"Are those Holly flowers, in November?"

... said Mrs Client, in wonderment.

"In November?" I echoed, desperately trying to remember what Holly flowers look like. And when they flower,

"Well, look, aren't these where the petals have been splashed onto the leaves, look!"

I looked. They did look exactly like a flattened flower, which had been papier mache-ed onto the leaves. 

There were lots of them, all over the tree, which is a variegated Holly, in case you were wondering.  It's been raining, on and off, for weeks, so the concept of flowers being smashed by heavy rain and plastered onto leaves below is perfectly plausible.

And before you ask, no, Holly leaves are not always prickly, especially on larger trees which don't get pruned much - the prickles form as a response to grazing, so areas which don't get grazed tend to have leaves with smooth margins. 

In modern times, by the way, "grazing" means "pruning or hedge-cutting" , rather than being noshed by animals, and this particular tree is allowed to grow, unchecked.  Hence the lack of prickles.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to remember what Holly flowers look like. Surely they don't appear at this time of year, because at this time of year, we are all looking at the berries, not the flowers, aren't we? 

I was also certain that Holly flowers are very small, so I thought it unlikely that these flowers, if they were flowers, came from the Holly - and I couldn't see anything else in the area which had white flowers.

"Hmmm, I'm not sure, it could be some sort of leaf miner damage," I commented, picking at the edge of the "flower" to see if I could lift it off.  Mrs Client wasn't convinced, and I had to agree that it did look rather like rain-splattered flowers. 

We continued to look amongst the foliage, and I spotted some tiny flower buds, still tightly closed. "Oh look," I said, "here are the flowers for next year, not even open yet."

"Well, maybe some of them opened earlier?" 

There was no answer to that, so what do we do? Answer, take photos, and/or take a sample home, then do some research.

It turned out to be laughably simple research - I typed "holly leaf miner" into google, selected "images" and half way down the page, there it was, exactly the same as the one in my hand. Phytomyza ilicis, commonly known as Holly leaf miner.

The good news is that it's just cosmetic damage, it doesn't hurt the tree overall, and damaged leaves can apparently remain on the tree for 5 years or more. 

But I wanted to know more about the flowers, so I did a bit more research - this is how I fill those rainy days, by the way, when it's too wet to work - and discovered that Holly normally flowers in late spring to early summer, so I was correct to say that the flower buds which I found were for next year's flowers.

Confusingly, I did find some photos on the internet which appeared to show Holly with flowers, open, next to bright red berries.  I have no explanation for this: in some cases you could see that the flowers were on a different, separate twig from the one with the berries, but that still doesn't explain how flowers - spring/summer - were present at the same time as berries - autumn/winter. 

Unless the berries were fake plastic ones: entirely possible, as the lady with the Holly Leaf Miner admitted that she didn't bother trying to keep the birds off the berries with netting, and could never remember to cut the berried branches now, while they are still covered in berries. (If you cut them now, and leave them in a cold garage or shed, they should still be fresh-looking for Christmas decorations) So she just cuts the branches that she wants, just before Christmas, and adds plastic berries!!

Oh, I suppose that's another answer: someone wanting to get a reference photo of berries and flowers together could cut the Holly in winter, and keep the cuttings in water, possibly in glycerine, until the following spring.

Or maybe they are opportune photos, taken when the weird weather fools the tree into opening the flowers, way, way too early?

Either way, normally, you won't see flowers and berries open at the same time, on a Holly tree.

And here's something interesting which I learned during my research - male and female Holly flowers are very different! 

You may already know that Holly trees are dioecious, which is a botanical term meaning that any one individual Holly tree will be either a male tree, or a female tree. So if you want berries, you have to buy a female tree: and if you want your female tree to product those berries, you need to have a male tree somewhere nearby, to fertilise the flowers.

How do you tell the difference? Not by the nursery cultivar names, that's for sure: annoyingly, Ilex 'Golden Queen' is in fact male, whilst Ilex 'Golden King' is actually female. Why? Why? *shakes head* What idiot got away with those names?

Moving on... here are the male flowers:

They have anthers, those projecting spikes, and at the tip of each anther you can see the bright yellow pollen.

That is the pollen which is carried by bees, hoverflies, and other pollinating insects, from one flower to the next.

With Holly, you need those insects to pick up a load of pollen from this tree, then to buzz across to your female Holly, whose flowers look like this:

Notice the complete lack of sticky-out stamens: instead, the female flowers have a central ball-like stigma, which - if fertilised - will develop into a berry, which will then turn the familiar bright red.

As always, it only needs one male tree to fertilise a number of female trees, so if you want berries, plant a copse of female trees, and be sure to include one or two males, and lo! and behold, berries will be yours!

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!

Is it worth buying good quality garden tools - forks!

Just the other day, I wrote about secateurs, and was it worth buying expensive ones. (In a word - "No.")

Then look what happened this week!

So much for the Wilkinson Sword 25 year guarantee, eh?

And I wasn't even doing anything extravagant with it.

What's particularly annoying is that, prior to this one, I bought a Wilkinson Sword (now bought out by Fiskars) border fork, the one with the five year guarantee.

It lasted two months, and the handle broke.

And it's not as though I'm a hefty six-footer: so I took it back and the garden centre gave me a new one.

Six months later, the handle broke on the new one.

Embarrassed, but determined, I returned to the garden centre and yes, the garden centre refunded my money. 

Well, technically, they didn't refund it, but they offered to replace it. Instead, I did a part-exchange for this one, which was more expensive (still Wilkinson Sword), but came with a 25 year guarantee, on the grounds that as I'd already broken two 5-year tools, I clearly needed a better quality one!

I hear this a lot, actually, especially from male gardeners, who tend to use strength rather than technique: modern spades and forks have quite weak handles, and the generally accepted view is that the manufacturers used to use seasoned Ash wood (no jokes about fork 'andles, please) whereas now they are using cheap wood, often not properly seasoned, and they tend to break rather than bend.

But I hoped that the more-expensive, 25-year guarantee one, would have a better quality handle: and yes, I do admit that these days, I do take care not to use too much strength when levering shrub roots out with the fork, specifically to avoid stressing the handle too much.

 In case you are interested, the reason that seasoned Ash wood is traditionally used for tool handles is that it "gives" a little, under stress: it will bend, slightly, rather than snap. So now, when forking with gusto, I am always aware of the handle, and when I feel that slight springiness, that "give", I take care not to force it any further.

And now look, one of the tines has broken. OK, this one has lasted a few years, and yes, the handle has survived (although it worked loose within a year, and now it has an ugly great screw through the plastic part, to hold it firm), but honestly! A broken tine? I am simply not "that" strong!

Of course, now I have to decide exactly how embarrassing it will be, to take it back to the garden centre yet again.....

 

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!

It's amazing what you dig up in other people's gardens....

I'm always digging up mildly interesting things - broken pottery, shards of glass, once even a dead body... long story, don't ask. Well, ok, maybe one day I'll tell you all about it...

The other day, I was merrily weeding around the base of a Mulberry tree, and at the back of it, between the trunk and the wall, there was something sticking up out of the ground.

It looked for all the world like a boot-scraper: you know, the old-fashioned sort with a horizontal bar of metal, usually embedded in a stone, or in concrete, beside the front door.

This caught my eye because, not ten minutes earlier, I had gone into my Client's house to use the loo and Mrs Client had made a passing remark about wondering where the boot scraper had got to. 

I always remove my boots before entering the house: well-meaning Clients often say "Oh, just come on in, don't worry about taking your boots off, we're used to it, stone floors, etc etc" but they have no idea just how muddy I can get when digging their garden... so I always take my boots off.

Except for that one time, last week... but no, I can't bear to admit to it. Sorry, Barbara.  Moving on.

So, I always (nearly always) remove my boots, Mrs Client mentioned a boot scraper, and then I saw what looked like one. You can see the train of thought... perhaps this was the missing boot scraper?

What would it have been doing, way out in the garden? Buried up to its neck? I know, I know, clearly I wasn't really thinking, I was "in the zone" of Zen Weeding - you know, that state where your hands are working on auto-pilot and your mind is busily planning the order of the next few jobs, how to get out that Cistus root without breaking another fork (er hem), wondering anew at the way there are such a wide range of weeds available, but how in any one area of the garden there are rarely more than two or three species...  so I took hold of it and pulled.

And this came out of the ground:

Hmmm... not a boot scraper, then! 

Although, looking at the entire thing, you can see a certain family resemblance to old-fashioned boot scrapers, can't you?

But it's clearly a trap of some kind.

The pair of eye-protector specs on the table should give you some idea of size: far too large to be a mouse-trap, not large enough to be a bear-trap, so what would it be for?

Rats, is the logical next suggestion,  and Mrs Client told me that the previous owners had had chickens in an outhouse in that direction. It is possible, then,  that traps were set to catch the rats running along beside the wall - the advice, for catching rats, is always to work out where their "runs" are, and to place the traps along the run.

"How old do you think it is?" asked Mrs Client.

"I have no idea," I replied, thinking that it looked rather old-fashioned, but not ancient, if you see what I mean. "Maybe 1930s, 20s?"  The style of it looked too elegant to be contemporary: the mud and rust with which was encrusted obviously made it look "old", but still, the design did not look modern.

After work, I did some research online, and at first it seemed as though it might be older than I'd thought, Victorian, possibly: I found quite a lot of pictures of wrought iron traps from that era, but nothing quite the same.

Eventually, I found it: it turned out to be a mole trap, which at least explains why it was buried in the soil.

The amazing part is that they are still being made today, to exactly the same design! Just look at that, then compare it to the picture above.

Snap!

Talking of which, I was shaking and scraping the mud off, while talking to Mrs Client, and I had just said "I think it's rusted solid" when it suddenly pinged undone in my hands!

Luckily it's not a finger-trapping sort of trap: when it went off,  the legs at the bottom closed together, presumably around the body of the offending mole.

But it made both of us jump, I can tell you!

Once we'd recovered from that, Mrs Client told me that they have lived there for nearly 20 years, so it's at least that old - but certainly not Victorian.

The only mystery remaining is that of why it was still there, upright and still "set", despite the fact that the bed in question had been dug over, at least three or four times in the past 20 years!

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!

How to: Tidy up your Tree Peony in late autumn

This question comes up quite often: What is the best thing to do with Tree Peonies, in late autumn? 

They look such a mess, but many people are unsure what they can and can't do, because there is a ton of information available on how to care for "normal" perennial peonies, but not a lot on these woody ones.

So firstly, what is a tree Peony? Is it really a Peony at all, or is just called that because the flowers look a bit Peony-like? Is it like Tree Poppies, which are not Poppies at all, but are actually Romneya? Should we prune it back in winter? Should we obey the labelling which says "does not need any pruning"?

Firstly, yes, it is a Peony.  Normal perennial Peonies are properly called Paeonia, that's the genus name: and Tree Poppies are the same genus, Paeonia. But no-one can spell it, so we generally say Peony.

Most Peonies are sold under just their cultivar name, which appears in single quotes, and Tree Peonies are the same: mind you, there seems to be some confusion over the naming of Tree Peonies. Wikipedia, that font of all (unchecked, unofficial) knowledge, refers to them being the Moutan Peonies, but I've never actually heard that term used.

One of the easiest to grow is Paeonia lutea var. ludlowii which is strong, sturdy, has bright yellow flowers in great profusion, and which sets seed, so you only need to buy one of it!! (I love plants which are generous with their seeding, and/or are easy to propagate!)

I have had, over the years, a white tree Peony, and a glorious dark red one, but alas, they have both died, whereas the good old ludlowii just keeps on growing.

Maintenance:

In mid to late autumn, they tend to  look like this:

The foliage is going brown, it is hanging down in unpleasant soggy fronds, and the whole plant looks like nothing on earth.

First things first: gently pull away all those dead and dying leaves - the brown ones. 

If they don't want to come off easily, don't rip them - leave them for another week or two, or use secateurs to snip them off, as close as you can get to the stalk.

Pay particular attention to the ground level, as a lot of the leaves will have fallen down and become wedged in amongst the stalks. Clear them away, otherwise they will encourage damp and rot around the base of the stems, which is not a good thing.

Once you cleared away the leaves, take a look at the overall shape: is it pleasingly balanced? Is it overcrowded in places?  Are there one or two branches which are bigger than all the rest? Is the whole thing getting too big?

Now is the time to get either secateurs or loppers out, and remove any of those stems which seem to be unwanted. Just cut them off as close to ground level as you can manage.

If one or two stems are sticking out too far, but you won't want to remove them completely, you can just shorten them: look closely along the stem, and see if you can spot a big fat bud which is in about the right place. If you can, cut immediately above it. This reduces the length of the stem, but won't leave you with dead stubby bits, next year.

Having achieved something a bit more pleasing to the eye, take a closer look at each of the remaining stems, starting at the tips. Look for any tips which appear to be dead: they will be grey, and they won't have a fat bud at the tip. Using secateurs, cut off any dead portions - they won't do any good, and the tend to die downwards, if not nipped off. 

 And there you are, done.

Here - left - is the same Tree Peony as you saw above, having had all these processes carried out.

It's now ready to face the winter - a few more leaves to drop, but for now they are quite pleasing - having been thinned and shaped.

Once all the leaves are down, the overall shape will be as attractive as a skeleton can ever be: and next year, there will plenty of new growth and lots of flowers!

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!

Glue or Grease bands on the Fruit Trees

Another sign of Autumn - apart from all the leaves dropping off the deciduous trees - is that it's time to apply the Glue bands to the fruit trees.

This is a simple mechanical, non-pesticide method of controlling winter moth caterpillars. 

It is done by quite literally applying a band of sticky stuff to the trunks, the idea being that the moths, which have overwintered at ground level, try to walk up, and get stuck. A bit like fly-paper, but for fruit trees. 

Why don't the moths fly up? Because the eggs - which turn into the caterpillars, which eat the buds, therefore destroying the fruit before it even starts - are wingless. They can't fly, they have to walk.

There are two main methods: either you paint it on, using a disposable brush: the stuff is impossible to remove, so you have to accept that you are going to sacrifice at least one brush, and quite possibly some of your own  hair (more of that later), when applying it. Or, you wrap a pre-made band of it around the trunk, which appears to be a more civilised method, but does - as you would expect - have its own set of problems.

The paint-on glue needs no explanation: just open the tin or container, dip in the sacrificial brush, and slap it on: it's normally applied fairly low to the ground, for two reasons: as trees tend to branch out higher up, it's easier to coat just one trunk, than to have to coat four or five of them: and it makes sense to get the defences in place sooner rather than later, so that you catch all the little blighters before they find cracks and crevices in which to lay their eggs.

Right, in case you can't visualise it, here is one I did earlier:

This is a run of fairly young fruit trees, just a couple of years old, so they are skinny little things!

The bright green strip is the grease band, and the darker lines are the green garden string with which I tied to tops and bottoms of the bands.

And yes, there is a matching grease band applied to the support cane... for the obvious reason! If wingless female moths can walk up a tree trunk, they can certainly walk up a support cane, so you need to protect both of them.

Applying the grease band is straightforward enough - well, it is, on paper, at least! When you open the pack, it contains a long, long strip of what looks like paper or plastic, folded in half lengthwise. All the sticky part is safely in the middle. 

Some of them have a plastic liner over the sticky section, some of them are literally just folded in half, sticky side to sticky side.

Whichever one you have, cut off a piece long enough to wrap all the way around your tree (or cane) with a bit of overlap.

Peel apart the two "halves" of the strip, revealing the icky sticky stuff within. There is usually a margin of non-sticky material, which gives you something to get hold of.

Wrap this, sticky side out, around the stem, overlapping it, and pressing it together - the overlap will, of course, stick to itself. 

There, job done!

Hmmm. Yes, it's never that simple, is it? OK, before you start, assemble all the things you are going to need. That includes the grease band itself, scissors, string, and some white spirit and a rag.

First problem - as soon as you peel it apart, it starts sticking to everything in sight. Your clothes, you, your hair, itself, a passing cat, a falling leaf: so don't unpeel it until you are in position, ready to apply it.

Second problem - you have to feed the incredibly sticky piece of material through the gap between tree and cane: or, depending on your situation, between the tree and the fence. If you are lucky, your only problem is to get it around the back of the trunk... word of advice, if there are tall weeds around the base of the fruit trees, clear them away before starting!

Third problem: having manoeuvred it into position, "overlap the grease band and press the edges together" she said... it sticks to your fingers, it sticks to itself, it argues, swears at you, refuses to go where you want it, and ends up in a baggy, floppy ring around the trunk. 

 NB try not to do this task on a windy day...

All is not lost - this is where the string comes in. Once it is more-or-less in position, tie it top and bottom, quite tightly, with string.
 

Don't worry about a few creases along the way - the important part is to get it close to the trunk, otherwise the wingless female moths just walk right through underneath it!

Here - left - you can see how mine are bunched up and crinkled, but that doesn't matter because the string has pulled them tight. As the moths are walking uphill, rather than downhill, creases at the upper edge are not really that important, but if you get a similar effect at the bottom edge, don't worry - they might walk in underneath that loose edge, but they can't get any further.

Now, by this time, your fingers are coated in sticky glue, the string is stuck to you, the scissors are covered in sticky stuff, and you can't find the piece which you just cut off, ready for the next one... and then you find it stuck to your hair, or the back of your coat....

My answer to this, assuming that you are carrying out this task on a dry day, is to dab my fingers lightly onto some dry, dusty soil every so often. This completely de-sticks your fingers, so you can use the scissors and tie the string without difficulty.

Oh, before I go any further, take another look at that last photo: can you see that the tree has a bright green band on it, but the cane does not?  Look closer, you'll see that the can has a transparent band around it. That's last year's innovation, invisible grease bands!

Presumably someone complained to the suppliers that they didn't like looking at bright green plastic all through the winter, so it was produced on transparent plastic. It's applied in exactly the same way, and at first I thought I preferred it, because it is, indeed, much less visible.

But after it had been in place for a few months (these photos are from this year, but I do this every year), I noticed that it was covered in dead critters, and it looked black and horrible. Plus, I couldn't instantly see if I had covered every tree and every cane... so on balance, I prefer the Hi-vis version.

So, where were we? Oh yes, dabbing our fingers in dusty earth to de-sticky them.

It works a treat, but you do get black dirty fingerprints all over the grease bands - as you can see here, left!

This also shows how impossible it is to apply the grease bands without touching them!

Once you have tied the last knot, trimmed off the last of the long string ends, cleared up all the rubbish, tracked down all the offcuts which are sticking to your backside, your boots, the fence, the cat, the dog... finally, get ready to clean up your hands.

The "dust bowl" trick works perfectly, but under the layer of dust, you are very sticky indeed, and this is where the white spirit comes in. Use the white spirit and the old rag to clean up your sticky fingers, before you attempt to wash them. Soap and water will not shift grease band glue!

Your final job is to make a note in your diary to remove the grease bands next spring: partly because you don't want to kill the any beneficial insects which also walk up and down the trunks (although grease bands are quite successful at catching - and therefore killing - ants...) but mostly because, when the tree starts to grow again in spring, the string which you tied so tightly around the grease bands will throttle them.

So it's important to remove the old grease bands every year.

Oh, unless you use the grease paint, of course, in which case you don't have to remove it: but of course, you do have to look at it all year, and it does remain sticky for a long, long time, which can be a problem if you need to weed around the base of the tree in question, as it will still - even at the end of summer - be sticky enough to grab your hair, your gloves, your shoelaces.....
 

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!

Is it worth buying top quality secateurs?

This is one of those topics which always interests me: so many professional gardeners - and amateurs, for that matter - make a big deal about only buying Felco secateurs, whereas I personally buy Wilco cheapy tools for less than a tenner, use them until they break, then throw them away and buy a new pair.

At this point, the Felco Owners Club look at me in horror, and say things like "but I've had these Felcos for 200 years and they're still going strong: I've replaced the blades three times, had four new springs, and two new sets of handles..." 

Ok, that last bit was a joke, but yes, Felco owners will always justify the exorbitant cost of their posh secateurs by saying that you can send the blades back to be sharpened, or you can buy replacement blades for them at "just" £30 a time... but in my opinion,  for the money, I would rather have ten pairs of cheap secateurs, each lasting a couple of years.

Here's a sample of my current selection of cheapy secateurs, and yes, they are standing up on their sides - don't ask! 

I think the most expensive ones are the clean ones, the Fiskars bypass, second from right: and I think they might have cost £12.

I should point out that I sharpen my (cheap) secateurs very often, probably once every couple of weeks, so it's not a question of sharpness: the springs tend to break, so I have a box full of assorted springs on hand, and when I finally throw out a pair, I always take the spring off, and re-use it: in fact, the weakest link in all the secateurs tends to be the locking latch. Once that wears out, they become impossible to use effectively and efficiently. I used to send them back to the manufacturer and have them replace the latch, along with the suggestion that they should source stronger latch material... 

So, back to Why?

Because I abuse my secateurs, that's why. I'm a professional gardener, I'm paid (as it were) by the minute, so I can't waste time running back to my car every five minutes to get a pair of loppers, or a pruning saw, if the items which I am cutting are just slightly too thick for the secateurs. Instead, I just abuse the secateurs by forcing them through tougher/thicker branches than they are comfortable with. 

There are a couple of techniques for cutting over-sized branches with under-sized tools (heh heh) which I won't share with you now, but they are not really good for the tools.

I also use them for cutting roots, under ground - and anyone who uses bladed tools knows that "earth" is the worst possible things for blades, because the small particles of rock damage and blunt the blades. You should never, ever use a bladed tool - secateurs, loppers, pruning saws - in such a way that the come into contact with the soil.

Yet I do it, all the time, because I have to. I can't stop to wash every particle of dirt off a branch or root, before I cut it - I'm paid to be efficient, to be effective, to be fast... so I abuse my tools, terribly.

If I had posh Felco secateurs, at £50+ a pair, I would not abuse them in this way! So they wouldn't be much use to me, would they?!

And that, dear reader, is why I don't have expensive posh secateurs.

Mind you, under the general heading of "there is no right or wrong in gardening", I do currently have a pair of very expensive secateurs.... a friend gave them to me for Christmas, and at first they stayed at home, unused, until the friend commented, somewhat crossly, that they were supposed to be used, not looked at. 

So I started using them, and they're doing quite well so far: they've lasted the best part of a year, no damage or breakage, despite being abused etc: I've only just had to start sharpening them, so they've held their edge well: but, despite being very "nice", they do have a couple of drawbacks.

Firstly, they are noisy. Every time they open, they make a small metallic noise. It's caused by that nappy-style spring, and no amount of WD40 prevents it. It's quite annoying.

When they close, they make a very satisfactory "snick", which is nice: I've written before about Clients commenting that they find me, in their gardens, by listening for the snick of the secateurs. 

The latch is an excellent design: it's not left- or right-handed, and I always appreciate that in my tools (I train all students, trainees and mentorees to learn to use most tools in either hand). Initially, I didn't like it, because it needed two hands to operate, which is just silly: but after a while, I got the hang of flicking it open by  "catching" it on my clothing, and closing it by simply nudging it against my leg. 

So far, then, all good.

But there are two design flaws which I find quite annoying; the constantly-annoying one is that they "slide" down in your hand: as you release the handles from making a snip, the spring is sufficiently strong that it pings itself open, and the angle of the red handle, the one that lies against the thumb, is not sharp enough to stay solidly in place, in your hand.

So if you are doing a repeated series of snips, by the time you've done about five, they are almost out of your hand, so you have to stop and re-adjust your grip on them. That is super-annoying. 

I tried to get a photo to illustrate the problem:

Here is my hand, doing three successive "snips".

You can see how they are slipping down inside my hand, with each action.

I asked the friend who gave them to me, and they have exactly the same problem. So it's not just me...

 

The other issue is that point at which the two handles meet, just below the blades:  the "bump stop". 

If using them bare-handed, once they've slipped down in your hand, it's awfully easy to get pinched by the bump stop! 

Here - right - is the photo at the end of the sequence above, when I open my hand: I've moved my thumb back out of the way, so that you can see where they are sitting in my hand:

I have had several very nice little blood blisters from that, thank you very much.

So on balance, once these posh ones bite the dust, I'm going back to the cheap and cheerful ones, which I shall use and abuse with impunity!

 

 

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!

Deadheading Roses - "hard"

I'm often asked about rose pruning, and one of the aspects which trips up a lot of people is the concept of dead heading.

So let's take a look at this topic: as with many aspects of gardening, it would be easier to teach you this in person - see my page on Garden Tuition for details! - but for now, let's take a quick canter through the basics.

What is dead-heading?

It's the practice of removing spent ("finished") blooms/blossoms/flowers. 

These three - left - are now what I call "going over" which means they have lost their initial beauty, the petals are starting to fade, droop, and curl: the flower has lost it's form, it is starting to look ragged.

Time to dead-head these ones!

Why do we dead-head?

Because once a bloom, or blossom, or flower, whichever name you prefer: once it's finished looking lovely, it will go to seed: it will create a hip (or a haw, I'm never quite sure of the difference), and it will consider it's work done for the season.

Because the whole reason for plants to grow, is to flower, set seed, and die.

But in our gardens, we want them to continue flowering again and again and again, and by removing the seed, we force the plant to produce another flower.

I know, I know, cruelty to plants: and people say to me "Oh, what a lovely job you have, working in harmony with nature..."  They have no idea that I'm torturing plants for a living (*rolls eyes*).

So by dead-heading, on a continual, rolling, basis, we prompt the plants to produce a succession of flowers for us.

How do we dead-head?

Don't just pull off the flower head (shrieks of horror), cut it off, with sharp secateurs or, if desperate, a sharp pair of kitchen scissors.

No, not the ones you use when cooking - an old pair.

There are three aspects of rose pruning which you need to get to grips with, and they are, in brief:

1) the sloping cut. Make your cut just above a bud, and don't cut straight across, cut at an angle sloping away from the bud. So that any water which collects on the cut end of the stem runs away down the stem, instead of being "caught" in the bud.

2) the outward facing bud. When deciding where to cut, pick a bud which is facing outwards: if you imagine yourself looking down on the bush from above, choose a bud pointing away from the centre. This encourages growth in an outwards direction, thus reducing congestion within the centre of the bush, which in turn allows good air flow, which in turn helps to reduce disease.

3) where to make the cut.....

This is the hardest concept for new gardeners to accept. When dead-heading, don't just nip off the dying flower, take off a good length of stem as well.

Here's a simple illustration: looking at this picture, taking that top left-hand flower, if you imagine that the flower is fading, many people would dead-head at the point marked A. 

That is, just below the flower.

It is better to follow the stem down into the bush, and cut it much lower, at the point marked B.

Why?

In simple terms, because if you look at the length of that stem - from B up to A and beyond - that's how long the stem grows before it flowers.

(This is a broad generalisation)  

So, when you take off the flower, the stem will immediately shoot from the next available bud - the outward facing one, if you did it correctly! - and will make that much growth again, before a bud appears.

This means that over the summer, your roses get taller and taller, lankier and lankier, and more prone to snapping and damage, not to mention that the flowers get higher and higher until they are out of sight!

By cutting back hard when you dead-head, you are "re-setting" that particular stem, and the new bud will appear at about the same height as the old one did.

When do we dead-head?

As soon as the flower dies! It's an on-going, continual, rolling process. In many of "my" gardens, I do all the dead-heading, and I do it every week. Sometimes there are many to be done, sometimes only one or two: and sometimes I have to be quite harsh, and remove a particular flower when it is only just going over, simply because I won't be there for another week, and I don't want to leave one which may look "sort of ok" today, but which will be brown and horrible in a couple of days.

In your own garden, you can go round every couple of days, or even every day! You will soon learn how long the flowers last, and how quickly or slowly they go through the process of going over. The weather makes a difference: heavy rain can literally bash the petals off, and soggy rain can make a flower look lank earlier than during fine weather.

The other question,  which one of my former Students asked, was "What's the difference between dead-heading and the pre-winter prune?"

A good question! The answer is, that if you have dead-headed "properly" all through the summer, you won't need to do much pruning in autumn, because you have been keeping the bush in shape. 

I am getting a weird feeling of deja vu as I write this, because I could've sworn I'd already covered it.... hang on...*checks blog*... oh yes, I covered it just last week, in an article on End of Season Pruning:  anyway, it is traditional to prune roses quite hard in autumn, to prepare them for the winter, and the core element of this practice is to prevent wind-rock. 

It's a bit like reefing your sails on a blustery day - by reducing the amount of above-ground growth on the rose bush (this applies to a lesser extent to climbing roses as well). it helps to avoid the plant being rocked by the wind, which loosens the roots and can cause all sorts of damage.

Right, there you have it, the basics of dead-heading the roses.

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!

The devil is in the detail - granite sett edging

I can hear you saying "Whut? What on earth is she on about now?!"

This might sound like a digression, but bear with me - some years back, my good friends Nigel and Anne were teasing me about my on-going campaign to find a new word for "gardener" because, as I say in my book about How To Be a Successful Self-Employed Gardener (available to download for free if you have Kindle Unlimited) (shameless plug!):

"We all know the difference between a cook and a Chef: anyone can cook, but you need training, experience, and a certain degree of flair, to take everyday ingredients and combine them in interesting, delicious, unusual ways: in other words, to be a Chef. 

"In the same way, anyone can be a "gardener", but those of us who are qualified, experienced, insured, careful, and thorough, deserve to have a job title that makes it plain that we are not amateurs, we are professionals, working with the same 'ingredients' as amateurs, but combining them in new and exciting ways."

They, ever-helpful, came up with the suggestion "Artisan". At first, I laughed, but then I thought about it: I'd seen a recipe just a day or two earlier, whose presentation advice was to "serve with artisan bread."

Now, I had no idea at all what "artisan bread" was, but at the same time, I knew EXACTLY what it was: I knew on which shelf of the supermarket I would find it: it would be bread, but rather than mass-produced white sliced loaves, it would be something hand-baked, non-mass-produced, more expensive than supermarket bread, possibly much tastier, made by someone with experience and/or training in bread making, someone with a bit of artistic flair, possibly using more expensive materials.

This nicely sums up my approach to gardening!

But it also applies to people working in the garden: and now, at long last, we get to the point of this article.  One of my Clients recently had their drive widened, and the builder put in a line of granite setts to edge the drive.

Granite setts are irregular, to say the least: they look more-or-less like square blocks, but they are all slightly different shapes.

And this is how the builder chose to lay them:  with the "straight" edges facing onto the soil.

I was so pleased!

If I'd been there while they were working, that was exactly what I would have suggested: because we can see the edge clearly against the dark soil, but we can barely see the edge against the jangly shingle of the drive.

In fact, I bet that you had to look closely at the photo to see what I mean. 

In case you can't see it, here's a closer look:

There - now you can see that the right-hand edge of the setts are more or less in a straight line.

Whereas the left-hand edges are in and out, shake it all about, quite irregular.

But the irregularity doesn't matter on the drive side, because the multi-coloured shingle disguises it.

However, against the plain dark soil, it would be very obvious.

So this is an example of the devil being in the detail: the builder, who was there to lay the drive, not to make flower beds, could have put the setts the other way round, not even thinking about how it looked.

In fact, in many ways, that's the way that I would have expected a builder to do it - because they were focussing on the drive.

They could have thought, if they had thought at all, "oh, the plants will soon cover it up, it won't matter which way round they go."

But at some times of the year, the plants get cut back....

So there you have it, that builder has now been promoted, in my mind, to an "artisan builder" because he took the time to place the granite setts in an orientation which will be pleasing to the eye for years to come.

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!

Autumn....

Well, I guess that makes it officially autumn...

*laughs*

Yes, it's that time of year: the clocks have gone back, the evenings are pitch dark, and the leaves are falling. 

Or, in the case of the Japanese Acer above, have fallen! One week ago it was magnificent, and now it's just a carpet of red leaves under the skeleton of the tree.  

Ah well, that's it then - it's officially autumn!

Did you enjoy this (short) article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!