Topic: The RAWK Gardening Thread. (All Questions Answered)

[reddebs]

Ta both - looking at it, and looking at the gardening forums after googling it, it does seem that drought can kill it (either restricting foliage to the top and the ground level, or just ground level, or killing it).

It has been incredibly dry here - the streams have run dry in some places even (and I've never seen that happen in this general area - it's come close at times, but there's literally no water in places). We have a climbing hydrangea that's wilting regularly (we do have a stream that does have water, so I have a little well dug from that and I water with gorilla tubs of water taken from there)... so I think the dry weather's taken it to the brink and it's effectively binned off the bits it can't keep alive. That's guesswork mind... but I suppose we'll just need to see if it comes back to life over the course of the autumn. It's in a pot too, which maybe makes it worse. We have ivy at the other side and the wisteria growing from round the corner so it'll not even be noticable in a few years' time... but harumph. I don't like things dying!

I'd give it an absolute drenching for a few days Roy it might just come back. 

Have you done the bark test to see if it is actually dead as they can fool you?

My solanum that I thought was a complete gonner last autumn after the gales burnt it to a crisp is back to fully alive and thriving 😁

[royhendo]

Worth a go isn't it? Hopefully it's still got a few miles left on the clock!

Done. I'll keep that going for a bit - I think I underestimated how dry it was.

[Crosby Nick]

In getting PTSD looking at that with memories of sweeping up out the front. And having to open the upstairs windows to pull/cut it away from the guttering.

[.adam]

In getting PTSD looking at that with memories of sweeping up out the front. And having to open the upstairs windows to pull/cut it away from the guttering.

Haha. Did take some maintenance. Always tried to keep it at windowsill level but would wake up some mornings and it'd started to crawl up the windows overnight.

[reddebs]

Worth a go isn't it? Hopefully it's still got a few miles left on the clock!

Done. I'll keep that going for a bit - I think I underestimated how dry it was.

Absolutely it is mate, they're too beautiful to give up on it for the sake of a good watering.

It's been really dry here too, made worse with the constant wind so I'm  watering every night pretty much.

[El_Frank]

I've got a question that's perhaps best asked in here.
I go for a walk every morning and part of that walk is through meadows with long grass and various wild things growing within. As I'm walking the trail, and not touching the grass, I can hear cracking sounds coming from all directions in the long grass. What the hell is this? I've tried a search but all I'm getting is possible seed pods cracking open in the heat, but I dunno. Anyone?

[royhendo]

Might be that or things like yellow rattle popping maybe?

Ta for the ivy help - that's some specimen you had there!

[royhendo]

See the Spurs kitchen garden on Gardeners World?

[reddebs]

See the Spurs kitchen garden on Gardeners World?

I did mate 😯

And Man utd are still arguing over who got more chips and what's for pudding 😂😂

[royhendo]

We tested it and sure enough it was dead as a Dodo. RIP YNWA.

[Red-Soldier]

See the Spurs kitchen garden on Gardeners World?

Yeah.  Thought it was great.

[reddebs]

We tested it and sure enough it was dead as a Dodo. RIP YNWA.

I still wouldn't give up Roy, again my solanum last year failed the test but still recovered.  Give nature time to work it's magic 👍

[royhendo]

I still wouldn't give up Roy, again my solanum last year failed the test but still recovered.  Give nature time to work it's magic 👍

There's a tiny shoot at the base of it Debs - it's such an interesting problem - the whole thing was stone dead when we looked at the stems after we cut it down. Oddly though the gable looks better without it - my wife got quite bloodthirsty about it! "Just kill it! Cut it down!" She wants a wisteria in the gap now but not sure how that'll work pot wise - we'd need a whopping big planter I reckon.

[reddebs]

There's a tiny shoot at the base of it Debs - it's such an interesting problem - the whole thing was stone dead once we cut it down. Oddly though the gable looks better without it - my wife got quite bloodthirsty about it! "Just kill it! Cut it down!" She wants a wisteria in the gap now but not sure how that'll work pot wise - we'd need a whopping big planter I reckon.

Wisteria are such fickle climbers too and take years to flower or look anything like the ones in glossy magazines 😁 beautiful though so I can understand why she'd want one.

If you've got a spare corner, wall, hedge or other boundary I'd plant the creeper in the ground if there's a shoot and let it grow wild 👍

[Crosby Nick]

We had a miniature apple tree as a wedding present. My father-in-law pruned it so much we thought it had died (hopefully not a metaphor etc etc!)...anyway, almost a year or so on there’s lots of growth from the very lower branches. Seems like there’s life in the old dog yet. The branches he did cut right back still look very dead. Am I best to just leave it, water it regularly and see what happens?

[reddebs]

We had a miniature apple tree as a wedding present. My father-in-law pruned it so much we thought it had died (hopefully not a metaphor etc etc!)...anyway, almost a year or so on there’s lots of growth from the very lower branches. Seems like there’s life in the old dog yet. The branches he did cut right back still look very dead. Am I best to just leave it, water it regularly and see what happens?

Water and feed and no more pruning, just let the new growth keep coming and you might get some fruit in a few years.

[El_Frank]

I'm just going to put this image up in case anyone isn't aware of how to prune properly. Also read-up on your individual plant as some need pruning in different ways or at different times.



A neighbour got someone in to cut one of their trees back as it was covering the garden and shed etc. The person didn't know what they were doing and instead cut it to encourage growth. The tree, which was meant to be 'tamed', is now about 30% fuller than it ever was. 

[Red-Soldier]

We had a miniature apple tree as a wedding present. My father-in-law pruned it so much we thought it had died (hopefully not a metaphor etc etc!)...anyway, almost a year or so on there’s lots of growth from the very lower branches. Seems like there’s life in the old dog yet. The branches he did cut right back still look very dead. Am I best to just leave it, water it regularly and see what happens?

Plenty of water.  No need to use any artificial plant fertiliser.

[cormorant]

I'm just going to put this image up in case anyone isn't aware of how to prune properly. Also read-up on your individual plant as some need pruning in different ways or at different times.



A neighbour got someone in to cut one of their trees back as it was covering the garden and shed etc. The person didn't know what they were doing and instead cut it to encourage growth. The tree, which was meant to be 'tamed', is now about 30% fuller than it ever was. 

Nice one. Appreciate that. Makes total sense when you look at the different images. Delving into the world of pruning sometime soon (in gardening terms) as a newbie. Got myself a young blackberry and gooseberry bush this year (one of each)... first time for that kind of thing. Working in limited space on a patio so would ideally like to stop them getting too wide and top them off at about 1.5m in height eventually (both are around 0.5m at the moment).

[royhendo]

Wisteria are such fickle climbers too and take years to flower or look anything like the ones in glossy magazines 😁 beautiful though so I can understand why she'd want one.

If you've got a spare corner, wall, hedge or other boundary I'd plant the creeper in the ground if there's a shoot and let it grow wild 👍

We like the foliage on them - it's nice and wafty, and we had our honeymoon in a gaff that had one so it's romantic you see?

Things don't tend to flower long in our garden anyway because we're so shaded by massive conifers - I'll try and share some photos of it - we lucked out so much when we got this place it was unreal - the seller (private sale) hated the plot of land and saw it as a burden.

[.adam]

There's a tiny shoot at the base of it Debs - it's such an interesting problem - the whole thing was stone dead when we looked at the stems after we cut it down. Oddly though the gable looks better without it - my wife got quite bloodthirsty about it! "Just kill it! Cut it down!" She wants a wisteria in the gap now but not sure how that'll work pot wise - we'd need a whopping big planter I reckon.

When I was looking at planting that wistera I mentioned on the other page, Roy, the internet suggested to me that you'll be lucky to get much more than a small tree if it's in a pot. If you want it to crawl up a wall, it need to be in the ground as it's thirsty.

[reddebs]

We like the foliage on them - it's nice and wafty, and we had our honeymoon in a gaff that had one so it's romantic you see?

Things don't tend to flower long in our garden anyway because we're so shaded by massive conifers - I'll try and share some photos of it - we lucked out so much when we got this place it was unreal - the seller (private sale) hated the plot of land and saw it as a burden.

If you remember I thought I needed to garden for mainly shade last year due to how big the hedges were and that we didn't have much border elsewhere but since we cut everything down last winter and created lots of new beds and border I'm now needing full sun everything 😂

I wish I could suss out how to put pics up on the site as I feel it helps so much to see things rather than visualise it from a description so please do get some up.

Oh and how can anyone think they've got too much garden unless you're too old or infirm to look after it.

[reddebs]

Oopsies I've run out of space for all the shrubs that I've bought as I need to wait for all the bedding plants to finish in the autumn first.

I've also started off another load of seeds for pots and containers so petunias, lobelia, marigolds, pansies, alyssums and nasturtiums which I'm hoping will be ready to plant up whilst it's still summer.

I'm having a go at growing broom, winter jasmine and a peach tree from seed too 😯

On top of all that a load of perennial seeds I ordered have been delivered today that I'm planning on sowing August/September to get them out in November so they're ready to go earlier next year.

I'm fed up with my veggies though.  My spuds have taken an absolute battering in the winds and are really wind burnt so I've no idea of they'll recover sufficiently to give us a crop.
 The onions are looking great though.

I've got 3 veg beds now and I'm seriously considering getting fruit bushes instead for next year.  Gooseberrys, raspberries and maybe some rhubarb.

[royhendo]

Ta for that Debs (re the Wisteria). I use imgur by the way and then paste in the image addresses in the picture tags on here...

On the veg, it's been strange here too - I think for some aspects the soil's been wrong for us - the beetroot and carrots seem to need bad soil - they're very leafy and there's not much going on beneath the soil. Fruit wise I think the rasps like tree material/acidity so they're doing quite well for us.

Our problem though is the shade - the tatties are going great guns cos they're in the prime spot sun wise. Everything else is bothered by the shade and gets very leggy very quickly - the rain then flattened a lot of that lanky vegetation the other week. Ah well. I'll try and load a few photos over the years an all to show what I mean. We accumulated so much free gumtree stone over the first three years of our time here that I was able to do all the hard landscaping when I was out of work for 3 months during lockdown. The idea was to have a perennial meadow around fruit trees that were there (and neglected) when we moved in. That's worked and our big plum tree has seemingly come back to life after brutal pruning. And we've some old apple trees (one cooking) that are doing alright, with another dwarf cherry tree in amongst it.

It was just left wild for years by the old owners' family (our pals) and they didn't see any value in it - it's inaccessible so can't be used to make a property or anything, or provide access anywhere - it's just a wild old glen.

[reddebs]

I grew up with orchards and lots of fruit bushes Roy. Lots of different apples, pears, plum, damson then red, white and black currants, gooseberryies, raspberries, strawberries, rhubarb and a mum who made jam, pickles, chutneys, wine and jars of preserved fruit.

We'd still be eating fresh, home grown stuff the following summer as we had a cellar to store it all in.

I failed miserably last year with rasberries but I bought bare root ones and they took weeks to arrive by which time it was too late for them to get going properly.

The strawberries this year have fruit on them but we've not any prolonged warmth for them to ripen so they're tiny and now going rotten.

The spud leaves have turned black with wind burn so I'm left with just a few bare stalks with just 2wks left before I should be cropping.

The onions are doing good though and some of them are huge!

Unfortunately our sunny all day area is also the most exposed as it's the north west part of the garden with fields beyond and no hedge, fence or boundary to protect things from the strong winds and driving rain.

I'm desperately trying to remedy that with the escallonia cuttings I did last year.  They went in in March/April and have grown quite well so far so who knows ui might have a successful veg plot yet.

I'd put fruit trees in but we've no idea how long we'll be here so seems a bit of a waste.

My first flowers that I've grown from seed have opened today.  A white nicotiana and some ice plants 😁

[royhendo]

So you've got green fingers from an early age eh? It really is a lifelong learning thing isn't it? There's all this advice and there's all this information everywhere, but at the end of the day, it's as much about understanding your bit of land isn't it?

I managed to load up some pics - first up here's how wooded the most of the area is.

[royhendo]

So not much light... apart from in four pockets, one of which was wild. Then I was out of work three months last year and I got a chance to mulch the wild bit with bin bags and cardboard cos it was overrun with ground elder that killed everything you tried to plant (including a wild cherry tree that was 4 feet tall we got from my brother in law as a wedding pressie). Basically we cadged every free or cheap bit of stone from gumtree for a few years. I made a horrendous mess of my old golf's boot!

[royhendo]

Then once I'd done that we got compost from the local tip (absolutely superb service - you get two bags/tubs a day and it's not that far a drive away) - and we put it over the cardboard and old carpet and made two wee ponds with roof liner plastic at the bottom by the patio. Then we just sowed all the seed we'd gotten from magazines and so forth and put in root cuttings of stuff growing in other places in the garden, and started to put in the veg bit (with suckers of rasps and currants from our in laws). Fast forward to now... the wild bit's starting to look like something (although the bits round it are still covered in bin bags and cardboard).









The spuds are in where the best of the light is - it used to be dry and a big sward of wild euphorbias and alchemilla - there's still a row of that behind, but most of it is now spuds (with a few rasps and currants at either end).




 


And the bit 'in progress' - there's a massive haul of stone still to be used to try and level bits of the slope and fix the retaining walls.

[Crosby Nick]

Monarch of the Glen over here.

[royhendo]

It is literally 'the glen' an all

It's a weird plot - it wraps round the back of our neighbours basically in that glen, and then on the other side behind the trees is another housing estate. It's sort of a narrow 'J' shape. Michael A, when he saw it, said 'You basically live in a National Park'.

[reddebs]

Wow Roy that looks stunning, I miss trees so would love to have that for my garden.

I guess gardening is in my blood too.  My maternal grandad is who planted all the fruit trees we grew up with as we moved back there when my grandparents died and my paternal grandad was a rose and chrysanthemum show gardener.

Of course my sister is also a qualified horticulturist, in fact the nurseries she works at is being featured on Gardeners World tonight on BBC as they're doing something for a show garden at Hampton Court.

I've just never had a garden of my own to have a go at 😁

[royhendo]

It's addictive isn't it? That's amazing about your sister's work eh?

We're improvising based on whatever we can pick up for next to free basically. I'm all over gumtree like a rash - leftover stone, leftover ballast and sand, if I see it I try and get it if it's free or next to free. Amazing what people throw away! Of that whole bit, I think the only thing that cost any kind of money was the IKEA seat. Well, that and about 25 rolls of bin bags. 

[Crosby Nick]

It is literally 'the glen' an all

It's a weird plot - it wraps round the back of our neighbours basically in that glen, and then on the other side behind the trees is another housing estate. It's sort of a narrow 'J' shape. Michael A, when he saw it, said 'You basically live in a National Park'.

Looks great mate, well done.

[reddebs]

It's addictive isn't it? That's amazing about your sister's work eh?

We're improvising based on whatever we can pick up for next to free basically. I'm all over gumtree like a rash - leftover stone, leftover ballast and sand, if I see it I try and get it if it's free or next to free. Amazing what people throw away! Of that whole bit, I think the only thing that cost any kind of money was the IKEA seat. Well, that and about 25 rolls of bin bags.

It is unbelievable how "disposable" things are to some people.  I got some free pallets to build my composts and I'm after some more now to split up to make some edging for round the veg plots so I can attach netting, cloches and/or fleece depending on what I need to protect from.

I've seen sheds, greenhouses, tools and equipment, stone, top soil etc you name it, you can get it.

I definitely need to do more cuttings though as I've spent a fortune on plants, shrubs and seeds 😂

[royhendo]

Haha well, I recommend things like anenomies, rudbeckias, heleniums... whatever you can take a bit of root from, bung it in the ground under some soil, and then see emerge the next year as a full grown plant. It's amazing how that's worked - mind you they all like it in our garden conditions it looks like. 

[Red-Soldier]

Looks fantastic there Roy - well done!

I was going to make a raised bed until I saw the price of timber. After watching YouTube, I then decided to make some planters from the pallets I picked up for free, instead.  Lined and stapled them with landscaping fabric, planted them up and butted them together (like a raised bed).  Stained them the other day - looks great!

[reddebs]

Haha well, I recommend things like anenomies, rudbeckias, heleniums... whatever you can take a bit of root from, bung it in the ground under some soil, and then see emerge the next year as a full grown plant. It's amazing how that's worked - mind you they all like it in our garden conditions it looks like.

I've grown rudbeckia, amongst other things, from seed this year and managed to split my existing oriental poppies and red hot pokers and get 3 small pieces of acanthus to take, so I'm not doing bad.

Amazingly I also managed to get a piece of gorse to take too.  It grows everywhere all around us so one morning I dug up 3 or 4 tiny bushes and although only one of them survived it's got really big already.

Me and sis dug up 2 buddleia last November, they were far too big and in the way.  We split them into 6, replanted 4 here and she took the other 2.  Not only are the 4 coming into flower but we must have left some root in which has sent up new shoots and is flowering.

I've also got 2 wegeila cuttings that flowered this year and I've done some more of different varieties.

My sister gave me quite a few bits and bobs.  Some hellebores, hebes and hostas then more wild stuff like teasel, comfrey, borage, pulmonaria and dead nettle, oh and a couple of hazel saplings that are still going strong.

I'm running out of space for everything and keep creating more beds and borders, then have to buy more stuff 😂😂 but we're getting there and it's looking great, we just need some warm sunshine to sit out and enjoy it all 😁

[cormorant]

Great photos there Roy. Really nice to actually see what someone is talking about. Your trees are much more mature than I had imagined. Went to post some pics of my my little patio site a week or so ago and hit some problems. Thought it would be nice and easy but the images on my phone were too big in terms of file size to post.

Met up with a longtime friend a couple of days ago. He has a garden centre literally across the road from the family house in a municipal park. We ended up unintentionally walking around the private part of it and got asked what we were doing by one of the members of staff. Got chatting to the guy and it turns out that they have a quarter of million plants on the go at any one time, teach local residents how to grow veg, let their members take any excess crops home but give most of their harvest to local soup kitchens. Would have signed up on the spot if I lived anywhere in the vicinity.

[reddebs]

Great photos there Roy. Really nice to actually see what someone is talking about. Your trees are much more mature than I had imagined. Went to post some pics of my my little patio site a week or so ago and hit some problems. Thought it would be nice and easy but the images on my phone were too big in terms of file size to post.

Met up with a longtime friend a couple of days ago. He has a garden centre literally across the road from the family house in a municipal park. We ended up unintentionally walking around the private part of it and got asked what we were doing by one of the members of staff. Got chatting to the guy and it turns out that they have a quarter of million plants on the go at any one time, teach local residents how to grow veg, let their members take any excess crops home but give most of their harvest to local soup kitchens. Would have signed up on the spot if I lived anywhere in the vicinity.

There's quite a few community type allotments now where everyone helps grow the crops and gets to use what they grow and lots of allotment users and locals who grow fruit and veg near me give excess produce to our local food bank.

[royhendo]

On the photos front btw, Hinesy married us - this is him in one of the other wee pockets that gets light on our big day a few years back…