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Category: Gardening

General gardening tips and hints

Taking Delphinium Cuttings

Taking Delphinium Cuttings

delphiniums-skipton-richard-sara

The towering spires or spikes of Delphinium are to be admired from near and far. How much better if you can increase your stock of a favourite plant by ‘Vegetative Propagation Methods’.

Method 1
April is a good time to take a cutting from the base of the plant below soil level. Cut out a sturdy 3-4 inch shoot that is about pencil thickness. Too thin and the shoot wont make a sturdy plant and to thick and it will be hard to root. Make sure you get low down taking a shaving of the old root with the cutting. Failing to do this will encourage a rapid but spindly growth that wont last the summer. A bit of hormone rooting powder can be used but the cutting should root quite easily. Pot on or plant out when healthy and strong growth is showing.

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Garden with a Bird Bath

Garden with a Bird Bath

bird-bathsource

A bird bath can be popular with our feathered friends and be a focal point in the garden. If creating a new bed, for plantings, that will have a bird bath as a centre piece locate the bath just off centre. Work into the soil suitable compost  about 4 inches of garden compost will give the bed a good start.

Plant suggestions

  • Use plants of varied heights and colours and bear in mind you are trying to attract native bird species.
  • For the back of the bed try a Persian lilac growing upto 10 feet. Syringia Persica has fragrant mauve flowers.
  • If there is a wall or sturdy fence try Virginia creeper Parthenocissus tricuspidata with it’s red autumn leaves and hiding place for the birds.
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Tips for Growing Acer – Japanese Maples

Tips for Growing Acer – Japanese Maples

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Acer trees and shrubs can be spectacular from Spring through Autumn due to the leaf colours and patterns.  This Acer Palmatum Taylor’s leaves with pink foliage will last through summer turning into rich Autumn colours at the backend. It will grow to about 10 feet in 10 years and is suitable for even a small garden.

Top Low Growing Acers

  • The cut leaf  maple Acer Palmatum Dissectum is an umberella shaped shrub with unusually shaped fresh green leaves. The leaves develop a red stripe in the Autumn. The name gives away a description of the shrub – Palmatum refers to the 5 segments of the leaf like the palm of your hand. Disscetum indicates that the leaves are disected into thin often feathery shapes.
  • Acer Pamatum Orange Dream is a slow growing Japanese maple with vivid orange spray foliage which turns golden yellow in Autumn.
  • Acer Palmatum Atropurpureum is a slow growing purple leaved variety grown for both the colour and the attractive shape of the tree. There is a Dissectum variety Garnet which combines the leaf colour with the feathery foliage.
  • Beni Maiko is a dwarf Acer Palmatum growing to  2-3 feet in 10 years and can be kept in a large pot or used in even a small garden. The scarlet leaves progressively turn dark red and green.

Top Tips for Acers

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Topical Gardening Tips – Mid-Spring

Topical Gardening Tips – Mid-Spring

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Mid Spring Garden

Garden waste composts best and quickest in a hot heap. Cover the heap and insulate the sides if practical. Mix hard and soft waste if you have mainly grass clippings tear up some cardboard or newspaper to avoid a soggy mess.

Keep sowing summer bedding indoors. Half hardy annuals can be sown out doors in May. Prick out seedlings as soon as they are large enough to handle.

Start a weed suppression routine. Hoe out any weeds or hand remove any pernicious perennials. Mulch to suppress and avoid weeds.Spot spray weed killer on hard to get at weeds in paving and wall cracks. Treat patios and paths with algicide or moss killer to remove slippy green paths.

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Colour of Spring

Colour of Spring

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What is your favourite colour combination? 
Cerise, Shocking Pink scarlet and yellow seems a bit off colour to me.

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Your second choice includes a white Hyacinth perhaps Carnegie or Aiolos
A bit better at keeping the colour temperature in check.

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Which Parks Gardener thought up this combination?
My kids would call it yucky and I think that is polite.
Think about colour schemes when putting plant close to one another.
The stripped greens of newly mown grass have a lot to commend them.

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Honesty Seedheads & Flowers

Honesty Seedheads & Flowers

everlasting-flower

Honesty also called Lunaria annua has beautiful purple flowers in April and May that are one of the few early nectar attractions for butterflies. In spite of it’s Latin name, Honesty is actually a biennial putting down a long tap root in it’s first year. This is why you seldom see it for sale in garden centres.

Gardeners Tips Growing Honesty

  • Honesty will also grow in shade and the seed heads make a great Autumn and Winter attraction as the coin shaped seed heads shed an outer skin and become luminous white moon shapes like tracing paper.
  • The growth is stiff and entirely self-supporting, a central stem branching out freely and bearing abundance of small flowers like Wallflowers.
  • Honesty should be massed with say a dozen plants in a group to give the best effect. The white variety is well worth growing, the colour being very pure and luminous in quality but purple is the main colour.
  • Honesty self sows quite freely and young seedlings can be transplanted with care being take of the tap root. Collect the seeds in October as the husks are shed but leave the papery head.
  • Seed heads can be cut, hung to dry in Autumn and used as dried flowers in floral arrangements. They look good with Christmas arrangements.
  • Most are anything but nondescript, and there are some strains with richly coloured flowers of a vibrant deep purple with a hint of magenta.
  • Lunaria annua is a biennial belonging to the brassica  family and will grow in most soil, if it looks unhappy try a bit of lime. When it is happy, which is most of the time since it generally chooses for itself where to live, it can develop into a robust, branching plant, 2ft tall and 1.5ft across.
  • Unfortunately it has no scent. Although a biennial, with each plant living only two years, when it is established it will go on forever, becoming a feature of the late spring garden. When left to its own devices it often turns up in unexpected places.
  • There is a perennial honesty Lunaria rediviva that is an exceptionally beautiful plant. It has a simple grace with yard-high stems clothed in similar fresh green heart-shaped leaves. Its cross-shaped flowers are pale lavender and sweetly scented.
  • Honesty develops thick storage roots, almost like tubers, and, in common with other brassicas, has deep tap roots.
  • Avoid overfeeding and do not use manure Honesty does best without pampering.

Read Honesty is the best policy

Hydrangea Houseplants

Hydrangea Houseplants

pink-hydrangea

Hydrangeas make good houseplants flowering in spring from a shop bought plant. Hydrangea have been successfully grown as blooming house plants for many years. They are colourful full of flower and relatively trouble free if you give them a good drink of water regularly. Keep plants cool between 50-60 ° F when in flower but give them some good light.

Indoor Hydrangea Tips

  • Buy a new plant each year and plant the old one in the garden when it has finished flowering. It may not be hardy enough to survive but getting it to reflower indoors will mean you have to emulate the seasonal conditions it would expect in the wild.
  • To buy a good hydrangea for indoors look for a plant with just a few blooms showing color and lots of buds still developing. The plant should fill out the pot with healthy dark green leaves.

hydrangea-buds …

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Simple Gardening Tips for Spring

Simple Gardening Tips for Spring

Foliar Feeding

  • Plants can take up food through their green leaves and stems. Dilute liquid feed by twice the recommended volume of water to avoid burning the leaves. Spray a good quantity on to  the leaves later in the afternoon is more effective. Bulbs like Crocus and Daffodills benefit as they are building up reserves for next year. Stressed and weak plants will probably pick up after a foliar feed  but thick leaved plants are less receptive to feeding this way.

Frost Damage

  • Hardy shrubs that have had the leaves browned off by frost damage will recover all being well. My hydrangeas have been frosted despite leaving the old mopheads on for a bit of winter protection. I will trim the brown very lightly to avoid damage to the buds. Other shrubs can be trimmed back to the healthy shoots or leaves but if another heavy frost is likely I would leave the trimming job or protect with horticultural fleece. My Pieris japonica have been damaged but the new red leaves should still perform.
  • It is still too early to sow half-hardy annuals as even cold weather will kill them off. Hardy annuals should be acclimatised to cold and wind gradually. This gardeners call  ‘hardening off’ and is done by bringing plants into exposed areas during the day and moving them indoors or protecting them at night.

Staking and Supporting …

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Combinations of Plants

Combinations of Plants

plant-combinations

Some plants look right together because the gardener planned it that way. In my case happy accidents are often the cause of plant combinations that work well. In yet other gardens it is the growing conditions that are the over riding factor that create the overall effect.

The Flag Iris above are in the process of being colonised by the small Euphorbia which spreads rapidly by creeping roots. In spring I am happy that the red shoots contrast with the lime-green, sword shaped leaves of the Iris so I plan to leave them until the Iris flower. By then the dark blue flowers will not need a red leaved under planting so they may have to come out. These Iris also need to be split as the rhizomes are old and each piece only produces one stem. I will do this splitting a few weeks after flowering and plant pieces of root and throw away the old woody center.

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Vegetables for a Drought

Vegetables for a Drought

Book Cover

When you plan your crops you have no idea what the weather will be in summer when your vegetables need water the most. Herbs, plants from the Mediterranean and grey leaved plants tend to withstand drought conditions better than most. Some vegetables once established can be more tolerant than others and if you expect low rainfall this summer give them a try.

Drought Tolerant Vegetables

  • Leeks need to be ‘puddled in’ when planting in a hole but from then on  they will send down strong roots in search of moisture. Earthing up for blanching by drawing soil around stems helps preserve some moisture.
  • Root vegetables like Parsnip and Carrot can survive dry conditions as long as they get well established
  • Onions  will tolerate low rainfall but I find it encourages sets to run to seed. …

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