Do you water frequently? Leave a section of hose laid out down the center of the garden. Drive double stakes of wood at intervals to keep the hose from decimating the vegetables as you pull it back and forth.
Double stakes protect garden from hose
Another gardener, who has several small vegetable plots, drives a stake at the corner of each bed to protect plants while he drags the hose around. Read the rest of this entry »
Your kitchen garden can be as simple as a few herbs in pots outside your back door, or a proper vegetable and herb garden.
The type of garden you choose will depend upon the space you have available, the amount of sun it gets, the time you have to spend in the garden, and to a certain extent, your own taste in food. A small-scale kitchen garden could perhaps consist of a few herbs and some tomatoes, lettuce and carrots. Read the rest of this entry »
Raising your own plants is much cheaper than buying from a nursery or garden centre. Although a greenhouse is helpful if you want to raise tender plants, a cold frame also has plenty of possibilities for propagating plants.
Apart from a greenhouse and cold frame, there are various other tools and materials which you will find useful for the successful propagation of plants.
Virtually all shrubs can be propagated in this way. The following respond particularly well.
In tubs, urns, window boxes or hanging baskets, the following plants will make a colourful show all summer and into autumn. Grow in a good potting compost either loam-based or a peat-based type.
Birds usually create the biggest problem, but you should look out too for mites and weevils.
I. danfordioe is another early dwarf, this time yellow, as is I. histrioides, of which the most commonly found variety is ‘Major’ at 4 inches high and with deep blue flowers splashed with yellow in the centre.
I. reticulate, 6 inches, comes in a range of blues: ‘Harmony’ is dark blue, ‘Cantab’ light blue, ‘J. S. Dijt’ a warm purple. A feature of these tiny irises is that they flower when the leaves are very immature and in some cases all but absent. Later the leaves can grow quite tall but by this time you will probably have planted them out in the garden. Whether they will flourish there is a matter of luck—I. danfordiae is never very robust—but it is always worth a try. Bulbous irises could be planted in a window box but I would rather see them in shallow containers— they need only be planted 22 inches deep—and close together for maximum impact. In a 12 inch pot I would plant a dozen of the tiny bulbs, then put them somewhere where they can be seen close up and also smelled. Read the rest of this entry »
Yellow King Alfreds we have seen before, many, many times, but ‘Irene Copeland’, 14 inches, cream, has petals as tightly packed as a small dahlia or chrysanthemum and ‘Tahiti’, at 15 inches, has a mix of golden yellow petals with a smaller bright orange centre.
To the expert a daffodil is always a narcissus but we tend to think of narcissus as the short-trumpeted variety, such as the poeticus species with their white perianths and orange crowns. Rather than bother about the different divisions—bicolour large cups, jonquilla, triandrus and so on—select daffodils for a box entirely on the information you can get about them. Most bulbs are sold from open boxes, or in packs, with a good illustration and details of size and colour; don’t fall for any with an incomplete description because although they may well be cheaper they cannot be guaranteed to provide the effect you want in a box. Read the rest of this entry »
Corny it may be, but there is no more heart-warming sight to a gardener than the emerging spikes of the first spring bulbs. If you plant your bulbs early in boxes of good peaty compost— not bulb fibre, some of which is about as much good as sawdust—you should see the first signs of growth soon after Christmas. As I write (in early March) I have snowdrops and crocus, both the tiny species crocus, which I prefer, and the big fat hybrids, which I like less but have to admit are a welcome splash of colour just now. Then there are Eranthis hyemalis, the winter aconite, which has buttercup flowers surrounded by a frilly ruff of leaves as early as February and so is beginning to go over now, and chionodoxa, which have blue, pink or white star-shaped flowers; C. gigantea reaches 8 inches in height and has large pale violet-blue flowers with a paler centre and C. luciliae ‘Alba’ reaches 5 inches and has white flowers. The pink form C. luciliae ‘Pink Giant’ reaches 6 inches; it is not always easy to get hold of but worth growing if you can find it. Read the rest of this entry »
Verbena is an old-fashioned cottage garden plant that is making something of a comeback. It is really a perennial but is best treated as an annual; the new hybrids have dense heads of pink, white and purple flowers that still retain their scent. Take out the growing shoots to encourage bushiness and dead-head regularly. Verbena is usually sold in boxes of mixed colours and these mixtures are particularly attractive. It reaches a height of up to 10 inches.
Gazania is another perennial most commonly grown as an annual. G. x hybrida at 9 inches has dark green foliage with a grey underside; the daisy flowers are in the yellow, orange, bronze range though you can also have some deep pinks. They like full sun. Read the rest of this entry »
Alyssum is always associated with lobelia—usually planted alternately along suburban front paths and all right, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing. Once available only in white, it can now be found in pinks and purples that have more charm. Ageratum, too, now comes in some really deep shades of lilac and blue, which makes it more appealing for the front of the box. Again, pack it in tightly.
Dianthus, the annual, is increasingly produced for window boxes and also for hanging baskets. Most varieties flower in flushes, three or four times during the season rather than continuously, so it is a good idea to plant a second basket three weeks later in the hope that when the flush in the first one is over you can quickly replace it with the second just coming into its best. Read the rest of this entry »
High summer, when everything in the garden is blooming and burgeoning in competition, is the time when window boxes should be planted very boldly. Colours in the summer must be bright to compete with the sun or perhaps make up for the lack of it.
Red geraniums and dark blue trailing lobelia are something of a horticultural cliché but for effect against stone or stucco they can hardly be bettered. As a change from the red geranium—like ‘Sprinter’, which is massed outside Buckingham Palace every year—you can have ‘Cherie’, which has soft salmon pink flowers and deeply zoned leaves, or ‘Ringo Salmon’, which is almost orange, or ‘Rose Marie’, a really intense pink. If your house is built of brick avoid all the colours and choose white, either ‘White Orbit’ or ‘Iceberg’, which will look asking if they would like them. Few would be so stunning. In fact when choosing geraniums thechurlish as to refuse, and most would be delighted to golden rule is to shop around because newer, moreexciting colours are introduced every season. When you have found a geranium in a shade you like, mass it for maximum effect. Read the rest of this entry »
In the open garden autumn is a time of cutting down, tidying up and battening down the hatches against the onslaught of winter. In the more restricted garden on the window sill there is a little more scope for planting, to provide interest and perhaps colour for the grey days to follow. It is the greyness of the days, and hence the lack of light, rather than the cold that makes the late autumn and winter such a dead season as far as flowers are concerned.
For early autumn you must have dahlias. Their paint-box colours are quietened by the softer light of autumn and dahlia blooms laced with cobwebs and beaded with dew are, for me, a final confirmation that summer is truly over. Read the rest of this entry »
Window boxes are often impulse acquisitions. You are halted in your tracks by a wonderful display of bedding plants and there is nothing for it, you must have some. No garden? Never mind, there is room for a few window boxes….
Such impulses can be the beginning of a long and enjoyable acquaintanceship with window box gardening. They can also be the reason behind the starved and unhappy specimens you sometimes see as the summer draws on, the unwanted kittens of window box gardening that you cannot give away and that certainly don’t seem destined for a death by drowning. If your first boxes are impulse buys, or if you know only too well that you are one of those people whose early enthusiasm is liable to wane, then hold your horses for a moment and plan. Read the rest of this entry »
In the open garden, heaths and heathers must be tightly massed and viewed from something of a distance so that their softly coloured flowers and vivid foliage create a moorland vista in miniature.
In the window box or in any container that offers a close-up view, heathers take on a quite different but nonetheless attractive appearance. The flowers are small and bell-shaped, in pinks and purple and white, while the foliage, which can vary according to the time of year, ranges from yellow to green to bronze to grey. Read the rest of this entry »
There is something very evocative about scents drifting into the house from the garden on a warm summer evening. Philadelphus, the mock orange, usually still called syringa, and lilac, which really is syringa, are two of the most potent scented plants that you could contain in a large tub and station near a door or window. But it would take a few years for a young plant to reach a size sufficient to support a quantity of flowers and so the best subjects for a scented window box are likely to come from the long list of annual plants. These grow fast and will flower their heads off if conditions are right. Read the rest of this entry »
You can also grow your own seedlings, or dig them up from your own or a friend’s garden. Taking growing plants from the wild is now illegal and so it is irresponsible to suggest that you look for suitable specimens on the local common, although I cannot see you being marched off to prison if you should carefully lift one tiny 4 inch birch seedling from among thousands in the wild. Wherever you find your seedling be sure to remove it very carefully, bringing as much soil as you can and not damaging the roots. Keep it in a sealed plastic bag until you are able to plant it in as small a pot as will comfortably take it. Don’t at this stage prune the roots, other than trimming any that may have been damaged, but leave it to settle in for a few weeks. Once you see signs of new top growth you can begin leaf pruning, reducing top growth and encouraging the development of side growth. Never strip a tree of all its leaves, for these are essential to the process of photosynthesis by which plants live. Read the rest of this entry »
Only so much as whisper to a serious bonsai enthusiast that you are thinking of growing bonsai trees in a window box and you will probably be greeted by howls of protest. But if you are unfamiliar with the art of growing bonsai—and it is an art, and no less surrounded with ritual than the Japanese tea ceremony itself—you could make a very creditable start with a few small subjects on your windowledge. These need not be expensive but they will give you the opportunity to practise some of the bonsai techniques and to see whether the conditions your window ledge offers are right for these rather demanding subjects. If they are, and you have been bitten by the bug, you will feel more confident about treating yourself to more mature, and more expensive, trees. If the enthusiasm wanes, or your lifestyle does not admit of the frequent watering necessary in very hot weather, you will still have had the pleasure of creating a tiny forest of seedlings, or a mini landscape of rocks and trees. Read the rest of this entry »
Chives have a milder flavour than onion and a few leaves can be snipped over potatoes or potato salad or added to omelettes to enhance the flavour. Buy a small plant and grow it in a sunny box and it will soon increase in size. In winter it will die back and may perish altogether; if you divide the plant up at the end of summer and pot the small bits individually you will increase your chances of having a survivor. Bring one pot into the kitchen at the beginning of spring to force it into growth for an early supply of leaves.
Sage you will need only infrequently unless you are mad about sage and onion stuffing. It makes an attractive plant, however, if you have the space. There is a purple-leaved variety that is colourful and well flavoured and you may also see a yellow and green one—Salvia officinalis ‘Icterina’—or the variegated white, green and pink form known as ‘Tricolor’, but these are perhaps best grown for decoration rather than flavouring. Sage likes plenty of sun and should be picked over regularly to keep it bushy; replace it when it becomes too gnarled and woody, again from cuttings tucked in beside their mother in the spring. Read the rest of this entry »
Although it is doubtful whether many of the herbs so devotedly grown by herb gardeners are ever used there is no doubt that cooking would be a dull thing without the classic bouquet garni herbs. These and many others are easily raised in a fairly sunny window box and have the edge for immediate accessibility over those grown in the garden. All I would suggest is that you curb your enthusiasm for exotica such as alecost—tall, untidy, invasive and of precious little culinary value—or angelica—a six-footer whose stems can only with difficulty be candied–and use window box space to produce more useful and usable herbs. Read the rest of this entry »
