Innholdsfortegnelse for 16-Jan-2021 i Amateur Gardening

“What effect has Covid-19 had on wildlife? The first lockdown had a positive impact on insects, and while the butterfly count was down, it may have been because of an unusually warm spring (see Val Bourne’s piece on page 14). What surprises me is Toby Buckland’s report (page 51) of deer moving into semi-urban areas because once-deserted hills are full of dog walkers! It’s amazing the effect that this virus has had — good and bad. Let’s hope it’s behind us soon…” Contact us: ■ Subscriptions: 0330 333 1113 ■ Editorial: 0330 3903732 ■ Email: amateurgardening@futurenet.com ■ Advertising: jessica.wong@futurenet.com…

AG once again proved it’s the cream of the crop when two of its writers bagged the top awards at gardening’s most prestigious ceremony. The Garden Media Guild annually hands out accolades in recognition of the year’s best garden writing, photography and blogging. This year, in the face of stiff opposition, AG fruit and veg guru Lucy Chamberlain was named Practical Gardener of the Year, and our wildlife columnist Val Bourne was hailed Journalist of the Year. Speaking about Lucy’s articles, the judges said: “Our winner is undeniably hands-on, and their years of experience came across in their column that was packed with personality and advice.” Let’s make 2021 a brilliant year! Lucy said: “I’m absolutely honoured and delighted to have been announced as the GMG Practical Journalist of the…

MID-JANUARY days always feel like the coldest and dankest of the year. Christmas has gone and even though the light is lasting for a little longer each day, there’s a general feeling of slump in the air. I use this time to concentrate on the trees and shrubs that create the framework of the garden. While they are dormant they can be moved and most deciduous varieties (those that lose their leaves in autumn) can also be pruned. Having said that, relocating a tree or shrub is more likely to be successful if it has only been in the ground for a few years. Anything over five years and it is harder for the plant to re-establish. Winter is also a great time for adding new trees and shrubs, including…

NOW, depending on skills, efforts, soil and region, you may or may not be able to grow some crops successfully enough to make these tips worthwhile. Trouble is, you really won’t know until you try! Still, here are some suggestions to save you some wasted efforts. Potatoes: in the west, go for blight resistance, and in the south east, drought resistance. No crop is harder to fail totally with, and few will respond as well to good treatment, but in the first years on new ground, pests can ruin your crop, so wait a while before planting many. Tomatoes also seldom fail, but only thrive in warm, sunny places, as do most squash and pumpkins It’s also hard to fail with radishes, broad beans, Jerusalem artichokes and courgettes, but be…

ONE of the things that sustains me on a glum winter’s day is remembering the butterflies I saw last year. I’ve always loved butterflies, and I’m proud to say that my granddaughter Ellie, now almost 14, is wild about them, too. Coronavirus saw off our family trips last year, as we usually decamp with a picnic and Ellie’s dog if we think we’ll see a rare butterfly nearby. This year we’re off to the Fens in search of swallowtails in August – we hope! Sadly, as time goes on, more and more once common butterflies seem to be getting rarer, and that’s one of the reasons I’m a member of Butterfly Conservation (butterfly-conservation.org), a charity that helps butterflies and moths. Membership costs you less per month than one fancy cup…

I’VE always had a soft spot – albeit a cold one – for witch hazels (forms of hamamelis). In the depths of winter, when there is precious little other garden colour available, they produce their spidery, richly coloured flowers on otherwise bare branches. The earliest appear well before Christmas (as with Hamamelis virginiana), while the later ones will still be doing their thing in early March. As we are now slap bang in the witch hazel season, there is no better a time to look at some of their stories. ■ Because hamamelis bloom on bare branches, they will always benefit from a dark background: when lit by the winter sun, the flowers really stand out. Idiosyncrasy 1: the flower CLOSE up, the witch hazel flower is intriguing. Technically, each one…

Write to us: Letters, Amateur Gardening magazine, Pinehurst 2, Pinehurst Road, Farnborough Business Park, Farnborough, Hants GU14 7BF (please include your address). Email us: amateurgardening@futurenet.com Cosmos are a treasure MY husband subscribed to AG as a present for me this year, and each issue has been packed with advice and help for us in our garden, particularly as we spent so much more time in it due to Covid and, of course, lockdown. The free seeds were a real plus – and for the first time ever, I actually propagated some of the seeds. I still have many left, and looking forward to doing more. My first attempt was with the cosmos seeds. Wow! I really did not realise what a treasure these plants are for the garden; they have…

IN the world of gardening, few things are more satisfying than sorting out a long-standing niggling problem. The top end of one of the borders in our back garden had become thoroughly congested with perennials that had outgrown their space and were jostling for room. Matters haven’t been helped by a very invasive Japanese anemone that we have been trying to contain without overall success since we moved here eight years ago. It looks lovely in its place, but refuses to stay there and keeps snarling up the other plants and, thanks to a deeply spreading, root system is very difficult to remove. The whole site looked an absolute mess and grated every time I saw it, so one morning I grasped the nettle and sorted it out. My tasks…

POPULAR AG free seeds return next week for their 2021 run. In a departure from the norm, this year’s batch will include some veggie seeds in the form of Tomato ‘Sweet Baby’! Our seed choices are a bright and beautiful mix of annuals (hardy and half-hardy), biennials and perennials that will add colour and interest to your garden this summer and also, if sown in autumn, next year. We kick things off next week with black-eyed Susan ‘Susie Mixed’, a colourful climber with yellow and white flowers, each with a dramatic dark eye. Each week, Ruth will be writing about a particular variety and showing you how to sow them for the best results, either under cover or directly into your garden. As the weeks pass and your seeds germinate,…

I LOVE the sight of a vibrant summer garden packed with a mixture of plants and colours, perennials, grasses and annuals creating one beautiful whole. There isn’t much we can do with the perennials and grasses right now as they are quietly going about their winter dormancy, but we can make a start by sowing hardy annuals. Poppies, cornflowers, sweet peas, Cerinthe, nigella, calendula and poached egg plants are just some of the varieties that last for just one summer, though any will self-seed with abandon for future years. I like to start some undercover and some directly in the soil as they will germinate at different rates so you get a longer flowering season. You can sow indoors and bring on the seedlings under cover, starting them in trays…

IF you pruned your shrub roses back by one half to a third in autumn, now is the time to give them a really good chop. If you didn’t get round to pruning them earlier, they will certainly benefit from a hard pruning now. It may seem counter-intuitive to cut them right back but I promise you that if you do, they will throw out lots of healthy new shots next spring. I took my loppers and cut ours back to ankle height, removing all the old growth. I can see tiny new buds already forming on the stems beneath the cuts, and these will grow fast in spring. I also pruned a small container rose, shortening the main stems and cutting off the inward-facing shoots so it keeps a…

EVERYONE should experience that pivotal moment when fork prongs are pushed into the soil to unearth the first new potatoes of the season. For those of us growing them outside, this will usually happen in early or mid-June. However, you can force Mother Nature’s hand by growing in tubs under glass. So how do you go about getting the best early crops? Choosing ‘earlies’ is key – this is the name given to varieties that take 100 days to mature (whereas maincrops can take at least 130). These early varieties hit the ground running as soon as they enter warm soil. Warm soil is crucial – impatiently planting into cold earth won’t reap any rewards; at best, the tubers will sit in stasis until things warm up – at worst,…

IT pays to know your enemy. Most gardeners will be able to identify weeds like couch grass, horsetail, ground elder and the dreaded Japanese knotweed, but there are lots of pretty ornamental plants that will happily run riot in our gardens. One of my own big mistakes was sowing a few seeds of the attractive Welsh poppy (Papaver cambricum). It looks like an annual, but is a hardy perennial that self-seeds everywhere. I still get this wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing popping up more than 20 years since I started to grub it out. It loves my sandy, free-draining soil and self-seeds among clumps of other plants. The only sensible way to get rid of it is to seek out the palegreen foliage, then dig beside it deeply to lever out the long taproot.…

I WAS putting out the recycling when I came face to face with the stag. It stood right outside our front gate, bold as brass, its muscular body steaming in the misty morning air. Facing off – me in just boxers and a dressing gown à la Tony Soprano in the opening sequence of the HBO gangster classic – we both jumped almost out of our skins. I’d never seen anything like it, and judging by the spooked whites of the beast’s eyes, nor had the deer. For anyone unfamiliar with Buckland Castle, its battlements are closer to an urban bus route than the bucolic beauty of rolling parkland. In fact, it sits in the middle of a town, a deer-free dot-on-the-map since time before memory. When I told my…

1 Start by digging holes for the new divisions, lining them with compost and bone meal. Lift the parent plant by digging widely round its roots and set it on a board or plastic bag. 2 Split the plant with the blade of your spade or, if it’s really congested, a garden knife or even a pruning saw. Make sure every division has healthy roots and shoots. 3 Set the divisions in their holes, making sure there’s enough room to contain all the roots. Plant at the same depth as before and firm down the soil when backfilling. 4 Carefully tread around all the plantings to firm the soil thoroughly and then water well. Mulch the root area with well-rotted manure and keep the area clear of weeds. Four more…

CLIMBING French beans with angelic protection, purple carrots from Ancient Egypt and multicoloured sweetcorn are some of the unusual seeds available to gardeners this year. The Heritage Seed Library at Garden Organic has more than 800 unusual or endangered varieties and a new batch are now to sale. New to the list is climbing French bean ‘Angel’, which has an ‘angelic’ pattern. Legend suggests that during the First World War, a French priest planted the beans above church artefacts that he buried for safety. The beans his plants produced bore the mark of an angel when harvested, and they are said to have protected his treasure. Saved for generations to come Afghan purple carrots have a bright yellow core and were depicted on Egyptian cave paintings dating to around 2,000BC.…

CONTINUING my run-down of good homegrown vegetable choices from last week, using the EW King catalogue (but not exclusively), I’m going to start with parsnips. There are two contenders: the most popular commercial one is Parsnip ‘Panorama’ and the other, with very strong leaf growth for weed suppression, is Parsnip ‘Palace’ – both F1 hybrids with some canker disease resistance. There are three garden peas to consider. ‘Meteor’ is an early one to sow indoors and plant out to crop on compact stems before pea moth maggot attack and it is suitable for containers. ‘Greenshaft’ is a maincrop for quality, yield and taste, ideally grown under mesh to avoid pea moth, then for later sowing and cropping. Finally, ‘Terrain’ has good mildew disease resistance. “1.5kg of quality salad potato from…

AT the time of writing it is hard to predict where we will be when you read this. Will we be in a post-Christmas lockdown, and if so, what shape will it take? If we are still under Covid jurisdiction, hopefully getting out for walks will remain an option and if so, you may be lucky enough to spy flocks of this week’s bird. The lapwing, also known as the peewit because of the males’ mating call, is a bird of open spaces and farmlands. When I was young, they mustered in vast flocks that darkened the skies but now, thanks to intensive farming and other environmental changes, their numbers are in sharp decline and they are a Red List species, worth worrying about. Lapwings are handsome birds with iridescent…

John will reply personally to all your gardening questions every week Are hybrid tea rose cuttings successful? Q Is it easy to take a cutting from a rose? I have an ‘Alec’s Red’ rose in the front garden and would love a second in the back garden. Grant Rivers, via email A I would like to say that the beautiful hybrid tea rose ‘Alec’s Red’ can be propagated from cuttings. Sadly, unlike floribunda varieties, hardwood or softwood hybrid tea cuttings have less vigour and seldom root successfully. But, you may be lucky and it is worth trying to increase your variety from hardwood cuttings. They are normally taken in November, but it may not be too late now as the plant is still dormant. Select mature pencil-thick shoots 9in (23cm)…

Filling gaps in shared gardens Q I look after the communal garden for a block of flats, and we want to save work and money by filling border gaps with small permanent plants rather than seasonal bedding. What would look good instead? Miranda Doughan, Ipswich, Suffolk A Although bedding plants bring seasonal colour, they need care and attention to perform well. In addition to buying and planting in spring for summer colour, and again in autumn, there will be regular soil conditioning, weeding, watering and feeding to carry out. In any case, they say a change is as good as a rest, and perhaps the time has come to introduce a new look. Your choice of bedding plants will have been dictated by sun, shade, dry or moist soil, so…