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- A Hawthorn SA gardener has some pretty old ‘Lady Finger’ grapes that
have escaped being pruned for quite a few years and asks, ‘how can they be
pruned to produce spurs, that will set grapes?’ After consulting Bruce
Farquhar, who’s an old Hyde Park colleague from my early TV days, we
concur that no amount of mutilation or pruning would stop a vine from
shooting.
- Vines have an enormous reserve of stored up latent shoots under their old
fibrous bark. When damaged or pruned very heavily or top-worked to add a new
variety they shoot out lower down quite naturally. So much so that you spend
a lot of effort rubbing off all those extra shoots.
- If you have a vine that needs a big cut back this winter, by late spring,
the resultant growths would be dozens of long canes, that then need to be
shortened and those would then produce laterals that could be pruned to
spurs next winter in 2002. Don’t be timid about the task, since the grape
vine is a very forgiving plant.
- If ordering bulbs for your garden in the near future, take them out of the
packaging as soon as they are received and set the veggie bulbs like garlic,
shallots and various onions offsets, aside to plant in April-May. They don’t
get planted immediately!
- With bulbs such as Tulips, Hyacinths, and early flowering narcissus, you
may want to stratify them, by putting them into the crisper of your fridge
for 4-6 weeks in paper bags, but not plastic. Then when they are planted
they burst into growth earlier than they would otherwise and flower in the
cool of late winter and early spring, rather than in late September to mid
October as Tulips are tempted to do. Left that late they often get burn off
before they flower!
- If you grow the pink double Tulip ‘Angelique’, they are the one
exception of a Tulip that does not need to go into the crisper of the
fridge, since that will kill them. ‘Angelique’ flowers for the Adelaide
Royal Show, because they get picked from my garden every year at Show time…
with or without my help!
- A Parafield Gardens gardener asked where to get the Lime Sulphur that I
mentioned as a control for Tomato Russet Mite, last month in this column?
Well it’s actually sold by Yates as exactly that, "Yates Lime
Sulphur" and no doubt there are other brands too. He also reminded me
that sulphur has been a preservative since way back when the prophet was
turning water into wine back on Galilee shores and probably before then too.
- If you simply have to have tomatoes all year round, you’d better start
preparing your winter patch soon. Select the sunniest and warmest part of
the garden and get your ‘Burnley Bounty’ seedlings pretty soon. They are
the benchmark here for a winter tomato crop.
- There is a new Callistemon cultivar due for release next week named ‘Mary
MacKillop™’ after the noted SA nun of the Order of the Sisters of St.
Joseph, which I noted from the label described here as a Saint. Either they
have prior knowledge or a retraction will follow. Anyhow it’s a lovely
compact red flowering bottlebrush that will thrive on our clay soil and
flower in spring. Being distributed by Heyne’s Wholesale Nurseries at
Burton, if your local nursery hasn’t got it yet, they soon will have.
- It’s bulb planting time and the perennial questions that flow are ‘what
to put in the fridge and why?’ Well I recommend that tulips, hyacinths and
any early daffodils be put in paper bags (definitely not plastic) and into
the crisper of your fridge for 4-6 weeks, then taken out and planted
immediately.
- This simulates a northern winter and brings them into growth quickly and
gets them to flower earlier than they would in our climate normally. Tulips
left to their own devices, would often flower in late September to mid
October and few hot days then would cook their flower buds. So they would
not flower at all.
- Bulbs such as Freesia, Sparaxis, Scilla, Ixia and Tritonia apart from not
needing the fridge treatment (called stratification), have all got the
potential to become weeds if planted in the open in the Hills. So plant
these in containers and replace them each year or salvage your bulbs and
corms by sieving the media and replace it with fresh potting mix.
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