Garden Centre

Friday, January 18, 2013

Defrosting a garden pond safely

Frozen ponds deny fish oxygen. Here's how we defrost our pond when it's wintry. Never smash ice on a pond or your fish may die of shock.

Boil a saucepan of water and place the pan on the frozen pond with a string tied to the handle of the pan attached to a stake or plant on the pond margin. This stops your pan sinking to the bottom of the pond!

The hot pan melts the ice and if it falls through you can haul it up with the string. In extreme weather you may have to melt twice a day.

Labels: defrosting pond, frozen pond, garden pond tips, pond fish, winter garden pond, winter garden tasks

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:47 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

My garden this week

Is a disgrace. We’re still drifting between a big re-plan of the borders and maybe (dare I say it?) moving to a smaller house where we’d have more time to garden. While the jury is out, nothing seems to happen.

Helen at Patient Gardener has been looking at her garden and appreciating what’s there, rather than focusing on what’s not. It was a good message for me too, so I went out to see what I could see.

Labels: hellebores, january garden tips, lungwort, skimmia, viburnum tinus

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:55 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Thrifty Gardening Tips

Here are some tips to help you save money in the garden – so you can spend more on your favourite plants, or on furniture and accessories to make your growing space even more great to spend time in.

1. Keep seeds you haven’t used in black film canisters, the kind that 35 mm film arrives in. If you can’t get that, use opaque envelopes so no light gets in and put a couple of packets of silica gel in the drawer or box where you store seeds to keep the damp away. You may find your local chemist or film developers will give you a bagful of empty film canisters for the asking. You can write on them in white tippex, or if you are a glam gardener, in gold or silver metallic gel pen.
2. Fruit and wine boxes, like mine, are cute but can be expensive to buy. Old drawers are a great resource for growing salad crops – usually they are too shallow for other crops but radishes, lettuces, and even spring onions will do well in them. You can often pick up an old chest of drawers for very little money, and then you just need to preserve the wood (don’t varnish it), drill holes in the bottom of each drawer, line them with black plastic (staple it to the wood) and fill with compost. Some drawers even have a thin runner on the underside to ensure drainage remains good – if yours don’t, use some pot feet or nail a small piece of wood to each corner to lift the drawer from the ground. If you have enough space, and are kitsch enough, you can nail the drawers into their chest, with the lowest one furthest out and the top one least out, and paint the whole thing with outdoor paint to make a ‘garden chest’. Otherwise, just set the drawers on your paving to make a cute addition to the garden.
3. Save old toothbrushes to clean pots before you re-use them, and to remove dirt, cobwebs and pests from greenhouse crevices and corners.
4. Use old tights with the toes cut to store small flowerpots – you can pull a pot out of the bottom close the hole with a peg, and then hang the tights up in the shed until you want another pot. Alternatively, cut up old tights and use them to tie up tomatoes and climbing plants – the elasticity stops the plant getting damaged if the tie gets too tight.
5. Newspapers make a great mulch – simply lay sheets around your plants and soak them with a hose. You can cover the paper with bark, pea gravel or even grass clippings to hide it.

Labels: drawers, mulch, seeds, thrifty gardening, tights, toothbrushes

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:49 AM 0 Comments

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Monday, January 7, 2013

Garden border ideas for 2013

Last year was easy, many people had a border that had a patriot theme, whether for the Jubilee or the hosting the Olympics, so plant and colour choices were simple. But for those who want to refresh or redesign their borders this year, what’s hot and what’s not?

Well for the patriotic, the arrival of a new generation of the house of Windsor is a pretty big deal. Borders like this one, with its predominantly pink theme, are ideal if you guess there will be a baby girl.

Of course you could opt for a similar theme in blue if you are betting on a boy! If you don’t like to bet either way, you could try a border with plants that have appropriate names, such as the Tradescantia Sweet with its grass-like leaves in a yellowy green and tri-lobed purple flowers with bright yellow stamens. Or there’s the William and Catherine rose, an old style musk hybrid which is small and bushy, ideal for small gardens and has apricot flowers which fade to a gentle cream and then a pure white. If you can get one imported from the USA (and think it’s appropriate!) you could go for Weeping Kate, a Dianella with both violet-blue flowers and violet-blue berries.

If all that seems like too much hard work, perhaps you’d just like to celebrate the new arrival and the lovey-dovey atmosphere that is bound to be generated, and you could do that by investing in a ‘love seat’ and enjoying your garden from it!

Labels: border ideas, love seat, Windsor baby border

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:54 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, January 3, 2013

New Year’s garden resolutions

I haven’t made any other kind of resolutions this year but I am making three for 2013.

1. I will plan the pond area as a proper bed and work to this plan! It’s currently full of plants that were here when we arrived, plus things that have been stuck in around the pond because there was a gap to fill. It’s time that I ended this miscellany of shame and actually planned a proper bed.

2. I will be ruthless with plants that don’t work. We end up with a lot of lame dog plants in our garden, along with a few bullies (like the carex that just seems to go from a self-seeding single stem to a grassy mound that could hide a wildebeest in about a fortnight!) and neither helps to create a good garden. I resolve to remove the underperformers and keep the over-performers in their place!

3. I resolve to reduce the high maintenance plants in my garden – we have clay soil and every year I plant hundreds of bulbs and most of them rot in the ground by the second year. This year I will not play this expensive game – I will plant things that work, and do without the things that don’t, no matter how much I love them!

What resolutions are you making?

Labels: bulbs, carex buchananii, clay soil, new years resolutions, pond

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:24 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Christmas garden tasks

Our list for the last weeks of December is quite simple:

1. Put out something tasty and nutritious for the birds - proper bird food contains the right mix of nutrients to keep our winter bird population healthy
2. Use the bubble wrap that comes wrapped around the gifts you’ve bought to give others for Christmas to protect your garden – it can be folded around pots, and tucked around taps and pipes to save them from ice damage
3. Clear your paths of moss, but don’t pressure wash them if frost is predicted because you may end up creating an Olympic class toboggan run for yourself!
4. Treat timber with preservatives as long as there is no frost warning. It makes a huge difference to the winter garden to have some brightness in the form of well-kept fences and sheds.

Remember that the work you do now may take a couple of hours but an hour in the garden between November and February adds up to a day saved between June and September, because maintenance completed now really does gain you so much time and energy later in the year when the weeds are burgeoning and you need to water regularly as well as just wanting to spend some time enjoying your garden!

Labels: bubble wrap, fences, mahonia, paths, winter birds

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:32 AM 0 Comments

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Thursday, December 6, 2012

Turning Seasons

Helen has a great blog about the turn of the seasons. For me it’s when winter reveals itself in frost, usually early in the morning, along with clear skies and champagne-fresh air, but by the middle of the afternoon, autumn is once again resurgence with pockets of warmth, the vulgar splash of colour provided by the last of the nerines, and the effect of the grasses, which Helen comments on too, against the skyline, although in our garden you have to get down to worm’s eye level for that to be possible.

Of course there’s all the other stuff too. The grey sky, the fallen leaves, no longer golden but sodden and the colour of old cardboard, the path slippery with lichen and the shade of a hippo’s backside … the general defeatedness of a temperate garden in winter. It’s only a few weeks, a few days if I’m lucky, before the winter plantings come into their own – the skimmias berry up and shine, the variegated holly starts to gleam as though somebody gave it a coat of varnish, the mahonia shoves out the first acid yellow flowers, matching those of the winter jasmine which has been doing its best to liven things up since mid November. It’s a period of hiatus, until true winter arrives, and it can’t be over fast enough for me!

Labels: mahonia, sempervirens, winter jasmine

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:09 AM 0 Comments

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