May 2009

The Big Lunch

Grow-your-own goes a step further with this scheme, devised by the Eden Project. The idea is that on Sunday July 19^th, street parties will be held across the country to enable communities to eat lunch together from ingredients they have grown themselves. So, get growing now if you want to gather your neighbours together and join in - even if all you can provide is a bowl of salad leaves, it’s a start!

Rootgrow

Following 8 years of trials, the RHS have extended their endorsement of Rootgrow mycorrhizal fungi products. They found that adding Rootgrow to the soil at planting time helped plants establish more quickly, gave fewer replant problems and improved both vigour and drought resistance.

I’m not sure if this was just with roses or with other plants as well. Rootgrow was originally intended to help with the age-old problem of rose replant disease. It’s now known that this isn’t a disease at all, but rather an imbalance of fungi and bacteria around the roots. An old rose develops (and can cope with) a large population of both, but if you replace it with a new, small rose, it gets overwhelmed and may die. This preparation helps the new rose cope and establish.

In the garden centres this week

Tomatoes are still selling well (taking 6 of the top 10 places), but they are being stalked in the top sellers list by strawberries and salad leaves as the weather improves and we begin thinking of hot summer days. Solar lights are still top of the sundries list, but tomato food Tomorite is hot on their heels.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show

We can’t let this week slip by without a mention of the Chelsea Show. The gardens looked great, the exhibits in the Pavilion were magnificent and the trade exhibits all looked superb. Even the weather has been reasonable, give or take the odd torrential downpour.

A total of 47 Gold Medals were awarded; 3 to show gardens and the majority to the exhibits in the Pavilion.

Special mention has to go to Winchester Growers, with Jon Wheatley, Mary Payne and the team providing a truly awe-inspiring display well ahead of the normal flowering season and winning not just Gold, but also the President’s Award. Also Dibley’s nursery, winning their 100^th RHS Gold medal (all shows) and Hillier’s their 64^th at Chelsea.

Business is booming

Most exhibitors at Chelsea are reporting a big increase in orders this spring, although there is some speculation that if the rules at the show aren’t relaxed to allow plant sales there, then it may not exist in 20 years time. Plant sales are only allowed at the very end of the show, meaning that the exhibitors lose out on a potential 157,000 customers over the 5 days. Costs are going up all the time and some of the big names have already withdrawn. The RHS stand to make a £5m profit from Chelsea and gain thousands of new members. Many growers would like the chance to make a profit, too.

Council doubles the size of its nursery

In these days of cutbacks and general misery, it’s good to hear that one council at least is investing in its environmental side. Taunton Deane Borough Council has doubled the size of its nursery to meet the demand for plants from local businesses and neighbouring councils. Staff there grow more than 200,000 plants and make up over 2700 hanging baskets, window boxes and other containers for the Deon and Somerset area.

Save our Science

There’s never been greater pressure on our industry (horticulture & agriculture) to reduce the use of chemicals and improve the way it works. The pressure on our research bodies to find new ways to fight pests, diseases and weeds is increasing all the time, due to EU regulations.

Yet thanks to funding cut-backs by successive UK governments, the few research bodies that remain in the UK may no longer have the money to pay their last few scientists in 2-3 years time.

Horticulture Week, the “trade press” for horticulture, is launching a campaign to highlight this frightening state of affairs. It’s already backed by the National Farmers Union and the main representative groups from the Fruit and Vegetable industries and they aim to lobby for the Government to match pound for pound the money raised from growers to change things.

If they can use our money to furnish their houses, they should be able to spare some to help this vital research!

Help for Heroes

To coincide with it’s sponsorship of the Help for Heroes garden at the RHS Chelsea flower show next week, B&Q are offering a limited edition pack of Petunias in the Help for Heroes colours of red, light blue and dark blue. A pack of 15 plants will cost £5 and, of this, £2.35 will go to the charity, which helps injured service personnel.

Sales news

The news from the garden centres is still good. Sales are now tipping towards salad plants and fertiliser as the weather warms up and the plants we bought a few weeks ago start to need feeding. Cordon tomato plants will need staking and tying soon, if you haven’t done it already, so it’s time to check you have enough canes. This is a good time to make the most of any offers on bedding, herbaceous perennials, strawberry plants and late summer or autumn-flowering bulbs. 

Hanging bra-skets

The Royal Horticultural Society is putting out a call for unwanted bras and boxer shorts to be donated to its Grow Your Own campaign. Along with stock donated by retailer Marks & Spencer, the underwear will be turned into a display at the Hampton Court Palace flower show in July. CLEAN underwear can be donated into a laundry basket next to the Press tent at the Chelsea show next week or posted to GYO/Bras, RHS, 80 Vincent Square, London SW1P 2PE. Georgie Webb of the RHS said “Once filled with compost you can grow salad leaves, herbs, alpine strawberries and even tumbling cherry tomatoes in them; the bigger the bra the more you can grow”.

Following a small trial of bras donated by staff last month, the RHS discovered that non-padded, bigger-cupped sizes were the best for growing in. To date they haven’t had the opportunity to test out men’s underwear to the same extent but it is hoped that with some tidy sewing, they too can be turned into a container that will sport more than just radishes.

On the website this week

See the video Chris took of the production line at Gardening Direct’s nursery in Jersey recently. You can watch how the trays of plants start off and progress through the stages right up to packing.

Have you checked out the Pest section? We will be adding a new pest regularly through the season so that you can identify the beasties in your garden and find out how to deal with them.

Gardening Direct

And finally…

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show opens to the public on Tuesday next week and we’ll be there. If you see us, do say hello and let us know if you have any ideas for this site.

If you’re not going to the show, the BBC will be covering it each day to show all the best bits and you usually get a much better view on the TV than you do when you’re there! So sit back with a cuppa and enjoy it – you may get some inspiration for your own garden, you may not, but it’s nice to watch it anyway!

Thank you!

As you know, we only launched in February, but the number of “hits” on our website is increasing all the time and, at the last count, we’ve had visitors from a whopping 58 different countries from all over the world – literally from A-Z (Argentina to Zimbabwe).

So, we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has visited the Gardening Channel website from the team.

Harewood House

Visitors to Harewood House, near Leeds, this summer will be able to see the spectacular new garden being unveiled there next week. The new Himalayan Garden has been created on the site of the old rock garden and features a gorge, a romantic sunken glade, a dramatic water cascade and the only stupa temple in Europe. Over 200 tonnes of stone was used to build the gorge and the plants used came from a 10-year accumulation of Sino-Himalayan species. It sounds fantastic – and well worth a visit.

Helping bees

The populations of both bumble and honey bees are declining in the UK, partly due to virus infections and partly to changes in land use. Gardeners can play their part in helping the bees survive by providing plants that are rich in nectar, such as Endymion (bluebells), Digitalis (foxglove), Buddleja and Sedum. There are several bumble bee surveys to be found on-line, so if you get these delightful creatures in your garden, it will help the scientists to establish the actual state of affairs if you complete one. Remember, without bees, we’d be really stuck when it comes to pollination.

Chelsea launch

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is only just over a week away and some of the new plants that are going to be launched there have been unveiled. They include Hosta ‘War Paint’ (Bowden Hostas), Rosa ‘Kew Gardens’ (David Austin), Cordyline ‘Southern Splendour’ (Hillier) and Scabiosa africana ‘Jocelyn’ (Hardy’s). If you’re able to visit the show, look out for them. If you can’t, then hopefully the BBC will show them on their coverage.

On the subject of Chelsea, several well-known names have pulled out this year. Notcutts have withdrawn for the first time since the show began in 1912. Squires have also pulled out, but Scotsdales (Cambridge) are returning for the first time in 4 years. Hilliers are seeking their 64^th Gold medal and are staging their usual large exhibit, which uses a massive 3500 plants and is put together in 3 days.

Wind warning

May’s an unpredictable month for weather, but if we get high winds, it’s worth checking your plants (particularly climbers) to make sure all the new growth is tied in. Long, whippy shoots will damage themselves and each other if they thrash around.

Gardening fights the credit crunch

It seems that gardening is one of the few sectors not being hit by the credit crunch at the moment. Total volumes of sales in garden centres in April were up an astonishing 31% on the same 4 weeks last year (after a 23% rise in March). The recent spell of good weather has undoubtedly helped, but it seems that people actively want to garden this year.

Many garden centres are reporting extraordinarily high sales of greenhouses and growing cases, too. So it looks like we’re going back to using our gardens for plants again, rather than as a “leisure room”.

Slug time

Warmer weather and damp conditions mean that May is a peak month for slug activity as they come out to chomp on all those tender new shoots. If you don’t want to be fighting an on-going battle with them all summer, take action now to control their numbers. There are lots of slug controls around, depending on what you want to use, and most are now safe around wildlife as long as you use them according to the directions on the pack. If you use one of the newer products, based on iron phosphate, the pellets will need applying more thickly than the old type to get effective control (6-7cm apart rather than 15cm for the old metaldehyde-based pellets).

Bird scarer

If you are plagued by herons visiting your garden pond and taking the fish, you might be interested in a new product by Velda. A sensor detects the bird as it arrives and emits a flash and the sound of a bird of prey. The shock makes the heron fly off.

Show time

The Show season is getting under way, so this is the time to get out and find a new addition for your garden (if you have any room left!). Take the time to talk to the grower and find out all about it, because he or she will be able to tell you its likes and dislikes, and may save you making a costly mistake. We have quite alkaline soil, so we have to make sure we don’t buy an acid-loving plant without realising it, because it would have to join our already large collection of containers - and we would have no room at all left on the patio.

There are two weeks left to the RHS Chelsea flower show and by now, activity will have started on the site. We aren’t doing our own exhibit there this year, but the Sun is sponsoring a series of small gardens in the Pavilion and we’ll be there during the week. If you’re visiting to the Show, come over and say hello.

This month

This is the month when frost becomes a thing of the past (hopefully!), so you can put out your bedding, tomatoes and tender herbs. Keep a piece of horticultural fleece handy, though, just in case the temperature dips one last time.

A weed-and-feed preparation now will help your lawn stand up to the demands of the summer. If you have trouble with moss in your lawn, you can treat it with a new product called M O Bacter. This kills the moss and then once it’s dead, bacteria within the product devour the remains so you don’t need to rake it out. Once the moss has gone, the bacteria will die off.