Garden News November 14

WHAT TO DO NOW!

November 14, 2015 £1.99

B rit a in'sed st m o st t ru in vo ice g a rd e n in g

✔ Propagate your poppies ✔ Get your greenhouse winter-ready ✔ Try out some new tulips

Fit in more

COLOUR! rol's crafty ways

Try Ca with clematis

AMAZING ORCHIDS

Stunning species to take your collection to the next level

SUPERCHARGE YOUR SOIL! Simple steps to add nutrients, improve structure & boost plants

New veg for small gardens Compact varieties to try next year

6

top tips to create a

terrarium!

Fantastic foliage! ● Top 10 must-have variegated shrubs ● Evergreens for every size garden ● Plants for pots & borders!

AboutNOW

Seeds for the future

Monterey pine, Pinus radiata, on the coast of California

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4,000 mile expedition to see the world’s most remarkable trees has yielded a bumper harvest of valuable seed.

Gardeners from Bedgebury Arboretum, which specialises in conserving conifers, travelled down the west coast of California to the cascades and across the country to the White Mountains, near New York.

“It was a remarkable trip, which yielded 90 seed collections,” said Dan Luscombe. “We saw all the amazing trees, such as the Bristlecone pine and a Patriach tree that was thousands of years old, at an altitude of 10,000ft.

“We walked among the Valley of the Giants with the giant redwoods and saw rare conifers such as the Monterey, Bishop and Sugar pines which are threatened in the wild.”

The team took their own tree-climbers to collect the seed. “What hit me hardest was the devastation caused by forest fires,” said Dan. “We passed through 75,000 acres of black sticks. There has been no rain for four years and so

Bristlecone pines – oldest trees on the planet (left).

Testing for ripe seed from the rare foxtail pine Pinus balfouriana

the natural regeneration is being held back.”

Seed is being germinated back at Bedgebury and the resultant seedlings shared with other gardens, such as Edinburgh, Kew and Wakehurst Place, while stocks of seed are being stored in the Millennium Seedbank at Wakehurst Place.

A s h a d e G re en er

Hedgehogs need your help

Words: Lucy Purdy Photo: Shu erstock

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he spiny garden visitor much-loved by children and adults, the hedgehog, needs our help. Numbers of hedgehogs have dropped by 30 per cent in n 10 years and they are disappearing from our countryside as fast as tigers are worldwide. The good news is that there iss much us gardeners can do to help.

Hedgehogs need to be able to roam far and wide in search of food, nesting sites and mates, so consult with your neighbours and cut a 13cm x 13cm (5in Make your garden x 5in) hole in your fence, or dig a a happier place channel between garden boundaries. for hedgehogs Banishing pesticides from your patch will also help to encourage these

6 Garden News / November 14 2015

animals – they’re great natural pest controllers! If you have a steep-sided pond, a ramp will help hedgehogs scramble out if they get into trouble, and keeping domestic drains covered is also a good idea.

As well as sheltered wood piles, purpose-built hedgehog homes make great spots for hedgehogs to nest and hibernate. Resist the temptation to clear all fallen leaves away too, as they make perfect nesting material for hedgehogs as well as home for their prey, and allow some grass to grow a little wild if you can. ● Visit www.wildaboutgardensweek.org.uk for more tips.

New shrubs to savour

Kids to get growing food

Give your garden a boost with this range of gorgeous shrubs for flower, foliage and scent. Available by mail-order from Crocus. ● Visit www.crocus.co.uk or tel: 01344 578000.

All photos: Luke Wallace

Very compact silvery-leafed shrub.

Fragrant flowers all summer. Sun, any soil. H: 90cm (3ft) S: 75cm (18in) Price: £11.99. Order from winter 2015.

Branched evergreen with aromatic, foliage. Dark pink in bud, fading white in spring and late summer. Any soil sun/part shade. Price: £9.99.

Styrax ‘Pink Parasol’

Cotinus ‘Ruby Glow’

Weeping small tree. Pink flowers in summer. Yellow autumn colour.

Moist, acid soil, sun-semi shade.

H: 3m (10ft) S: 1.5m (5ft) Price: £19.99.

Mounding deciduous shrub. Vibrant autumn colour. Pink flower heads in summer. Sun, in moist well-drained soil. H/S: 1.8m (6ft) Price: £22.99.

Coffee on tap!

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cup of Irish coffee could soon mean just that, rather than a drink with whisky added. A coffee company from Northern Ireland is about to experiment with growing its own coffee to evaluate the pitfalls.

Lisburn-based coffee supplier

Johnsons is to plant 18 bushes in volcanic soil in a greenhouse maintaining temperatures above 23C (73F). The Johnsons team spoke to contacts in coffee-producing countries to discover the ideal soil conditions and temperatures.

The coffee plant Coffea

London schoolchildren will be flexing their green fingers

Shu erstock

Buddleia alternifolia ‘Unique’ Choisya ‘Appleblossom’

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campaign encouraging school children to grow their own food has launched in London. Growathon, an initiative from the Food Growing Schools: London partnership (FGSL) aims to get 10,000 London-based students to grow at least one crop in 2016 and engage friends to follow suit by summer 2016.

The grassroots initiative is open to any school or educational establishment, whether they are experienced or first-time growers. A range of organisations, such as community gardens, are being asked to help schools meet the challenge by providing help and support.

Partners include Garden Organic’s ‘Give it a Grow’ campaign, the Soil Association’s ‘Food for Life Award Scheme’, Morrison’s ‘Academy of Food’ and Trees for Cities ‘Edible Playgrounds’ scheme.

A Growathon Forum event will take place in Spring 2016, to build on momentum and boost food-growing networks across all of the London boroughs. ● Visit www.foodgrowingschools.org

arabica is a subtropical evergreen shrub from Ethiopia, but is grown around the world. The beans form in red ‘cherries’, each fruit forming two beans from fragrant white flowers.

“This is a very, very small knowledge-gaining experiment,” said Growing their own – Johnson’s Phillip Mills. coffee in Ireland

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November 14 2015 / Garden News 7

What to do this week

ON YOUR FRUIT & VEG PLOT

Sort out your greenhouse!

The most important job at this time of year is to clean the glass, says Clare

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here’s a window of opportunity between clearing summer crops out of your greenhouse and filling it up again with overwintering plants when you can get stuck in and give it a good clean. It’s one of the few times of year when you've got room to wash and clean it thoroughly.

Temporarily move any plants outdoors so they’re out of the way, and if possible remove staging and shelving so you’ve got free access to the glass. The most important job at this time of year is to clean the glass, inside and out, to remove the build-up of green algae and dirt, allowing maximum light through to plants that will spend winter inside. Add a drop of disinfectant such as Jeyes Fluid or Citrox to the water to cut through any lingering spores or bacteria.

Sweep the floor, and nooks and crannies, of the year’s debris, then reposition staging and shelves after brushing them clean and giving them a scrub with the disinfectant and water mix.

Depending on what you’re overwintering, you may want to put up some extra protection with a layer of bubble wrap insulation. This is easily fixed to a wooden-framed greenhouse, or you can buy clips to attach it to aluminium frames. It will raise the temperature inside your glass by a degree or two, which could

make all the difference to borderline plants.

If you don’t want to insulate the entire greenhouse, you can just do a section of it. This can be a more economical way of storing plants that need the added warmth of a heater – you only need to use the heater in the small, insulated part of the greenhouse, rather than heat the entire thing. Check your heater is working now, rather than waiting to find out it isn’t when temperatures are freezing.

Although it seems counterintuitive, as much as you’re trying to keep heat in, ventilation is still vital in a greenhouse in winter.

Damp, stagnant air can encourage moulds and rots among your plants, so on bright, crisp dry days, remember to open vents and doors to let a blast of fresh air in, closing them again when the temperature drops in the afternoon.

When you've finished cleaning and tidying, you could wash out your stash of plastic pots and trays and scrub writing off plant labels so everything is ready for next season.

Wash down glass and staging with disinfectant

Make a runner bean trench

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Shutterstock

Beans are hungry, thirsty plants, so anything you can do to add nutrients to the soil and conserve moisture will benefi benefitt your bean crop crop.

Start now by digging a trench where your beans are to grow next year. Line it with newspaper or cardboard and st start to fill it with garden and kitchen waste such as vegetable peelings, eggshells and chopped up stems.

Add a layer of soil to cover each layer of waste material. All this waste will gradually rot down as you add more to the trench. When it's full, finish with a layer of soil. When it's time to plant the beans next year, the soil in the trench will be rich and fertile, just the place for the beans to enjoy!

Keep topping up the trench with kitchen waste

MEDWYN WILLIAMS

Growing for

Shake the knobbly tubers free from the roots

SHOWING

Winner of 11 Chelsea golds and awarded an MBE! Photos: Medwyn Williams

Harvest oca

If you are growing oca, also known as New Zealand yams, don’t harvest them until at least the middle of November.

The tubers only start to bulk up after mid September, so they need to stay in the ground for as long as possible. If you can, leave them until the tops have been completely withered by frost, then lift them – you'll have to search under the sprawling foliage to find the roots. Then, use a garden fork to lift the plants as you would potatoes. They are small, so there’s not much risk of putting a tine through a tuber, and you can get in quite close. The shiny pink or white tubers have ridges that harbour dirt, so give them a good scrub before eating raw in a salad or baking them like potatoes.

Drying shallots on a mesh bench

Stop the rot on stored shallots It seems to be a big problem this year

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Photos: Neil Hepworth

Tidy rhubarb Reliable rhubarb is entering its dormant phase now, its large leaves and fat stalks dying back for the winter. As they turn yellow and flop, gently twist them free from the crown to tidy up the plant, clearing away any dead brown leaves and stems too. It will keep your veg plot looking neat, and take away hiding places for slugs and snails. It won’t be long before rhubarb can be lifted to start the process of forcing for an early crop. Make a note of clumps that are large enough to lift and divide while you’re clearing around the plants, and mark them so you know which ones are your prime forcing candidates when the time comes.

grow ‘Aristocrat’ shallots for and then potted up in 7.5-10cm exhibition – a variety fellow (3-4in) pots that are kept in a cold grower Elwyn Davies gave greenhouse until planting out. me several years ago. Both this The only fungicide available variety and ‘Hative de Niort’ to amateur growers is are really difficult Bayer Fungus to keep from one Fighter Concentrate season to the next – I’d use it to treat the without them root plate before A botrytissuffering from basal planting. infected set rot or rotting around Harvesting the the shoulder – and th this bulbss properly and looking year seems to be one of after them during summer the worst for rotting off in store. and autumn helps keep them From the date of harvesting disease free. When harvesting, (around Midsummer’s Day) until put a fork under each clump and they’re started into growth in shake off surplus soil. Don’t snap late December or early January off the bulbs from the root plate is a long time to keep shallots but leave them intact to dry out stored without fungal disease thoroughly first. This avoids entering and rotting them. exposing the clean-cut root plate Top shallot grower David to attack by various diseases.

Thornton hardly ever loses any I dry mine in my polytunnel in storage as he takes off a thin on a steel-mesh bench that’s sliver from the root plate of every covered in fine nylon mesh and bulb. This remoistens it before near the door so air can circulate it’s dipped in fungicide powder and work through and around the bulbs. I turn them periodically until the green tops shrivel completely. Only then do I take off the tops and shrivelled roots with secateurs, before leaving them on the bench to dry out.

In mid to late September, I move them into stackable tomato boxes, which still allow plenty of air to reach the bulbs, Once dry, and store these in a cool, airy shallots go into place until I plant them in late stackable crates December/early January.

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November 14 2015 / Garden News 33