Innholdsfortegnelse for 25-Sep-2021 i Amateur Gardening

“The health benefits of gardening for us amateurs is well known, but what is less known is how a career in gardening can change the lives of people from disadvantaged backgrounds and those who are looking to restart their lives after prison or addiction problems. ‘Future Gardeners’ is a project by The Worshipful Company of Gardeners in which people between 18 and 60 can be sponsored to attend a gardening course with the aim of it leading to a job in horticulture. It has been a great success, and it says much about how gardening can have a positive effect in so many ways. You can find out more on page 6.”…

AN initiative that was launched to give underprivileged youngsters in London an understanding of horticulture has now gained charitable status and is offering jobs and life skills to hundreds of people in the capital. Future Gardeners was established five years ago by the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, a City of London Livery Company, and the environmental and volunteering charity the Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST) to encourage youngsters into horticultural careers. Schoolchildren were the initial target, but the scheme now attracts men and women aged between 18 and mid-60s, from all backgrounds and ethnicities. With support from the Greater London Authority, Chelsea Physic Garden, the Royal Parks Guild, Grosvenor Estates, Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, the RHS and many other organisations and companies, Future Gardeners runs three 12-14-week courses a year,…

RULES for good plant cultivation remain much the same, but some plants are now cultivated for specific use, and I worry that gardeners are not being given enough guidance in this area. One example would be petunia and garden chrysanthemums: visiting the Kerleys in Cambridgeshire, I saw their latest Xanthe Series – small-flowered autumn chrysanthemums. They feature an arching habit specifically to suit growing in hanging baskets. Growers just pot up rooted cuttings – no pinching, no disbudding. These new introductions naturally grow in a semi-pendula and rounded shape to suit baskets. When choosing petunias, advice will be needed at the point of purchase so as not to buy a specialist plant that may not suit its intended use. The Kerleys offer nine distinct series of petunia, with each one…

IT’S been a dodgy summer here, looking back, but whenever we manage to sit outside for a cup of tea, we seem to be assailed by mechanical noises. Given that we’re down a no-through lane and live in a village of only 200 people, that’s amazing. The worst culprit is the strimmer. They make a high-pitched whine and they go on, and on and on… Even I can hear them with my less-than-adequate ears. My other affliction is numbers. I can’t do them, so when I told the Best Beloved that I wanted to put the strimmer in Room 303, he quickly corrected me: “That’s a road, Val – I think you mean Room 101.” For those of you who haven’t seen the programme, three celebrities get to banish their…

Q We love fresh broad beans and attempted to grow some earlier this season by buying plants. They went into good soil, but didn’t seem to take off and were attacked by blackfly. I’ve heard about autumn plantings. Do they work, and when do we sow? Monica Huggins, Camberwell, London A Broad beans don’t yield a massive crop for the space they take up, but the tenderness and flavour of young beans harvested from pods picked at precisely the best moment is worth the effort. Thrown into lightly salted boiling water, they cook in minutes. Mealier beans can be boiled, slipped out of their skins and mixed with olive oil, garlic and herbs as a hummus-like spread. In spring, broad beans grow fast, and buying young plants in good condition…

AS summer slowly slides into the colder months it’s time to bring some new pops of colour to the garden. The early bird gets the worm, so get your autumn and spring bedding plants in now, while there is still a massive choice in garden centres and online. If planted pronto, when the soil is warm from summer and dampened by autumn showers, plants will have time to really get established and develop robust root systems before it gets cold. They will then enter dormancy and stop flowering and growing during the coldest months of the year, before surging back to life when the mercury rises and spring returns. Don’t be confused by terminology. Autumn and winter bedding is the same as spring bedding, an umbrella term used for plants…

WE gardeners love and nurture our more exotic summer flowers, the canna lilies, dahlias and gladioli, though sadly our climate rarely treats them with the same consideration. In many areas, the UK’s chilly winters kill off tender tubers, corms and bulbs, or they rot when left in soil that stays sodden and cold for months on end. If you have a warm, sheltered southern garden you may be able to leave tender tubers in the soil through winter, as long as they have a thick overcoat of mulch, straw or bark chips to keep out the worst of the cold. But in most areas, gardeners are advised to lift and store them somewhere dry and frost-free. Most should be lifted before the first frosts, though dahlias are left until sub-zero…

CORNFLOWERS have been beloved of humans for millennia; the dried remains of your standard blue ones were even found in the floral collar buried with the Pharaoh Tutenkhamum to garland the young ruler on his way to the afterlife. This week’s free seeds of Centaurea cyanus are for a much more contemporary variety that despite its rather misleading name, will look eye-catching in the garden and add an extra dimension to indoor arrangements. Cornflower ‘Black Ball’ isn’t black at all! Rather, it is a rich, dark claret and grows to 30in (75cm) with sturdy stems. Like all cornflowers, it is a hardy annual and can be sown now or saved until spring, though seeds that go in the ground in autumn generally produce larger, stronger and more floriferous plants the…

GROWING plump, crunchy apples to pick and eat straight off the tree is the epitome of living your best life in the garden, so how do we ensure this dream becomes a reality? With many enticing eating apple varieties maturing now, you might be tempted to plant some this winter, so let me help you. Aside from following my checklist on the following page, what else is there to know? The right space, the right shape While very dwarfing rootstocks (such as M27) will sound tempting on smaller plots, I have found M26 easier to manage as the slightly greater vigour gives the trees more ‘pep’, and they can still be pruned to keep them compact. With flowers opening in May and bees essential for pollination, shelter is key; blooms…

This week it’s: AS a fledgling gardener, one of my favourite late-summer border plants was Sedum spectabile (pronounced ‘spectah-b’lee’). Bees and butterflies go crazy for it, and it has red, pink and rustcoloured flowers for the front of a late summer border. I fell in love with all of the sedums, from those with large, umbrella-like flowerheads, to the tiny alpines in bright yellow, white and silver. Then the botanists split the sedums into not just three different genera, but also into numerous ‘clades’, ‘tribes’, ‘subdivisions’ and ‘sub-genera’, making it one of the most complex plant groups. Thanks guys! Along with the remaining sedums, we now have hylotelephium and the lesser known rhodiola. Let’s take a look… Hello there, hylo! SINCE 1977, many of my beloved sedums (including S. spectabile)…

HOW refreshing it is to read the news item (AG, 28 August) setting out some of the problems with peat-free compost and asking for comments. I have found in nearly all of the gardening literature I have read little or no constructive contributions of how to use peat-free compost. As an ordinary gardener with only a basic knowledge I have purchased numerous brands of peat-free compost from reputable suppliers and have found them as stated very inconsistent and many of very poor quality. In one case a third consisted of small pieces of sticks. In another case, when wetted the surface became caked so that it had to be broken up before further irrigation. In fact, in general, I was very disappointed when I used the peat-free compost compared to…

LIKE a marathon runner crossing the finishing line, your garden soil needs sustaining after a long summer of growing, and autumn is the perfect time to do so. There are several ways to revitalise soil after a busy summer. You can feed it with a general purpose fertiliser, though this is an expensive option, sow it with green manures, dig in lots of well-rotted manure or cover cleared ground with a generous layer of compost. I tend to favour using green manures and mulching using home made compost that is a combination of green kitchen peelings and well-mixed garden waste including grass cuttings, chopped prunings and other cuttings. Spread over the borders and around perennials now, itwillbreakdown through winter and be dragged under by worms, feeding soil and nurturing the…

I SAVED a friend a few bob the other night. He asked me which was the best blackcurrant variety, as he wanted to grow some to make loads of his own jam and juice. I said all were as good as each other, but it was most important to be sure he bought proper virus-free stock from a reputable source and never some cheaper, riskier offer. You really shouldn’t economise when buying plants that are going to be with you for years. It’s not like bedding plants, which are composted after a summer. Bushes and trees that under-perform will keep on doing so year after year… Even Anyway, he was off to get a half dozen plants so I asked if he would get one of each variety to see…

Q I’m starting to buy my spring bulbs and seeds, but we’ve recently got a kitten and I want to keep the garden safe for him. I’d like to plant pretty bright, warm colours of varying heights. What do you suggest? Helen Armitage, Baildon, Bradford A When planting spring-flowering bulbs that may harm your kitten if they chew them, I suggest that you avoid the following that could cause stomach upsets or even death: bluebells, daffodils, hyacinths, tulips, fritillaries, snowdrops, snowflakes (leucojum) and squill (scilla). I urge you not to grow lilies, which bloom in summer, for if cats ingest the pollen, it can be fatal. As for spring-flowering bedding plants, forget-me-nots, wallflowers and pansies are non-toxic and should not pose a threat, but I would avoid polyanthus and primroses.…

Some plants that can be propagated by hardwood cuttings ▪ Buddleja ▪ Cornus ▪ Deutzia ▪ Forsythia ▪ Platanus (London plane) ▪ Populus (poplar) ▪ Vitis (grape vine) ▪ Weigela ▪ Ribes (flowering and fruiting currants) ▪ Rosa (especially ramblers and species) ▪ Salix (willow) ▪ Symphoricarpos (snowberry) HARDWOOD cuttings are probably the easiest cuttings to take when you want to produce new plants. All you need is material from a suitable subject and a deep pot of compost or part of the garden where the cuttings can sit undisturbed while they root. Hardy woody plants are ideal for this type of cutting, and you need shoots of the current season’s growth that have started to turn brown. Ideally, select shoots that are about the thickness of a pencil and…

I LIKE to keep up with the times, but there are some changes I struggle with. The world’s bestselling chocolate bar, rebranded as ‘Snickers’ (31 years ago, would you believe?), will always be a Marathon to me. And asters – despite botanists splitting them up into Eurybia, Symphyotrichum and Doellingeria – will always be asters. Don’t get me wrong: distinguishing different parts of what is a diverse group of flowers is important. But if the botanical bigwigs want their new names to catch on then they shouldn’t really choose monikers that sound like Klingon swear words… New names or old, this is a plant with incredibly long handles. My favourite is a case in point, with a name that makes War and Peace look like a quick read. Now called…