A week of all seasons in the garden

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 9, Issue 385, 7 May 1991, Page 11

A week of all seasons in the garden

The weather last week was nothing if not varied. Summer, Autumn and Winter all in one week. Still quite a lot of colour in the garden though and the roses have a brave show of new buds just bursting into flower.

That delightful little rose 'the fairy' has bloomed profusely all summer long and with the cooler weather and some much needed rain the later blooms are a much richer, deeper pink. I spent a pleasant half

hour on Sunday afternoon removing spent flowers from the lavender bushes and trimming them to a good shape. This will give them a chance to put out new shoots and thicken up before the winter descends upon us. I

by

Bea

Barnes

couldn't see all those lovely cuttings going to waste and although it is recommended that lavendula cuttings be taken in early summer I always put in some cuttings after trimming the bushes and a good proportion of them grow. I leave the cuttings a little bit longer, about eight or nine inches and am careful to take only good healthy wood which hasn't flowered. Planted in the shade of the parent bush to prevent them drying out and watered in dry weather, most of them seem to survive. Autumn is a good time to take cuttings of conifers at the time when the sap ceases to run. Take a piece about eight or nine inches long with a 'heel'. This is quite easily done by selecting the piece you need for the cutting and giving it a sharp tug downwards. It will come away with a little piece of the bark of the branch attached to it. Trim off any frayed edges with scissors and plant in pots in a good sandy mix. Keep the pots in a shady place away from warm sun and wind and make sure the pots don't dry out. Potted cuttings will need to be put under more cover in the coldest weather, the back porch can be quite a good place for them. Keep only very slightly damp in the cold weather letting the surface of the soil mix dry out before lightly watering again. I have had some success by planting cuttings directly into the ground under the parent bush but if you do this make sure you choose a

place with good cover for them. Chamacyparis and juniperis varieties strike quite readily from cuttings but some of the thicker leaved thujas I have found to be tempermental. Cupressus varieties can be very difficult to propagate from cuttings but I am going to try a few more from blue ice'. I had two which had survived for several months under the parent tree (and blue ice is a tree. It will grow to fifteen feet or more). They were both still strong and healthy looking until Kate decided that the good friable soil around them was just the place for an elderly bantam to take a bath. I came home to find my precious cuttings scratched out on the lawn and was quite unable to decide whether the dried up looking hairs at the base were embryo roots or not. The impatiens which I had grown from cuttings last year spent the winter months in pots on the window sill, the roof of the outside deck protecting them from frost. I planted them out in the garden for the summer and they have all put on good growth and flowered profusely for months. There are still quite a lot of buds to open but I doubt that the plants will survive the first frost so again I will take cuttings and plant them up for next year. The potted fuschias must be put under cover before the first frosts arrive and watered very sparingly during the winter months. In the spring they can be repotted when the first

new leaves show at the base of the plant, the old wood being removed from the base. We have at last completed the two new raised beds with ponga log surrounds on the far side of the lawn. The ground is slower draining here with a hard pan base about twelve inches below the top soil. We have made the beds about eight feet long and four feet wide edging them with the ponga logs placed one on top of each other. The base logs sit securely in a narrow trench and the top ones are securely wired to them. First we cut out the lawn turf and laid it aside, then completely removed the soil in the trenches right down to the hard pan base. The turves were then laid in the trenches grass side down. These will eventually break down and make good compost.

Then followed by a thick layer of rotted straw plus a layer of unusable parts of a sheep's fleece and a thick layer of newspaper on top of this. The trenches were filled with good new topsoil (from

the carrot washers) mixed with a bale of peat moss, some old horse manure and a good dressing of blood and bone. The filling was left to settle, being well hosed in dry weather.