Wildlife & Gardens

I'm always right....I'm TuT

 

Perhaps but you are no TVOR.

 

Damn, now I don't know what's the truth any more.

 

As itinerant renters, we have to have all our plants in pots, so we can take them with us when we go. It means a lot of watering in the dry summer months. Everything gets pot-bound too. Some I've had to plant out, even though we have some big pots.

Cifriana and I both like smelly plants, so we have nicotianas, lillies, stocks and mock orange of various types.

 

Excellent planting. When we had to move from Wales we had to rent for a couple of years. Although strictly not allowed (and we did do most planting in pots) I had to plant some dahlias which we lifted when we moved on.

 

Finished getting my bean poles up so will be planting the runners out tomorrow

 

There's nothing nicer than a fresh from the garden runner bean. Shop bought stuff is orrible in comparison.

This year I'm not planting any however. Last year's crop was stringy and tasteless but thankfully few in number.

I'm dedicating the area to an expansion in chilli production. My Chilli pickle has become bloody popular and I'm having to ramp up production. I think I'm becoming a white middle aged Levi Roots with no singing skills.

 

Same here. My neighbours like to 'puff' and I get sick of the smell when it's every single day (usually first super-skunk spliff is around 8AM). Stocks and nicotianas (very happy to discover it's a perennial), lavenders (grew my first plants from seed - I didn't get many but the experts at Ayletts said it was very, very difficult to do - so yay me!), 'proper' poppies (they do smell) and various aromatic herbs (sages and rosemary) and jasmine.

This year is my third year of having asparagus which makes the shop-bought stuff taste like school-dinners. Also I found last year the best strawberry for hanging baskets - Gasana -this year I grew 25 plants to seedlings but they got fried during the freak hot spell (I didn't think it would get that hot) and I couldn't find any gasana plants anywhere*.

*Crews Hill and Ayletts.

 

Is growing your own asparagus easy ? Might just try that. Love the stuff.

 

From a lot of unused decking I built a raised (50cm*90cm*180cm) bed. Filled it with compost (had to go as rats were living in it) and chicken manuare pellets. Bought 16 crowns from ebay (one plant 'died' during weeding and one was dug up by cats) squeezed 5+4+5 into bed. Waited one year. Waited another year but was allowed to take one spear per plant. Now getting lots and lots it and tastes nothing like the shop bought stuff.

 

Just googled this. Think I'll give it a go. Bit of a pain you have to wait a couple of years before full harvesting but hopefully worth it. Make sure you sell any Tesco shares you hold before 2021. https://www.thompson-morgan.com/how-to-grow-asparagus

 

Just looked at the link and OK. I had to go the raised bed route as my newish build home is on the site of an ex-film studio and laying some paving stones I discovered that the 'cheeky' builders had formed the garden by laying turf on 5cm of soil over rubble. I was worried about heavy metal contamination so everything in my garden is grown in pots/containers/hanging baskets. The bed was 5cm layers of compost/soil from previous containers then a not particularly liberal sprinkling of chicken manure pellets followed by a lyer of sand from the kids' old sand pit and repeated until the soil layer was about 5cm from the top (this was a suggestion from GQT). One thing I forgot to do (literally I only remembered when I had built and filled the bloody thing) was to have laid a root barrier netting layer at the base of the frame (to stop ash tree root invasion) - something I was surprised to find when I got rid of my garden's compost bin.

The 12 decentish sized spears I harvested last year were used in this recipe and were exquisite:
https://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/asian-asparagus-17963

 

Might it be a bit early to to put runner bean plants out?

 

Nematodes.

Microscopic, well, nematodes. Worm-like things. Naturally occurring, they live in the soil anyway and kind of eat slugs from the inside. You get them delivered in packets as a powder which you dilute in water and spray onto the soil. I’ve tried them before and it did seem to work. You need to start in spring when the slugs are small and continue through the summer.

They may be worth a try.

 

This thread is more Chris Packham than David Beckham.

 

OK on the south coast. Not had a frost here for two months and they are all in the coldframe now

 

Mrs S keeps suggesting I get some nematodes. You reckon it's worthwhile to try?

 

I had success over a small area in a small garden a few years back. I used it around areas where we had Hostas. The last couple of years seem to have been a nightmare. We have a much larger border and over this larger area they didn’t seem to work.

Slugs love small runner bean plants!

 

Don’t buy from T & M though, they are ****. Go to a decent nursery/garden centre.

I am pleased to discover I have inherited asparagus on my new allotment but am unsure how long it has been there so will probably wait another year to be on the safe side.

Re runners: only sowed mine on Monday, well behind as usual with seeds.

 

Runners will catch up in no time. Can still be sown (sowed?) in July.

 

Couple of questions for the group, since apparently we have a bunch of closet gardeners:

1. What's the least toxic way to kill weeds efficiently? Currently I spray with something that's pretty nasty (Round-Up), but it works. I'd like to find some environmentally safer way to do it, but everything I've tried as far as alternative products doesn't seem effective.

2. Anyone got a recommendation for how to kill grass/plants/weeds around trees? I have a nice tall pine in my back garden, but I have a bear of a time keeping grass, weeds etc from growing around it. I don't want to kill the tree so I'm very careful about what I use near it.

 

What sort of weeds?

I just dig mine up and then mulch over the bare soil. Hard work though.

 

Honestly, I don't even know what a lot of them are called; I've never seen anything like them in the UK.

I have a fair few bags of mulch ready for this year.

 

Ive heard HighGrade is an expert on homegrown. Although you may need to outlay for hydroponics

 

Yes, you might well have some nasty colonial types over there!

 

Round up type of weed killer is the most effective thing that I use but it is pretty nasty.

How big is the area you want to cover around the pine? Could you cover it with plastic sheeting or something to keep the light out they die off?

 

10x10 foot area approximately. I've been thinking about using black garden tarp with mulch on top so we're of like minds!

 

I had a garden, until what I can only imagine was a small tornado touched down in my neighborhood last night during a particularly ferocious round of storms. Now I have a mangled trampoline wrapped around the pillars that support my back porch and I’m minus a swing set that appears to have completely disappeared. Needless to say, the flowers have also met their end. Surprisingly, a fold-up garden chair remains in the exact same spot it was left amidst the carnage.

 

Blimey - where do you live?

 

I still use a very nasty combination of weedkillers that I bought when we had our farm - too big an area to look after without 10 litre sprayer. In that I used a mixture of Gallup bio, Attak and Chikita (careful - don't go into ABBA) suitably diluted. This would kill everything but not harm animals and last for 6 months. I am using the leftovers here for a once a year kick off until it is all gone.
Beyond that I am trying to move to a "no dig" methodology (see books by Charles Dowding). It aims to cover areas to inhibit weeds and the philosophy is that it is digging that mainly unearths weed seeds. It seems OK where I am trying it but takes a year or two till all the weeds are dead and do not come back - we will see.
Mainly I am putting down thick layers of compost or bark and picking any weeds that get through. I still have an awful problem with bindweed and "sticky bob" though - it needs pulling out as soon as you see it as it grows so fast.

Mrs S is encouraging me to buy a garden flamethrower (can get them on ebay (butane) for about £10) to use around the base of trees because you can selectively target only what you want to kill. I will probably give it a go.

 

I want a garden flamethrower and I want one NOW.

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Range-WEED...flamethrower&qid=1557576322&s=outdoors&sr=1-2

 

The leafy suburbs of Houston, TX. There’s a couple square miles where I live that seem to throw up small tornadoes on a regular basis when there’s a major storm passing through.

 

Flamethrowers are a lot of fun but leave a bit of a mess and tend not to kill the roots so the weeds come back pretty quick.

I put black opaque porous sheet round our trees and then cover with gravel. Tried bark initially but the cats loved to crap in it and it’s difficult to tell the crap from the bark to remove !