Garden Centre

Monday, September 29, 2008

No rest for the gardener

September should be a time when we sit back and celebrate our labours, a bit like a Harvest Festival for horticulturists, but it doesn’t happen, does it?

This month what I have in mind to do is:

Keeping on with dead-heading roses as the blooms fade away. This means cutting the bloom just above the top leaf on the stem, but I'm letting the rambler rose at the back of the garden simply drop its petals that it forms rosehips which the birds appreciate in the winter months.

The lavender has to be cut back too, just as far as the old wood, and the gladioli and dahlias have to be staked to get the best out of them without the autumn breezes flattening them into the lower border plants. As soon as the flowers are over, I’ll have to lift the gladioli corms and store them for next year, somewhere that the mice can’t find them like they did last year!

Planting up my containers with wallflowers and tulips – for the year ahead I want to try Erysimum cheiri ‘Sunset White’ which starts a sort of primrose and ages to be a cream colour, with Tulipa ‘Spring Green’ which will grow up through the earlier wallflowers and give the pots a much longer life.

Gladiolus courtesy of Carl E Lewis

Labels: David Austin roses, garden tasks for autumn, gladioli, lavender, september gardening, wallflowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:46 AM 5 Comments

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Friday, September 26, 2008

Autumn colours in the garden

More pink …

Yes, it’s another offering from my worryingly pink flowerbeds! This time it’s one of autumn’s best performers, the cyclamen. One thing that surprises many people is that this pretty flower, which nods over its elegant green and silver marbled leaves like a butterfly, is actually related to the primrose.

The cyclamen grows from a tuber, and depending on your soil and whether it finds itself in conditions it enjoys, it may form one or two large tubers or many much smaller ones that spread to cover a wide area. Ideal conditions are fairly dry, partly shaded, well-drained areas, like a rockery.

For outdoor hardiness look out for Cyclamen coum which has the classic heavily marbled leaves but with reddish undersides. The flowers are tiny too and may be white, pale pink or tending towards magenta and they are highly resistant to frost – I’ve even had them encased in ice in the early morning and still perky when it melts at midday.

Also worth looking out for is the pictured variety, Cyclamen hederifolium which used to be sold as Cyclamen neapolitanum – this plant has leaves that die away in spring and don’t appear again until the flowers are already on show. The flowers range from white to pink but without the bright magenta and once they have gone over, their stems curl up like the springs inside a ballpoint pen, very pretty!

Labels: autumn colour, autumn flowers, cyclamen

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:41 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Being a girlie gardener

Today I had a visitor who stood and watched me as I prepared to type this blog. It’s a bit disconcerting to be observed while blogging. In fact he put me off so much I stopped and made a cup of tea instead. We stared out of the kitchen window into the garden.

“Your garden’s very pink, he said.

“No it’s not.”

But when he pointed out that just about everything that’s in flower was indeed, a bit ‘pink’ I couldn’t argue with him. We walked around and looked at the cyclamen and the nerines, and most of the Japanese anemones are pink (there are a few white ones though) and the rock rose is definitely pink and this thing, which is part of the potato family and whose name I don’t know because I got it in a lucky dip at a garden centre …

“That’s not pink,” I said, desperately. “That’s magenta!”

“Which is just a way of saying bright pink,” insisted my non-girlie visitor.

Now, partly this is due to seasonality – you won’t find an early spring flower that’s red for example. The only red spring blooms are polyanthus and tulips and neither of them are the first bloomers: early spring flowers are either purple or yellow. Summer is very strong on hot colours like reds and oranges, which continue through to the autumn with dahlias, for example, but once the leaves start to fall, you’re back to a different palate, usually pinks.

Even so, I’ve got to say he’s got a point – my garden is a bit like horticultural Barbie-land!

Labels: autumn colour, garden colour, garden flowers, pink flowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:54 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, September 20, 2008

Mushrooms in the garden

A 40 year old woman has died after eating poisonous wild mushrooms picked from a botanic garden in the Isle of Wight. Another woman is seriously ill in hospital. They are believed to have tasted the fungi, which has been tentatively identified as the death cap, on Monday after the younger woman had collected them during a visit to Ventnor Botanical Garden the previous day.

This tragedy follows fast on the consumption of highly toxic mushrooms by the author Nicholas Evans (the Horse Whisperer) and his family. And it happens at a time when many of us are finding lots of mushrooms – or fungi as we should properly call them – in our lawns and borders. So we can safely bet that the next couple of years will be great for growing our own mushrooms, but please, invest in a kit via mail order, don’t take risks with wild spore!

You need:

• Mushroom growing kit
• Well-rotted compost or preferably, horse manure
• A bucket, trough or other container

Just spread the sterilised grain (which is coated with mushroom spores) over the compost and you're away. It can take up to a year to see any results, although with the current weather conditions, most people seeding a mushroom bed now can expect a spring harvest as long as they water their container well afterwards and keep it in a garage or a sheltered spot outdoors, moving it into the warmth in winter.

Most people will get two to three 'flushes' of mushrooms - producing up to a couple of pounds of mushrooms each time before the food supply in the compost is exhausted.

Labels: autumn tasks, garden mushrooms

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:06 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Japanese Anemones

There’s nothing like these plants for the autumn garden – along with nerines, which usually come out later in the season, they give a combination of height and colour that can’t be beaten. Oddly, my nerines are in full flower already, which is very early – normally I wouldn’t expect them to be opening for at least a fortnight.

Anyway, back to the Japanese anemones: the best ones have very clear subtle shades of purple, pink and white and rise gently on slender stems over the heads of shorter shrubs, so that they move in any breeze – despite their apparent fragility, they are quite wind and rain hardy, in my experience.

They are also not Japanese but Chinese! Apart from heavily soaked soil conditions they seem to cope with just about anything: chalk to heavy clay, whatever you’ve got, although they prefer damp, limy loam because they are an anemone and like woodland conditions and shaded or semi-shaded areas. Often they take a year or two to establish, so be patience and don’t crowd them with other plants, they will spread generously. They can be grown from root cuttings, so once they ‘go over’ beg some cuttings from your friends or share around your own bounty amongst your fellow gardeners.

Labels: autumn colour, autumn flowers, japanese anemone

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:12 AM 1 Comments

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Sunday, September 14, 2008

Best performing annual plant this year ...

Amaranthus caudatus, because it’s beautiful and because it has one of the most impressive sets of common names ever – the best known in the UK is Love-lies-bleeding, but it’s also known as pendant amaranth, tassel flower, velvet flower, foxtail amaranth, and quilete.

It’s a very simple annual, which grows easily and nearly all parts of the plant, but especially the leaves and seeds, are edible and have been used as staple ingredients in South American and across India. The plant grows anything from three to eight feet in height, and produces the best tassels in full sun, but it can cope with both humid and arid conditions. In less clement climates, plants can be started indoors in early spring and transplanted outdoors after the last frost but I just chucked my seeds onto a patch of raked soil in May and they seem to have thrived on my general neglect!

Labels: amaranthus, annual plants from seed, love-lies-bleeding

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:28 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, September 5, 2008

Favourite garden places

For the past few days there has been something missing from my pond – the dog! Until the rainy weather came, Falco spent nearly every hour of nearly every day sitting on the ‘bridge’ which is actually more of a platform that crosses the pond: it’s meant to provide shade for the fish, rather than a route from one side to the other, but Falco thinks it’s the nearest thing to heaven a dog can have.

The reason I’m so aware he’s missing from his favourite spot is that I’ve spent quite a lot of time under an umbrella, by the pond, looking at a patch of garden that currently is a bit of hard-standing for a barbecue, a home to two compost bins and the nesting place of our currant and blackcurrant bushes. And the reason I’m lurking in my own garden in the rain is that I’m going to be given a greenhouse for my birthday!

There are still some issues of course, like what kind of greenhouse, because they can be constructed from so many different materials. Polyethylene ones are just sheets of plastic over a frame – they are cheap to purchase, but need re-covering every two years and in winter are prone to wind or snow damage: wind damage rules these out for us. Corrugated acrylic sheets are said to be not much better because they crack and discolour - polycarbonate materials are more durable (and much more expensive) but I think that’s the route we’re going to take. Glass is the best option but costs a fortune – I’m sure we can’t afford it.

Then there is the frame: cedar and teak last forever, especially if you oil them, ideal, but are very expensive, while ordinary softwood looks just as good but has a very limited life. Aluminium does not rust, but isn’t exactly attractive and one issue with cheaper greenhouses is that the bolts and screws holding the structure together steel which does rust, so we need to pick carefully and if we can’t inspect the interior, ask questions of the retailer to be sure what we’re getting.

The only thing that has already been decided is the siting – a greenhouse needs an open area in full sun because while it’s easy to shade a small greenhouse if the sun is too strong, it’s almost impossible to improve the light entering a greenhouse in shade.

And of course, I have to decide what I’m going to grow in it! Heirloom tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers for sure, but I also fancy some Hedychiums for their scent and a lime tree … and I’m sure that as the weeks pass I’ll think of more and more I can do ‘under glass’ and the greenhouse will become my favourite place just as the pond is for Falco.

Labels: all year gardening, garden fruit, garden ponds, greenhouse, hedychium, tomatoes

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:47 AM 0 Comments

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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Garden woes for August

Botanists and phenologists (which is the posh name for people who look at seasonal environmental events like flowering, seeding, migrating etc) have announced that our unseasonably miserable summer hasn’t just been bad news for gardeners – we had already noticed the problem of course, you should see the blight on my tomatoes for a start!

Fungi has gone off like rockets, as I’m sure many people have noticed – there are mushrooms in my garden but also across the grass verges on local roads, areas that usually have too much footfall for the spores to fruit successfully. Wood cranesbill and wisteria have flowered twice within a few months apparently, although not in my garden! The problem is that the strange weather conditions seem to have tricked the plants into believing it is spring again. But whatever it does to us: killing plants or causing infections to spread, raising the prices of certain foods or limiting the flowering or ripening of garden produce, it’s much, much worse for the flora. And where the flora is affected, the fauna suffers too.

Some of the country's best loved animals and birds are already paying the price - moth numbers have been worryingly low and the early berry season also suggests that the crops, which provide vital food for animals and birds in the lead up to the cold winter months, may disappear too early.

So you might want to think about feeding the birds this autumn and winter, and setting up some moth homes and beetle corners, to try and get our rare native wildlife through the starving months ahead.

Labels: august berries, august flowers, august fungi, garden august

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:05 AM 1 Comments

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