Great garden food to eat during summer and winter and how to take care of your garden
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up; snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather just different kinds of good weather.
Being winter, I know how most gardeners are feeling right now: excited but frustrated, energetic but discouraged, warm inside but freezing out and optimistic in an exasperating season. I am no genius to have deduced that, just a gardener myself. Winter is really an awkward time to be encouraged to garden but lets look at what will entice you outdoors this month.
Other pesticides can be viewed here.
Soup is the first thing that comes to mind!
A delicious soup, on a wintry day, and what better than using veggies from your home garden. Many of the vegetables planted at the beginning of autumn can be harvested now. Broccoli, beetroot and cauliflower come to mind. Peas are happy when its cold and sowing them throughout winter will provide you with excellent crops for soup-ing or canning in the months to come. Spinach, parsley and leeks are an obvious choice for winter, all of which are highly nutritious greens and thrive in cold weather. Onions and garlic planted now will make big cloves by mid-spring.
A cold frame
A cold frame, especially for those in frosty areas, will enable you to plant and harvest throughout winter. What is a cold frame? Nothing more than four walls to trap heat and shelter plants and a transparent lid that admits light. You can make the walls from any sturdy material, from plywood to concrete. An old window works perfectly as a lid, but you can also use plastic sheeting tacked to a frame. The P&P Garden Greenhouse is newly available, easy to erect and maintain, and is superb for growing all sorts of plants and vegetables.
If some of the leaves on your Ficuses (its as bad as saying rusks) are behaving oddly, in other words if they are folding over and envelope-ing closed, then you have a problem. These closed parcels are the hideout of a small insect that sucks the sap from the leaves.
Contact pesticides are not that successful in combating these insects and using a systemic pesticide (one which is taken up by the plant) is recommended instead.
For assistance in choosing the correct one, pop into your local garden centre. Pruning away the infested leaves is another alternative.
Treatment for the control of conifer aphid is recommended this month. Again a systemic pesticide is easy to apply and most effective.
After a summer spent battling aphids and scale, mildew and rust, the winter garden is like a vacation, with few bugs and virtually no diseases. However whilst on the subject of food and bugs Stinkbugs are used in some cultures to add flavour to stews! To harvest them, make sure you go out collecting at the crack of dawn while it is cold and the stinkbugs are less mobile! Talk about killing two birds with one stone and happy stewing!
Plant out winter and spring annuals
Continue to plant out winter and spring annuals. And if you want your winter flowering annuals such as Iceland Poppies, Pansies, Violas, Sweet Peas and Primulas to look as good as they do in the magazines then remember to fertilise them. Use high potassium fertilizer like 3:1:5 or 6:1:5 for Sweet Peas, especially if you notice that the leaves are becoming papery on the edges and light brown in colour.
Turn the contents of your compost heap if you have not done so already. Compost will generally boost the growth of plants and enrich the soil. Compost activator, available in most garden centres, will help you to get the heap decomposing.
Also note that our garden soil needs suitable preparation with composts and fertilisers before planting. There are very few plants from the nursery that will give of their best if they are just planted straight into unprepared soil. So remember that for every plant purchased you will also need compost and fertiliser. We call this invisible gardening that must also be included in your budget.
Watering in the morning
Watering late in the day will not allow sufficient time for the foliage to dry off and ice could form, causing chill or frost damage.
Before pruning your roses, consider harvesting the rose hips. In areas that get frost rose hips ripen after they are touched by the first frost. The colour of rose hips varies, but in general, orange hips are not quite ripe, and deep red hips are overripe. Overripe hips are sweet, but have lost much of their vitamin C. To prepare rose hips for tea, cut off the bloom stem, cut the hip in half and scrape out the seeds and hairy pith. They can also be used whole. Save the smallest hips for jam or syrup. Rose hips used for syrup don't need to be seeded or scraped. A half and half mixture of rose hip juice and apple juice makes tasty syrup for dribbling over custard tarts or bread pudding. Dont forget the rose petals, they are edible and can be added decoratively to the syrup or sprinkled into salads.
Place your orders for roses. Some of my old time favourites are the highly scented Harmonie (a tritone, cutflower), Glowing achievement (red, hedge), the fragrant Blue moon (cutflower) and Egoli (a strong, frilly, yellow).
Feed all winter and spring flowering bulbs and make sure that you give your bulbs enough water.
Look out for the sunbirds. They will be feasting off the blazing orange Aloes in the veld. Bring a little of this veld life into your own garden by planting some aloe species in hot sunny spots. ALOE ferox and ALOE striata are both striking.
Plants of the month:
Dwarf Bloukappie (POLYGALA myrtifolia): Its versatility allows the Bloukappie, or September Bush, to grow in places as varied as dune landscapes and rocky open areas. Its a neat, compact shrub that grows to about 1 m high, and bears mauve flowers most of the year. The dwarf variety looks very effective as a hedge along pathways.
Whats as common as weeds, creeps where its damp and grows like hair on a dogs back? Peace in the home, of course! Now I know some avid gardeners would not exactly nominate this as a candidate for the plant of the month but somehow it charms the pants off our customers with its cute, fuzzy look. It suits damp areas with paving or pathways, around low birdbaths or in hanging baskets, or can be used creatively in old metal watering cans or kettles.
Hmm, now Im off to make creamy spinach soup with toasty croutons!
By Carmel Wolf
Published with permission of Chris Wilkinson Graemark