Innholdsfortegnelse for 12-Mar-2022 i Amateur Gardening

“For the last few weeks, I have been experiencing the joy and wonderment of seeing my daffodils rise from the earthly slumber and burst into bloom. It’s strange that when their time is up and they regress into the ground, I am never entirely certain they will return. Utter nonsense, of course, but somehow their reappearance comes as a hugely welcome surprise. I guess that is the magic of plants, and in particular spring. It’s funny how much it can lift our spirits to see everything come back to life, especially as the garden has for the most part been visually dormant for such a long time. The garden has come alive again, and we have so much to do!…

JUST over ten years ago, busy lizzie (impatiens) plants across the country were wiped out by a disease that most of us had never heard of. Impatiens Downy Mildew (IDM) was first found in Britain in 2003 but it had been kept under control by the use of fungicides. Resistance to fungicide However, the mildew adapted, developed a resistance to the fungicide, and the result was that in 2011 busy lizzies in gardens, parks and town centre hanging baskets were wiped out. “The UK Impatiens market, estimated to be in excess of £40m a year, contracted by 80% leaving home gardeners with a huge loss of this great garden favourite,” explained Stuart Lowen, Marketing Manager of BallColegrave who supply impatiens seed and plugs to commercial growers. The mail order companies…

THIS week’s free seeds are enough to make anyone sit up and take notice. Zinnia ‘Jazz’ are half hardy annuals that pack a massive punch of colour with their large flowers in vivid shades of pink, orange and purple. They are bushy plants that grow to 30in (75cm) and are suitable for borders and containers. They also last well in vases after they have been cut. They are also popular with pollinators, which will help the other plants around your gardens. Because they are half-hardy annuals it is still a little early to sow them directly in a flower bed, so I have split my pack in half. The first lot I have sown in a pot and am germinating them on a light windowsill. The rest will be sown…

WHEN it comes to growing spuds for roasting, boiling, mashing, chipping or baking, bulk is definitely the name of the game. So how do you guarantee superb quality and yields? The right spots for spuds Assign your potatoes to a sunny, open spot – being tender, they enjoy warmth while good airflow will deter the humidity that encourages late blight (see page 20). Unlike many veggies, a slightly acid soil is preferred, so don’t habitually lime bare beds in early spring. “Tuber bulk is related to leaf surface area” For top-notch maincrop potato yields, ample fertiliser is required – phosphate and nitrogen, in particular. Non-organic growers could add sulphate of ammonia (for nitrogen) and superphosphate at planting, and again on earthing up. Organic gardeners can rely instead on fish, blood…

You can listen to Steve on alternate Sundays 10am-2pm on BBC Radio Kent’s Sunday Gardening (BBC Local) Steve Bradley MA MHort (RHS) has written (or co-written) over 40 gardening books, including Propagation Basics, The Pruner’s Bible, The Ground Force Workbook and What’s Wrong With My Plant? He is resident expert on BBC Radio Kent, Sussex and Surrey, and he has built medal-winning gardens at both Chelsea and Hampton Court Palace. AGAPANTHUS are very popular plants for the garden, whether in the border or growing in containers. They are happy in either, as long as the soil or compost is free draining. For many people, their first introduction to these stunning plants comes on holiday in Madeira, where they grow profusely. However, don’t be tempted to bring them back with you…

PEOPLE who aren’t gardeners sometimes surmise that winter is the ‘quiet’ time in the garden. That is so not the case, as there is always something to do whatever the season, but it has to be said that where we are now is probably the time when we wish for extra hours in the day, more hours of daylight. Spring is called ‘spring’ for a reason: it is the time when everything leaps back to life and into growth. With this welcome surge comes an ever-lengthening list of things to do, and this week I have been tackling just a few of them. Potting up summer-flowering tubers, clearing pots, giving fuchsias their seasonal trim and making sure the pond water stays clear and healthy are all part and parcel of…

THIS is a key time of year for roses, because if you give them a good, healthy start it will help them to flourish well into the autumn. It is time to give shrub varieties their annual hard prune as they can take, and will respond well to, a severe trim. I cut back our old floribunda rose to ankle level this time last year, and it bloomed better than ever, and on stronger stems, from last summer right through to November. Climbing roses can also be pruned now, and you can remove some of the oldest stems from well established plants to make room for new growth. Tie in new shoots and prune flowered stems back by a third. Rambling roses should be left alone until after they have…

LOOK at the plots of the ‘old boys’ on any allotment and note what they grow. Apart from the odd adventurous one, most have remarkably few ‘unusual’ vegetables and not many different vegetables overall. Look at the ‘grow to show’ prizewinners’ plots and, again, you’ll see there are not many other crops competing for their attention. Then consider how many packets of seed you have waiting to be sown… Want Our common self-inflicted problem is that we want to try growing absolutely everything, aggravated by our habit of potting up every seedling. We tend to spread ourselves too thin. It’s an easy trap to fall into at the start of the season, with everything looking hopeful. It’s just that when it gets busy and all the tasks start piling up,…

This pot and trellis is the perfect solution for growing tall climbers easily year after year. The stylish yet sturdy planter system, with matching trellis is ideal for growing your climbers on the patio. The Tower Pot is made of tough durable plastic, with a gold-painted effect. When fully assembled, it reaches 1.3m (4ft 4in), tall, and at 37cm (1 Sin) diameter, the pot holds over 20 litres of compost, giving a large root growing volume. Clematis 'Taiga' This superb Clematis was launched at the 2017 Chelsea Flower Show and was judged as most admired plant by visitors to the show. The fully double blooms have the appearance of cactus dahlias reaching 4in across or more. Early to bloom Taiga flowers and flowers all summer long. Clematis 'Mrs Thompson' AClematis…

CROCUSES have flowers like small, slender, upright goblets, made up of three inner petals alternating with three outer petals. The whole plant is not usually taller than about 6in (15cm). The slender dark-green leaves have a fine white stripe along the centre, and both leaves and flowers spring from small corms, usually referred to as bulbs, not more than about 1in (2.5cm) across, with a rough, stringy covering. Each year, a new corm, or sometimes two or three, develop above the previous year’s corm as it dies away. Roots pull the new corm down to the right level. “The flowers come in a variety of colours” Flowering is mainly in late winter and spring, and the flowers come in a wide variety of colours, although not including red, and there…

FANS of archive radio comedy will know the programme Beyond our Ken, which aired on the BBC Light Programme from 1958-64. One of the characters in it, played by the comedian Kenneth Williams, was a gardener called Arthur Fallowfield. His response to any gardening question put to him was always: ‘The answer lies in the soil’. He wasn’t wrong! As gardeners, we think of soil as that dark, crumbly, gritty layer we can see on the surface of our beds and borders. To a professional land worker or soil scientist, however, it is not just the top section (the ‘topsoil’) that we should worry about. There is also the ‘subsoil’, which can sometimes go down several metres before hitting rock. It generally contains no plant nutrients, organic matter or worm…

Dividing your perennials Q To fill empty spaces in the garden, I plan to divide some large clumps of perennials. Is spring or autumn the best time to do this – and when making large groups, how many plants per metre should I use? Sam Muirhead, Nether Heyford, Northampton A Hardy herbaceous perennials such as Lysimachia clethroides, Michaelmas daisies and Sedum spectabile, are plants that die back in winter and grow again in spring. Versatile and long-lived, they eventually spread into large clumps with all the healthy flowering growth around the outside and a bare patch in the middle. Fortunately, these perennials take kindly to being forked up (usually while dormant), divided into chunks and replanted. This is good news when you have spaces to fill, especially as larger swathes…

THE closest thing to a swimming pool at Buckland Castle might be an old bucket that collects rainwater off the shed, but when my friend David asked me to help choose plants for the terraces around his 12x30-footer, I jumped right in. Top of the list of plants to avoid are those with razor-sharp leaves, like yucca, or those that bleed toxic sap such as euphorbias. But there are less obvious no-nos – not just for the other half’s pools but for places where you park the car, sunbathe or walk around in shorts. With flowers the colour of a Californian sky and silver leaves that thrive in the sunshine and reflected heat, lavender and catmint seem perfect partners for any sunny seating area. But be warned: the summer blooms…

Spread the love: In next week’s pages I show you how to plant and divide perennials and keep them looking their best all summer long. 1 It’s time to start potting up your dahlia tubers. Sit them in pots of compost, cover with more compost leaving the old stems intact and visible. Water, place in a greenhouse and wait for shoots to appear. 2 Cut back fuchsias to the lowest healthy pairs of leaf bud and re-pot in fresh compost if growing in containers. Border fuchsias should be fed and mulched. Do not compost the remnants if they carry rust or fuchsia gall mite. 3 Garden wildlife will be busy nesting and breeding and will be hungry, especially if we have a late cold snap. Provide fresh food and drinking…

MOST gardeners are ‘waste not, want not’ types of people and this week I have been recycling one of last year’s summer containers. It held a mix of flowers including petunia and coleus (long since gone), a pink salvia ‘Wishes and Kisses’, a trailing nemesia, silvery Calocephalus and two dwarf Gaillardias which miraculously survived winter. I want to reuse them this year so I moved them into individual pots of fresh compost and will rejuvenate them in the mini greenhouse until late spring. I also cut back the flowering plants to encourage bushy growth with lots of new buds. Amazingly, the nemesia was still in flower and the Gaillardias were in bud, but I remove them so the plants will concentrate on root and shoot growth rather than energy-sapping flowering.…

MY high-altitude garden is known for being chilly, so spring arrives late here. I’ve calculated that spring arrives four weeks later than it does in the Vale of Evesham, which is only ten miles downhill from here as the raven flies. It’s no accident that all the good gardens, growers and nurseries are down there, where temperatures are usually 3-4°C warmer than up here! Cold Aston, on the northern uplands of the Cotswolds, lives up to its name wonderfully well. Many get my village mixed up with the similarly named Cold Ashton near Bath, where Derry Watkins’ Special Plants is based. I once visited Derry in May and saw black ‘Queen of Night’ tulips emerging through a bright-orange, frilly, semi-double geum named ‘Prinses Juliana’. I liked the combination so much…

Success with non-stop begonias Q My non-stop begonias weren’t a success last year, but I’m giving them another go. How can I be successful with them? Mary Deerley, Staines, Surrey A The best time to start begonia tubers is in March or April. Pot them up into the smallest containers possible on fresh compost that has been dampened. The tubers should be placed hollow side up and some people say they shouldn’t be buried, while others say they should be covered in compost. We have had good results with both, so it’s up to you – you could try both! Keep the pots at 16-21°C (60-70°F), with a bright warm room being ideal. When the new shoots are a couple of inches high, pot up the tubers into containers of…

Write to us: Letters, Amateur Gardening magazine, Future Publishing Limited, Unit 415, Winnersh Triangle, Eskdale Road, Winnersh, RG41 5TP (please include your address). Email us: amateurgardening@futurenet.com Star letter Patience rewarded GARDENING can be very rewarding at times but you have to be patient to some degree. It’s not the first time I have tried to remove a seed from an apricot but last summer, I had another go. I had a good white, but slightly marked, seed. Most advice is to sow straight away, so that’s what I did. The pot has been kept on the greenhouse bench covered in a clear plastic food container, and left to its own devices. The plants that I have are covered over with fleece which are now and again uncovered for checking. So I…