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Thursday, January 26, 2012

Greenhouse sowing

We’re off! This year I overwintered my sweet pea seedlings from the autumn, so they didn’t need to be sown, which is usually an event that takes place in the last week of January: my son was born on 29th January and when he was a baby we used to call him sweet pea, so it’s become a tradition to sow them around the time of his birthday. Not this year though …

Instead I’ve started off the broad beans and bush beans and the purple Ipomeas are also in pots. I am only sowing to give the plants away this year, as it keeps the seed viable and as long as the people I give the plants to give me back a couple of dried seed pods, I shall be able to keep my stock going until I have somewhere to plant them again.

The little bulblets that I took off the parent bulbs when I lifted them and put them in storage over the winter are all fine – one or two have even begun to put out green growth in their trays of compost which is surprising as they are way too small to have stored enough energy to flower and survive. I suppose the really mild winter has had an effect on them too.

In the garden I’m having an anxious wait to see if the perennials I bought last year will survive – the Romneya looks okay, the Astrantia has vanished completely (but then, they always do) and the Echinacea appears to still be alive although OH, having seen it in flower in somebody else’s garden last year, muttered something to the effect that he won’t be at all disappointed if it doesn’t make it through into bloom in ours this year!

Labels: astrantia major, broad beans, bush beans, ipomea, romneya coulteri, sweet peas

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:43 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Flowers from the January garden

This week’s vase contains hellebores and viburnum tinus. Although it’s a tiny little vase, it works really well because once the tealights are lit in the other holders, the gentle light reflects well off the pale flowers – and because the screen is set up on a mantel, the full effect of the beauty of the hellebores is available because they are slightly above average eye level and the freckled interior of the bell-shaped blooms is revealed.

Of course hellebores aren’t the easiest of flowers to work with: some people have an allergy to their sap and to be on the safe side I always wear gloves when cutting them or dividing the plants. Then they get airlocks very easily, so what I do is cut them as long as possible, then take them in the house, plunge them in cold water up to the blooms and cut them again, using a sharp knife rather than a pair of scissors – that means that water rushes into the hollow stems rather than air so they continue to take up water. To be really on the safe side, I then make pinholes every inch or so up the stem so that the air is forced out when the flowers are arranged in the vase.

Because they, and all other flowers cut from the garden at this time of year, are winter flowering, they don’t appreciate the warmth indoors very much – the best way to keep them going is to put the flower vase on the floor in the coldest room of the house overnight to revive them. If you have a porch and it doesn’t get morning sun, that’s an ideal place as long as it’s frost free.

The best way to display hellebores is always to float them, when they really become show stoppers, but for today I’m happy with my little bud vase of winter colour, and every time I walk into the room I get the light, faintly dusty, scent of the viburnum which is a delicious counterpoint to the gloom of winter.

Labels: cut flowers, garden flowers, hellebores, viburnam

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:52 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, January 16, 2012

Winter flowers ...

Viburnum Tinus flowering beautifully








Hellebores starting to bud.

Labels: hellebores, viburnum tinus, winter flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:57 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, January 13, 2012

Snowdrops but no snow

Apparently the spring flowers are weeks earlier than they should be, although in my garden the snowdrops actually seem to be a little behind this time last year! According to meteorological records there were only four air frosts in the last three months of 2011, compared to 35 in 2010, and that’s not good news for those contending with slugs and snails and the blasted, benighted, blithering whitefly that are plaguing brassica growers across the UK.

So, snowdrops are in full bloom in places that don’t usually open their doors to visitors for a further fortnight, which traditionally heralds a good snowdrop viewing week, and daffodils are in bloom in sheltered areas. I’ve seen silver birch in full bud in Sussex and the robins have been singing for at least a week.

My unforced hyacinth bulbs are showing, as are some of the anemone de Caen who will certainly suffer for their presumption, and I just wonder how long things are going to survive their winter reprieve before a killer frost mows them down?

Labels: air frost, early spring, robins, snowdrops, whitefly

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:05 AM 1 Comments

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Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Shame corner – the greenhouse

I just found these two poor babies, like the babes in the wood, hidden beneath and behind a heap of pots that were in the corner of one of the shelves in the greenhouse.

They’ve grown all in one direction, as if they were Tradescantia, and I had to lop about five inches of pendant growth from each one when I repotted them, but they had a brilliant root ball so I’m confident that they will survive the decapitation.

They are dianthus, a supposed perennial that never survives the winter in our heavy clay. I took the cuttings from a friend’s garden and then totally forget about them. They’ve survived six months in a small pot of John Innes #2 which suggests they are amazingly hardy (and undemanding) but I know that unless I remember to lift them in autumn and put them in the greenhouse, they will rot below ground and as soon as I brush against them in the late winter, they will fall apart as if only held together by spiderwebs and the memory of once being a viable plant.

As far as I can recall, they are single, red and very fragrant. I love the smell of pinks, of all kinds, and these appealed to me as the little red flowers against the silver-grey foliage were dramatic and appealing.

So I’ve replanted, lopped and installed on the kitchen windowsill to give them a chance to recover and be turned round every few days so they grow straight(er). I’ll pop them back out into the heated greenhouse in February and get at least one summers’ scent out of them.

I am a bit ashamed of myself though – plant neglect is not one of my usual sins and these two are obviously tough beasts to have made it this far.

Labels: cold greenhouse, dianthus, overwintering perennials

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:21 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Forcing, faking and flowering

Victoria has a brilliant post about the natural and unnatural history of the poinsettia, that most forced of winter flowers (not that it’s a flower, exactly) which led me to reflect on the nature of flowers in winter in a temperate climate and why we invest so much in something so transient. And truly, so fake, because it can hardly survive here even with a lot of care.

I don’t like poinsettias that much, have never owned one, and never bought one for somebody else. I do have a dirty secret though – at this time of year I haunt garden centres, buying up the pots of forced hyacinth bulbs that they sell of a half price or better between now and February. Often they are droopy – the flowers hang over the edge of the pot instead of standing up like soldiers in overlarge busbys. I don’t mind that. I buy them for their fragrance, to which I am addicted, and then to plant them out in the garden, where they will flower much later in the following year, but flower they will.

I don’t force any bulb – I am too lazy. But I do like to have something going on in the garden at all times, and right now it’s my winter planters that have lovely tall stems of miniature iris already, the first anemones are going for it (why? It’s way too early but they obviously want to beat the rush) and the stubby emergence of the hyacinths has begun too. It’s just as exciting, to me, as the whole showy, fragrance-free, delicacy of the poinsettia, but my bulbs will survive without needing much more care than a regular repotting and they provide fragrance, colour and – dare I say it? – excitement, for many years.

Labels: poinsettia, Victoria's Backyard, winter bulbs, winter planters

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:43 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The long and the short of it . . .

OH is pruning the apple trees. One of the problems with being a sentimental gardener is that nothing good ever gets removed so the best never gets a chance. These apple trees are the bane of my life and if I’d been a different kind of gardener – the sensible kind – they would no longer exist. What I should have done, if I’d had any sense, was to hire a tree surgeon to visit the house in the week before I moved in and take them out, roots and all. But OH loved them as soon as he saw them, despite the fact that they are huge, unwieldy and unproductive. So they stayed.

I say they are unproductive, but while one gave us about five apples this year, the other, in a bumper year for fruit, decided to produce about 50 kilos of large, pappy, blemished apples which it then deposited on our next door neighbour’s flat garage roof. I’ve gingerly tiptoed around up there, trying to remove them all via a bucket and rope system (all a bit Heath Robinson) but their garage still smells like cider vinegar and I feel guilty.

And then there’s the winter pruning – every year the trees put on vast upward-facing growth that supports little or not fruit (apart from the one tree that had a joke with us this year) and which has to be pruned out or it shades the entire garden. So OH has been clambering up the ladder every day over the holidays to thin out the growth. And I am looking at the heap of apple prunings (and bits of iceberg rose, which is definitely the best thing about that apple tree) and defiantly not picking them up and doing anything tidy with them.

Still, the rosa mundi will be happier for the extra light … if it doesn’t end up being destroyed by having rose clippings, a stepladder and/or a substantial OH land on it.

Labels: iceberg rose, pruning apple trees, winter pruning

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:13 AM 0 Comments

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