The All Seasons Gardener

Gardening in a heatwave

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:51:00 +0000

It’s been ten days since we had a drop of rain in my part of Sussex, and with the daytime temperatures officially classed as ‘heatwave’, the garden is suffering. Not because there is a hosepipe ban this year (or not yet, anyway, there’s still time!) but because it’s almost impossible for an environmentally friendly gardener to lavish the amount of water necessary to keep a British garden looking at its best at this time of year. I simply can’t justify running the hose night after night when I know what the environmental (and economic) cost will be.

The first thing that I’ve neglected is the lawn. To be honest, were it not for the fact that the dogs like to sit on it, and OH likes it, I would remove the lawn altogether, it’s a drain on resources – not just water but also the regular mowing and aerating and fertilising it requires also use electricity and our energy, and chemicals. But an established lawn usually comes back, and I’m giving it ‘benign’ neglect by emptying my (cooled) washing up water onto it at the end of the day, which has always been enough to keep it alive, if not green and lovely, through the hottest, driest summer.

Next there’s the question of what absolutely must be watered – salad crops for a start and trees that are still not well established, because the former will not grow without water and the latter may die if their roots dry out. For the trees I water at night and have used the municipal tree approach of sinking flexible pipe a foot into the ground near the young trees and pouring water down it. It can actually be counter-productive to water the trunk and leaves on a young tree in hot weather, as the leaves can scorch and the bark can soften leaving it more open to predator attack.

Finally, I’ve picked out the plants which will cope without water and I’m simply ignoring them – they are plants with deep taproots that will reach water in the subsoil, grey foliaged plants, especially those with hairs or filaments on the leaves, as both greyness and hairiness help the plant trap and conserve moisture from the air, and succulents which store their own water against times of drought.

A rose by any other name

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:52:00 +0000

My garden is not suited to roses, as I’ve said very often. We have a combination of clay soil which is like terracotta when dry and like a bog when wet, and an onshore wind which can be salty in summer and gale force in winter. So despite my love for all things rose-shaped, rose-coloured and above all, rose-scented, I content myself with my Iceberg rambler which would, I believe, survive if planted in concrete, one Old English Rose which gets as much care and attention as the whole of the rest of the border (and smells so gorgeous it’s totally worth it), a yellow rose that I was given, and two miniature red roses that arrived by accident when I ordered something else.

I don’t know what this rose is called, and for three years I forgot it existed, but this year, being a good year for the roses, it suddenly decided to remind me.

The way I acquired it was strange: I wanted to buy a garden lantern and saw exactly what I wanted at a car boot sale. As the owner wrapped it up, she held out a twig in a pot and said, “Want this?” Under the table she had quite a few of these twigs and explained that her husband had been a driver for a nursery which laid him off while he still had a van full of roses. Three months later they hadn’t been to collect them and she was giving them away with every purchase. As I say, for three years the twig remained a twig, but this year it’s rewarded my patience. I hope all its siblings were as lucky.

Violas – unsung summer beauties

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:37:00 +0000

When the showier flowers are doing their thing, it can be difficult to see the smaller, more modest summer bloomers that give the garden its air of complex bounty.

One of my favourites, this year, has been the violas I grew from seed. They are F1 hybrids, which means any offspring they have won’t come true to the parent, but I still think for the subtle colours they’ve produced, it’s worth having them, even if they won’t reproduce truly for future generations.

Because they are so low growing, violas are often neglected, but they are ideal plants for some of those places where nothing else will grow. I’ve put mine as an underplanting below my winter jasmine, which is in a concrete trough on a north-facing wall – the jasmine takes most of the moisture and there is probably less than ten minutes of sun a day for the flowers to bloom on, but they are still doing a sterling job, sturdily getting five or six flowers a plant out there and as long as I dead-head, they will give me gentle colour right through until September.

I haven’t decided yet whether to treat them as annual bedding or give them perennial status – so few flowers have coped with this hostile situation that I’ve got used to planting the trough as summer bedding only, but somehow I think these violas may thrive where others have suffered.

Kniphofia – a lily by any other name?

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:37:00 +0000

If I failed to appreciate my Tamarisk, I make up for it when it comes to some other garden flowers that others consider vulgar – I love gladioli, both the natural and the hybridised kind, and the gaudy Kniphofia with its plethora of common names, is a perennial favourite.

Kniphofia is also know as Tritoma, Red Hot Poker, Torch Lily, and Poker plant – it’s African in origin and has bright rocket-shaped flowers in many shades, not just the red/orange/yellow combo that I personally favour. Nor does it have to be a four foot tall spire of showy brightness that I adore – there are cream and green kniphofias, pale yellow ones, and even some miniature ones. Lovely I’m sure, but why, I wonder, would you bother with such subtlety when there are a thousand other summer bloomers that will deliver those minor garden notes? If you want a Stravinsky-like blurting of incandescent colour, go for the very early (June) or very late (mid-August) classic kniphofias and enjoy them for their spectacular, firework-like, brilliance. Actually, what they most remind me of is the Rocket ice-lolly I used to eat as a child!

Kniphofias are not difficult to grow at all if you understand that they get a lot of water in the growing season in their natural home, but none at all in winter – they insist on good drainage, especially in the colder months. Give them that, and you’ll have a firework display of your own.

June Flowers and Invalid Gardeners

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:43:00 +0000

There are times that owning a garden means that you never lift your eyes above knee level, or at least the height of your highest shrub, and your focus is totally macro: you can see every aphid and ant, every snail trail and wilting flower, but not the big picture.

At other times you can only see the big picture. Two weeks ago I found myself having unplanned major surgery. Now I have another four weeks where I can’t dig or lift heavy things or even drive. It’s a surprise to me, just how much time I’ve spent with my eyes lowered to the task in hand, instead of raised to the garden as a whole.

Enforced leisure can be fun, but it brings other problems: I can see what needs to be done but I can’t do it! My fingers twitch to pull out the annual weeds that are springing out of my borders, and to dead-head the roses but I mustn’t. I can mention it to my nearest and dearest but if they don’t listen I can hardly nag them to do what they don’t even notice.

But after a few days, my eyes adjusted and I started to see certain charms that I’d never seen before, often because I’d removed them from the garden before they had a chance to be charming! Take this field poppy. I have glorious oriental poppies in the border, but usually these chance blown seedlings get removed before they have the chance to flower. This one escaped my weeding this year and has rewarded me with a smaller, simpler but perhaps more graceful flower than its blowsy oriental cousin.

Don’t worry though, I shall be back to frantic weeding by Mid-July!

Weigela: another shrub some people love to hate

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:31:00 +0000

I’m very fond of the candyfloss pink form of the Weigela and quite a few butterflies seem to like it too. A few years ago, you could find Weigela in garden centres here, there and everywhere for a couple of quid and people planted them with wild abandon, loving their fast growth rate and, of course, the huge stems of white, pale-pink or magenta flower trumpets.

And then they realised the downside: Weigela is what is charmingly called a ‘lax’ grower, which always makes me think that it’s got rather slutty habits, like pushing the dust under the furniture instead of getting the vacuum cleaner out. What lax actually means is that the Weigela will throw out a couple of dozen long springy stems, and then decide it can’t be bothered after all, and let them fall to the ground in rather pretty bending arches, with then absolutely smother themselves in flowers. And that’s all great, until the blossom falls in a rather messy brown pile, and you’re left with eight foot stems of rather uninteresting branches that bend every which way and seem to try and trip you up.

The answer is heavy pruning every year. This keeps your Weigela lush and dramatic but also pins it back in its corner for the rest of the year so you can get round the garden. And then you get the best of all possible worlds. What could be better than that?

My Weigela is underplanted with variegated ivy, which echoes the dappled colours of the flowers rather well, I think.

May flowers - unknown roses

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:25:00 +0000

I don’t know what this rose is. It was planted in the front garden when we arrived, and in the first three years we lived in the house I don’t think it ever flowered. In year 4, armed with some pruners and a lot of hard-heartedness, I pruned it to within an inch of its graft. The following year it produced beautiful blush pink and golden blooms in May and has done so ever since. It’s strongly scented, with a tea and sugar fragrance, and has large open flowers. If you think you know which of the many hundreds of roses it is, please let me know.

Because we’re on pretty intractable clay and live in a windy, salt-exposed environment, even though the garden at the back as six foot fences, we don’t have massive success with roses. I have one Old English Rose, which holds its own but has never really been impressive, one Ernest Morse which does pretty well, and an Iceberg climber which thrives (but then Iceberg would survive in a dustbin, given an inch of soil) so this rose, whatever it is, makes me very happy as it provides the illusion of a British summer garden without putting me to too much effort!

Greenhouse ponderings

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 16 May 2009 13:47:00 +0000

So, the greenhouse is lovely and the recent wet and windy weather has completely proved its value but I have a question which I have not seen asked anywhere else and almost fear to ask myself, in case it proves that I am a complete idiot.

Back when we were looking at greenhouse options, it became clear that because there was only one possible location, in the far corner of the garden, it also had to be a polycarbonate greenhouse as our neighbour’s teenage son has a set of goalposts in the adjacent corner of their garden and no glass would have survived long under the onslaught of him and his chums practising (and missing) their penalty shots and skying the ball onto our greenhouse roof.

So far, so good, the polycarbonate has coped with any number of footballs and as we are nearly into basketball season, a few of those too. But are all polycarbonate greenhouses quite so noisy in windy weather? Ours is like standing an inch from Rolf Harris’s wobble board.

Or am I a complete idiot?

Tamarisk: exotic shrub or tatty tree?

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:29:00 +0000

I have a real issue with tamarisk. It’s said that Abraham planted a tamarisk to invoke the name of God, which presumably means that it’s a tree that has biblical value, and you see lots of tamarisk in the Maghreb region, providing windbreaks for more tender crops on the lee side of the trees’ growth. The tree is known in America as the salt cedar and bees certainly love the tiny, pendant pink flowers but not only do tamarisk have such deep roots that they suck water from all nearby plants, they are a horrible fire risk – their dry, fragile growth is a real invitation to wind-blown sparks or lightning strikes and when people drop cigarette ends in summer, tamarisk is likely to go up like a petrol soaked bonfire.

When we moved into this house there was a tamarisk in the back garden. I waited until my other half was safely away for the weekend and dug it up. It did actually take all weekend because when I say deep-rooted, I am not exaggerating – the neighbours probably thought I was digging a grave!

Anyway, the tamarisk was replaced by a viburnam, which is a better bet for winter colour and for allowing the rest of the garden to get some ground water too, but as I walked past a neighbour’s house this morning, I saw this … and wondered if I’d really done the right thing.

Garden flowers in May

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:17:00 +0000

It can be difficult to know what spring flowers you’re going to get in which month – last year the bluebells were earlier, being just about in bloom before the hellebores went over, but this year they are later, and have come into their own with the lilies of the valley and the early lilac, which is a lovely combination.

I don’t understand how bluebells are sometimes pink and white, but in my garden at least I believe there must be a pH related element, as there is for hydrangeas, because when I got my fifty bluebells, some four years ago, I planted ten in one place and forty in another – simply taking ten bulbs at random from the pack. Those ten, on the south side of the garden, have come up pink and white while the other forty, on the eastern side, are all blue. Now I suppose the blue ones might have had a couple of pink or white in with them originally and they might have smothered them, because the blue are bigger and more vigorous, but I don’t remember ever seeing white or pink among the blue and there’s definitely never been any blue bluebells in the south border. Isn’t that strange?

In the background of my bluebells, lilac and lilies of the valley are a couple of sprigs of photinia Red Robin, because its bright scarlet leaves provide a lovely foil to the subtle colours of the spring blossoms.

What you can’t get from a photo is the heavenly combination of fragrances: the top note of the lilies of the valley, followed by the sugar sweet lilac and finally, when you’ve been sitting in the room for a while, the clear cool perfume of the bluebells. Glorious.

Garden tasks for May

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:30:00 +0000

I’ve finished showing my hardy annuals – last year I found that the cold damp spring prevented a lot of outdoor sown annuals from germinating, but this year the germination rate has been very nearly 100% - and I’m a bit worried that my later sowings will catch up with the earlier ones in no time, instead of producing later blooms as they are supposed to.

I’ve lightly raked some general purpose fertiliser in around my crocus and snowdrops before they disappear completely – it gives them some reserves to build their bulbs for next year’s flowering and it’s an easy task to forget when the foliage vanishes.

As far as pruning is concerned, I’ve cut back several of my hellebores but left one flowering stem on each of my helleborus argutifolius plants to set seed as I have several requests from friends who want to grow their own plants and as I divided my hellebores last year, I won’t be dividing them again this year to make new plants to give away. By the way, although they look pretty in a cottagey vase, the best way to display the beautiful flowers of all hellebores is to cut them from the stems entirely and float them in a large shallow bowl. That way their glorious freckling can be seen in all it’s subtle elegance.

And I’ve also neatened up my saxifrage and aubrieta just to keep them tidy. Sadly I’ve lost yet another edelweiss, that’s the third one in a row that hasn’t survived in my garden and I don’t know why, other alpines seem fine, so I shall have to find something else to grow in its spot next year – any suggestions?

I’ve filled my two hanging baskets this year as salad baskets – they contain:
• Red Orache
• Mizuna
• Variegated nasturtiums
• Sage (which I’ve pinched out to try and keep the plants bushy).
And I’ve got to say, they are already starting to look very pretty as well as tasty!

Six months of greenhouse ownership

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:02:00 +0000

I can’t believe it’s six months since I left himself in the garden with 275 bits of labelled aluminium and polycarbonate and hid indoors, typing madly and pretending that I had a deadline to meet. I did make lots of tea, of course, but that was almost my entire contribution to the process of setting up a greenhouse.

And now I can’t imagine how I could live without it. We’ve only had one failure to date – the passion fruit seeds have simply not germinated, despite people telling me that as long as the seeds were super fresh they would zoom, vine-like, out of their pots and loop around the greenhouse. They haven’t.

But apart from that, everything has germinated, everything has bloomed, nothing has curled up and died. And the most amazing thing of all is that our garden season has been brought forward by about a month, just by having this clement, frost-free place in which to raise or overwinter my plants.

The downside: well I am getting quite fed up with carrying trays of plants in and out of the greenhouse twice a day – it’s a shame that the only flat space in the garden on which said trays can be set to harden off is the entire length of the garden away from said greenhouse. Bad planning on my part, but there’s nothing to be done about it now, unless I move the shed and fill in the pond and … well, you get the point. And also, it’s a time vortex. I go out just to check how many borlotti beans or lupins have germinated and it’s a whole hour before I realise that I said I’d only be a minute …

Wildlife Gardening: planting for butterflies

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:40:00 +0000

In the past fortnight, as well as the overwintered Peacock butterfly that decided to sit on my husband's hand and prevent him doing any mowing, I’ve seen two Wall Brown butterflies in the garden, along with several Holly Blues. As we like butterflies, I’ve been looking at what it is that attracts them to the garden. There are two areas the Wall Browns seem to like:– the first is around the pond, where we have pebbles and stones in an area that borders the lawn and is very sunny, and their other favourite spot is near the ornamental currant. Their first spot certainly makes sense as they are said to lay eggs in open grassland where the turf is broken or stony. They eat a lot of grasses and in the pond area we have several carex and sedges that they are probably enjoying as a habitat if not a food source.

The Holly Blues are always in the same place – the fatshedera - which they adore. They lay their eggs on it and as it grows in one of those corners of the garden that will support almost nothing else: it’s between an ancient and unproductive apple tree, and a shady wall, only a yard from the shed, I’m very happy for them to have their share of the plant. It’s worth it to see their pale blue flutterings in that dank and rather sombre corner of nothingness.

Both species spend a lot of time hanging around the lavender bushes too, which suggests that they are using it as a food supply.

We try not to tidy up too much in winter, as the best way to increase the butterfly population, after planting things they will use as a food source, is to leave the areas where the pupae or overwintering caterpillars can rest undisturbed. We also have a wall covered in ivy, which is a natural winter home for tortoiseshells and peacocks.

April Garden Tasks: Strawberry beds

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:54:00 +0000

I love home-grown strawberries – and if you have clay soil or suffer from late frosts, mid April is a better time to plant new plants than in September, which is the traditional time. The reason for spring planting is that in clay, newly planted roots can become waterlogged and rot because they aren’t in active growth. And frost is actually a big killer of strawberry plants, so you need to work out where to plant them to protect them from late frosts. Funnily enough the plants will cope just fine with winter frosts, it’s the early production of flowers that is damaged, because they are so close to the ground that they have a very high risk of having flowers completely blighted by unseasonal weather. This means higher ground or raised beds are a great idea.

On the other hand, you can have alpine strawberries in almost any situation that doesn’t get waterlogged – they are really hardy and although they don’t have anything like the productivity of ordinary strawberries, half a dozen plants will produce enough tiny berries to top a bowl of cereal every day for weeks on end.

Another point is that strawberries should never be planted where members of the nightshade family: peppers, tomatoes and potatoes have previously been grown because they can harbour verticillium wilt which causes strawberry plants to die.

And if your strawberries are established, this is the time to lift any runners you don’t want and snip through them, cut off all the old brown foliage and damage leaves and make sure you remove any old fruit that hid from you all winter and has become dry or mildewed, as it can transfer mould and blight to other plants in summer. I have got some runners I separated last year to plant into a new bed this year, and this week I'm tidying them up and getting them into the ground.

April Garden Flowers: Bluebells

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:42:00 +0000

If you’re one of those people, like me, who loves the sight of a woodland full of bluebells, then I’m afraid you have to accept that your desire will either have to be fulfilled by travelling to a public park or stately home where the spring ‘blue haze’ can be fully appreciated, or you’ll have to drastically overhaul your garden to make it a place that bluebells can thrive. And that’s the rub – once bluebells are thriving, then not a lot else will be!

If you read any gardening book, it will tell you that bluebells need woodland – not strictly true. Bluebells do thrive in woodland, but the three conditions they actually need are dappled light, reasonably damp soil and something to provide summer cover that stops grass establishing. Grass is the enemy of bluebells which is why woodlands have become their natural habitat, but if you have a border in which there are large and large-leaved shrubs that tolerate a dampish soil, you can get bluebells to take hold very easily. Under a cotoneaster is usually a bit too dry, and below hydrangeas is often a bit too hot, but mine are happy enough on an ornamental pond margin which they are sharing with a prostrate rosemary, some hellebores and a Continus (smoke bush).

One reason that the bluebell thrives so wonderfully when it does get established, is that it contains a toxin that the plant uses to fight off potential pests like slugs and snails – scientist are trying to work out how to extract this or create it commercially in laboratories so that we can use it to protect tastier plants, but until that happens, it’s always worth thinking about whether you can help preserve a particularly lovely plant or shrub from predator attack by cutting off the access to it using plants like bluebells, or the many members of the onion family who are equally unpopular with slugs and snails.

Colour in the April Garden

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:41:00 +0000

April, May and June are the months when British gardens often look their best. March is a bit variable (ie gardens are often under snow or invisible through driving rain) and July is frequently too parched for a really good display of garden-wide flowers: Cosmos, Cape Daisies and sunflowers will be looking great but a lot of the border will be tired and showing its age, and lawns can be a bit bald, so these twelve weeks or so are the real glories of the British gardening summer.

One of the things that often disappoints me is how little use some gardeners make of the colour range available to them at this time of year. Once the snowdrops and crocus have gone over, and the camellias are fading, many gardeners seem to have nothing much to show for their labours until the roses flourish in late May and June. This is such a waste! In a clement climate (that’s posh speak for damp and cool) you can have colour every week of the year and when there are long hours of sunshine without too much heat, that colour can be really glowing, varied and sustained.

One of my favourite spring displays is this bank of lungwort (Pulmonaria) set against the variegated Euonymus behind it. The daffodil is a bit of a bonus – it’s usually gone over before the lungwort is at its best, but this year the double daffs came a few days later than usual and gave an added zing to the planting scheme. See how honest I am? I could have pretended I planned that …

Anyway, this kind of planting, where you use a stable year round colour (the cream and green of the Euonymus) to offset a range of short-lived contrasts is a really good way to get your garden performing well. Later in the year, the Crocosmia, which is to the left of the lungwort, will come into flower and its fiery orange display will work just as well with the cream and green as a backdrop. Neither flowering plant would have nearly so much impact against a plain green background. But if I’d planted red hot pokers (Kniphofia) instead of Crocosmia, it wouldn’t have worked so well, because their red, orange and yellow combination would have been too much of a scatter of colour – solid blocks of colour work better with variegated plants.

April Garden Showers

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:40:00 +0000

Not the lovely baby-shower type showers but the chilly, hearty, English summer type showers. And – for Pete’s sake, give me a break – showers accompanied by slugs!

I suppose it could be worse, it could be showers OF slugs, but really! On the very first night that I put my seedling alpine strawberries out to harden off, in trays, with clear plastic covers that I thought fit rather snugly, they had not only the showers but the slugs to contend with. To be fair, there was no choice, the greenhouse is full, the cold-frame is full, there was nowhere else for the baby plants to go, but how the Dickens did the slugs get into the seed trays?
I discovered the answer at about 11 am, while I was still trying to find enough level spaces in the garden to set out all the seedlings that need hardening off: ie leeks, nasturtiums, sunflowers, celeriac and native trees.

The answer, of course, is that just as it’s the time of year for baby plants, so it is the time of year for baby slugs. I found a slug under a piece of gravel. This was rather like ‘miniature world’ – usually you find a slug under a stone but the scaled down version is miniscule slug under miniscule pebble. I was heartless and threw both gravel and slug into the pond, where the big lazy goldfish will find the slug floating and have a happy snack. But as it was as thin as string, I do understand how it, and its evil siblings, got under the plastic lid.

For tonight I shall sprinkle salt over the table they are spending the night on, as well as using some of the slug pellets that I loathe, even if they are supposedly wildlife friendly, but I need to find a better long-term answer than this.

What’s good in the garden in April?

Today what looks wonderful is my later-flowering Mahonia – the early one has gone over: it’s at it’s best in February, but the later one is scenting the whole area beautifully. The hellebores are fading and the bluebells are just not quite there yet, so the Mahonia has the garden largely to itself for a few days. Not that anybody is complaining, mind you. At this time of year, the sight of any flower is still a surprise and when that flower has a heady scent as well as a glorious appearance, it's actually rather nice to enjoy it in its solitary splendour. Between heavy showers.

Garden tasks for April

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 09:10:00 +0000

The one thing that I always tend to forget at this time of year is to prune!

Honestly, it’s my biggest weakness in spring. I never forget to weed and I usually remember to lift and divide clumps of spring bulbs, but somehow I forget that shrubs need some tender loving care too. What I ought to be doing is pruning back my winter-flowering jasmine so that it looks as good next year as it did this. It’s on my list, but (sad confession) I tend to only get around to giving it a prune every third year, instead of every year.

Also needing to be brought down to ground level are my dogwoods – actually they should have been cut a couple of weeks ago, but it won’t do any harm to cut them now, even though they are just starting to come into leaf. If I don’t hack them back, they won’t have jewel-bright winter stems last year.

My neighbours are planting out dahlia tubers now, and as long as they are covered in a few inches of loose soil, they should be okay. In northern regions it might be best to wait until the end of the month. I don’t grow dahlias, but I do have lily bulbs in pots that I’m hardening off now. The reason I grew them in pots is that we’ve got the hideous red lily beetle (Lilioceris lilii) in our garden. Because the larvae overwinter in the soil and can eat a lily bulb to the ground in a matter of a few days, I’ve got into the habit of repotting the bulbs in sterilised soil at the end of each flowering period, after carefully dusting off the bulbs to ensure that no horrible larvae are lurking. So far so good!

And although we don’t usually have hanging baskets, this year somebody gave me two empty baskets for Christmas, so I’ve decided to make them into salad chandeliers, featuring nasturtiums and other pretty but edible crops. I planted the seedling nasturtiums in them this week, and I’m also going to have orache, and dwarf marigolds and variegated sage to add colour.

Wildlife Gardening

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:49:00 +0000

This is the month when the garden really comes into its own in wildlife terms. The fish are frisking in the pond; the frogs have stopped being frisky and are ignoring the growing frogspawn; the first cabbage whites are fluttering around and I saw three bumble bees this morning.

We garden for wildlife by providing a range of resources that suit insects, mammals, birds and amphibians. For insects we have a log pile that we hope might one day be inhabited by stag beetles, although at present it probably only hosts earwigs and woodlice. Did you know that stag beetles can spend as much as seven years as larvae and as little as two weeks as beetles? Amazing.

We also have bee logs: short lengths of tree-trunk with holes drilled into them at downward angles – solitary bees love to nest in them and it seems to be working as our bumble bee population is definitely growing. The downward angle is to stop the hole filling up with rainwater and drowning the bee larvae that is developing in it.

We have a pond, which has goldfish, frogs and lots of mayflies and we grow plants that should provide food throughout the year, so native daisy type flowers in summer and autumn, berrying plants like rose bushes, cotoneaster, pyracantha, berberis and viburnum in winter and mahonia in early spring. In summer the beans and sweet peas attract lots of bees and other pollinators. We no longer put out bird food: instead we leave the dead heads on roses to provide rose-hips, ditto sunflowers, and use the berrying plants and the log pile to provide seeds, berries and overwintering insect life to feed birds.

Am I a gardening April Fool?

This is a picture of my greenhouse, taken from the outside. The top polycarbonate panel has been painted with one of those products that is supposed to cut out the sun. It does seem to work, if you compare it to the lower panel.

Here’s the question though: the product is supposed to be transparent when it rains, so that it allows what little light there is to get through – which is a great idea. But it’s also supposed to be ‘easily removable with water and a cloth’ to quote the instructions. But how do you know? If it’s transparent while wet, how do you know if you’ve managed to wash it off? Or am I being too complicated …

Sweet peas and beans for the small garden

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:15:00 +0000

The way I grow sweet peas is to mix them with runner beans and (this year at least) climbing French beans. I do this because (a) I’m greedy and like to have food to eat as well as flowers to admire and (b) sweet peas are a lovely cut flower but not, to be honest, the most beautiful climber. Essentially, if you want to keep your sweet peas in flower for as long as possible, you have to cut flowers every day, so they don’t become very floriferous (to use the proper word) simply because if you have a sweet pea covered in flowers, within three or four days you will have a sweet pea covered in seed pods and then it won’t flower any more!

So … what I do is I fill a trellis with runner beans, planting White Lady, which has white flowers and straight, large beans, and Scarlet Emperor, which has red flowers and curving, but very tasty beans, and which has previously been planted with a mixture of pastel sweet peas for colour and the old fashioned matacuna (the one with the purple and magenta flowers) sweet pea, which has the strongest fragrance of all.

I started my sweet peas in January in the greenhouse. No, I’m never going to get fed up with saying ‘greenhouse’ I promise you! But the beans are going out as seeds this weekend. This way the sweet peas ‘get away’ by being in the ground for a month or so before the beans are ready to join them. The sweet peas are hardening off by being placed outside in the garden every day but returned to the cold frame at night. A cold frame is better for hardening off than a greenhouse because I can leave the lid open a crack, to ensure that the plants don’t ‘soften’ again but also protecting them from any stray air frosts that might sneak up.

You then have the chance to pick flowers and harvest beans every day, giving you a lovely flower display to look at as you munch on your very fresh beans!

Frugal Gardening Tips

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:44:00 +0000

I’ve been scouring the web to try and find ways to make better use of the water that we have, and in the process I came across a lot of ideas for being frugal in the garden. Some of them are second nature to most of us, but others were new to me, so here’s what seemed most interesting to this gardener:

Coffee grounds contain natural minerals and low levels of potassium and nitrogen which are key to healthy soil – use them as a mulch for established plants rather than mixing them into the compost heap, but don't put them around seedlings in case you scorch their fragile roots.

If you spot a flower or plant that you like, maybe at a friend’s house, ask them if you can take a cutting as opposed to spending money on a new plant. I’d add to this, if you see an expensive plant when you’re out with friends or on a horticultural group outing, club together to buy it, with the one who pays half getting the original plant and others who divide the other half of the cost between them, getting rooted cuttings or seeds – you may have to wait a year but so what, if the plant is worth it (nb F1 hybrids don’t come true from seed)

Plants will not object to old bathwater being used on them – well, I’m not sure this is entirely true because (a) in an organic garden you could be adding all kinds of non-organic substances from bath products and (b) while most vegetables won’t care, some flowers are extremely sensitive, for example, to oils in water which can damage petals and scorch tender leaves. So either ensure your family bathes with biodegradable and organic toiletries, or save (cooled) bathwater for things that don’t care, like established native shrubs, and trees. As an aside, we invested in a thing that was supposed to siphon bathwater in a tube from the bathroom window to the garden – it never worked!

Old containers make great new planting schemes – can’t disagree with this, we’ve used old baths, old sinks, tyres turned inside out, old packing chests and even a typewriter, to make lovely floral displays.

Garden Water Issues

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:56:00 +0000

It rained for about ten minutes yesterday – granted it rained torrentially, the kind of rain that hurts the top of your head if you’re not wearing a hat – but that was the first rain we’ve had since January and we could do with some more.

I’ve been using the rain butt in the garden to water the seedlings in the greenhouse, but it’s almost empty and now that things like wallflowers are ready to be planted out, I’m a little worried that there won’t be enough water if we don’t get some more rain soon. I can always water the garden from the house, but as we live in an extremely hard water area, this can be a different kind of a problem – not all of my plants like the hard water that they get from the hose!

There are things that can be done to conserve water, and some of them are already habitual for me (we had a hosepipe ban a few years ago) such as:

• Only watering the lawn when it needs it – in fact, I never water the lawn! All I do is throw the cooled washing up water over it at night and it thrives perfectly.
• Water during the early parts of the day and not when it's blowy – although this can be more difficult that it sounds, given that I live on a windy coast! Early watering reduces water evaporation and has the added benefit of cutting down on slug depredation as slugs like damp conditions so night watering gives them a playground. Windy weather carries away a lot of water as vapour, which is wasted.
• Mulching with organic material to improve absorption and water retention.
• Planting drought-resistant shrubs and plants.

But I’m now having to think about getting extra rain butts and seeing if we can conserve more water from the various roofs in the house and garden. I wonder if there is anything else I can do to harvest water or cut down on its use?

Greenhouse gardening March

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:55:00 +0000

I really don’t know how I coped without my greenhouse. Six months after I cursed it roundly and retreated to the house to make tea and treacle tart for my other half – who then spent two days putting the 471 piece monster together while regularly being fortified with said tea and tart, I spend at least an hour a day in it.

Here’s what I’ve got going on:

• Three trays of broad beans
• One tray of native trees - a sort of goody bag of who knows what? So far what = one seedling ...
• One tray of passionfruit seeds (an experiment – can a passionfruit vine be grown from the seeds of a supermarket passionfruit? We’re going to find out …)
• Six pots of sweet peas
• Thirty-six pots of nasturtium seedlings (don’t ask, other half got carried away with himself)
• Three pots each of Love-lies-bleeding, sage and dill, which will be the nucleus of my new herb bed
• Twenty-four pots of seedling alpine strawberries
• Twenty transplanted celeriac seedlings
• Thirty-six pea seedlings in toilet roll inners
• Three over-wintered fuchsias
• Two tubs of wallflowers

The passionfruit is going to be interesting because if they do grow I shall probably have to give them all away, not having a single south facing fence that isn’t already covered with: jasmine, winter-flowering clematis, pyracantha, Iceberg rose and fig tree. All the people I’ve spoken to say that the secret to growing passionfruit is heat and freshness of the seeds, and as these went straight from fruit to pot in about forty-five seconds, I’m confident that freshness isn’t an issue.

There is a bit of an issue in the greenhouse though – I can’t actually turn round in a hurry because if I do, I end up knocking something to the floor. I just hope that the weather remains gracious so that I can start planting things out next weekend!

Cottage Gardening - Aquilegias

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:34:00 +0000

My columbines do not survive. Even if I label them with the proper Latin name of aquilegia, they never appear after the first year. I buy them from garden centres, I buy them from plant stalls, I buy them from specialist growers. I grow them from seed, I buy them as mature plants. They flower, they die down, and … they never come up again.

Aquilegias, or columbines as I prefer to call them, are the quintessential cottage garden plant. Their dainty flowers are supposed to be a bit of a nuisance as they self-seed everywhere (except in my garden) so I have been trying to find out what might be the problem. And everybody says that columbines suffer from few problems: mildew might be an issue in dry years and they can be attacked by sawfly and leaf miners – but don’t worry, say all the experts cheerily, ‘These things are almost never life-threatening, especially if the plants are in reasonably moist soil and growing vigorously, just cut the plant back hard to ground level immediately after flowering. This encourages a new burst of foliage.’ Actually, I think it just encourages the plant to die a bit quicker, at least in my case.

So rather than admit defeat, I’m going to indulge in the final resort of all gardeners – container growing. That way I can control light and shade, moisture, soil drainage and pH, and if I can’t grow them after that, I really shall give up!

Columbine courtesy of TieGuyII at Flickr

Greenhouse Gardening – Fuchsias

noreply@blogger.com (The All Seasons Gardener) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:45:00 +0000

The fuchsia is a beautiful plant, which can be found in a wide range of colours but predominantly a mixture of pinks, purples, whites and reds.

All fuchsia flowers have three parts: the upper tube, the sepals beneath it, which are a bit like wings furling outwards and the corolla or skirt-like growth underneath the sepals. Each part of the blossom may be different colour which is one of the things that gives this shrub its appeal to the gardener. There are two basic categories: hardy ones that can be left outside all year, some of which are particularly good for hedging, and the tender kind, which may either be bushy or upright and grown in pots, or as a trailing plant for hanging baskets.

Now I have a greenhouse, I can start to invest in tender fuchsias, most of which are prone to frost damage but can be grown outside from June to early autumn in the UK, at which point they need to be taken into a frost-free greenhouse to over-winter.

I’m buying young plants which means I will be spending the early spring pinching out young shoots to encourage the plants to stay bushy and because it’s a waste-not-want-not world these days, I shall be using those cuttings in a pot of quite gritty potting medium with a bit of hormone rooting powder, to make new plants.

I’ll stop pinching out in late spring or the flowering will be delayed. To flower well, fuchsias need humidity in the warmth, and this can be given by mist-spraying the plants, never letting the pots dry out while the plant is in flower and avoiding the full intensity of the noon sun.

Once the plant has given its glorious blossoming, say around mid September, I shall have to cut back on watering so that the wood hardens a little – this helps it get through the winter and by October, the plants should be kept almost dry – at which point I shall take them into the greenhouse and stop off any really leafy areas so that I don’t need to water any more. Through the winter I shall only water if the plant is utterly bone dry and the growing medium is cracking, and I shan’t prune until early next spring, when I can see the new shoots coming up from the base and then I will cut off all the old wood and re-pot the plant.

Fuchsia courtesy of Tanakwho at Flickr