GARDEN NOTES

Taranaki Daily News, 13 September 1934, Page 15

GARDEN NOTES

THE WEEK’S WORK. l THE FLOWER GARDEN. Make sowings of annuals. Transplant early sowings when ready. Thin out sowings of hardy annuals. Lift, divide and replant gerberas. Make new plantations of violets. Lift, divide and replant delphiniums. Plant out phlox drummondii, stocks, pansies, nemesias, schizanthus. Make a sowing of matthiola bicornis, the night-scented stock. Gladioli can be planted. Plant the bulbs four to six inches deep. Tie securely climbing roses. At first signs of aphis spray the plants. THE GREENHOUSE. Sow tomatoes, cape gooseberries, egg fruit, peppers. Seedlings must be pricked out as soon as ready. Room Under glass is valuable just now, so do not take it up with seedlings, etc., that “may” be wanted. Ventilation must be closely attended to. Do not attempt to force, but avoid draughts. THE VEGETABLE GARDEN. Plant potatoes It is not a loss of time to sprout the seed before planting. Manure early plantings of potatoes when tops are about six inches high. Work the soil between the drills. Spray and earth up potatoes as required. Sow peas as required. Make sowings of tall varieties as well as dwarf sorts. Sow lettuce and radish in sufficient quantities to supply salad needs. A sowing every other week is necessary to keep up a continuous supply. A sowing of dwarf beans can be made in very warm sheltered positions. The end of the month will be soon enough in most gardens. THE FRUIT GARDEN. Apply a dressing of manure to citrus trees. Clean and manure strawberries. Do not hoe near the plants. Any pruning necessary can be done to lemon trees. Prepare litter for mulching strawberry beds. Finish planting, pruning and spraying. Head back apple and pear trees for grafting. Clear weeds and hoe under trees. Now is the time to apply sulphate of ammonia to peach and other fruit trees. SEED REQUIRED. One quart of broad beans should sow a row 80 feet long. One ounce of beet seed should sow a row 80 feet long. One ounce of carrot seed should sow a row 120 feet long. One pint of French beans should sow a row 160 feet long. One pint of scarlet runners should sow a row 160 feet long. One ounce of onion seed should sow 9 square yards. / One ounce of parsley seed should sow a row 80 feet long. PLANTING TIME. The weather conditions experienced throughout the winter and up to the present have enabled the garden to be got into and kept in a fair condition. Although wet at times the dry spells have allowed digging, etc., to be done. Planting has been delayed where the soil is of a heavy nature, but better to delay planting than to be led into putting out plants when the soil is unfit for planting. Get the soil ready and a little extra working will not do any harm, but probably be of more benefit to the plants than early planting. THE VINERY. The pruning of all late vines, if not already finished, should- be completed with the least possible delay. The season of rest with indoor vines is so short that even if all the ventilation possible is given and every effort is made to keep the vines dormant, there is always a risk in pruning, even the latest varieties, after this time. A week or two of fine’, bright weather quickly starts the sap into activity, though no perceptible swelling in the bud may be noticed for some weeks. To prune after the sap is active, however, is almost certain to result in bleeding, which is by no means easy to stop and is in every case weakening to the vines. Tire safest time to prune, no matter what the variety grown, is as soon as possible after the wood has properly ripened and after most of the leaves have fallen. Pruned at this time there is no risk of bleeding, while tire wounds made with the knife have ample time to heal before the vines are again started into growth. After priming, the house can still be kept well open so as to keep the vines back until it is decided to start them into growth. The cleaning and dressing of the vines should be completed as soon as possible. The trellises and woodwork, too, should be thoroughly cleaned. The borders should be lightly forked over and a topdressing of some good stimulating manure given. BOUVARDIA. Starting with young rooted cuttings, they should be potted into a mixture of loam, leaf soil, peat and sand, in small pots, and placed in a temperature of from 70 to 80 degrees until well rooted. Then stop the young plants back to the first joint, and continue to pinch back Until sufficiently bushy plants are produced. Neglect or stopping results in ill-shaped and almost flowerless plants. Regulate the pinching by the time the plants are required to flower, and do not stop them after the end of February. When the pots are well filled with roots, shift the plants into sin or 6in pots, which are quite large enough to flower them in, using the same compost as before, with the addition of a little plant fertiliser, and giving good drainage. A cool greenhouse, with a damp bottom for the pots to rest upon, and with a moist atmosphere, is the most suitable place in which to grow them during late spring and early summer; but a cold pit or close frame is better during the summer months, as a moist atmosphere and cool bottom are then certain. Ventilate during the greater part of the day by tilting the lights, and on fine nights they may be removed altogether. Shade during bright sunshine. It is absolutely necessary that the plants receive plenty of water during active growth, with occasional doses of manure water when well rooted. Many cultivators plant them out about the end of November, in favoured situations, or in spent hotbeds; and if carefully pinched and watered, fine specimens are obtained. These are lifted in early autumn, with a good ball of soil, potted and kept shaded for a few days until the roots are again active, when they are taken to the house in which they are intended to bloom, and an enormous supply of flowers is secured Syringe plants to keep down red spider, and fumigate if green fly appears.

ARTIFICIALLY-COLOURED.

Those people who are not content with flowers as they find them but are anxious to have some out of the common, can at least get something unusual if not artistic. If pure white, freshly cut roses with long stems are placed for an hour in a solution of two or three grammes of methylene blue, two grammes of saltpetre, and 100 grammes of rainwater, the blooms will turn sky blue. Red roses placed in the same solution Will turn a curious green. Pure white, half-blown roses, freshly cut and. placed in red ink or an aniline solution, will absorb the colouring matter and become red. This absorptive quality of flowers is well known and in a measure has been practised for a long time, especially on the Continent. At a season when flowers were scarce it was possible to buy bunches of purple or light blue flowers which at first sight appeared to be heliotrope but which on examination proved to be alyssum maritimum artificially coloured. This artificial colouring does not affect their natural fragrance. The florists of Florence are also credited with staining freesias and white lilies .to scarlet. As an experiment, the thing might be worth doing once or twice, but why change the colours? Who wants a scarlet freesia when we have schizostylis, lily-of-the-valley, emblematic of innocence and purity? What use if it was stained scarlet, the colour of blood? Interesting, perhaps, but let us at least demand to have flowers their natural colour. HISTORY OF THE POTATO. In a lecture given at the Auckland Horticultural Club, Mr. E. A. Bunyard, F.L.S., speaking of the potato, said:—. The potato has a long period of neglect and even active dislike, although it started with every augury in its favour. The Batatas or Yam (dioscorea batatas) was valued in Elizabethan times as an aphrodisiac and Falstaff’s panegyric “Yet the sky rain potatoes”—referred to this vegetable and its properties as the context well shows. The potato was thought to possess similar virtues, but it nevert.helss took three hundred years to popularise it, and only dire necessity persuaded the country cottager to include it among his vegetables. Its merits as a food for the poor were brought before the Royal Society in 1663, but Evelyn’s faint praise may have checked this effort.

In Wales we read of it as a field crop in 1687, but in 1779, London and Wise, in their compendious account of vegetables omit it altogether. Scotland can claim priority in appreciation of the potato, as in 1728 Thomas Prentice, of Kilsyth, showed the merit of Scots seed, and made from it a fortune of £2OO, and retired to Edinburg on this thrifty competence. Bradley, of dictionary fame, laments in 1747 that it is “not yet enough into the notion of the country folks.” It was in Lancashire that large scale cultivation first arose, and later around London. Arthur Young refers to three hundred acres at Barking in 1807. But this was for town consumption. In the country, folk agreed with Corbett, whose liveliest invectives were showered upon the unfortunate tuber, and when the Quarterly Review suggested it as a substitute for bread, he broke out into a magnificent diatribe which can be read in his Cottage Gardener. In his Rides, he states with approval that Sussex did not show an acre of potatoes, and; indeed it was made an election issue at Lewes in 1765—“N0 Popery, No Potatoes.” The Times, too, had its word to say, and said it in its own inimitable style. “A valuable esculent to lower the food of the opulent.” The hard times after the Napoleonic Wars finally brought the potato into general use in the country, and after this long wooing it won its way at last into the daily life of the country labourer. In France it arrived early and was served ,at the Royal table as a curiosity in 1613. In Burgundy it was thought to be the cause of leprosy, and its growth prohibited.- In the early eighteenth century it was in general use according to Lemery, but contrary to its English experience, not in the higher grades of society. The author of the Ecole de Potager (1749) wrote: “The worst of all vegetables. However, the people, which is the most numerous part of humanity, nourish themselves with it.” A significant phrase in which one dimly hears the first faint rumblings of revolution. The great Parmentier, whose name our menus enshrine in various potato dishes, like many of the famous, earned his notoriety by an accident. His was the part of the Quarterly Reviewer to recommend its use in bread-making, and, as we see above, the potato as a vegetable was already well established thirty years before his famous book. It was, however, in Germany that the potato played its most important part. Owing to the prevision of Frederick the Great, the sandy plains of East Prussia were planted with the versatile tuber, and its culture and extension enforced by all the vigour of judicial exactment. Prussia, therefore, was founded upon the potato in a way that no other European country has been, by force of law, despite the protest of those who still believed in its dangers as an aphrodisiac. So long did the legend cling. The great famine of 1770 caused its universal adoption in Germany, and in 1820 there were more acres grown than of rye, that great northern cereal and staple crop of northern Europe. The potato therefore changed the course of history by making the uninhabitable wastes of northern Prussia habitable, and from this has flowed a train of events of which the present troubled state of Europe is the result.

Had the Holy Roman Empire remained the central force of European policy, how different might have been the course of history. We may, perhaps, consider that to-day we have outgrown such prejudices as I have detailed here, and are willing to consider any new vegetable on its merits. It is remarkable, however, how few of the genera of plants we have called upon to supply our vegetable needs. Are we sure that no other family of plants may not afford something of value? Should we eat, let us say, momocharis, tulips, or dahlias, or, in fact, any plant that we value for its flower? I think it is very doubtful. It would be well, however, if a few bold spirits were to explore our vegetable resources. We make “spinach” from several different plants. Are they the only ones? We eat the tender shoots of hops and asparagus, and in Japan the bamboo—are there no others of value? The only vegetable of recent years which has been introduced successfully and “boomed” is the Stachky's tuberifera, and sd far France, so far as I know, is the only country where it is grown in marketable quantity. A touch of the Elizabethan spirit of adventure in the vegetable garden would not be amiss to-day.