March is the start of spring, and with a bit of warm weather the garden begins to get growing.

As the garden wakes up, so will our main pests, so be prepared with your preferred defence against slugs and snails.  They will be very keen to munch on your newly emerging herbaceous perennials.

Snail (photo from RHS website)

Follow this link to the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) website for lots of ideas on how to control these troublesome critters:

RHS Slugs and Snails

March is the month to prune established bush and standard roses.

Rose pruning (photo from RHS website)

You are looking for an open framework – like an upturned hand of five fingers. First take out the three D’s (dead, diseased and damaged material). Then remove any rubbing or crossing stems, and cut back any spindly growth to 2-3 buds. If the bush is crowded, then take out some old shoots completely to keep the centre of the framework open.

For Hybrid tea (large flowered) bush roses, shorten the strong remaining shoots to about 15cm from ground level. (This is only 6 inches, so you are going to go quite low).

For Floribunda (cluster-flowered) bush roses, shorten the remaining strong shoots to 30cm from ground level.

For standard roses, the same guidelines apply, except that the measure is taken from the base of the branched framework

Always prune with a slanting cut just above an outward facing bud.

There are many books and on-line resources to help. In our opinion two of the best are the RHS guide and the advice and tips available from David Austin roses.

If you fancy some practical training on pruning in general, BCA (at Burchett’s Green) runs a pruning course amongst many other short courses on horticultural topics. See the BCA website.

You can also give your roses a balanced feed and mulch, although make sure the stems are kept clear of mulch so that the stems don’t rot and avoid covering up the graft point.

The grass will start growing more strongly this month, so get your mowers ready. If you grow potatoes, then a good place to put your early batches of mown grass (provided it is free of herbicides) is in your prepared potato trenches. As the grass breaks down it helps the soil to retain moisture and creates slightly acidic conditions, which can protect against common scab.

Finally, if you haven’t already done so, now is a good time to clean and disinfect used pots and greenhouses to prepare for the busy growing season ahead. You should remove all debris and wash with a mild solution of a disinfectant such as Jeyes Fluid. This will help to avoid fungal diseases such as dampening off, and get rid of any pests which have taken advantage of your hospitality over the winter.

This is the first of a new monthly series of gardening tips, written for the Cookham Parish Magazine. This web version is longer, offering greater detail and illustrations.

February can be an odd month for gardeners. Despite the lengthening days and occasional warm spells, it is still winter and February is often one of the wettest months. So our first tip is don’t be in a hurry. If the ground is waterlogged or frozen, steer clear of lawns and borders – you could create more of a mess than you clear up. Frosted lawns can scorch when you walk on them and waterlogged beds are easily compressed, which can ruin the soil structure. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of time to catch up later in the year.

Provided that the temperature is above freezing, and that you can get to them without causing damage elsewhere, February is a good time to prune apples, pears and wisterias. They should still be dormant and with no leaf cover it is much easier to see the shape you’re creating. At this time of year, you can easily distinguish the larger, flowering (and therefore fruiting) buds from the smaller vegetative ones. This makes it easier for you to produce a balance new growth and flowers.

Flowering buds on apple tree

Vegetative buds on apple tree

Wisteria flower buds

Wisteria vegetative buds

As with all pruning, the first task is to remove the three D’s: Dead, Diseased and Damaged material. Then take out crossing branches that may cause congestion and reduce the air flow that keeps the plants healthy. Finally, cut back to the size and shape that you want. It is also a good time to treat dormant fruit trees with a plant oil based “winter wash” to kill overwintering eggs of aphids.

Spring bulbs are one of the great joys of gardens, with their emergence giving a clear sign that life and colour are coming back to the garden. You can start planning for next year’s bulbs now – yes really. As this year’s bulbs come through, take some photos so that when you are tempted at the autumn bulb sales, you’ll know exactly what gaps you want to fill. These might be physical gaps, where a space needs filling, but they could also be gaps in the calendar. With careful selection of varieties, bulbs (and the related corms and tubers) can be used to give colour pretty much all year round. Once planted many are long-lived and fairly undemanding, so are great value contributors to the garden.

Crocuses among leaf litter

Daffodils in the sun

With the Christmas Decorations still up, we’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Our Christmas wreath benefited from a tip on Gardeners’ Question Time.  This was to cover up holly bushes to protect the berries from marauding pigeons, if you want some for decorations.  Admittedly the bush looked a bit daft with one of our brassica nets slung over it, but it was worth putting up with that for a couple of weeks, in exchange for a profusion of berries for decorations.

Wreath – With holly!

The protection is now off the bush and the pigeons have nearly stripped it.

Despite the horrible weather that has dominated the start of the year, we have reached that time when thoughts start to turn towards the new growing season.  The seeds that arrived last autumn have been stored away and the annual sowing spreadsheet updated and now that we are in February the nagging timetable in the spreadsheet has meant that it is time to start cleaning the propagators, sieving the compost and sowing the seeds.

Our standard practice as described earlier is to bring on almost all of our seeds in trays or cells before planting out.  This means that whatever the weather we can get seeds going and kick start the most optimistic time of the year.  When the first seeds start to sprout and the window ledges fill up, you know that spring (and summer) can’t really be far away.

We have been lucky in that neither the garden nor the allotment have actually been flooded, so although things have been very wet we haven’t experienced the same amount of trouble as many.  Indeed looking forward the healthy levels of ground water should mean a good growing season, provided that we do get a reasonable amount of warmth and sun later in the year.

Further to the (almost) free plants that you can generate using vegetative propagation techniques, a very reasonably priced way to produce new plants is by growing them from seed.  Packets of seed are cheap when compared to grown plants, even expensively bred F1 hybrid seeds cost a small number of pounds with the potential to produce many plants.

Growing from seed is a favoured option for many vegetable growers because of the very wide range of cultivars that are available, allowing the selection of crops that will thrive in your locality and give the taste that you want.  There are increasing numbers of plug and grafted plants available, these allow you a head start, but as yet they do not offer the wide range that seeds give.  As we described last season, our approach to growing from seed is generally to aim to produce our own version of plug plants by the time that the planting out season arrives.

We start indoor seed sowing fairly early in the year, usually in early February.  We are not trying to grow prize winning onions and leeks which are often started earlier, rather we are looking to have healthily sized plants ready for planting out once the soil starts to warm up in the spring.

A heated propagator is a great help, but is not suitable for all seeds.  Most seed packets will specify if extra heat is required and some seeds have very specific requirements, but a general rule of thumb is that if the final plant is something that will thrive in sunshine and heat (tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, squashes and flowers like dahlias and sunflowers) then some heat will help to stimulate quick germination.  Our experience is that for leafier crops such as the brassicas then a slightly cooler, and thus slower, start to life gives sturdier (less leggy) seedlings.  Lettuces are an interesting case as their seeds show dormancy in higher temperatures, so are best kept cooler.  At this time of year a cool windowsill is ideal for lettuces.

Lettuce seedlings

We don’t have a heated greenhouse or any external power, so much of our earlier seed sowing is inside the house.  We have experimented with different propagators over the years and have found that temperature controlled propagators have proved unnecessary and that larger ones have been unwieldy on window sills.  This year we invested in a simple long thin propagator tray with 7 seperate small seed trays with lids allowing us to control different plants development at a more individual level than in a larger propagator.  So far this has worked well. 

 The new propagator

As the picture shows, this set up allows different treatment of different seeds as they start to germinate.

A key thing is to prick out the seeds before they get too big.  The usual time is as soon as the true leaves start to appear.  It is worth remembering that roots develop first and you want to be able to extract your new plants from the seed tray with as little damage to the roots as possible so that they settle into their new environment quickly.

On the subject of roots here is a quick diversion onto growing media.  Compost for seeds doesn’t need high nutrient levels as a lot of the early fuel comes from food stored in the seed itself, what is important is the capacity to retain moisture and oxygen, so there needs to be a decent amount of porosity.  We use commercial seed composts as they provide both decent water retention and good porosity, however we add vermiculite to increase the porosity, making it easier for the roots to grow.  The coarse structure of vermiculite also helps to ensure that the seed coating is pulled off the emerging plants as the seed leaves swell.  We always seive composts to get rid of the coarser lumps that would block root growth.  Seed composts tend to have fewer of these, but they are still there.  If you’ve never tried seiving compost, have a go and see just how much grot there is.

We also use a seed tray sized propagator, but again often use small seed trays or pots inside the propagator to allow us to control when the individual types of plants are removed.

… well almost.  There are some costs associated with propagation – compost, pots, power if you are using a heated environment, but, even allowing for these, you can end up with plants that are significantly cheaper than if you buy them.

There are many ways to propagate plants, one of which we’ll come back to another time (from seeds).  For now the focus is vegetative propagation, cuttings, layering and division.  Different types of plants can be propagated in different ways (and some by different methods at different times of year).  There are many guides to propagation, books, TV clips and other on-line resources, so I don’t propose to go into the individual details of different techniques.  A resource that I have found helpful, because of the detailed step-by-step instructions is the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) website.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be one bit of the site devoted to propagation, but within the list on this page http://apps.rhs.org.uk/advicesearch/AtoZ.aspx are links to things such as cuttings (of various types), Irises (dividing), Ornamental grasses (dividing), Perennials (dividing) and Layering.  The individual pages such as this one on softwood cuttings http://apps.rhs.org.uk/advicesearch/Profile.aspx?pid=307 follow the same general structure describing not just the process of collecting and preparing cuttings, but identifying plants that can be propagated using the specific technique.

The purpose of this piece is to share some of our experiences and to focus on two particular techniques that we have found to be particularly useful.  The first is softwood cuttings (for two reasons – firstly it is almost time to be taking these and secondly that these are the cuttings most likely to root quickly.  A great advantage of softwood cuttings is that you get a fairly quick result (either success or failure) and if you are successful then you have a young plant ready to grow on during the later spring and summer.  This means that you can also get quick results in terms of a display in the same year.  We have used this technique for Fuchsias, Hebes, Rosemary and Box to name a few.  Softwood cuttings will also root if taken later in the year, but are slower and need more care to get them ready for the following year.  Here are some (now safely rooted) young plants from cuttings taken last autumn.

Fuchsia Cuttings

Sarcococca Cuttings

It will be a year or two before the latter look like this

Sarcococca confusa

but the Fuchsias will be flowering this summer.

The other technique that we’ve been trying out is hardwood cuttings, see here for the RHS advice http://apps.rhs.org.uk/advicesearch/Profile.aspx?pid=387.  The big advantage of this technique is that once you’ve done the initial work, you can pretty much forget about them for 6 months or so until you pot on the successes and get rid of the failures.  This little nursery corner in front of our shed shows the blackcurrant cuttings taken early last year that were potted on individually last summer and will be ready for planting out this spring.  It also shows the rose cuttings taken late last year, which we’ll be potting on later this year.

Nursery Area Feb 2013

In the nursery you can also see some rhubarb plants that are growing from the crown that we divided last year.  The key with division is to be bold and not worry too much about damaging your original plant.  This technique is mostly used with herbaceous perennials and not only gives you new plants but also rejuvenates the original.  We have just finished lifting and dividing some of our ornamental grasses, with some of the divided pieces being immediately re-planted and others potted up so that we can plant them out at leisure (or give them to friends/family).

An interesting example of division was a very weary looking Aloe Vera plant that had been sat on the kitchen windowsill, when we went to re-pot it, we found the best part of 20 plantlets and after dividing them and potting them on, they have grown away really well, to the point where the individual plants are starting to produce their own colonies of new material.  Here are some of them.

Aloe Vera

On the subject of indoor plants, a number can be propagated from leaf cuttings.  Here are some examples from the RHS practical course taken last October.

Leaf Cuttings

These cuttings do require some care (an environment that will prevent the cuttings from drying out, but is not so humid that they pick up fungal diseases) and patience, the pictures below show that it has taken more than four months for solid rooting to take place followed by the start of top growth, but for those of you who love your house plants, the opportunity to get new examples of your favourite ones may make the results worth the time and effort.