
• Plant brassicas for spring eating and broad beans too. Continue sowing leafy greens to ensure regular harvests. Most of the quick maturing Asian greens can be grown over winter as well as silver beet and winter spinach. Peas can also be planted.
• Get an autumn copper spray onto citrus trees to prevent leaf drop, fruit rotting on the tree and a range of nasties. This is a critical spray to carry out if you want to protect your harvest. Mandarins are particularly vulnerable.
• Don’t let the autumn leaves build up in your fish ponds. Rotting leaves can reduce the oxygen levels in the water and even kill the fish in extreme cases.
• Keep a sharp eye on weeds. With the shortening day length, pesky cress does not bother about growing large. It just goes straight to seed, as do other weeds.
• Green crops must be sown now if they are to make some sort of growth before winter and to justify their role in nourishing the vegetable garden. Don’t put it off. Green crops develop a root system which makes the soil much easier to break up and till in the spring, particularly with heavier soils.
Tikorangi Notes: May 14, 2010
Latest posts:
1) May 14, 2010: The lovely blue of autumn flowering Moraea polystachya keep continuing over a long period.
2)May 14, 2010: Outdoor Classroom – our fortnightly step by step guide. This time it is pruning a rampant climbing jasmine which is blocking most light in a window as well as threatening the downpipe, roof spouting and even the roof tiles. We used to have a member of staff who refused to use any of our ladders on the grounds they were unsafe. Mark has no such qualms as can be seen in this photo which we did not dare to use in this Outdoor Classroom instalment which gets published in our local paper. We could see an onslaught of outraged letters to the editor about unsafe practices and that would be from people who didn’t even know that the ladder in question lacks even a bracing cross bar. Mark credits regular yoga for his good sense of balance.
3) May 14, 2010: As our unusually calm, dry and sunny autumn continues, there is plenty to do in the garden this week. Advice on lawn care, harvests, green crops (yet again) and more.
The colours of the autumn flowering oxalis
4) May 14, 2010: After the breathtaking inadequacies of the Tui NZ Fruit Garden, it was a relief this week to be reviewing a NZ publication of merit. Threatened Plants of New Zealand deserves a place on the shelf of anybody interested in our native flora, botany or conservation. Apparently 1 in 13 of our native plants are currently under threat of extinction.
5) May 14, 2010: The first of a new series of notes about plants which are tried and true in our garden – this week the smaller flowered vireya rhododendron hybrids.
6) Camellia Diary instalment number 2. It appears to have been a busy week for me with new posts!
Oxalis purpurea alba - one of the very best garden varieties.
Last week certainly ended on an exciting note with my review of the new Tui NZ Fruit Garden Book by Sally Cameron (published by Penguin) even making the metropolitan daily papers and being picked up by radio as well as other publications. The speed with which the internet disseminates information is amazing, nearly matched by the speed at which Penguin ordered a total recall of a book they had only released days earlier!
This week it is back into the garden. Mark has been continuing his autumn harvesting routines though he had the grace to laugh at his banana harvest which will be revealed in detail in due course. I have to say we are more than marginal for growing bananas and he has to work hard to get a crop from his outdoor plants. In the garden, the ornamental oxalis are making a very pretty picture indeed. I think we must have somewhere around 30 different varieties now across a range of colours. These are surely an under-rated autumn bulb in our New Zealand gardens.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 