TIMELY TOPICS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 225, 19 June 1936, Page 18

TIMELY TOPICS

Suggestions for the Week If you are buying new shrubs for vour garden, you will find that it really pays best to have small plants. The large ones are much more expensive and often take a long while to get over their move. They will even die if they strike unfavourable conditions. Speed up your digging; it simply must be finished off in the next week or so. The overhaul and planting of the herbaceous border Is another task on the urgent list. # ♦ * Dress Ribes sanguineum and Cydonias japonlca and Maule! thickly with freshly-slaked lime 18in. on all available sides of the main stems. There is never any holding back of the buds when there is a sufficiency of lime to sweeten the soil and release locked-up food.

Did you root shrub cuttings a year last autumn? If so, transplant them into a rich border at 2ft. apart. By next autumn they should be in fine condition for the permanent quarters.

Give a few minutes to Canterbury bells, sweet williams and border carnations. Stir between the plants with a hand-fork, working in a good sprinkling of lime. Clear the growing points of soil crumbs, and if there are signs of rust on either sweet williams or carnations, spray with liver of sulphur solution (loz. in a gallon of water).

Turn then to the spring-bedding plants. Firm them all, then give wallflowers a loz. per square yard dose of superphosphate of lime. Daisies, for-get-me-nots and polyanthuses need a liberal sprinkling of weathered soot, not only to stimulate growth, but to ward off slugs, which persistently worry these plants.