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- With so much mild weather and the farmers and graziers crying out for cereal-sowing
rain, it would be prudent to keep an eye on soil moisture. I’ve been watering
Annie’s cottage garden twice a week the past few weeks, the vegetable garden weekly
and containers almost daily, especially if they are in full sun.
- I must tell you how well the Nemesia ‘Caberet’™ seedlings are doing. This
new cultivar really loves our mild autumn and unlike the usual Nemesia varieties, it
flowers well without the really cold weather. I have them growing on rich compost as well
as our usual clay and they are thriving and flowering from quite small plants, while the
Poppies do nothing (just yet).
- Bloody "Sour-sobs" are pushy little bastards aren’t they? I reckon they
could push up a slab of concrete and they certainly have no trouble with gravel, I’ve
discovered. They laugh at Roundup™ and No-Grow™ and even
MCPA-Dicamba, takes at
least three weeks to make a dent. Then they shoot again anyhow. I’m told Paraquat is
effective, but it’s also a schedule 7 "Dangerous Poison", which I
wouldn’t use. You please yourself!
- If you wondered what happened to the S5, S6 and S7 labels that used to appear on home
garden toxic chemicals, but don’t any longer, it seems we have a new system, based on
a New Zealand model. ‘Tell ‘em nothing’ and labels now use nebulous
descriptions like "Caution" which is to alert you to the fact you have a
schedule 5 poison in your hands at the supermarket, or "Poison" to describe the
old S6 and of course "Dangerous Poison" = S7 buried deep in mountains of text
(frequently concealed inside the packaging) is supposed to alert you to the fact that the
contents are so toxic they should not be on offer to a home gardener.
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