Pruning, planting and blanching – here are this week’s top tips for a bloomin’ marvellous garden.
- Plant new climbers, shrubs and trees while the soil is still warm.
- Clear out summer containers, taking cuttings or saving tender plants if you have space to overwinter them.
- Check the greenhouse heating and insulate to save heat.
- Stop feeding and reduce watering for plants in the greenhouse.
- Make sure bowls of bulbs being forced for indoor flowering do not dry out.
- Finish pruning out all shoots from rambler and climbing roses that carried flowers as soon as they have faded.
- Continue blanching leeks, covering plants with tubes of cardboard or drainpipe.
- Pick crops at their best including marrows, runner beans, spinach, sweetcorn, beetroot and salads.
- Plant blocks of Dutch iris in sunny positions, to flower in early summer.
- Propagate new gooseberry bushes by taking hardwood cuttings from healthy plants before their leaves drop.
- Where grass growth is thin, over-seed now with a suitable grass seed mixture.
- Cut down marginal plants around pools that are dying back.
- Plant out hardy primulas raised from seed or divisions.
Best of the Bunch – Stipa gigantea
Flowers may be fading, but many ornamental grasses are still going strong, providing structure, movement and colour to borders and pots.
Among the best in autumn is Stipa gigantea, or golden oats, originally from Spain and Portugal, which forms neat hummocks of narrow mid-green leaves to 70cm (28in) long, carrying clouds of green flowers on erect stems to 1.5m (5ft) in early summer.
The embedded asset does not exist:
Asset Type: BTImage
Asset Id: 1363839999231
PAGENAME: btcom/BTImage/Detail
In autumn the flowers turn a deep golden brown as they age and persist well into winter. Wait until early spring to cut them down, along with any dead leaves.
Grow S. gigantea as a specimen or as a gauzy screen at the back of a border. It does best in full sun in fertile, well-drained soil.
Speak Your Mind