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Your "Tiger Lilies" have probably
finished flowering and the black bulbets on the stems are starting to swell, so if you
brush those off, your underground bulbs will swell bigger for next year, creating larger
blooms. If you leave the black bulbets to develop,
they sap a lot of the nutrient from the "Tiger Lily" bulb and create a three
year time lag before the bulbets flower. Still if you want lots more Lilium stems, leave
them to swell by all means. Either way your "Tiger Lily" bulbs will benefit from
being fed pretty soon, by top-dressing with superphosphate.
The interstate bulb catalogues have started to arrive, so
the earliest bulbs will soon be in the stores. If you hanker for the exotic, ring for any
of these interstate catalogues: Tesselars (03) 9737 9706, Broersens (03) 9737 9202 or Van
Diemen’s (03) 6442 2012, their illustrated catalogues are a treat.
I almost get tired of saying ‘It’s time to plant
Chives, Parsley and more Lettuce’, but after the recent heat, they always bolt to
seed and that makes them useless, so yes it’s time again. Plant the curly leaf
‘Afro’ Parsley as well as the ‘Italian’ plain leaf variety too, since
they taste quite different. The ‘Italian’ best in cooking the ‘Afro’
in salads.
Autumn flowering annuals to go in now as seedlings are
"Snapdragons" and here the variety is enormous this year. There’s the tiny
pale pink and lavender ‘Sugar’n Spice™’, the tiny and very hardy
colourful self coloured range ‘Camelot™’ in white, pink and yellow and the
taller similar colours in the ‘Excallibur’ range, all of which have noticeable
rust resistance.
If you are about to plant Cauliflower, Cabbage, Kohl rabi
or Brussels Sprouts seedlings, following a mulched crop in your vegetable garden,
you’d be advised to lime the soil first with garden lime. This is because the soil
acidity may well be more than the cabbage tribe can handle. Same goes for Sweet Peas too. |
