Weeding the Web

Winter Bedding Plants from Plant Me Now: juggling ajuga with viola and lavender

Some things are obviously complicated. Others, you think, Surely not.

This weekend I had a go at Life Drawing and, yes, it was every bit as demanding as I thought it would be. Last month I was offered a choice of bedding plants from Plant Me Now - how difficult could it be to create perfect winter pots?

Hah!

It was my first venture into both winter bedding and designing pots with it. Thinking tonally, I requested two that are new to their range - Viola Teardrops Pink Blush and Lavender Lavance - and a stalwart bugle, Ajuga Burgundy Glow, which has lovely pinky-violet variegation.

Clever, I thought. Three short, bluey-leaved lavenders in the centre of a pot; pinky-purply bugle encircling them, showing the odd creamy splash; and an outer ring of blushing pink violas. A doddle. Why on earth are there so many magazine articles, telling you how to plant pots?

Hah!

They arrived. I hadn't received stock from Plant Me Now before and I was impressed. From my visit to Ball Colegrave I know that much effort went into researching good packaging and, although the box was left on its side in the porch, it wouldn't have mattered if it had been upside-down. The packaging keeps soil in its place and plants well protected.  The plants themselves looked bounding with health.

The other thing I like about Plant Me Now is that the plants are ready to go. I didn't have to hang around, nurturing anything, I could just plant up the pot.

Hah!

Space: massively underestimated. No way was I going to cram in three lavenders, five bugles and five violas, as planned. 

Combination: bugle = bushy and lavender = petite. Both lovely. Not pot companions.The robustly leaved bugle sort of overwhelmed the more whimsical-looking violas. Not pot companions. 

So here's Plan B: One lavender, surrounded by all five violas.

How did that heuchera get there? Oops, and the weed.

What of the bugle?

Though I says it myself - and in opposition to Husband, who proffered an unasked opinion on colour contrast - I'm rather proud of the way the plants complement each other tonally.

So, rather than remove the bugle elsewhere, I potted one up by itself and set it next to lavender/viola combo. I would have put more in, but the plants are a good size so one is almost filling the pot already, and being in "lonely splendour", so to speak, gives it a certain gravity all its own, which it lives up to with the variegated colouring.  Completely accidentally, I've entered the realms of blending pots together as well as plants.

So, unexpectedly I've now also got four lavenders in a trough, where I think they'll knit together into a rather smart little hedge that I might transfer into the ground when I've found the right spot, and four more bugle that, several weeks down the line, are still in the soil they arrived in and still thriving (obviously supplied in a good growing medium), and awaiting to adorn the top of a much larger pot where I'm intending to place a small tree. 

As a viola virgin, I really didn't know what to expect, so I've been pleased with the way they've taken off. They also, accidentally, fulfil Husband's demand for contrast as they start off yellow and gradually acquire their lilac-y hue from the top petals down (it is lilac more than pink, but plant expert, Tim Milward, of Plant Me Now, suspects that soil and weather conditions play a part in that). The yellow picks out the creamy splashes on the bugle.

Pansies and Violas at Wisley March 2013

I chose violas because I was so impressed by the massive display that Wisley put on last year as part of its Autumn Planting for Year Round Colour campaign. They made a very cheerful show.

Teardrop violas are already a popular series (Pink Blush is a new colour). They have a semi-trailing, cascading habit, which should suit my pot but, even better, in October's Gardening Which?, they report that Teardrops displayed the best winter flowering of all the violas they trialled and continued well beyond spring. By July, apparently, they were trailing beautifully.

Now, all you out there with pot+bedding experience, does the following sound familiar? There's something very addictive about planting up pots. I want to have another go. I want to tweak what I've done with a slightly taller lavender in the middle.

The possibilities seem endless, but do you ever find that you're absolutely satisfied? I fear the answer is no, and that the only remedy is to keep having another go. 

If you'd like more on Plant Me Now, visit Catharine Howard's post Plants by Post - do I rate them?

 

Presents for gardeners: music while you work from QDOS

If there's one thing that strikes horror to my heart, it's adverts for garden speakers - torture implements, surely, masquerading as rocks. Who would be cruel enough to inflict that on their neighbours?

This is not to say that music, or the Afternoon Play, doesn't appeal at times (obviously played at a level that won't disturb).

If you've ever tried wearing an iPod or similar while gardening, you'll know you end up fishing in the dirt every five minutes for an earphone dislodged by an untoward trowel movement. And if you want to listen to podcasts or stream music or radio through your laptop or tablet, you won't want to move it to a place where soil and water are just begging to add themselves to its delicate bits.

Enter Q-BOPZ. I was sent one of these to review for my column in Towpath Talk, but it sooned dawned on me that it also ranked as Useful Garden Equipment. It works with any Bluetooth-enabled device, up to 10 metres away, and produces a good round sound for speech. I also like it for music, though if you like a lot of bass you'll be disappointed.

It's splash-proof, and its foot is also a sucker that you can attach to most surfaces, though I wouldn't rely on it hanging on indefinitely while on the vertical plane. It fits easily in a pocket, comes in all sorts of eye-catching colours, so you don't lose it, and the volume can be controlled on the speaker.

Not a bad idea for keeping you company while tidying the borders or the shed.

MoreVeg gives gardeners the chance to grow more varieties

With many of us mulling over our seed catalogues at the moment, are you finding yourself looking at the number of seeds in a packet and thinking, "Well, most of those will be wasted"?  Lettuces are my particular bugbear. There's no way I'm going to get through 1000 lettuce seeds before their viability falls off.

With Rachel Martin, it was cabbages. Her children were starting to rebel at the sight of yet another cabbage. Then - horrors - she lost her seed tin. "We went to buy more," she told me, " and the bill came to £80!"

So, about five years ago, she and her husband dreamt up MoreVeg, selling vegetable and other seeds in smaller numbers. They visited lots of gardens, heading straight for the vegetable patches to see how many of each veg most people actually grew. "Most only grow about 20 cabbages," she said.

This is such a simple idea, I wonder no one's thought of it before. The cost per seed may be a bit more in a MoreVeg packet, but lower prices per packet mean that you can afford to try more veg and varieties. For Rachel, growing a wider variety of cabbages created unexpected interest. Instead of groaning at the greens on their plate, her children started asking, "Which cabbage is it?"

MoreVeg started with 124 varieties and now sell over 1000. They won't be expanding the numbers much further because 1000 is quite enough to administer, says Rachel. They don't grow the seed themselves, but what she and her husband do, though, is grow and taste almost everything they sell. The only exceptions are varieties such as Sunspot Cucumber which they put on the list because of overwhelming demand. And flowers have to earn their keep - those stocked will attract bees and butterflies or have some other use.

I think a lot of us can see the point of MoreVeg. If you have a smallholding, vast quantities of individual veg seed make sense, but for the rest of us, as Rachel says, “No one sells anything in the quantities that people actually want.”

Apple scab takes over

How are your apples? Mine look absolutely ghastly. Our unnamed 25 year-old variety that ripens round now is, pretty much, one big scab.  OK, so the fruit is still broadly edible, but some of the scab is so bad that it's cracked, and those apples will have to be used asap before disease creeps in.

All parts of a tree can be affected, and scab also causes early leaf fall and thus weakens the tree if it continues for several seasons.

Not every apple gets scab. Our Egremont Russet has escaped, faithfully living up to its reputation as one of the numerous varieties that are extremely scab resistant. So what happened to the anonymous variety this year? There's often a bit of scab, but on nothing like the scale we're seeing now.

What is Apple Scab?

Apple scab is a fungus (Venturia inaequalis) which overwinters on fallen leaves. You have to admire Nature. Maturity of spores, rather magically, coincides with the development of the tree, and their release begins with bud-break, when the leaves first emerge (a time also known as "green-tip"). By the time the blossom is over, most spores have matured, spurred on by periods of weather most conducive to tree growth (when, presumably, they're somehow alerted to the presence of fresh "flesh").

The number of spores released is, as you can imagine, directly related to the number of infected leaves left over from the previous season. A 1-3% increase in infected leaves on the ground is likely to result, the following spring, in a 10% increase of spores released at green-tip; a 5% increase leads to a ten-fold increase in spores. (Source: Apple Scab Disease Management video from MSU).

Mature spores are released in wet weather, about half an hour after rain begins (fascinatingly, if it rains at night, spores don't usually spurt forth until daybreak - fungus afraid of the dark?). They're blown by wind onto fruit and leaves, which need to be wet for them to germinate. They will then infect the apple if conditions are favourable. For example, if leaves and fruit stay wet for 23 hours at an average 5.5 degrees Centigrade (42F), or 9 hours at 16-24 degrees C (61-75F), then lesions will appear in approx 3 or 2 weeks respectively. 

Spores from these new lesions are dispersed by rain throughout the season and - wouldn't you know it? -  these these lesions release even more spores than are coming from the lesions on leaves on the ground.  So infection continues, although leaves are completely resistant once they're full grown, and only succumb again once their cuticles begin to crack. Fruit also becomes more resistant, though late scab infection can develop in stored fruit.

Why this year?

April and May were warmer than average for most in the UK, and in April and May we had plenty of rain in the south, so it's not surprising that fungus flourished.

But not without a little help, you're no doubt thinking.

And you'd be right - I never clear up leaves. Combine this with the weather and the result are obvious to all. But enough of my sluttish ways. This year every single leaf is coming out from under that tree.  Yes, there are sprays that can be employed at strategic moments in spring, but let's see if a little garden hygiene won't go a long way. 

Annoyingly, as the tree tends to bear biennially, if it does work I won't enjoy the fruits of my labour until 2016.

(Incidentally, if you'd like more science, Cornell University has a useful Apple Scab factsheet. And so does the Horticultural Development Company.)

 

 

 

GBBD: Cyclamen never stops

Well, this Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day I'm hoping for some advice. Here's what I've chosen for this month:

I featured this plant at the beginning of the year when I reviewed its Ebersankey Glossy Self-Watering Pot from Fiskars.  The string wick that draws the water from the reservoir has, incidentally, suffered no further diminishment and, as you can see, the plant has at least doubled in size. It has also flowered non-stop - and I'm not exaggerating; it's had bushels of blooms - since last Christmas.

The question I'm asking is, Can it flower itself to death? Should I take it out of its pot, let it dry out and give it a rest, or just let it get on with it? If the latter, I really feel I ought to start feeding it in some way - perhaps a drop or two of plant food in the water.

Any advice would be much appreciated. What do you think?

NB See what's happening to blooms around the world this Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day at May Dreams Gardens.

Tree Following: autumn's progress

This month shows mostly signs of autumn on the lilac. At least, I hope they are, rather than something gradually eating away at the tree. The leaves are browning, but they are also getting eaten.

Not something that happened when it was a tree, but then perhaps the snails that like to call the lilac home didn't climb so willingly.  At least they're pretty ones.

I guess it was to be expected that the shoots (can I call them branches now?) would stopped growing. The lilac is no taller than it was last month.

Time to take a closer look at the sawn-off end of the stump.

 

And here's what it looked like back in May. The markings are darker now but I don't think they've spread.

 
And finally, Baby Lilac:

The tiny new leaf has gone brown and fallen, and there's just this left now. I suspect there'll just a stump to see next month. I must remember to not to let it dry out over winter.

To see how other trees are faring around the world, hop over to Loose and Leafy.