| If you are about to invest in a live Christmas
tree this year, place a capful of White King™ bleach into a litre of water when you
stand the tree up. I'd recommend a glass container rather than a tin, or it corrodes
quickly and top it up with fresh water daily. Now for
your Petunias and Marigolds to be at their best, nip the flower tips out this weekend and
feed with a water soluble high potassium fertilizer. Then keep them dead-headed. That just
means taking the spent blooms off, when they dry, rather than let them seed and expend
lots of nutrient.
Christmas gift buying time and what to get? My most used
hand tools are quite small and inexpensive. My three pronged chrome hand rake has a lovely
hardwood handle and probably cost less than $10.00. I also have several hand trowels from
Save the Children office in Whyatt St, Adelaide.
So long as you are not posting your gift, a tub of slow
release fertilizer, always goes down a treat with gardening friends. If they are Rose
growers get one of those special Rose fertilisers. Then complement them on how good their
Roses look next year, (and just hope they used it!).
If your really need a gift to impress Rose growers or even
would be growers, Susan Irvine's new book "Rose Garden" by Viking is a stunner,
but at $60.00 they will need to be on your special list.
Another book that I'd recommend to suit the newly committed
computer literate gardener looking for the definitive book of inspiration, is
"Botanica" from Random House of Australia that comes with a free CD ROM and a
box to protect it, but at $89.95, it won't squeeze into everyone's stocking. Throw the CD
ROM away, it’s a dog, but for $29.95 you can buy the Botanica Plus CD that really
hums. No such thing as a freebie eh? |
