FEED YOUR PLANTS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 271, 12 August 1938, Page 20

FEED YOUR PLANTS

To Ensure Prolific Blooms To derive the full benefit from judicious feeding in all parts of the garden you must begin early. Take the wallflower beds. A loz. per square yard dose of superphosphate accelerates the now sluggish root action and brings on the blooms quickly and in rich perfection. Forget-me-nots have a pronounced love of soot, as you will find if, starting now, you hoe into the beds at threeweekly intervals until the end of the flowering season, a light dressing of weathered soot. One of the chief functions of this homely fertiliser is to intensify colouring. That is what you want with for-get-me-nots —a really rich blue. Soot is also good for the polyanthus and the named primrose family. It gets the flowers well up and intensifies their colours, too. But they must have some sulphate of potash as well—half a teaspoon per plant. If you alternate this with soot at fortnightly intervals, you will have no broken centres, but a perfect array of bloom. The menace over the tulip bed is the disease known as “fire,” which blinds the buds and breaks the colour of the miserable flowers that do open. To ward off that disease, and get the most magnificent blooms from your tulips—whether early-flowering or Darwin—dress them with sulphate of potash (loz. per square yard), at 10-day intervals from now until the blooms are fully open. This treatment is also appropriate for for English, Spanish and Dutch irises. It keeps the mosaic disease, to which thev are liable, at a safe distance, besides encouraging the perfect development of the petals. Dutch hyacinths like a richer diet. Feed them weekly and alternately with quarter-strength liquid manure (2 pints per plant per dose) and sulphate of potash (loz. per square yard) until the blooms are fully open. If the weather is consistently dry, water occasionally to give the plants the full benefit of this mixture. _ Avoid all bud-opening difficulties with the cydonias japonica, Maulei, and their varieties by hoeing in at once a 2oz. per square yard dose of freshlyslaked lime as far as the branches, stretch.

Apply superphosphate in the same way to the forsythias speetabilis .intermedia, and viridissima. to ensure full colour in their golden bells and enable every hud to open to perfection. Feed aubrietias weekly and alternately with quarter-strength liquid manure and half-strength soot-water, from now until the end of the flowering period. Weekly feeding with quarter-strength liquid manure also brings the very best out of doronicums. which are the harbingers of the herbaceous border pageant.