Eight tips to improve your garden

With the summer months almost here, it is certain that you will be spending more time in your garden. Whilst the spring may have been exceptionally wet, the one benefit is that your plants will have thrived in this important growing season. If you are looking ahead to the warmer and drier months of June, July, and August and want to ensure that your garden looks great, here are eight easy steps you can take.

Incorporate garden furniture

Whether you use your garden frequently to entertain guests or treat it as more of a private, family space, it is important to splash out and buy garden furniture, and particularly a garden table and chairs. This will enhance your enjoyment of your garden when the sun shines, and allow you to use it as an outside room.

Mow regularly

Grass can sometimes be difficult to maintain, and one of the biggest reasons that it becomes unmanageable is because it is not cut on a regular basis. Faster growing grasses can overshadow and choke out slower growing strains within your lawn mix, resulting in tufts and rough specimens taking over. By mowing at least every ten days to two weeks, you will help to ensure that your lawn always looks magnificent.

Deadhead

It is all too easy to pop to the nursery, fill your garden with beautiful flowers, and then be discouraged when they don’t last. By deadheading – or removing – all of the faded blooms before they begin to form seed-heads, you will help to encourage new flower growth throughout the season.

Add lighting

With the warm summer evenings on the horizon, you can enhance both the look and the usability of your garden at night by adding garden lighting. There is a great range of solar powered products and torches available, offering an easy option for adding illumination to your garden without having to worry about electrical fixtures and fittings.

Trim lawn edges

If your garden is looking untidy, one easy way to spruce it up is to trim the lawn edges. Along with cutting the grass, this is one step which will instantly transform your patch. In many cases you will be amazed at just how big an effect keeping carefully manicured lawn edges can have.

Buy more foliage plants

Plants with great foliage are the backbone of any garden, providing colour and interest to the space. If you have gaps in your garden, consider buying foliage plants. Purples contrast beautifully with greens, whilst silvers will reflect the light and are generally more drought tolerant.

Buy more flowering perennials

Many of the flowers that you will see in the nurseries will be annual bedding plants. You can remove the need to buy new specimens every year by investing a bit more in perennial flowering species such as lavenders, rudbekias and geums (left). These will add vibrant colour to your garden year after year, and require very little effort to maintain.

Consider all the senses

Gardens aren’t just about their visual impact, and it is important to try and appeal to all of the senses. Plants such as jasmine will offer a bouquet of perfume to smell, whilst fountains and wind chimes will offer something for the ears. Using a range of textures in furniture, decorations, and hard landscaping will offer an interesting variety for materials to excite the sense of touch.

Potting on and planting up

It’s been almost a month without a post. Why? Because of pouring rain. Whilst garden’s may have thrived over the past few weeks due to a torrential April, getting outside to actually garden has been more than problematic. However, with the sun making a surprise visit to London today, I finally managed to step foot outside and start potting up with fury.

I’m often overjoyed and amazed at how some plants are incredibly easy to grow. In my mind, the more exotic or popular the plant, the harder it is to grow. However, it’s often quite the opposite, with strawberries being a perfect example. For being such an iconic British fruit and having a short season, they actually grow like weeds; something that surprised me greatly when I first got an allotment.

Last year I bought some tiny Heuchera Melting Fire seeds. At almost £4 for only 25 seeds, I thought that germination rate was going to be pretty poor. However, these gorgeous plants have shown their vitality and grown in great number. With warmer wealth and plenty of moisture, last year’s young plants have put on some dramatic growth spurts. Being out of bagged compost, I’m currently using home grown material for propagation and planting on means, and my stunning heuchera’s will now be far happier in their large pots for the commencing summer.

Melting Fire will benefit from be potted on

Meanwhile, it’s also time to be thinking about getting those dahlia tubers in. They tend to show you when they need planting and if, like me, you store tubers in newspaper over the winter, you’ll notice lots of buds beginning to form at the base of last year’s stems. I’m not lucky enough to have a mollusc free garden, so I always start my dahlias off in pots before transplanting later. In some cases, I simply keep the tubers to the pots and place them in borders where the base can be camouflaged with other foliage.

Buds on Bishop of Llandaff indicate planting time

If you get a sunny spot this weekend, it’s a good opportunity to ensure that last year’s young plants are root bound. Potting them on now will give them the best chance to thrive this summer, letting your home grown plants outshine any nursery bought specimens.

Cordless mowers for happy gardeners

In keeping with tradition, April has arrived, bringing with it lashings of rain which seems ironic under the current environmental conditions of drought. With a hosepipe ban in place and the promise of a scorching summer ahead, I was anticipating a lack of grass mowing over the next months as beautifully green meadows turned to dusty barren tundra. Without being able to use a hose, my client’s would have to cope with fields of brown instead of green. Though, with Wimbledon, The Diamond Jubilee and The London Olympics all occurring this year, I should’ve realised that this summer will probably be the wettest we’ve had in years.

When I first unpacked the Bosch 34 Li Ergoflex, it has to be said, I wasn’t that convinced. It looked rather flimsy, and though it went together fairly easily, that in itself instilled a sense of trepidation. Surely, click, snap, bolt into place, means only one thing; whir, grind, puff of smoke, break. It’s a lawnmower, I wasn’t too sure how much I’d be thrilled by this device, even though it was cordless. And, my first impressions weren’t great. So, I set this thin and fragile looking device a challenge; conquer the allotment. A world away from a beautifully flat lawn. Here was an undulating, tussock-filled, unkempt wasteland to navigate through – take that on and do your best.

As Ron Weasley would put it, this lawnmower is actually bloody brilliant. Its blade is quick, and it whirs into life in just seconds. Did it navigate the dent festooned plains of the allotment? Yes. Did it actually cut well? Yes. Did it do its job in about a fifth of the time that cutting the allotment grass normally takes? Well, once again, yes. I’m actually amazed how good this lawnmower is, and as soon as I got home I rushed out into the garden to try it on my godmothers back lawn. Would it, and this was pushing it, stripe the garden just as my godmother’s partner likes? It only blimmin did!

It takes a lot to get me going on about garden equipment. I’m a plantsman and a wildlife geek, indulging in crisp foliage, tender petals and vivid scurrying beasts. I’m not really one for machinery, even if it helps immensely with the gardening task in hand. But, Bosch’s Ergoflex really did it for me.

Not only does it leave a great cut and deal with far more than the perfectly flat English garden you’d think it would handle, but it’s battery driven so you can take it anywhere. The battery lasted the entire time I used it (which was about 45 minutes), and the speed at which it cuts counters the negative that you have a limited energy supply. It’s easy to put together, easy to charge the battery, and easy to use. And, then it gives you an amazing cut too. Definitely one for any gardener’s shed.

Guest Post – Latest Gardening Trends

Current trends in gardening have led to herbal and natural organic plantings, vertical green walls, meditative serenity in a hammock, lush exotic plantings and decorative ornaments, ponds and special lighting. People are always looking for new ways to use space, grow organic foods and spend their summers doing creative gardening. The backyard is the ideal spot for flowers, shrubs, trees and more. The patio is also great for all flowering beauties and certain unique vegetables. Back porches, rock gardens, the sides of walls, fences or a special trellis are all current concepts used for spring planting.

New Plant Varieties for 2012:

Ornamentals

One of the more enchanting spring perennials is the ‘Fairy Wings.’ They are beautiful pale pink and white spur-like flowers draping from a plant that is 3 feet wide and 18 inches tall. They can be grown in partially shady conditions, which make them ideal for almost any yard. Being both new on the scene and totally unique create something extremely magical. The plant’s delicate flowers will be admired by all those who pass by and stop to view them.

The ‘Wheee!’ hosta is a unique clumping variety of a somewhat delicate perennial and is also new for 2012. Deep green leaves curled with an edging of creamy white add to the beauty of this particular variety. This is a good plant to mingle with other types of hostas.

Appropriate for sun and shade is the new ‘Solar Eclipse’ Foamy Bells. The leaves of this plant are burgundy-purple and chartreuse green. This plant grows 16 inches by 16 inches and does well growing with day lilies.

The ‘My Valentine’ Hibiscus is a deep red hibiscus approximately 4 feet by 4 feet. It mixes well with all types of spring plantings. Flowers blossom in the summer and last until the first frost. Its deep color makes this a very stunning plant.

Vegetables

A new disease resistant tomato introduced this year is the ‘Big Daddy’ Tomato. This is a relative of the ‘Big Boy’ variety, only it grows even larger and often weighs a pound or slightly more. It needs full sun, lots of moisture and grows best in well-drained soils.

The ‘Power Pops’ Tomato is a form of cherry tomato that has 55% more lycopene than other varieties. It is a deep, rich red in color and is great for growing in pots or other types of containers. It makes a good patio companion for the summer months.

The ‘Cayennetta Pepper’ plant is new for 2012. This pepper loves patio planters and produces a mildly spicy pepper. The plant is dense yet requires no staking. It likes full sun or partial shade which makes it ideal for any patio setting.

Certain garden centers allow for placing a flower order on their Internet site. They then deliver the products directly to the front door. With higher gas prices and crowded seasonal shopping, this new ‘order-delivery’ concept is a wonderfully practical idea. People buy flowers in UK in this manner.

New 2012 Garden Variations on a Variety of Old Themes:

Vining plants up the side of a wall or over a trellis is an old concept. Newer ideas have evolved from this where plants are now being layered in tall boxes with many slots to create a uniquely full look in a small garden area. Some plants do better than others in this situation, but most can be trained to do whatever the gardener wishes. These vertical gardens require creative thought and a great deal of time. If all goes well, they can be extremely unique and stunning in their appearance.

The rock garden has long been cultivated and admired; newer varieties of plants for this type of garden are being developed on a yearly basis. A new look can be created around this old concept.

Ponds and lighting fixtures are constantly changing to add new charm to any garden design. More people are looking to find serenity in their homes and in the surrounding garden areas. Constant care and yearly updating can take a garden from something ordinary to the exquisitely exotic spot of each and every homeowner’s dream.

About the Author

Patricia Hall works part-time for an online florist in uk and loves to surround herself with flowers at any given point of time. Even in her free time she loves to involve herself with everything flora and fauna.
‘To me there is nothing more beautiful and global as the language of flowers – it is the easiest to understand all around the world in the same way. That is one reason why I truly admire flowers for what they represent in some ways – unity of all mankind!’

52 Week Salad Challenge – Homegrown Food

I am no cook, but I do like some scrambled eggs after a work out. There’s nothing quite like popping down to the coop to gather some freshly laid hen-fruit; you don’t have to spend a penny. Now, with the 52 Week Salad Challenge, I also have the means to indulge in a little side portion of greenery.

The amazing thing is though, you don’t even need a garden to grow salads. My current crop is coming from washing up bowl, filled with multi-purpose soil and placed on the windowsill. I’ve sown new seeds every couple of weeks to get a succession of salads. Now that the bigger plants are growing well, you can easily remove several leaves without damaging the plant, and with many more plants coming up, there’ll be salad for weeks to come.

Washing up bowl, soil, salad seeds…it’s all you need

Get yourself a washing up bowl, a few salad seeds and a couple of hens and, hey presto, one free and easy meal!

Tips for Surviving the Chelsea Flower Show

There are 61 days until the RHS Chelsea Flower Show opens it’s doors. From May 22nd to 26th, 2012, the world’s biggest and best flower show, in my personal opinion, will attract thousands of people from around the world to indulge in flowers, foliage and garden accessories of every kind. The last time I visited the show was in 2010 because Chelsea Flower Show tickets sell out fast, and if you think you’ll be able to buy your way in on the door, then you’ll be much mistaken. Tickets for this event sell like hotcakes, and with the shows international appeal, you’ve got to get in early if  you want to get past the garden gate.

If you’ve managed to get your hands on this golden prize, then there are few tips to help you survive your day;

Take a picnic

There’s a lot to see and do at the Chelsea Flower Show, and if you want to try and whizz around in half a day, then you won’t get to see very much. There are lots of grassy banks and areas where you can settle down with a picnic and enjoy a more relaxed day, slowly perusing the shops and show gardens without having to worry that you’ll never get through the crowds in front of you. There are lots of food venues on offer and you’ll have to carry your food around with you if you bring it from home, but taking a picnic  and treating the event as an entire day out is advisable.

Use a folding box cart

If you don’t want to check your bags and picnic into the cloak room, then take a folding box cart. These are also normally on sale at the Chelsea Flower Show and are very useful as you can not only stuff your belongings into them as you trundle around, but once the food is eaten, you can start filling the cart up with your plant purchases. Lots of people use these carts at the Chelsea Flower Show, so you won’t be the only one and, if you don’t take one, you’ll soon be wishing you had.

Relax

The show is crammed with people, and you often can’t get that close to some of the show gardens. Great swathes of hornbeam trees are often in flower, letting off their pollen, and hundreds of carts trundling around your feet can quickly become irritating. You may be in London, but that doesn’t mean that you have to live up to the capital’s frenetic way of life. Relax a little, take your time to wander around and look at exhibits and avoid getting stressed.

Indulge in the last day

The last day of The Chelsea Flower Show, May 26th, 2012, is a great day to go if you want to buy plants. You’ll only have half a day to peruse the exhibitions, but if you get there when the show opens at 8am, there’s plenty of time to see everything. If you want to bag a bargain, then carefully choose what you most want on your way around and, ahead of the 4pm sell-off bell, position yourself next to the best stands. Be prepared for a battle; this is where British queuing culture disappears, and you’ll have never seen pensioners move so quickly or aggressively for that £5 rose. Stands and show gardens are often dismantled at an astonishing rate, so get in quick and get bargains. And, bargains there are. I’ve bought ferns for £2, roses for £5, and alliums (right) and thrift for a £1 before.

Chelsea is a great day out, and anyone who has the slightest interest in gardening should definitely seek to go once in their lives. With many show garden drawings for this year already released to the media and the promise of many plant bargains, 2012 is set to be a great year.

Weed Invasion

It’s safe to say that in the past seven or eight months my work on the allotment has been minimal. Holidays towards the end of the year, a new social life re-introducing me to hangovers and then missing the key-swap ceremony meant that I not only had little time for veggie growing, but that I couldn’t even get onto my plot. The war of the weeds was lost, couch grass invaded from all sides, and whilst the amphibians leapt for joy at their new home, Mary wept for my lack of diligence.

My lack of diligence was good for toads

Having finally had a weekend when we were both free, we headed to the allotment and discovered horror; in addition to the dead squirrel floating in the water butt, our plot seemed to have grown a lovely couch grass meadow.

Today, after securing a new key and digging for several hours, the backs of my legs are locked in pain. But it’s a good pain. It’s the type of pain that you only get when hard work has been done and washed down with several evening G&T’s.

Work is moving on quickly, and I’ve already uncovered large beds of beautiful soil for planting in. No wonder the weeds were growing so fast; they had the perfect soil to give them a foothold.

Ben helps me dig for victory

Today, the first of the peas went in. I’m trying to plant more in situ this year rather than transplanting as it helps to acclimatise seedlings faster, whilst also giving them a better resistance against dry conditions. I never grow enough peas, and always make the mistake of forgetting to plant successionally.

This year I want to grow peas across an entire bed and plan to sow a line a week. I normally place two seeds per 5cm to take care against mishaps. Lack of germination can leave you will holes that need to be plugged later. Meanwhile, eager pigeon beaks often decimate a crop in mere minutes. I have found that the holly leaf trick works though, prickly little mice noses and keeping vermin at bay.

This year’s pea – Hurst Green Shaft

With good weather on the forecast, the coming week is an allotment blitz as I prepare beds to get in onions and spuds before its too late. And, with the sun in the sky, I may even get a little golden brown whilst I’m at it.

Four Ways to Protect Plants from Drought

Blissful and refreshing rain has arrived in London today, quenching the ground and offering that vital life-force towards plants which have begun to thrive after the recent warm spell.  It’s St. Patrick’s Day and wet but as one friend stated, it means only one thing; wet, Irish rugby players!

There’s nothing quite like opening the back-door to the wet skies on a warm day and letting the gentle drizzle freshen the home and wash away the grime. Particularly in a cityscape, you really get the sense that the rain manages to wash away the pollutants, dust and stifling grubbiness of surroundings, allowing everything to be fresh and new. But, with drought ahead, it’s important to recognise that this rain is not likely to be a regular occurrence in 2012, and so it’s important to take steps to protect plants and crops when water wells start to run dry.

Certainly in the south-east of England, they’re already discussing hosepipe bans from as early as April 2012. This means that either you abandon watering the garden completely, or you look to labour intensive drenching with a can, running back and forth from the water butt or kitchen as you go. In many ways this is preferable anyway because much of the fine mist provided by hosepipe’s or sprinkler systems evaporates long before it is anywhere near soaking into the soil. So, what to do?

1. Install water-butts

Obviously, one of the best ways to survive a drought is to collect as much rainwater as you can. If you can install water-butts, then your days of running back and forth to the kitchen are over and you can ensure to catch as much rainy liquid as you can on the odd occurrence that the sky plummets down.

2. Water infrequently and hard

If you water your garden only a little, every day, you’ll end up with plants whose roots all lie just under the surface of the soil. This is BAD news, and as a result the slightest touch of drought and lack of watering by you will cause plants to flop and wither. Providing a drenching drink on an infrequent occasion will encourage root systems to develop deeper into the soil as they search for natural water, helping plants to stave off drought effects.

If you want to do a spot of recycling too, you can use plastic bottles to help irrigate plant roots. Simply cut the bottom off a bottle, take the cap off and plunge it upside down into the soil next to your plant. You can water directly into the bottom and the water will escape through the nozzle into the soil where it’s most needed

3. Plant in-situ

If you’re worried about your little seedlings needing constant watering, one way to help them survive the odd day or two without a drink is by sowing them in-situ. This will help plants to acclimatise to their environment as soon as they germinate, rather than being grown in a lovely moist and human controlled environment before being dumped into a relative desert later on in the year. Seedlings WILL still need watering, but they’re more likely to survive dry and hot spells when you’ve forgotten to take a trip down the garden or allotment.

4. Reassess your planting

Plants, plants, plants. Some love a good ‘ol drought. Other…not so much. We are a nation of lawn loving individuals (well, some of you) and love our borders to be lush with life. However, not all of these plants are great in a drought and a birds-eye view of many gardens this year is likely to capture an urban sprawl of brown gardens. There are lots of great plants which are slightly better at surviving dry periods, especially those with silver and grey leaves. Use these to your advantage and replace thirsty foliage with succulents, hebes, lavender or lambs ears. Consider reducing the size of your lawn to increase borders or vege-patches, and if you know of particular plants which have caused troubles during previous drought periods, resign yourself to giving up and trying an alternative.

Whether we like it not, droughts will cause the garden landscape to change and without the uses of hoses or sprinklers, there is no way to provide enough water to all flowers and foliage. Nor is the an ecologically sound or economical route to take. So, instead of ignoring the drought and trying to plough on regardless, take a few steps to reduce your water requirements whilst letting your outdoor retreat flourish.

Spring

I can’t capture the beautiful drone of the sleepy spring bee, the soft twitter as a pair of robins follow around the garden, or the soft coos from the hen house. I can’t offer, through the words, the feeling of the spring sun on my skin, the warmth in the air or the gentle breeze that breathes life into the plants filling my garden. However, I can share photos, and with a warm day bringing hope of what’s the come in our gardening year, here’s a few shots collected today.

Pulmonaria offers a spring snack for bees

Japanese Spirea brings a fire start to the year

The flaming stems of winter cornus are covered in lime green hope

Chaenomeles begins to fill the trees (as identified by @scyrene)

Clematis prepares to cover walls and trellises aloft with colourful blooms

Hosta spikes emerge as if in some alien landscape

Winter Sowing for Early Starts

Believe it or not, we’re still in the month of winter. Whilst the snow may have receded and temperatures have warmed a little, there are still several weeks until spring officially starts. However, this means nothing for my gardening year as I simply can’t stop myself from sowing far too early as soon as the first glimmers of spring-like weather appear. It was the same when I was a child and kept Australian finches; the onset of a warm day meant that I filled the aviary with nesting boxes and then my poor parents had to foot the heating bill as temperatures plummeted and I turned every radiator on to keep the eggs and chicks viable. So now that the one warm week of February has disappeared, I have windowsills covered in seedlings which cannot be placed outside for fear of frost.

Echiums jostle for room on my windowsills

One of the ways that I’ve gotten around this problem in the past is with the help of garden storage in the form of cold frames and miniature greenhouses. Of course, if you decide to germinate your seeds in a heated propagator, then place young plants outside at your peril as it won’t even require a frost to kill off these tender things. However, due to my resistance against the cold (growing up in the middle of the country in an old rectory with nothing but storage heaters will make living in arctic temperatures feel completely normal) I tend to let seeds germinate at their own freewill on the windowsills. The temperature in my home is often more akin to those outside, allowing seeds to germinate in a more naturally heated environment. If you cling to heat like a blanket, then you can sow seeds in a spare room which is rarely used and where the average temperature will be lower. This will ensure that once the seedlings have poked their heads up and you’ve got far too many to keep inside, transferring to an outside and frost free cloche is feasible.

Of course, moving young seedlings is no easy matter and you should wait until there’s a balmy day before even contemplating such an idea. Place seedlings outside for a few days when the weather is good, bringing them inside at night to avoid the severe drops in temperatures which could spell the end of your carefully grown seeds. Once a number of days have past and you’re confident that seedlings have acclimatised to the outside environment, choose a night when temperatures won’t fall too low and place them inside your frost free garden storage area. As long as you have a few nights of relatively warm air in the offing, then the seedlings should acclimatise well and free up all that space on your windowsill for, you’ve guess it, more seeds.

Honesty is a great plant for an early start

If you’re anything like me, then the slightest rise in temperature results in every possible surface near to a light source being covered in pots and seeds. This is no bad thing, and can get your gardening year off to a great start. By germinating in a low temperature environment that closely simulates the weather outside, you’ll be able to transfer plants to a cold frame more quickly. And, though plants who like warmer weather will take longer to pop up their green shoots, vigorous early year seeds will thrive and allow you to create space for even more wonderful flora.