Gardening Tips

Haiku - 

Running water

Green hedges

Wet pebbles

below

Minature Iris by Lake

Remember that all plants in Containers need to 

be watered regularly. Baskets, pots, planters 

are all Mini Gardens and do need to be 

kept fed and watered often.
If the compost is dry it is in need of
watering.

 Compost needs to be replaced
now and again with big planters.

 Keeping your plants

nourished and as healthy as possible is the secret
to happy plants. More on that later on.

Different plants need different Composts.
See section on Soils and Compost coming soon. 

Hanging Baskets

There is a real knack to planting well 

and successfully in a hanging basket.

I will talk about that more fully later on.

Once planted up you need to feed

them with plant plugs and keep watering 

daily if the soil is dry.

Shrubs in Pots

Sometimes we forget to water and

feed shrubs which are not in the ground.

They are just as important but can get

neglected.

Such as this prolific Clematis.
It took a long time to grow and after a couple of years suddenly produced
beautiful bell shaped flowers. It now has a few lovely seed heads.

Remember in windy weather we need to keep plants well watered so they do not dry out,

even those in the ground. With this extreme wind we need to make sure plants are where possible
put in a sheltered place. That is if they happen to be in a pot you can easily move. Dead heading flowers
that have gone over, like roses. 

You can keep the dried petals and make your own lavender/rose bags.

Pests and Disease

Remember Gardening is not always a pleasure..

Roses are particularly prone to green or black fly.

So we need to spray them regulalry to remove them.

This year my hellebores seem very susceptible to aphid attack.
I have had to spray them quite a few times already in a short
period of time. I keep them away from other plants incase they
too get infected.

Watering Plants in Summer

All plants in hot weather need to be given extra attention and watered more often.

All plants in pots need to be kept reguarly watered or they will suffer. Look at the 

leaves if they start to droop or even if they start to shrivel up and dry out. 

This is leaf scorch on my Actinidia

This is a beautiful climber and does love sun. It gets a lot of direct sun 

when it is out and suddenly got really scorched.

I have removed the dead leaves which fell off and watered it a lot twice a day. 

I have given it more multi purpose compost as it needed more. 

I will keep an eye on it and see how it is doing over the next week. 

Keep reading please.

Lemon Balm scorch on leaves July 15

 This Lemon balm plant is normally quite happy and grows

well but it too has developed some leaf scorch. It is also in a relatively 

sunny spot and the intense heat we have had recently (end of June/early July)

has been a bit too much for it. So again I will remove these leaves and keep it

watered.