Dovefromabove

Latest posts by Dovefromabove

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Lupins and delphiniums

Posted: 06/03/2013 at 06:22

But aren't they absolute slug magnets? - as I've frequently boasted, we seemed to have very little slug problem in this new garden of ours - I might have to eat my words - last summer I bought a lovely dark blue delphinium plant which flowered well. This week its little shoots began to peek through the soil and I surrounded it with a layer of very gritty sand to keep the little rascals away and all seemed well until the other day when I discovered that a little grey slug had climbed the stem of a nearby plant and weighed it down so that it formed a bridge over the grit and it could reach the delphinium and chomp its way through all the new shoots

It's been firmly squidged and the gritty sand has been extended - but what's the betting it had friends ....

Lavender query

Posted: 06/03/2013 at 06:08

Not growing true from seed means that if you're harvesting seed from your own lavender plants it could have been cross-pollinated by pollen from another variety of lavender so the resulting seedlings will not necessarily be identical to the parent plant but will be a cross. That's not necessarily a bad thing - you may develop a good new variety

However none of that is a concern if you are using seed from a commercial producer.

Lavender needs a gritty well-drained soil - it hates to have wet roots. When planting out add plenty of grit to the soil and make a raised ridge to plant your little lavender plants into, so that excess water drains away easily.

As they grow give them a really good trimming back after flowering - it looks a bit savage but they soon bounce back and are all the better for it. The commercial lavender growers of Norfolk cut them back to about an inch of new green growth every September and they have lovely bushy and longlived plants covered in blooms.

pesticides

Posted: 05/03/2013 at 21:05

I'd rather use nematodes - they worked for me last year on a really bad infestation of a bed of primula deticulata and vialli. I'll use them again this year as soon as the soil warms up and hopefully that will really have knocked them for six.

Gardeners world tv or mag. pest and disease advice.

Posted: 05/03/2013 at 20:09

Basically he just creates another identity and uses another computer

competitions

Posted: 05/03/2013 at 19:58

Yes, I won one of the competitions not long ago - keep trying

Gardeners world tv or mag. pest and disease advice.

Posted: 05/03/2013 at 19:03

Verdun

Thoughts on Nesting Boxes

Posted: 05/03/2013 at 18:45

OH has just told me that Notcutts sell oozie-type water pistols - I wonder why?

Thoughts on Nesting Boxes

Posted: 05/03/2013 at 18:40

Our neighbours' middle aged moggy is getting decidedly middle aged, and their old one popped his clogs, so we thought our birds were safe - then one evening the neighbours arrived on our doorstep distraught with a young male tabby with a chicken bone stuck in his throat - OH (being a hero) at great risk to life, limb and woolly jumper, stuck his fingers into the cat's throat and removed the bone.

Not only have the neighbours got a new bird-marauding cat named Pippin, but OH saved his life

Said Pippin keeps creeping through the hedgehog gate in the bottom of the fence and sitting under the bird feeders waiting for them to fall into his lap (not a terribly successful hunting tactic so far). When I see him I open the back door and he scarpers back through the hedgehog gate - when I retire and am around more I'll get a water pistol,

He's a lovely cat - but this is my garden, not his

How can you tell if manure is "well rotted"?

Posted: 05/03/2013 at 07:45

My mother tells us that when she was a child and horse drawn vehicles were still quite usual on the streets, she would frequently arrive home from school to find her father waiting by the front gate with a shovel and bucket - he had been standing guard over 'deposits' in the street, staking his claim and warding other gardeners off - but it was beneath his dignity to actually shovel them up; that was his daughter's job