THE HOME GARDEN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4055, 1 June 1938, Page 3

THE HOME GARDEN

WORK FOR THE WEEK. THE FLOWER GARDEN. Most of the liliums can be planted now. Now that the soil is moist seedlings of hardy annuals and perennials can be transplanted with safety. Commence the planting of flowering trees and shrubs. Lift, divide and replant herbaceous perennials. Plant out calendulas, carnations lupins, pansies and violas. Take cuttings of pentstem ons, hydrangeas, carnations and pansies. THE VEGETABLE GARDEN. ■ Plant gooseberries, currants . and other small fruits. Rhubarb beds should be planted now. Established beds should be given a dressing of well-decayed cow manure. Broad beans can be sown now. Plant out Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, kale and savoy. Make fortnightly sowings of mustard and cress, sowing the cress a few days before the mustard. Thin out root crops as growth demands. Plots not likely to be used for some time should now be sown down in green crops for digging in. DO YOU KNOW THE MAIDENHAIR TREE ? The maidenhair tree is the one survival of that distant past when there were few flowers, and the earth was covered with beautiful foliage trees of various kinds. Its supreme beauty also entitles it to special attention. The leaves with which each tree is thickly clothed are shaped just like the much-enlarged leaflet of a maidenhair fern. In the fiercest drought of summer they will retain their refreshing green. Growth is comparatively slow, and never in the smallest garden does the maidenhair tree develop to such an extent as to become a nuisance.

Now is a good time to plant, and for a tree of this quality you must select a conspicuous position.

Having selected the right spot, take out a 3ft. wide 2ft. deep station. Loosen and, if necessary, rubble the bot tom to afford drainage.

With each pailful of bottom spit mix a third of a pailful of well-rotted stable manure and a cupful of crushed bones. Mix no manure whatever with the top spit, but make a point of including a good sprinkling of bonemeal. .

Line the planting holes with an inch of leaf-mould, plant firmly, and youi maidenhair tree will make excellent progress from the start. COLOURFUL GERBERAS. EASILY GROWN AFRICAN DAISIES. Gerberas demand three things. Surely that is not asking too much. These are sunlight, good, almost perfect drainage., and a free, deeply-dug soil. There is another matter that of keeping the “crowns” (a definite junction betwen leaves and roots from which the flowers and leaf-shoots emerge), at soil level. This is imperative. No half-measures are allowed. Bury the crown and the plant sickens and struggles to live, and produce flower buds, which rot at their inception.

There, are variations of course, and additions in detail in growing gerberas. Planting carefully, with the roots spread outward and downward is important. Watering should b.e given freely where drainage is assured So can manuring and feeding be practised in poor particularly sandyground. Liming is recommended, but an overrich soil should be avoided. The latter produces too much foliage at the expense of blooms. Keep each plant stripped to a dozen or so leaves (for a yearling), and more., up to two dozen, for older clumps, and quality blooms on free-flowering gerbora plants will be the result. Look for good-class gerberas. Pomstuff is not worth carrying home. If buying seedlings, get them from good strains, and then cull out the rubbish. When purchase is of selected colours, choose those with long satiny petals and deep calyces. It is all in the strain. If you have window-boxes, it is advisable to lime-wash them inside before filling with soil. The wash discourages insects, and helps to preserve the wood. HELPFUL SUGGESTIONS FOR AUTUMN ROSE PLANTERS. The rose is practically without question our most beautiful flower. You cannot touch it for colour, nothing equals it in form. Yet the muddles that are made with rose plantingare astounding. Comparatively few folk realise the proud disposition of the rose. There is no better way of putting it. If two varieties don’t like each other, they blazon the fact to the world. The primary mistake is making a

museum of a nose bed. If there is room for a dozen bushes, stick in a dozen varieties. That seems to be the policy. The result is that you get discord with a vengeance.

It cannot in this connection be too emphatically declared that the rose is unsuited to planting singly. You must make some sort of colour block.

If you are lucky enough to have a rose garden containing a number of bads, work on the principle of one variety a bed, starting at the centre with the deeper colours and working in easy gradations to the outside where you would have white and pale yellow. Or you might have a scheme of two varieties a bed, working these colours in partnership; crimson and deep yellow, scarlet and mid-yellow, pink and pale yellow, pink and salmon flesh, pink adn white, white and scarlet, or white and crimson. Keep orange and pink and scarlet and pink apart. White and yellow commit no colour crime, but the partnership is feeble and anaemic in the extreme.

You can arrange the partners in various ways, one being to set the deeper shade in the centre, surrounding it with the paler one. COLOUR GROUPING. Another is to set the varieties in groups of three, the colours alternating. A third, to plant the colours separately and alternate them. Perhaps you haven’t a rose garden, but you have a big bed in which you wish to make the best possible display. A grand opportunity is this if you seize it in the right way. You might work on the three-band principle, which would be appropriate in a circular or widely oval bed. Start at the centre with scarlet or crimson, at the outside a band of pink, between them yellow. Beds of this kind look glorious. Or you might quarter your bed, and grow one colour in each section, say, white, red, yellow and pink following each other.

The quartering- idea works beautifully in square or oblong beds, as does the cross arrangement. You form a cross of one variety, which leaves four corners to fill.

A good idea is to make a white cross. Then you can put any colour you like in the bays, for white is a safe divider of discordant shades. The maltese cross, a favourite rose bed shape, provides an opportunity in another way. Plant at the centre of the bed and in the arms of the cross one colour, and fill up the space between with another colour. Crimson and white arc the finest partners for this scheme, the white being the divider of the crimsons Yellow as a divider of pink is also effective, but somehow, the splashes of crimson against the white are more effective. If your beds are not exactly of the shapes mentioned, you can. of course, with, a little manipulation, adapt the schemes to suit them.

Weeds that have, a habit of appearing on the garden path can be killed by dissolving a large handful of common salt in a gallon of water and pouring it over the offenders. This is effective, and is better than many weed-killers, as it is non-poisonous. METHODS OF IMPROVEMENT. THE IMPORTANCE OF AUTUMN WORK. Whenever an article appears on the eternal topic of soil cultivation, something seems bound to be written which gives rise to a deal of correspondence, but more often omissions are commented upon, and requests are made by many readers for further details on certain points. The- subject is too big and too complex to be thoroughly covered by one article, but the, proper treatment of the soil is so vitally important a factor in gardening that no apology need be made for reverting to it at frequent intervals.

Not long since, an article appeared which wound up with a reference to the question of dealing with rough turf when breaking up new ground. We have not the copy of that article at the moment, but without attempting precisely to quote it, the gist of the statement was that some writers advocate burying the rough turf during the process of digging, but, we added, this may be beneficial on heavy clay soils, but on light soils it may do harm. TURF ON NEW 7 ” GARDEN LAND. It was rather unfortunate that the article had to end abruptly there; we had actually put into type a few further sentences, but had to delete them to make the article fit the space available. We are too well aware of the virtue of good turf loam to have wished to convey the idea that, even on good soil, much less on sandy, hungry soil, the turf should be pared off and discarded. Rough pieces of turf, buried in tne second spit of a plot of stiff, wet clay soil, will help considerably to keep the clay from consolidating, and thus facilitate the escape of rain water from the top spit during very wet periods. It is a different matter when one is

dealing with light sandy soil. Turf buried a foot or more below the surface of such soil will be unrotted for an extraordinary length of time, and all the while it will keep the subsoi] hollow, often letting water escape too freely, and rendering it impossible to secure the even degree of firmness which is essential to proper root development of most classes of plants. In our experience of over half a century of gardening on widely different soils we have proved it to be better to pare off the turf, stack it fairly deeply, and let it have a 12-month round to decompose. At the end of that time, all but the walls and roof will have rotted down to make excellent fibrous loam. This can be chopped down with a keen-edged spade, spread over th© ground, and dug into the top spit, where it will do its maximum amount of good. INCREASE HUMUS CONTENT. In the meantime every effort is needed to increase the humus content of either loose, sandy soil or stiff unwieldy clay, and that is why we advocate sowing new ground with a quickgroWing green crop for digging in as green manure. prefer t o do the sowing during February and March, digging the crop in as soon as a good coat of soft growth has been made. When it is convenient to carry out that programme, it is worth while to make an early spring sowing, and dig the crop in before planting summer bedding* plants or sowing summer salads, etc. An alternative to that course would be to dig all the rotted vegetable matter available during winter digging. We have sometimes been chidded by readers for having advised burning instead of burying rubbish, but we do so only when foliage and stems are infestde with dangerous plant foe-s, of which clippings of ivy laurel, yew pine needles and the like are liable to make the soil unhealthy. We certainly do not condone burning good, wholesome herbage, so long as the soil of the garden wants more humus. There will never be uniformity of opinion about soil management. We are reminded of a man who refused to believe that it is sound policy to disturb clay soil in autumn because winter rains work the surface down to a pasty mass which sets in a hard crust in spring. Something of that sort is bound to happen if we get a wet, mild winter, but even without autumn digging, stiff clay soil will be bad to work in spring if the winter has been wet, and against that there is, un questionably, tremendous advantage in having stubborn ground loosely dug before a spell of keen frost. Many things may be brought into service while dealing with the difficult task of opening up and lightening an adhesive clay. Peat is useful, especially if it is of rough fibrous caracter: It is absorbent, and will hold up a lot of moisture which would otherwise remain in the clay; also it expands and contracts more rapidly than clay. We have seen a stretch of horribly stiff clay treated in quite an unusual way but with wonderfully good results. The ground was dug in autumn in such a manner that when the task was finished, it lay in ridges and hollows. The ridges were liberally dressed with half-slaked lime, but along all the hollows, peas haulm, the vines of runner beans, cut tops from asparagus beds and straw were placed in a layer almost six inches thick, and covered with only about two or three inches of soil. During winter the hollows were frequently covered with water, and because the green rubbish and straw lay shallow and wet, decay had far advanced by spring. The lime had pulverised the clay of the ridges. Then the whole area was dug, starting so that the trench crossed the ends of the ridges and hollows. This facilitated mixing the limed soil with the decaying vegetable matter, and soon after digging it was possible to rake down the surface to a tolerably fine tilth. Hop manure was applied during this spring digging, and later that year we saw some magnificent vegetables growing on what had been thought almost an impossible soil. It is too much to expect to reduce heavy wet clay to a state of perfect friability in one season, but with perseverance and patience stubborn clay can be made fertile, and then is more productive and resistant to drought than light soils.