Weeding the Web

No reel need - storing the garden hose

Garden hoses - with the extraordinarily dry weather this spring it looks as if they will be much used until confined to quarters by the ban that everybody (at least down here in the South-East) is expecting.

The question is, what are those quarters? Where, or rather how, do you keep your hose? Pile it up in a loose arrangement and it soon becomes damaged, the walls folding against each other, twisting and gradually springing a leak. I used to leave the hose trailed carefully around the garden paths, straight and untwisted, but another member of the family found that unfathomable and kept piling it up.

Hose reels are not, in my opinion, much cop as they can be fiddly; you have to bend down to them and they can be awkward and heavy. The best way to store a hose is looped on the wall, high enough so that you don't have to bend to loop it round, making it easy to lift off and unhitch to the required length, taking only moments to put back.

You could get something fancy like this cast-iron hose tidy from Harrod Horticultural, but hey, it's a hose, so a no-nonsense, neat-and-tidy storage hook from Wickes is serving me very well. And at just over a fiver, it's a lot cheaper too!

 

How to Harvest Rhubarb

One of the features of modern times, in my opinion, is the proliferation of instructions and an accompanying fear in novices of getting things wrong. Perhaps it has always seemed thus, but the media nowadays strikes me as particularly strong on nannying didacticism.

So, as reassurance, I can reveal that a member of my family, well advanced in years (no, not me!) has managed to go through life without ever knowing exactly how to harvest rhubarb. Both she and the rhubarb plants that have endured her cutting, rather than pulling, have survived, so it just goes to show that getting things wrong isn't as disastrous as we are sometimes led to believe.

However, harvesting rhubarb stalks by pulling is, according to Tom Cole in the Videojug production below, beneficial to the plant as it stimulates the roots. For best results in future years, you should also restrict your harvesting to plants three years old or more. Actually, he says you can harvest a couple of sticks from two-year-old plants, but only in the first two weeks, so it barely seems worth it.

So, just to stop you having to carry a sharp blade across the uneven surface of the garden (risk assessment - another feature of modern times), here's how to harvest rhubarb:

 

Codling moths gather early - or do they?

Bright sunshine, glorious warmth. What else to do but relax in the recliner, gaze languidly up into the apple tree, and "What the...?!?"

I counted 15 of them: small, dark moths with extraordinarily long antennae. I'd have thought them cute, but for their intense concentration on a tree that contributes substantially to our food supply. Anything that focussed and that numerous just has to be bad, doesn't it?

But what were they?  Seriously hampered by the fact that they were too high to see properly, and wouldn't stay still long enough for me to snap a close-up, I first plumped for the codling moth as the main apple pest known to me, but they would be rather early. Here we were at the end of April and the RHS tells us that they emerge in late May-June (to lay eggs on or near developing fruits from June to mid-July).

What happens when I plant daffodil bulbs (too) late?

Last year I reported on what happened when my tulip bulbs went in later than any self-respecting gardener should admit. I got full-sized leaves but a teeny, tiny flower.

You'd think I'd have learned my lesson, but no. Sure enough, what turned up a few weeks ago, but the remains of a bag of daffodil bulbs. So, I bunged them in some time around the beginning of March.

You can see what happened.  This time, there's a full size flower, but no leaves and a three-inch stalk. I think we can deduce that, if we don't let bulbs gather momentum over winter, then something's got to give.

Incidentally, the tulips have come up quite normally since.