Amateur Gardening 8-Sep-2018

GARDENING can be an expensive and time-consuming hobby, but for excellent results that don’t cost a second mortgage you can do a lot worse than investing in a few packs of spring bulbs. These wonderfully versatile plants are relatively cheap to buy, and once they are in the ground you can forget about them until next spring, when they will delight you with a cheery fanfare of colour to blow away the winter blues. Garden centres and online suppliers are stuffed to the gunwales with spring-flowering bulbs now and this is the perfect time to get them in the ground, when the soil is damp and still warm from summer’s sunshine. It’s all very well going for traditional tulips and daffs, but there’s a whole world of bulbs out there so don’t limit…

IT is true to say that bulbs are an easy way to bring colour to the garden, but there are certain rules to adhere to for optimum results. First, prepare your soil by forking it over to break up the clods and remove any stones, roots and weeds. Bulbs do best in soil that is fertile and free-draining, in sheltered sunlight or light shade. They can rot in soil that is slow-draining or prone to waterlogging. When planting bulbs I enrich our soil with well-rotted organic matter and bulb fibre (usually used for container bulbs, but will help wherever they are planted). The same ingredients can be used to enrich and leaven heavy clay soils. Read the packet to see how high they will grow and position them in your borders accordingly. Discard…

Daffodils that grow with lots of foliage but no flowers are known as ‘blind’. If yours suffered last year, dig them up now, check them over and discard any diseased ones. Then replant the rest. Blindness can be caused by several factors – shallow planting, knotting or removing leaves loo early after flowering, pests and diseases, overcrowding or allowing seedpods to form instead of deadheading. Remedy the problem by replanting the bulbs at the proper depth in sunny, well-drained soil. Also, let the foliage die down naturally before removing it and feed the plants with liquid tomato food. If the clump looks overcrowded, lift and divide after flowering.…

1 Put crocks and container compost or bulb fibre in the pot and add the first bulbs – in this case, tulips. 2 Cover the bulbs with compost. Container compost and bulb fibre are formulated to give good drainage. 3 Avoid placing the second layer directly over the first lot of bulbs, so they will grow around each other. 4 After adding more compost, I topped my ‘lasagna’ with delicate Anemone nemorosa (wood anemone) 5 Water the bulbs, place the container on feet somewhere sheltered and wait until spring when you should get a stunning show.…

AWAR of words has broken out surrounding the use of the country’s most popular garden chemical. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in a cocktail of chemicals found in the UK’s most popular weedkillers. It is a systemic killer and works by travelling though the whole plant down to the roots after application to the leaves. It appears in brands used by domestic gardeners including Resolva, Roundup, Job Done and Weedol. It is also widely used commercially and its prevalence in farming has increased by 400% in the past two decades. Last month Monsanto, which launched Roundup in 1974, was ordered by a Californian court to pay damages of $289m (£224m) to groundsman Dewayne Johnson, who said prolonged use of the chemical had caused his terminal non-Hodgkin lymphoma. “Agricultural use has increased 400% in 20…

Several EU countries have banned glyphosate or are discussing the chemical’s future: Germany has started the process of banning it and a resolution is being finalised to end its use in public parks and sports facilities. Belgium has forbidden its use by domestic gardeners. Portugal banned the use of glyphosate in public spaces in 2016. France intends to ban the chemical outright within three years. Denmark has banned farmers from blanket spraying arable crops with glyphosate before harvesting. This practice is used in the UK because it makes the grain ripen and dry more uniformly for storage.…