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| Go greener |
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| With a growing number of gardeners eschewing chemicals in favour of natural alternatives, we can suggest some effective products from our organic gardening selection |
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| Relax and refresh |
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| Good food freshly prepared daily, aromatic coffee, chilled wine and a grassy play area for the children. What more could you need? |
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| Food heaven |
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| Our Farm Shop is heaven for food lovers! Delicious handmade food, top quality groceries, fresh fruit and vegetables and stylish cookware and gifts. |
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| The Discovery Walk |
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| As thousands of daffodils herald the spring, stroll or stride around our Walk while the youngsters enjoy the Nature Trail |
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Let ’em hang!
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| Thursday, 24th April 2008 |
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IN THE GARDEN WITH PETA MARSHALL
I love this time of year. The garden centre is choc-a-bloc, filled with planted up containers. Customers come along and can pick from hundreds of ready-planted tubs, pots and hanging baskets. And for me, it means that the better weather is finally here.
I reckon that the baskets are my favourites. They can form a neat bundle of colour adhering to the basket in a sort of a suspended globe, or the plants can trail to the ground, dripping with a profusion of colour and possibly scent as well. Gorgeous!
If you consider buying a ready-made basket is ‘cheating’, and you fancy having a go at creating your own, then all the components are available from the Priory Farm Plant Centre.
Making up your own basket can be hugely satisfying, and you can really opt for any kind of bedding plant to create the basket of your dreams. The good old reliable trailing plants such as fuchsias, ivy-leaved geraniums, pendulous begonias, lobelias, ivies and nasturtiums do very well.
In recent years, however, there have been some fantastic non-stop flowering plants, such as the Surfinia petunia, Million Bells callibrachoa, and the trailing Bacopa ranges. These have all been especially bred for hanging basket growing. Once established in the container, these heavy-bloomers go on, right up until the autumn frosts.
I have also used African and French marigolds, osteospermums, tobacco plants, snapdragons, sweet peas, verbenas, zinnias and the lovely black-eyed Susan (Thunbergia) which, when planted against a wall climbs up it, and when grown in a basket hangs down from it.
So what are the important things to check?
Positioning It seems fairly obvious, but the tallest plants should be set in the centre of the basket, and the smaller ones, or those that trail down, should be at the edge. I’ve seen plenty of baskets in my time that have veered away from this principle, and none of them has looked aesthetically pleasing.
Compost Make sure you use fresh compost and set the plants well into it – so that the when planted the compost around each plant’s stem is at the same level as the surrounding compost. I often see attempts where the plants have been dropped in a hole that was too small, and not firmed in place properly. With this kind of planting there will be less nutrition available for the plant, it will dry out more quickly when the weather’s warm, and there’s a very good chance that it won’t become anchored into the compost sufficiently and could actually fall out of the basket when it gets top-heavy.
Watering Check your basket each day once you’ve got it planted and hanging in its new home. Because several plants are growing together, all sharing the same small amount of compost, hanging in a place where the sun or wind can dry the whole thing out in a matter of minutes, it is crucial that you check every day for watering.
A way to help retain moisture in the basket is to use water gel crystals. You can buy these from the garden centre, and when planting the basket you incorporate them in the compost so that they are next to the roots of the plants. When the basket is watered the crystals absorb some of the moisture, swelling up to several dozen times their size. They can then release the moisture they’ve gathered when the baskets get a little dry. It’s a great invention, and I recommend all gardeners use them.
Ready-made baskets from the garden centre will usually have these crystals incorporated at planting time, but do ask. If not, you can add the crystal afterwards by pushing them deep down into the compost between the plants.
Feeding When so many flowering plants are growing in such a small amount of compost, they will quickly use up the available food reserves. It is important therefore to feed the plants, at least on a weekly basis (and twice a week won’t hurt). This may sound a lot, but the best way to do it is to mix up a very weak solution of tomato fertiliser (high in potash, which promotes flowering), and to apply this as you water, once or twice a week.
Most of the above advice applies to all sorts of container, not just the hanging baskets. For example, you might imagine that a disc jockey would be into top of the ‘pots’, but the weatherman talks about ‘troughs’ of low pleasure. And of course the late great Eric Morecambe had his ‘little urn’! Mmm…I must be suffering from a touch of summer madness already!
Happy gardening!
This week in your garden
Herbaceous perennials are now pushing through their soft new growths. Make sure these don’t get nibbled down before they have a chance to shine, by regularly applying slug controls.
If you haven’t yet planted summer-flowering bulbs, rhizomes and tubers – such as lilies, cannas, zantedeschia, gladioli, dahlias and eucomis – then this is really your last chance for this year.
Give strawberries a high potassium feed to encourage flowers and fruit setting. Tomato fertiliser is ideal.
Peta Marshall is the plant centre manager at Priory Farm in Nutfield. Website: www.prioryfarm.co.uk
NEXT WEEK: Green salad veg
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