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Category: Novice Gardeners Advice and Pointers

Learning to garden is part trial and error and part recommendation, learning and application of information.

What does Self-Sown Mean?

What does Self-Sown Mean?

Hesperis matronalis Alba

Seeds are self sown when seeds germinate and grow without the help of a gardener. The majority of plants grow, flower, get pollinated then set seeds. If seeds are then distributed naturally from the plant they are self sown.

What Plants are Self Sown

  • Weeds are among the most common self sown plants. I am thinking of Dandelions, Daisies and Buttercups but unfortunately there are lots more.
  • Before cultivated gardens anything not grown for food was probably ‘nature sown’ in that the plant did it for it’s self.
  • In a broadleaved wood you may get Oak trees growing from self sown acorns whilst Rowan and Elderberry are sown by birds eating berries and dropping seeds.
  • Garden flowers that are commonly self sown include Foxgloves, Nigella, Candytuft, Poppy, For-get-me-not and Nasturtium.

How are Seeds Self Sown

  • Wind distributes seeds that are very light or have a float mechanism like a Dandelion clock or Sycamore seed’s wings.
  • Some seeds are expressed from seed pods by firing. Pansy seedpods tighten up and the ripe seed is squirted a good distance from the parent plant.
  • Birds and animals including humans can be responsible for spreading seeds. Some stick to your clothing others are eaten but not digested like Tomatoes.

Top Ten Self-Sown Garden Plants

  1. This list was compiled with the help of Crocus whose first choice was Alchemilla mollis aka Lady’s mantle, good for edging sunny and shady borders and filling cracks in paving.
  2. Aquilegia ‘Nora Barlow’ or Columbines self-seed readily and are very easy to grow in sun or partial shade.

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Chionodoxa – Glory of The Snow

Chionodoxa – Glory of The Snow

Chindoxia

Chionodoxa are beautiful, hardy spring flowering bulbs that are easy to grow. They grow 6inches tall from small bulbs and have pretty star-shaped flowers with long narrow leaves. (Also spelled Chinodoxa and common name Glory of the Snow). The blossom has a central line on each of 6 petals.

Cultivation 0f Chionodoxa

They do well in most garden soil. Plant 2-3″ deep.
Chinodoxa are most effective when planted in clumps and allowed to naturalise.
Suitable for rockeries and growing in pots.
Flowers lasts for 3-4 weeks, after which both the flowers and the foliage die back.

Chinodoxa Varieties

Chinodoxa Lucilliae is widely available and flowers bright blue
Chinodoxa Luciliae Alba is a clear white with star shaped flowers in March.
Chinodoxa  Forbesii Pink Giant produces a wealth of pink flowers.
Chinodoxa Forbesii is bright blue with a white centre.

Chinodoxia Alba

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Help with January Gardeners Jobs

Help with January Gardeners Jobs

The new year gets gardeners all enthused but it is also a time to show patience. The gnomes wont rush to help you anytime soon Hi-ho.

Helpful Tips

  • Beware experts – book learning may not translate into a better garden.Most experts make me worry.
  • Worry less about experience. Applied experience as a result of your own gardening is better than the secondhand variety.
  • Maslov’s hierarchy of needs applies to garden plants as much as gardeners. The basic needs of food, water then shelter in an appropriate home need to be taken care of first. No need to rush into being an exotic all knowing gardener.

Guardians of the Mint

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jobs left from Last Year

  • Clean pots, ornaments and seed trays, insulate outdoor taps and do those maintenance jobs you have avoided.
  • Build compost heaps, raised beds and hard landscaping when weather permits.
  • In dry weather treat wooden furniture and structures.

Plant Matters

  • Prune soft fruit bushes and apple/pear trees.
  • Force rhubarb by covering with a bucket filled loosely with straw.
  • Sow alpine seeds and plant winter flowering clematis cirrosa or napaulensis.
  • Check over wintering tubers, cold greenhouse plants and pinch out the tops of sweet peas to get bushy well rooted plants.
  • Prune grape vines before the sap rises to avoid bleeding.

Crops

  • Keep taking the green and look after the sprouts.
  • Bring hyacinth bulbs indoors for scent and flowering.
  • Gather leeks and root veg roughly clearing the ground.
Month by Month Gardening for Guru & Novice

Month by Month Gardening for Guru & Novice

Book Cover

The Royal Horticultural Society produce many books and this one, RHS Gardening Month by Month by Ian Spencer contains over 1,300 seasonal tasks. Covering tasks for every part of the garden, expert plant advice and lists of star plants from January to December it is a great confidence booster. When you have finished those tasks it will be time to start a new year!

Whether you are a green-fingered guru or are just starting out enjoy 12 months of successful gardening. With help on what to do when to ensure your plants are well cared for and your garden blooms all year round.
Easy-to-follow, this guide not only tells you what to do when, but shows you how to do it.
You only need to browse and not follow slavishly.

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Plant Hardiness Ratings

Plant Hardiness Ratings

You want your plants to survive our British climate so it is worth understanding the hardiness ratings. Plant hardiness is based on the lowest temperature that a plant can normally withstand during  winter.

Categories of Hardiness

  • Hardy plants are those capable of coping with temperatures as low as -15º C.
  • Frost-hardy plants tolerate temperatures down to -5º C
  • Half hardy plants should survive in temperatures above zero.
  • Frost tender plants may be at risk below 5º C.

Hardiness Zones

  • The USA is so large and covers many different climates that it relies on Hardiness zones for horticulture and gardening.
  • These hardiness zones are geographically defined areas where temperature  will dictate what plant life is capable of growing.
  • Zone 1 is -50º C,   Zone 8 equates to -7º C   and Zone  10 is zero.
  • England is generally in zones 7 – 10 Scotland is cooler and Ireland warmer due to the warming effect of the gulf stream.

Plan Your Hardy Garden

  • Frost will run or fall down slopes and collect in ‘frost pockets’. Be careful what plants you put at the bottom of slopes.
  • Frost on young buds may not hurt but a rapid thaw caused by spring sunshine probably will. Camellias get frost burn and loose their buds if facing an easterly rising sun.
  • Your garden will have a series of micro climates so map out those areas that are suitable for special plants.
  • Allow your plants to acclimatise. Sudden drops in temperature can be more deadly than cold.
  • Be aware of heat hardiness as some plants will not survive hot temperatures.
  • Fertilizer hardiness is an issue not fully understood so watch out for sufferers.

Tactics of Hardy Plants

  • Hardy herbaceous plants allow the foliage to totally die back in autumn. The roots remain viable under the soil and regrow in spring.
  • Some hardy plants allow the stems and leaves to fall on the root crown to create a warming mulch until next spring.
  • Sappy growth is a target for frost so hardy plants stop growing in summer allowing the twigs to toughen up. Do not feed plants with high nitrogen feed in late summer if you want them to remain hardy.
  • Trees and shrubs take the sap back down into the plant and branches so that twigs are too dry to be damaged if they freeze.
  • Plants will grow less well and be prone to winter injury if the soil is heavy, wet, of low pH or low fertility, or in general not suited to the plant.
  • Some plants grow more sugars in summer to sustain them through cold winters.
  • Thermal insulation from snow cover helps plants survive normally deadly winter temperatures

The Hardy Plant Society

  • The Hardy Plant Society is a UK charity that was formed to foster interest in Hardy Plants.
  • The Society informs and encourages the novice gardener.
  • There are 40 regional groups so you can join one near you.
  • They have specialist societies for Geraniums, Peony, Pulmonaria, Variegated plants and Ranunculaceae

Sources of further information

It is hard to address the ‘question asked by everyone with ambitions to grow hardy and semi hardy tropical plants in the UK’.

The British Fuchsia Society has an official list of fuchsia plants that are capable of being over wintered in the garden

Easier Gardening as You Age

Easier Gardening as You Age

Expert gardeners can spend 50 years learning, sometimes just about one species or family and then they die!

You are never to old to start gardening, nor are you too old to learn easier and simpler ways to enjoy your gardening.
Bending and kneeling may get a bit harder as you age but there are ways to overcome these restrictions like padded kneelers with good handles.

Tools as You Age

  • You are not going to double dig acres of ground so get a spade to suit. A small stainless steel blade will not over tax the muscles but still get most jobs done at a steady pace.
  • I have very useful forks and a trowel on long handles. They are easy to obtain and save your back. You can also fashion your own dibbers and gadgets
  • A two wheeled barrow is lighter for pushing than a traditional one wheeler.
  • Use large pots and containers to reduce watering and put them on casters for moving around.

Book Cover
The Illustrated Practical Guide to Gardening for Seniors: How to Maintain Your Outside Space with Ease Into Retirement and Beyond by Patty Cassidy from Amazon

Easier Gardening as You Age

  • This new American book shows how easy it is for seniors to carry on gardening, into and way beyond retirement.
  • It looks at different kinds of homes and the gardens they provide, assessing the location, local climate and soil type and evaluating problems such as arthritis and loss of balance.
  • The book also outlines the importance of taking care of your body, summarizing the safety issues, what to wear, warm-up exercises and equipment to make the garden easy to access for unsteady feet or wheelchairs.
  • Included is a directory that profiles the many planting choices available, each with a difficulty rating and a hardiness category.
  • Gardening for Seniors is packed with projects, garden plans and step-by-step sequences.
  • Easier gardening will appeal to active gardeners in their early retirement through to those with more limited abilities, showing how, by adapting garden activities and the tools employed, the joy of gardening will remain undiminished.

Plants and Planting as You Age

  • Avoid fast growing shrubs that need pruning and regular spraying. I prefer small rhododendrons to roses for this reason.
  • Aim at your senses placing plants where you will get the best reaction from those you have in full working order.
  • Design and implement your gardening to impress others and they will stop and talk. Easier gardening can still recognise you are up for a challenge despite your age
Funs, Puns, Quips and Snips for gardeners

Funs, Puns, Quips and Snips for gardeners

Gardening is no Laughing matter, the joke is usually on the gardener

Naughty Gardeners Quips
There was a young man from Australia
on his bottom he painted a dahlia
the heat of the ball
caused the petals to fall
and the scent was a bit of a failure

What is long and thin, covered in skin,
red in parts and goes in tarts?
Rhubarb

‘I think the answer lies in the soil’ Arthur Fallowfield the man who put the sex in Sussex but left Scunthorpe alone.

Clean Gardeners (I don’t believe it)
What is the difference between bogies and broccoli? Kids wont eat broccoli

The snowman asked can you smell carrots?
Does okra come from Okrahoma
What is a vampire’s favorite fruit? A: A neck-tarine
What is orange and sounds like a parrot? a carrot

The older the better unless you are a banana
Are 2 banana skins a pair of slipper
What is green in the morning, yellow in the afternoon and brown in the evening? another banana

Going to the Flicks
Who framed Roger Raddish,
20,000 leeks under the sea,
Butch celery and the sunflower kid,
The lawn ranger,
Quatermass and the Pip,
The magnificent five-a-day,
Snow White and the 7 Dwarfbeans,
Okrahoma,
Rocky soil II,

Garden Jargon & Terms

Garden Jargon & Terms

Top Topiary

What is a Tree or Shrub

There are no hard and fast horticultural rules for these perennial plants. Trees are generally larger than shrubs and bushes.

  • A tree is a woody plant that produces a single trunk and an elevated head of branches. Small trees are defined in the UK as 15-30 feet tall whilst large trees are over 60 feet tall.
  • A shrub is a woody plant which branches from the base or near the ground with no obvious trunk hence the term shrubbery.  Large shrubs are over 10′ but less than 15′,  medium 6-10′, small 3-5′ and dwarf and prostrate under 2′.
  • A bush is a shrub with stems of moderate length and is smaller or more compact than a shrub. Common parlance has currants, gooseberries and roses as bushes
  • Cordons, Espalier, Pyramids and Fans are tree or shrub shapes created by training and pruning.Topiary is pruning and shaping to a shape of the gardeners chosing.

Colour bed

What is an Herbaceous Plant …

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Growing Aubretia in Blue and Purple

Growing Aubretia in Blue and Purple

Aubretia

Aubretia is available in many colours of blue through to the deepest purples. Reddish tinges help create the pinker varieties but it is the blues and mauves which really catch the eye.

  • Aubretia will tumble happily from cracks in walls, creep across rockeries, and crawl through the front of mixed borders.
  • Aubretia forms dense mats of evergreen foliage with a profusion of spring blooms, these little plants thrive in reasonably poor soils with a toughness that belies their beauty.
  • The leaves are a grey green and are not unsightly but cut back hard after flowering to promote a fresh flush of growth and maintain its compact form.
  • Aubretia is perennial and will spread for upto 24 inches at a low height of 2-3 inches.
  • Plant in any reasonably drained fertile soil and will spread naturally by seed. Aubretia is quite hardy.
  • Aubretia is also know and sold as Purple Rock Cress and Aubretia deltoides.

Aubretia plants and seeds are available from Thompson Morgan.  Once established you will get many years of happy spring  flowering.

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Growing Year Around Pansies

Growing Year Around Pansies

purple pansy

The smiling face of a pansy greets the gardener during most season of the year.
Pansy is a thoughtful flower as thoughtful is what the name Pansee means in French. In the wild form it is tricoloured and often called Heartsease and is a member of the Viola family.
There are many varieties to choose from including 46 on our T&M list below.

Growing Pansy

  • Great and quick results can be achieved from plug plants or seedlings.
  • Treat as annuals or biennials even though they may survive longer.
  • From seed, sow late winter/spring or mid-late summer 1.5mm deep in good seed compost excluding light as darkness helps them germinate.
  • Germination usually takes 14-21 days at 19-24C no warmer or germination suffers.
  • When seedlings are large enough to handle, transplant and grow cool.
  • Gradually acclimatise to outdoor conditions for 10-15 days before planting out after all risk of frost.
  • Prefers sun or part shade in borders or containers .
  • The flowers are edible and useful to colour a salad.
  • Summer sowings of winter flowering pansies should be  planted out in autumn or early spring.

Useful Links
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