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- This is a good time to check your potted plants. The deciduous plants can
be repotted using at least 50% new potting mixture and don’t be timid
about severing at least 30% of the old roots, but I stress this is
recommended for deciduous plants, but citrus! Try that on citrus and they
drop all their leaves! They will however recover, but it’s a pointless
exercise.
- For really large potted plants that cannot be easily removed from their
pots, use a bulb planting tool to remove cores of potting mixture all round
your large potted specimen and backfill the holes with fresh manure laced
potting mix. If you don’t have a bulb-planting tool, an empty tin with
both ends removed is fine for a few thrusts, before it collapses. Even
jetting water with a hose to remove soil is an option, but a bit messy.
- Any ant activity near pots must be checked too. Ants love wintering inside
the root ball of potted plants, because it’s a lot warmer than in the
ground! Remove suspect pots and check for ant galleries. If these are not
disturbed and refilled they dry out quickly in spring-summer and lead to a
rapid decline for your plant. A small section of shadecloth over the
drainage hole, placed inside, prevents ants re-entering.
Large pots sitting on soil or leaf litter that accumulates around them, can
easily lead to the plant rooting into the nearby soil, or conversely large
trees that are capable of gaining entry to a well tended pot plant, there by
depriving your much loved pot plant of its nutrient. Ash trees and
liquidambars are notorious for this.
When you have completed your pot assessment, feed them with a water soluble
or controlled release fertilizer, but not organic pellets. I know that you
probably would not bother to do this in the ground at present, but the soil
temperature in your pots is at least 7°C higher than the soil at present and
that means it will make growth. Even roses can be kept evergreen in pots!
If repotting with some old potting media that’s been in your garden shed
for a few months, add a wetting agent or else when watered the water can be
repelled by the old pine bark in the mixture and it just runs down the inside
edge of the pot and leaves a dry root ball. The other precaution is to water
your potting mixture before using it if it’s been stored for a while or else
if you are in the target group (over 50 years and a male smoker) you could be
putting yourself at risk to contract Legionnaires disease or Kew Fever.
I was faced with having to prune a large glory vine on a pergola last week
and thought ‘Why bother?’ Anyhow I took the electric hedge pruners and
shaped it all over then just made a few tugs here and there to remove severed
canes that no longer had legs and it looked pretty neat in less than 15
minutes. Some of our modern garden tools really do make gardening easy and if
you don’t have an electric hedge pruner in the shed, they are easily hired
and quite cheaply too.
Walk around your garden this week and make a few notes about what’s doing
well and what’s not. I heard Lord Abercrombie (ex Royal Horticultural
Society President in London) once say, “Gardening is only about finding out
what grows best in your plot and planting lots of them”.
A rose planted in a slightly shaded area that is not thriving, maybe just
hankering for more sun, so move it. It’s dead easy at present. Dig it up and
replant it in a sunnier aspect and then remove 50% of its canopy. That 50%
dictum is a sound practice for all shrub roses when pruning. More than 50% is
getting radical and although exhibition growers will prune harder than that,
they also feed and lot more than the average gardener too.
When pruning roses remember that shrub roses respond best to a 50% removal
of their canopy annually. While some exhibition growers prune much more
heavily than that, they also feed more than the average rose grower too and
they will settle for less blooms.
After you have pruned your roses, hydrangeas, stone fruits and vines, spray
them with PestOil or Bug Oil. These are very light synthetic oils that cover
the stems with a coat of oil preventing rapid infestation from fungal spores.
We used to use winter oil for this purpose, but the new generation oils are
much lighter and can be used at higher temperatures, although that’s not a
problem at present.
The copper based sprays are also used to control fungal attack, but Bordeaux
Mix and Copper oxychloride will wash from your plants into the soil, where the
residues kill your earthworker worms. Kocide (Cupric hydroxide) does not kill
worms as other copper sprays do, but it’s pretty expensive. The light oils
have become more popular than copper based sprays for fungal protection,
principally because they are easy to use, have low toxicity and are much
cheaper to use. The initial cost of the oils may surprise you but they last a
long time since such a small quantity is used each time.
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