The Vicarage Garden

As I said in a previous post, my germination success rate was very poor. So I turned to the excellent (but sadly out of print), ‘The “Gardening Which?” Guide to Successful Propagation’. Here I found a number of reasons why seed fails to germinate: old seed kept in hot, damp conditions (yes, that may apply to me); a crust forming over the sown seeds (possibly); and drying out just after germination (that’s entirely possible given the weather we’ve had).
The book then suggests that many types of seed can be pre-germinated by sowing on damp kitchen towel. As soon as roots begin to develop, the seed is mixed with a sloppy water-retentive gel and placed in a plastic bag. It’s then sown in a damp seed bed as if piping icing on a cake.
So I’ll give that a try and report back.

Meanwhile, the relaying of the paving is complete (not perfect, but not bad considering it was done for under £5, using only slabs found in the garden and two bags of sand!). More expensive was a pyracantha to grow up the fence, but I’ll take cuttings later in the summer to provide more plants and a better hedge. Hardy fuchsias will provide some colour.

The relaid patio

The strawberries are now netted - net given by a friend, and posts old aluminium greenhouse bits.

Well, both baby bananas are doing well, but the second to germinate clearly has a different parentage from the first since it is now several times as large.
No further germinations

Bananas growing on well

The strawberries are covered in bloom this year (though the apples are not!).

Potato foliage is growing at an incredible rate, but are there loads of spuds below?Some potatoes are in 'proper' growing bags, others in old compost bags. It makes no difference, except for the price.

A week off work, so my wife's come up with a major project - relay and reshape an area of paving, and create a new bed with shrubs to cover the fence.

The soil was warm. I watered carefully before sowing and sowed fresh seed at the right depth. But still germination rates have been very poor for peas (less than 50%), carrots (less than 25%), spinach (about 50%) and parsnips (nothing!).
So what’s the problem? The soil is a fine tilth, and once things have germinated they grow on well, so presumably no major problems there. The only thing I can think of is that with the very hot weather, the soil has dried out at some point despite watering.
So now I’ve taken to planting seeds in modules in the greenhouse and then planting out. Germination is quick and almost 100%. But it’s more time consuming, especially hardening off properly.
If anyone has ideas about improving my in situ sowings, I’d be glad to hear them…

These aren’t great photos – they’re taken on a simple point & press digital camera, but they give you an idea. if I have time, I’ll borrow my daughter’s digital SLR and post some decent pics.

Camellia behind Acer Palmatum in bud

Tulips - will need dividing this year

Hellebores & Amelanchier lamarckii

I can’t remember a warmer start to April, and this heat so early in the season can of itself cause real problems, but it can also lead us gardeners into problems of our own making.
Small seedlings are especially vulnerable to this heat; their small root systems struggle to keep up with the demands of the leaves, and small pots dry out very quickly. But watering must be done carefully – seedlings sown at the same time in the same compost and in the same pots don’t always dry out at the same rate. Each one must be carefully checked.
Then, because it’s so warm, there’s the temptation to put plants outside too soon and to sow too early. We could still have frosts in some parts of the country, and even cold nights can seriously check the growth of young plants.
Another danger is potting on when it’s too hot: I need to pot on a number of young plants, but the greenhouse is scorching this afternoon, and to do it now would leave them drooping and stressed. Better to wait until the evening, or even until the weather cools down a bit.
Still, to be surrounded by daffodils in full bloom when it’s 22C is great!

Someone at church this morning asked me how my banana plant was doing. And then she laughed about this blog!

Well, just to show that the banana plant is doing very well thank you, and that it wasn’t a freak, here is the first seedling… and a second:

Meanwhile, other seedlings are growing on well:

Cucumber, lettuce, tomato (and echinacea)

Beetroot - sown as Monty Don suggested - two to a cell

Despite the warm weather and being under closhes,  the peas seem very slow to germinate. Perhaps this is usual – I’ve not tried peas before. The sweetcorn, on the other hand, have germinated very quickly in the greenhouse even though they’re last year’s seeds.

Elsewhere in the garden, the daffodils & tulips are fabulous (and they would be outside the church as well had some vandal not smashed them down this afternoon).  Magnolias and Camellias are some of my favourites, and a rgeat planting combination that we inherited is Magnolia stellata beside the white bark of the Betula jacqemontii (the photo really doesn’t do it justice):

Silver birch and magnolia

Sometimes it seems as if gardeners are prone to following traditional methods rather than science.

For example, why is it that we’re encouraged to clear away leaves from borders because they encourage disease, but then we’re also encouraged to replenish the soil with compost. If it were true that domestic compost heaps got hot enought to kill viruses and bacteria, then perhaps there would be some sense in this advice, but let’s face it, most of us only get a decent temperature in the heap for a few days and only when we have a good mix of grass and other material available.

And then there’s the advice to protect vulnerable plants from harsh frosts by covering them with straw or similar material. Is straw sterile? No, of course not – in fact, it could be infected with pathogens which otherwise wouldn’t come into our gardens. Why not just leave the leaves to act as a natural, normal mulch?

What we need are more proper trials, and from what I read in the RHS Garden magazine, it seems as if they’re getting on with this. But we need a lot more.

Of course the old gardeners also spoke sense. For example,  I remember someone saying, ‘Hoe when there are no weeds and there will be no weeds.’ If only I lived up to this maxim!

For the first time, this year I’ve sown some banana seeds, and when I went to the airing cupboard to look this morning, the first had appeared!

My first ever banana seedling

They’re supposed to be germinated at 80C; the propagator gets to 70C, and the airing cupboard 75C, so the airing cupboard had to do.

The smaller seeds are two to a 3″ pot, and the larger ones just one per pot. This, I think, is one of the smaller ones. Time alone will tell which variety since they were just a packet of  mixed seeds (not bought from vegetableseeds.net I’m afraid because I hadn’t discovered it back then!).

After that good start to the day, and having done a few hours work, it was out into the glorious sunshine to clear away the dead foliage from perennials, deadhead the hydrangeas, dig over the last part of the veg patch, and sow some sunflowers and echium seeds (which,  together with the bananas, will form the backbone of a new tropical border. Other plants will include dahlias, hemerocallis, thalictrum aquilegifolium, and the exisitng perennial pink anenomes (even if I wanted to get rid of these, I couldn’t!).

I love both ornamental and cullinary alliums. But I’ve had problems with both for exactly the opposite reasons.

My ornamentals have too much leaf growth and no flowers:

Lush leaves, but no flower buds

But last year, my leeks were just small and pathetic with no leaf growth; and the year before, they put up flower stalks far too quickly!

Of course, I grow them in different parts of the garden, so the obvious answer is that the ornamentals have too much nitrogen and the culinary not enough. But I grew the leeks in soil that had had nitogen-fixing legumes growing in it the year before, so I thought the nitrogen would have been sufficient.

Both have similar amounts of sunlight, so that can’t account for the difference.

Perhaps the two types aren’t as similar as their name suggests (after all, one has a proper bulb, while the other doesn’t) and perhaps they need different growing conditions.  I’ve looked online for a solution, but not found one, so perhaps I’ll contact the RHS (as a member you get free advice), and post again if I get some more info.

Meanwhile, if any readers have any ideas…