Summer’s in full swing now – excellent! Here we are at the longest day, with wonderfully light evenings to relax in after a hard day’s labour in the garden.
And there is still plenty to be getting on with including sharpening tools, potting on tender plants and feeding them for fab flowers…….
Sharp Practice
I was tying in the stems of cordon tomatoes yesterday and reached for my snips to cut the jute twine. Uh-oh, they wouldn’t cut, and they were even showing a bit of rust. Mea maxima culpa! I should have included them in my annual tool-sharpening session earlier in the year. It makes a ridiculous amount of difference to the ease of cutting and – rather counter-intuitively – is in fact safer.
The reason is that the extra force needed to cut through stems and branches with a blunt blade, makes it more likely that it will slip and cause injury. Apart from that, using sharp cutting tools are much kinder to aching and tiring fingers, hands and arms; and you’ll get the job done much quicker – definitely a factor when you have a quantity of pruning ahead of you as I do in the featured picture at the top of the blog this week!
Blunt blades can also bruise and snag plant tissues, allowing the possibility of diseases to enter, rather than making a clean cut.
We stock the perfect thing! It’s a handy pocket-sized sharpening steel in our online shop, which has a natty magnetic trick whereby the filings stay on the steel and can just be wiped off with a cloth. Isn’t that a clever idea! Do check it out – there’s a link at the bottom.
So if you have any cutting tools – secateurs, snips, shears, hoes and even spades etc, that you intend to use for the rest of this growing season, just stop and take a little time to make sure they are properly sharp and up to snuff.
Penny-saving pelargoniums
Do you remember back in April when I was urging you to take advantage of very cheap offers of tiny tender bedding plants and then growing them on yourself ?
My titchy pelargonium babies took kindly to this treatment and are ready to be put out to give a mass of colour right until autumn. I’ll be putting them into pots of good compost with some grit added for drainage, watering them and placing them in sunny positions wherever there’s a need for some pizazz.
Were you reading our column last week about our ideas for keeping the summer colour going, and, in particular, my suggestion for dropping pots into the borders where there’s a gap? Well, these are going to be ideal for that purpose – and all for about twopence-ha’penny back in the spring. If you weren’t on to that little wheeze back then, do at least go and check out the garden centres now – their sale of bedding plants will be just about ended and there will be real bargains to be had.
Hardy geraniums
Oh I do love my hardy geraniums! Laura is quite often sniffy about them, but I think their simple charming faces are the very epitome of spring and early summer.
But most of them are feeling a little weary now and looking it. The stems are mostly long, floppy and untidy, and this ‘tiredness’ has been exacerbated by our recent hot weather. They might still have one or two flowers on them so you feel you should hang on to them, but you must harden your heart and get stuck in.
Get out your secateurs and cut the whole lot right back to the ground. Then give it a real drenching – if you have a drop of liquid fertiliser handy, add that to the water as well.
Sorry, but the plant will look totally dreadful for two or three weeks. You’ll be cursing me and wondering why you ever listened. Keep the faith and water it once a week. You will start to see small green leaves appearing, and by a month down the track, your hardy geranium will be covered in fresh growth all over. This new leafage will last right into the autumn, and if you’re lucky, the plant may even flower again in September.
You can work this magic trick with chives as well. Once the flowers have faded and the stems have gone droopy or woody, cut it right back, water it well. It will renew itself satisfyingly quickly – lots of delicious shoots and peppery flowers for your summer salads (and the bees go crazy for the flowers!)
Gardening shorts
- Our outdoor pots and borders are starting to fill up with lovely colourful tender bedding plants – hurray! A liquid feed formulated for tomatoes once a week/fortnight will keep them loaded with blooms till autumn.
- The roses are having a really good year. Lots of mine are finishing their first wonderful flush (just look at gorgeous R. ‘Lyda’ in the feature pic this week!) and need dead heading. A while ago I made a video about the best techniques to use when dealing with different types of roses. Find it in the link below.
- Keep the hoe moving between the rows of crops in the veg patch – weeds are so much easier to deal with when they are small, and you can leave them on the surface to wither during dry weather.
- Cut Oriental poppies right back to the ground after they’ve finished flowering – the dying leaves look awful and the plant really doesn’t mind losing the whole lot. They will come again happily from the roots again next spring.
- The greenhouse has been hitting some high temperatures this week in spite of all the ventilation. Damping down the floor helps to raise the humidity and lessen the heat.
What an incredible range of different varieties of clematis there are! Louise has picked out a lilac-blue beauty for us that has the clever knack of producing double flowers early in the summer and single ones later on. Find out other reasons why it’s her Great Plant this Month.
Do have a look at this brilliant little tool for keeping all your garden-cutting implements sharp and working as they should:
Here is the video I put together recently on the best way to dead head roses.
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