MEETING ON WEDNESDAY 1 DECEMBER 2021 SPEAKER: CHRIS DAY SUBJECT:The All New A-Z of Fool Proof Gardening Chris gave it from behind a barrage of plants, pots, packets of bulbs, pest control products, seeds. etc., all of which were for sale. He called it a gallop through the alphabet, but really the letters where a vehicle for giving us a lot of very useful tips and advice on gardening. This is a selection of his most useful letters.. A – Annoying Pests. Number one pest is slugs and snails. Ferrous sulphate pellets are effective but should only be used at a rate of 3/plant. Slug Gone pellets made of sheep wool, the slugs don’t like going over it. For pots use copper tape, two strips, one round the top and one round the middle of the pot and keep pots away from walls and from each other as slugs can pass from a leave of one to the other. Vine weevils, mostly found in pots, especially primroses and fuchsias are prone. He recommends liquid control with something like Bug Clear ultra. For box blight there is a preventive fungicide called Topbuxus. To strengthen box against blight they should not be allowed to get stressed, so feed then, water them and only clip them if no rain is forecast for 72 hours.
D – Dead Heading. Some plants are ‘self-cleaning’ they don’t set seeds so the flowers fall off. When dead heading don’t just snip off the flower, but take the whole stem too, sometimes it can be pulled out. The stems are sometimes hollow and waster can get in and cause rot.
F – Fighting Growth! This is really pruning. The main rule applies, remove dead, diseased and dying bits. Any plant (Except Prunus) can be pruned now, cut back to where you want them to be. Cut back spring flowering plants and shrubs immediately after flowering. Try to cut above a node where new shoots will grow. If your Acer has some dead trigs, wait till the leaves have appeared to prune them.
H – House Plants. They have become very popular especially among millennials who are renting flats but still want some greenery. The business is now worth £2 billion a year. Certain plants are supposed to remove noxious chemicals found in cleaning products for instance. He recommended spider plants, peace lilies, orchids. He explained how to get Poinsettias to reflower next year, but I rather lost the will to continue after he said in September for 10 weeks you must put them in a cupboard from 4pm-8am everydayand then they are likely to flower after Christmas!
J – Japanese Maple. They need slightly acidic soil. They can be grown in a container with ericaceous compost. They are woodland edge plants so ideally need dappled shade, but also suffer from wind scorch. They need dampness and when they come into leaf feed with ericaceous foliage feed.
L – Layering. You can plant up pots with layers of bulbs. And put some violas on top for interest. Up to five layers of lily bulbs can be planted in a large pot and you will have flowers for at least two months. Don’t forget good drainage and lots of grit. After three years they will have run out of steam so start again.
M – Motivating Growth. He recommended Maxicrop a seaweed feed. Drench roots with it, put it on a pruning cut, it can be mixed with you liquid feeds such as Phosphogen.
P – Planting. If you plant comes in a round pot, dig a square hole, and vice versa as the roots will spread out. Tease out the roots too and above all water well.
R – Rain. He gets asked a lot what plants endure lots of rain: dogwoods, hazel, snowberry, philadelphus, elders, sambucus black lace and viburnum tinnus.
S – Small Gardens and Spaces. He recommended hellebores as many new varieties are being produced, skimmia, euonymus, grasses and carex, bergenia, ajuga, geranium and hardy evergreen ferns.
W – Weed Control. He foresaw that Glyphosate will soon be banned. The same company now sells a Non-Glyphosate. Weed suppressing fabric can be used. When weeds are in flower is the best time to spray them with weed killer.
MEETING ON WEDNESDAY 3 NOVEMBER 2021 SPEAKER: VICTORIA LOGUE SUBJECT : HIGHS & LOWS OF VEGETABLE GROWING This was not your usual talk about growing vegetables usually given by a man and issuing instructions on how to grow perfect vegetables in perfect straight lines. The first thing Victoria said was that growing vegetables was not easy, they needed constant attention. Then she listed a series of warnings to take into account before starting: be realistic about the area you can manage, pests and diseases can devastate a crop, it will not save you money, only grow what you like, vegetables need sun and decide if you want dig or no dig or raised beds nor not. She emphasised crops rotation was important, if you don’t do it you get diseases in the soil. Don’t plant root crops in freshly manured soil. The crops she thinks hard to grow, and by extension don’t bother, are celeriac, cauliflower, bulb fennel and sweet peppers. She peppered he talk with her own experiences and likes and dislikes and successes and failures and showed pictures of disasters mostly caused by pests and diseases. She listed the main ones and how best to combat them. She’s had success with Slug Gone, which are pellets made from sheep’s’ wool and dung, against slugs and snails. It is important to protect crops before it is too late by installing mesh and netting in good time to protect against, caterpillars, pigeons and flies. She also reminded us that some plants, runner beans, tomatoes and lettuces need a lot of water. The latter should be sown in small qualities and often or else you will end up with all the lettuces reaching maturity at the same time and far more than you can eat. She finished her talk by reminding us not to take the instructions on seed packs too seriously, take into account the weather and where you live. It was a very useful talk and reassured us that we do not need to be experts and to expect degrees of success.
MEETING ON WEDNESDAY 6 OCTOBER 2021 SPEAKER: BILLY STOTT SUBJECT: TRAVEL OF A HORTICULTURAL STUDENT Billy Stott, the owner of Stott’s Nursery on the road to Ibstone, came to talk on his studies for a B.Sc. in Horticulture (Commercial). He studied at Hadlow College in Kent. There were only 7 people on his degree course which rather explains why the Horticultural world has been crying out for trained people for some time now. As he explained, the course was a long way from the traditional idea of growing plants in garden, the key word was commercial. The students learnt the techniques of growing endless identical plants for sale to supermarkets and plant centres. They were taken to visit commercial nurseries which huge green houses with mechanised robots to fill pots and plugs with compost, plant the seedlings, water, control the light, the temperature and move plants around the different areas of the green house to according to the heat they need. During much of the work there was only one person, the robot operator. The supermarkets paid one student to grown a range of tomatoes, different types, sizes and colours; they would then decide which type they wanted for their shelves. The rest of the students were the unpaid assistants who had to doing the weeding etc. Another trip was to Spitalfields Wholesale fruit and vegetable market where they saw the cells where green bananas where ripened with ethylene gas, different supermarkets want different shades of green for their deliveries. There was also a heated room to keep the cut flowers. Bill visited Iceland (the country) where they have so much thermal energy that they have underfloor heating for the pavements so they are never covered in snow and ice and they grow all sorts of fruit and vegetables including bananas in heated greenhouses despite touching the Arctic Circle. He finished his telling us how he set up his nursery. We enjoyed his talk, it was a personal story of the ups and downs and quirks of being a student.
MEETING ON WEDNESDAY 1 SEPTEMBER 2021 SPEAKER: SANDY PRIMROSE Sandy Primrose returned to give us as very interesting and well-presented talk full of information, history and anecdote on Daises, Dahlias and Dendranthemas – which we all know as Chrysanthemums. The Daisy family is the largest plant family with 8,000 species and 1600 genera. They are a very complex flower and in fact what we consider to be petals are in fact individual flowers. So when you are doing the ‘loves me, loves me not’ game you are pulling off flowers. Sandy continued with facts about of some of the different types of daisies. Marigolds in Mexico are associated with death, but in India they are used on happy occasions. There are edible daisies – chicory, and endive. The Shasta Daisy was named by its American breeder after the snow covered Shasta volcano in California. The sunflower was first domesticated in Mexico 5,000 years ago. In the sixteenth century it was brought to Spain, but did not take off until the 1700 hundreds when Peter the Great started to grow it and now after 100 years of breeding Russia is the world’s biggest producer of sunflowers which are used for oil and cattle food. Although the flower’s name, Helianthus, is derived from the Greek word for sun it is a myth that the flowers follow the sun. Once fully out they face east and stay there. Dahlias are also natives of Mexico and were brought to Europe by the Spaniard Francisco Hernandez. But it was the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt who brought back numerous varieties. Now 9 types based on flower shape are recognised. The tubers are edible, they taste a bit like parsnip, and were eaten by the Aztecs. Chrysanthemums originated in China and have been known there for over 2500 years. They have always been particular favourites of the emperors and a stylized Dahlia is the symbol of the Japanese monarchy. Pyrethrum, the insect repellent is made from Chrysanthemums and it has become an important crop in Ethiopia and Kenya. Finally Sandy told the story of China’s role in developing a malaria treatment (not prevention). In the 1960 the North Vietnamese army was ravaged by malaria and Ho Chi Min asked the Chinese if they could help. Artemesia annua, belonging to the daisy family, had long been used in traditional Chinese medicine as an anti-malarial, and as part of the research for a cure the Chinese scientist Tu Youyou trawled through thousands of old Chinese medicinal recipes and discovered the compound artemisinin in Artemesia annua. Using it she developed a drug that became the best treatment for malaria at the time. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 2015.