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I have complained on gardeners’ behalf since early March about the British weather and its effects at ground level. It is a joy at last to record the opposite, albeit briefly. Sunday June 8 was a dream day for gardening in Britain. Prolonged rain on the Saturday made the soil workable. Weeds could be pulled or dug out easily. If you want to know what makes me happy, it is a day of intermittent cloud, sunshine after rain and damp earth. If you are sunbathing in the dry weather which has returned this week, spare this downcast gardener a pitying thought.
On the recent dream Sunday, I tried to map out tricks which new gardeners would be glad to know. I imagine them taking on a new garden or a small yard or balcony in a town. I can well imagine that they feel bewildered by the range of choice and advice. Here is a small selection for viewing and then for eating. It is adapted to this midsummer moment.
Plants in pots are a good starting point as they suit both sites. Buying a plant in flower is not real gardening. For that process longer care has to be involved. Any beginner would be pleased with the results from a yellow-flowered bidens, that rapidly spreading bedding plant which is still on sale in individual pots in garden centres. A young bidens does not look like much when first bought, but watering and intermittent feeding make it quintuple in size and width, a beginner’s delight. Bet on bidens, regularly a top tip here.
Try a salvia too, not one of the red bedders sold in boxes with a plume of flower, but a shrubby one in an individual pot in many more colours than harsh scarlet. Almost every garden centre is selling them, and within six weeks or so even a small one will be bulking up and showing flower-buds. I remain unshakeably loyal to Hot Lips, whose flowers are white with a red lip when the weather is sunny. I did not see Hot Lips at the Chelsea Flower Show and when I asked the owner of Middleton Nurseries, a top salvia grower, why it was missing, he answered as if the Lips series was something from the remote past. In my summer it is ever-present.
The basic manual for all keen gardeners may give a contrary impression. It is the RHS Plant Finder, which lists tens of thousands of hardy plants and where to buy them in Britain. Beginners may find it overpowering but I hope they will graduate to use it by the summer’s end. It is a gateway to so much fun. It lists more than 800 different salvias, other than the Lips varieties, partly because recent genetic research has caused every rosemary to be renamed salvia, swelling the family’s numbers. Ignore that surprise and look under Salvia greggii and Salvia x jamensis for many of the best for growing in pots. They range from pale blue through shades of pink to the pale yellow of La Luna and others. They may not survive the winter head-on outdoors but put their pot in as sheltered a space as possible from November onwards, preferably backing it against a sunny house wall. If you find scarlet-flowered Royal Bumble on sale, buy it on sight. It flowers from May till late October and is relatively hardy.
Fertilising and correct planting are arts that beginners also need to grasp. Remember two basic facts of life. One is that roots do not eat: they are wrongly described as hungry. They drink, taking up chemicals that are available in soil in a dissolved state. The other is that roots grow outwards but do not move their core after planting.
Two crucial points follow. Never force a plant to fit the hole you have dug for it. If you need to do so, the hole is too small and the roots will suffer. Instead, the hole must fit the plant: after being planted its roots will not untangle themselves. They will run outwards and downwards, but only from the starting point you have fixed for them. If they are already running round the pot, score or break them in places with scissors or a knife before planting. This trick helps the loose ends to grow outwards, not round and round in circles.
Watering needs care too. Before planting, soak each plant up to soil level in a bucket of water until bubbles cease to come up from its compost. The plant should feel heavy as a result. So many plants fail because they are planted when half dry and are then never fully watered as far down as their lowest roots. To avoid this error, hold the hose or the spout of a watering can down near soil level and aim the water near to the plant’s root, pouring slowly. General spraying from above is a bad practice, especially in sunshine when the water soon evaporates.
As for fertilising, it transforms the health and the flowers on almost everything in pots, especially geraniums, petunias and salvias. In open ground it is equally beneficial to clematis and roses. Impatient beginners tend to exceed the recommended doses, hoping to speed up good results. It does not, least of all on roses. Expert rose growers even believe that overfeeding may contribute to the problem of replant disease, a condition that can affect new roses when planted where other roses grew before.
I use two straightforward dilutable fertilisers. Maxicrop Original Seaweed Extract promotes roots, and Tomorite promotes buds and flowers on much else, including dahlias, beyond the tomato plants in its brand name. As a mixed all-purpose alternative I use Phostrogen.
On green vegetables I use Miracle-Gro as it has plenty of nitrogen. As midsummer turns, there is still ample scope to sow fast-moving vegetables, especially lettuces, courgettes, French beans and foolproof radishes. The results will hard wire you into gardening, radishes being the simplest starting point. Rake over some clean soil outdoors and then press a drill or very shallow trench into it, about half an inch deep. Sow radish seeds into it and keep them watered from a can with a head, or rose, to deliver a spray like gentle rain. I have just sown Suttons’ long-rooted radish Felicia in this way. If you prefer rounded radishes, Thompson and Morgan’s multi- coloured Rainbow mix is easy and unusual.
Courgette seeds should be sown on edge, not flat on the soil, as they may then hold water on their upper surface and rot. I like yellow fruiting courgettes as they are sweeter and less watery than green. Beside them, about 18 inches away, plant a row of dwarf runner beans, Hestia being the one to go for as it crops when only 18in high. Sow one bean seed or two together 2in below lightly raked and broken soil, and space the next seed or two 12in apart.
One final trick. Rather than growing parsley or basil from seed, buy a pot of each ready grown from a supermarket. Unpot them and separate the roots into several little plants. Line them out in good soil and water them regularly: you will then have a seasonal supply of leaves as the plants mature. Is that cheating or shortcutting? Beginners may hesitate, but old hands do not care. It works, so do it.
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