News - Page 110
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It's spring! This is the month when all gardeners have a bounce to their stride. It's hard to go indoors when the sun is shining, the birds are singing and the garden is alive with the year's first flowers. Enjoy!
General tasks:
- Watch out for frosts and keep horticultural fleece handy to throw over any plants vulnerable to damage
- Trim back climbers threatening to invade your guttering and eaves, always cutting back...
Test your soil before you sow as one of the easiest mistakes to make at this time of year is being too quick off the mark sowing seed outdoors.
Seed hunkers down to wait for better weather in chilly soil instead of germinating, putting it at risk from rotting or being eaten first. Sown in warmer conditions, though, they germinate quickly and grow away vigorously, often overtaking earlier-sown seedlings.
Every spring is different, and the da...
Prune coloured dogwoods to encourage a dazzling display of those vivid red stems again next year. Dogwoods are among the very best shrubs to choose for winter colour as their young growth has bark in vivid hues which shine out through the coldest months of the year, especially when back-lit by the low winter sun.
The best scarlet is Cornus alba 'Sibirica', but there are more subtly coloured dogwoods too: Cornus stolonifera 'Flaviramea' has lime-yellow s...
Plant a bumblebee garden to help our favourite black-and-yellow insects as they bustle about the garden pollinating our flowers and vegetables. We wouldn't get far as gardeners without them: they're responsible for the glistening displays of berries from autumnal stars such as cotoneaster, beauty berries, berberis and pyracantha; and even more importantly, they pollinate about a third of the crops we grow.
Sadly they're going through a tough time at the...
Buy in vegetable plug plants to fill gaps left by seedlings which didn't quite make it, or to stock up on veg you didn't quite get around to sowing earlier in the year. In small gardens, or when you're only growing for one or two people, plug plants are the obvious solution – instead of trying to find space for seed trays, buy ready-to-plant plugs and pop them straight in the garden. And if you only want a few of one particular vegetable – Brussels sprouts, say – it...
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It is Mother’s Day Sunday so don’t forget! Remember to treat your Mother to something nice to make her feel extra special! We have a lovely gift area in out centre in London where you will be sure to find her something.
You could choose one of our planted arrangements, handy tools kits for the garden, a sweet garden bench or even gift vouchers, but you must remember a card.
Why don’t you bring your Mum down to our centre for a day out? She...
The plants of the month for March are pansies and violas, among our best-loved bedding plants and always popular for their cheery easy-going nature. Take the time to look closer at their prettily-marked petals and you'll find there's more to them than you think: like little works of art, you can find varieties splashed, shaded, two-toned, striped and whiskered, in every shade from near-black to classy shades of bronze, copper and yellow.
Pack them into...
What to do in the garden in March:
It's the busiest month of the year – your chance to kick-start the season in style. By the end of the month windowsills are groaning with seedlings and the garden is bursting into life – so let's get started!
General tasks:
- Mulch bare soil in with lots of organic matter – well-rotted farmyard manure or home-made garden compost is perfect.
- Re-seed bare patches in the lawn ma...
Prune your roses this month before the spring takes a proper hold and they're starting to put on new growth. Bush and shrub roses should be first on your list: climbers are usually pruned in autumn, and you should leave rambling roses alone altogether – they're pruned after they've finished flowering, in late summer.
Arm yourself with a pair of sharp secateurs – you'll find professional-grade models in our garden centre here in London. It's important to...
Plant an edible hedge for a dual-purpose garden feature which tastes as good as it looks – and is really useful too!
Any kind of hedge is a wonderful asset to the garden, filtering wind to protect your crops and providing shelter for birds, beetles and frogs – your personal pest control army. However they do take up a lot of room: a mature hedge can easily reach a metre across. If you plant an edible hedge, though, you don't have to lose productive gard...
Build a composting area in a corner of your garden and you'll never regret it. In goes kitchen peelings, garden prunings and autumn leaves; out comes lovely, crumbly black gold, rich and ready to spread on the garden to feed your plants.
Once you get into composting, one bin just isn't enough: three is the ideal (one to fill, one to rot and one to use), then there's leafmould to make, and a green cone and wormery for kitchen scraps. You'll find a fantas...
Prune hardy fuchsias to tidy them up while the spring shoots are still dormant, and you'll find they erupt in fresh green growth from next month onwards ready for their lovely long-lasting display of pendent purple and red flowers through summer.
There are plenty of varieties of fuchsia able to survive even quite a hard winter: most are related to F. magellanica, a tough shrub which is so resilient it's naturalised and now grows wild in the hedgerows of...