YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 12, 15 September 1939, Page 41

YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

By

Ann Earncliff

Brown

No. 2

AST week I received a letter 1; from a gardener who proudly told me she had that morning cut a savoy cabbage "37 inches round the bust and not bust." Also that she had dug carrots, late sown to replace ones spoilt by blight, and that these emergency roots now measured 12 inches of crisp, sound flesh despite their winter sojourn underground. I am particularly interested to hear news of this cabbage, for last autumn I saw the young savoys being patiently dusted with derris dust to protect them against the white butterflies. My friends is no mere surface worker in her domain. Always she digs deeply, limes liberally, and whatever fertilisers she uses, mixes them with that most potent of all ingredients -- brains. Reginald Arkell in "A Perfect Lady" says: I knew a girl who was so pure She couldn’t say the word manure. My lady of the cabbage patch quite frankly regrets the good red

days of dung-hot, steamy, stimulating dung. Nevertheless this resourceful Good Provider, nose pleasantly titillated by the heady odours of hops, expertly shovels these by-products of a brewery into celery trenches, tomato beds, etc. From these, excellent results and no lurking weeds are obtained. Lime is generally useful, but certain plants dislike, and a minority actually do not tolerate, it. Rhododendrons, laurels, and azaleas, most lilies and Japanese Iris, loathe lime and thrive in cool peat and leaf mould. Madonna lilies and bearded Iris, however, delight in lime and suit baked soils. Wood ashes are generally bene-ficial-especially so to delphiniums. Ready mixed garden fertilisers are popular and convenient to use in flower pots and on lawns, where frequent light applications well watered in are preferable to a single generous application.