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Downtime home and Gardening-National News Jobs in June
| Jobs in June |
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| Wednesday, 20 June 2007 | |
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Repeat flowering roses need to be dead-headed regularly so the plant makes an effort to breed on, and you get plenty more roses. According to the old school, you should use secateurs to cut a few inches down from the seedpod to where the stem is of pencil thickness. Cut so that the next shoot is pointing outwards to avoid new roses looking silly in the middle of the plant. Recently, there has been a lot of experimentation on dead-heading and it is now acceptable to simply snap off the forming seed pods. This reminds me a bit of when they discovered that chainsawing roses produced almost as good results as the traditional snipping methods. Burn your dead heads. NB: Don’t dead-head the rugosas and others that are valued for their seedpods (hips). Rose hips are a valuable source of vitamin C and can be eaten, if you have the patience to remove the prickly and furry seeds, and the roses haven’t been sprayed with anything nasty. Your roses may need watering. Avoid sprinkling them. If the leaves and buds get wet it encourages disease and causes the flowers to fail in bud. It’s better to use a hose on the ground with the water coming out slowly. Ideally, equip yourself with a leaky hose or buy the ones made out of recycled tyres. They are porous and biodegradable after about 15 years. If you have not fed your roses this year, do so now. There are several sorts of feed: those in spray form combined with protective rose spray. There are also liquid fertilisers and granules. Don’t fertilise on dry soil as this will burn your plants. Plant some water lilies. Watch out because they can become very large. Find out when you buy the babies. Miniature varieties are available. By the way water lilies are normally known as nénuphars in French, but also rose d’eau or lune d’eau. Pretty names for these flowers which inspired Verlaine, Monet and many others. Foxgloves at up to two metres high are very elegant at the back of a flower bed. These perennials are normally cultivated as biennials. Sow them now and plant out in the autumn at about 50cm apart. They don’t like a soil which is too alkaline but otherwise are easy and reseed happily. It’s lovely to see them growing wild in the hedgerows along the Breton lanes. Mow your lawn and if you can afford it water it copiously from time to time (but not too often). If applying fertiliser, do so only after the grass has had a good soaking. Tiny tip: earth up beans which were sown last month. |
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