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08 June 2020

April 18 / Alan Hamilton / Beechgrove Garden – TV

For the armchair gardeners one of our members, Danny, has informed me his favourite gardening programme, Beechgrove Garden, will be starting its run on Sunday at 9.00 am on BBC NI (if you miss it you can catch it on the iplayer ). It’s on www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ from April 16 and lasts 11 months.

19/09/19 / Inge Mueller / Make a Wild-Flower Meadow

I’m glad to say Inge has kindly excused me for using her script without permission - her talk last October was so good I was planning to get it for a Know-How Topic, and now here it is in an Idea-Pool. I’m hoping there will be more scripts (and photos) coming along from Inge, and that’s specially because she knows a lot about natural gardening outside of the limit she gave her brilliant script, entitled “Creating a Wild-flower Meadow on an Existing Lawn in Autumn”. It has just 8 steps:

1 In Autumn, select a patch of lawn and cut it short; remove the grass clippings in order to reduce fertility.

2 Sow wild-flower seeds, including Yellow Rattle, on to the short grass.

Yellow Rattle is a semi-parasitic plant with lovely yellow flowers: it feeds on grass roots . It weakens the grass so that other wild flowers can more easily establish.

3 If you like, you can keep cutting the grass for the rest of the Autumn, always removing the grass clippings. Alternatively, leave it alone.

4 In Spring, you may cut your lawn just one more time (removing the grass clippings), but stop clipping as soon as the wild-flower seedlings appear. The Yellow Rattle has little “woolly” leaves to start with.

5 In late August or in September, cut the tall grass and wild flowers once the wild-flower seeds have set and fallen to the ground. Remove the clippings and cut as normal for the rest of the season.

6 In Spring, let it grow tall again. Who knows? You may wish to extend the patch and use the seeds from your wild flowers!

7 Additionally, you can add wild-flower plants that you may find in your garden or in ditches (only take seed from plants that are already plentiful) to enlarge your wild flower mixture.

8 ENJOY ! !

When we arrived in the Waterside we were surprised to find a wild Spotted Orchid established at the base of a palm, and next year a seedling emerged in lawn several feet away - related, for sure, but far less spotted. Since then I have sown their seed, but without results above ground. If you have tried growing wild flowers from saved seed, why not tell us how you got on? S.H.

I took this picture on April 17th. On April 24, we asked: Are these sunburned leaves just off colour, or are they about to fall off? They were green in the porch all winter with very little watering, and when the March rains relented Val asked me whether it would be OK to put them outside. I’d said Yes. Later Val was worried - the leaves were turning red ! However, at mid-May the plants looked bright: no leaves had shrivelled. There was just not much growth.

24 April / Syd Harrod / Sunburned Pelargonium

This picture, taken on May 30, gave us quite a shock. Comparing it with the one taken five weeks earlier, so little has changed: the flower has gone; one flower bud is forming; there’s a new green leaf at the top. That’s all. It does look as though the sunburn has largely masked or destroyed the chlorophyll, leaving the few unburned leaves to sustain the entire plant.

Is it any wonder ‘purple’ hedges grow more slowly than the green ones? 08/06/2020