Innholdsfortegnelse for 16-Apr-2022 i Amateur Gardening

“I’m beginning to think the term ‘peat free’ is the new ‘organic’: declare it on any bag and people will assume they are buying a pure product. At a press event recently, I saw bags of manure labelled ‘peat free’ — was there ever peat in farmyard manure before? No, but perhaps the producer thought if they put ‘peat free’ on the bag they might sell more? This may just seem a bit of harmless marketing, but as we get closer to the banning of peat, the products on offer at garden centres will be more bewildering for the consumer. So be careful buying ‘peat free’ products – make sure you know you’re not just buying the hype.” Contact us: Subscriptions: 0330 333 1113 Editorial: 0330 3903732 Email: amateurgardening@futurenet.com Advertising:…

SOUTH Western Railway are all aboard when it comes to giving nature a helping hand thanks to their latest collaboration with the RSPB. Key railway stations will be transformed into hubs for wildlife thanks to this new partnership. Through planting wildflowers, cutting holes in fences for ‘hedgehog highways’ and putting up nest boxes, stations along the SWR network will now be acting as refuges for wildlife. This isn’t the first time SWR and RSPB have worked together. In 2014 they created homes for bats and reptiles at three stations in Surrey: Effingham Junction, Oxshott and Hinchley Wood. Everything welcome from bugs to bats Thanks to the success of the project, the partners will transform four more stations into wildlife-friendly gardens across the south of England: Sunningdale in Berkshire, Havant in…

I HAVE never grown carrots before so I’m very excited about this week’s free seeds. Carrot ‘St Valery’ is a reliable heritage variety renowned for its tasty, robust, burnished orange roots. Also known as ‘James Scarlet Intermediate’, it is a French heirloom variety that can be sown from March to July and will harvest in late summer. Its frost-hardy roots also make it ideal for winter storage. Carrots do best in a sunny sheltered spot in fertile soil that has been well forked over and raked and cleared of debris that can cause the roots to fork if they hit them while growing. For this reason, many people find it easier to grow carrots in containers of compost or in stone-free raised beds. Sown now, your ‘St Valery’ crop will…

AN annual feature on any vegetable plot, runner beans can be sown now and are utterly delicious when the pods are picked at a young and tender age. The pitfalls are easy to avoid if you know how, so let me divulge how to ensure a summer full of beans! Better beans on the scene Plant breeders have done gardeners proud in recent years. While older varieties flowered late in the summer, modern types develop earlier blooms due to boffins adjusting the bean’s sensitivity to day length. Drought resistance is improving, too. Red-flowered varieties were once shallow rooted compared with their white-flowered counterparts, but breeding has now blurred the boundaries. “Modern runner beans develop earlier blooms” By far the most exciting development has been the crossing of runner and French…

HEUCHERAS, sometimes known by their common names of coral bells or alum root, are neat, hardy, perennial plants for sun or shade that are grown mainly for their foliage. Plants vary in height from 2-4in (5-10cm) to medium-sized plants up to 30in (75cm) in flower, with a mound of evergreen foliage growing from a tight, slowly spreading, rather woody crown. The leaves can be 2-4in (5-10cm) across, are carried on stiff stems and overlap together to make an attractive mound of weed-smothering leaves. The foliage can be maple-like in shape or with rounded lobes. The chief glory of heucheras is their extraordinary variety of leaf colours and leaf patterns. They range from almost black to silver, taking in crimson and purple shades, pink, marmalade-orange, yellow, lime and grey – two…

Plants to combat ground elder QI can’t seem to rid a border of ground elder by digging it out, as it returns from around the base of shrubs and from under a fence. What large-leaved plants will shade it out? Teresa Birchill, Longford, Gloucester AThe white flower umbels of ground elder are typical of plants in Apiaceae, the cow parsley family, and non-gardeners could be forgiven for wondering why their gardening friends hate this plant so much. The answer lies below ground – because ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria) fills the soil beneath its leaves with a spaghetti-like mass of underground rhizomes. Not for nothing is it also called ‘devil’s guts’. Both roots and leaves will outcompete smaller desirable plants, especially woodland bulbs, and attempts to eradicate it are usually doomed…

I heard a song that stole myheart,A song from which I could notpart.There were no words for me tojoin in and sing,For they were sung upon thewing.He started in the early morn,Heralding in another dawn.He sang his melody in perfectkey,With his chest puffed out for allto see.As light grew bright and strong,Others joined in with his melodicsong.The dawn chorus was now allaround.Oh what a joyous happy sound.…

TO my mind, the Easter weekend whenever it falls is the unofficial start of the gardening year. The first bank holiday since the December festivities, its springtime arrival makes it perfectly placed to get the garden ready for the year ahead. This year Easter comes relatively late, giving gardeners an advantage. Soil should be warm and workable and dampened by seasonal showers, making it welcoming for new plantings including summer bulbs. On the other hand, it is also a boom time for weeds and pests, so make sure you add their removal to your list of weekend tasks. If you are planting bulbs, as I will be doing, and you garden on heavy soil, dig in generous amounts of well-rotted manure and some grit first, to help open the soil…

HAVING been caught out by the bitterly cold weather of April 2021, I’ve been holding back from one or two bits of spring pruning. But now conditions are improving, I’ve bitten the bullet and taken my secateurs to my Pheasant berry (Leycesteria formosa), St John’s Wort (Hypericum ‘Hidcote’) and hydrangea. They all have slightly different pruning requirements, but the end result should be pleasingly compact shrubs laden with flowers and berries in season. Pheasant berry, also known as Himalayan honeysuckle, is an attractive addition. Fast growing, it can become leggy if left untended, but if you keep it in check you will have a plant with pendulous maroon and white flowers that are followed by dark purple/brown berries that birds love (hence the name). The berries are edible, with a…

POTATOES are easy, and obligingly can be grown in many ways. Traditionally, we make a trench, add manure, put in our sets (small potatoes used as seeds) and earth up the growing haulms (stems and leaves). We then dig up the new crop later as ‘new’ potatoes when we can’t wait any longer, or go for bigger yields later when the haulms die down. Of course, we may lose crops to blight and other problems such as slugs. But, overall, potatoes are fairly reliable, especially if you chose mostly earlies and second-earlies. These are fast and usually harvested before those problems have time to set in. So, what will improve your yield? Well, ‘water, water, water’ more than anything. Then enrich your soil with humus and fertility from manures and…

John will reply personally to all your gardening questions every week How do I care for ‘Polish Spirit’ clematis? Q Please could you tell me how best to plant and look after the Clematis ‘Polish Spirit’? I’d like to grow it over a Ceanothus ‘Zanzibar’ Joanne Bell (via email) A I am delighted that you have purchased Clematis ‘Polish Spirit’, a lovely viticella variety, to grow over your Ceanothus ‘Zanzibar’. Ideally, plant it 2-3ft (60-90cm) from the bush, in a well-prepared planting hole around 2ft (60cm) in diameter. Fork well-rotted and moisture-conserving manure or garden compost into the subsoil and sprinkle the top soil you have removed, which you will use to cover the roots, with 4oz (112g) per sq m of fish, blood and bone meal. Set your plant…

This week it’s: Salad leaves We look at the best leaves for our salad days AS a youngster, the first thing I learnt about lettuce is that it is easy to grow too much of it. From late March onwards, sowing 10 or 12 seeds every other week will see you with plenty of lettuces throughout summer. In recent years, though, we’ve grown fewer lettuce and more of the mixed salad leaves. Yet the same ‘law of glut’ applies – don’t sow too many at one time otherwise you’ll have far too many leaves, and salad leaves quickly become old and tough. Let’s take a look at some salad leafy facts. ■ The word ‘salad’ comes from the Latin herba salta or ‘salted herbs’, so called because such greens were…

Star letter Peat ban will be a disaster I AM amazed that the government is powering ahead with the proposal to end the sale of peat to the many millions of ‘ordinary’ gardeners. These people, who like most things in my experience, will not be concerned until it affects their ability to continue gardening with the use of peat which, after all, is the ONLY ingredient within the price range of most, allowing the success of sowing seed or planting plugs to the expected success level. There are NO alternatives available that work to the same efficiency and I challenge the government to list any. Others who respond to the consultation can make the technical argument but as a gardener who has tried all other affordable alternatives, I have at…

STAND near the tree heather by our shed for long enough, and it’s possible to pick out the different species of bees just from the sound as they work the bell-shaped blooms. There’s the deep thrum of the bumbles, and the start-stop buzzing of honey bees which, like fuel-efficient cars, cut their engines whenever they park up on a flower. Then there’s the lighter, often haphazard buzz of the solitary types, of which we have around 240 different species. They get their name because, unlike bumbles and honey bees, they don’t live in colonies. Most are smaller and more hairy, and many are what are called ‘cavity nesters’ as they lay their eggs in holes in soft rotting wood, masonry or plant stems. The leafcutter bee is one of the…

PLUG plants are a great way of taking the ‘faff’ out of growing your summer garden. They are an easy and economical way of growing ornamentals and vegetables because someone else has gone to the trouble of sowing, germinating and then raising the seedlings. The plants are small and bought in trays or singly, in a floral version of the ‘pick and mix’ sweet counters of old. I have bought a mix of lobelia, petunias, fuchsias and a funky dahlia and will grow them in the greenhouse before hardening them off. Plug plants are young and delicate and need careful nurturing. When you get them home, keep them somewhere frost-free and stand them in water for half an hour or so to hydrate their roots. Then pot them up into…

I WAS doing a talk on growing vegetables recently. I’ve grown vegetables all my life, because I was born in the pre-war ‘Dig for Victory’ era. Money was tight and food was in short supply, so lots of suburban London gardens had a vegetable patch and some even kept chickens. I’ve carried on growing my own vegetables organically ever since, because I can eat super-fresh food and save money. My Yorkshire grandmother, Lucy Elizabeth Hardy, would be proud of me! I trained as a teacher in Birmingham during the mini-skirt era – which makes me feel very old. I went for plenty of interviews, all unsuccessful, and it think it was the pelmet skirt! When a job came up at the National Vegetable Research Station in Wellesbourne, Warwickshire, off I…

A GOOD knife is an essential tool for most gardeners and most of us have one that we carry almost all the time in the garden or on the allotment. There is a wide range available in all sorts of styles, shapes and sizes, so your choice depends on what you need, the size of your hand and your own preference. Handle material Originally, the choice of handle was limited to various types of wood or, with some of the really old knives, some type of bone or horn. These outer layers are referred to by the manufacturer as the ‘leaves’. The inner lining that the blade sits against is often brass, steel or a metal alloy and this is referred to as the ‘scales’. Wooden-handled garden knives are still…