Fact Sheet 32
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THE GARDENERS DIARY
WEEK 32
8th May 2005
THE DIARY THE FLOWER GARDEN: Plant some evergreen colour with conifers. This week is an ideal opportunity to plant conifers. Conifers are ideal plants for the gardener who wants a low maintenance garden. They can produce all-year-round colour with their decorative foliage and their architectural shapes. Conifers can be used to gain structure in mixed borders making great backgrounds for other plants, as hedging they can screen off eye-sores and they also make great boundaries. On the rockery, coniferous foliage can help gain height and colour in the winter months. Groundcover varieties can quickly cover the soil and produce a carpet of evergreen foliage which can then help to suppress weed growth. In containers they can help make great companion plants or even be trimmed into a wide range of topiary shapes. Certain varieties of Conifers can even be trained onto trellis work. Create an espalier or fan shape by taking a well branched medium-sized variety and then train onto the trellis work by secure the stems onto the frame using twine or raffia. One thing to remember is to make sure your plants are well irrigated in dry spells especially at the base and feed twice a year with a conifer & shrub fertiliser in the spring and autumn. THE GREENHOUSE: Keep damping down Remember to damp down the floor each morning if the weather is sunny. This isn't to encourage your paving stone or gravel to grow but to help keep the humidity raised and the temperature lowered. With the air humidity raised it helps stop excess water loss through the leaves which in turn reduces the amount of water which you have to give your plants. Further more a lot of the insects that can attack and feed off your plants prefer hot dry conditions thus keeping pest control to a minimum. FRUIT & VEG: Time to return to the trenches! The trenches which you produced for your celery last month now need filling with plants. Celery can be planted in single or double rows, planted 23cm apart. Ensure that your plants are strong healthy and have a good ball of root. Single rows are easier to manage when you earth up around the plants as they mature.
" Once planted keep well irrigated as Celery is a bog plant and require an abundance of water LAWN CARE: Time to cut newly sown lawns If you sowed a new area of lawn last month it should have started to germinate and be growing well. As soon as the grass reaches 8-10cm in height it is time to give your new lawn its first trim. Use a hover mower or a rotary mower which doesn't have a roller on it. Set the lawn mower on a high setting. Do not scalp the newly sown blades. Leave the lawn about 5cm in height. This allows the grass to strengthen itself and for the first year keep the new lawn on the shaggy side as this will protect the newly sown lawn against any dry spells which we may encounter this summer. Don't forget you will not be able to treat the lawn with any weedkillers or mosskillers in its first year and for feeding only use liquid fertilisers do not use any form of granular feed as this can sometimes be to strong for newly sown turf to cope with. DISEASE PROBLEM OF THE WEEK: Lilac Blight If you have Lilacs with foliage that is going limp and blackening off you might want to blame the weather but this isn't frost damage it is caused by a bacterium which is readily spread on air currents and by rain. On some plants angular spots develop upon the leaves. These leaves then subsequently flag, wilt and then die. Buds will also appear blackened. On older stems large areas of elongated canker can be present. A secondary infection is the sign of grey mould which can mask the symptoms. Control of this is difficult. Affected stems need to be removed promptly, cutting well back into healthier tissue. Once trimmed it may be worth treating the soil with a steriliant. If the problem continues then remove the plant and do not replace with another Lilac as this may contract the disease as well. Listen to The Gardener's Diary with Luke Ashmead on BBC Three Counties Radio every Sunday afternoon at 2.00pm Contact The Gardener's Diary Here BBC Three Counties Radio 94.7, 98, 103.8, 95.5 and 104.5FM | 
