Gardening in North Otago August 7th 2018

North Otago is becoming more spring like every week with camellias blooming everywhere, magnolia buds are beginning to burst and spring bulbs thinking it is mild enough to bloom. I feel we still have some cold days and nights to come before we can leap fully into spring which is what is needed for gardens to perform well coming into a new growing season.

Spring is the one time that gardens bursts forth with an abundance of hidden splendor without us having to do a lot of pre planning, nature pretty much takes care of things once they are in place. But I am thinking about early summer right now and what I would like happening in our garden which means seeds need to be sown for the cottage annuals like cosmos, cornflowers, love in the mist, snapdragon and alyssum. all can be sown under glass in a warm area but more tender annuals can wait until it is a little warmer unless you have a heated glass house.  

A few more hydrangeas have been pruned here as nice fat buds are swelling on the stems, cuttings can be taken and bedded in from the hardened stems that  flowered lat season.  A shaded moist area is best for bedding these down and hopefully roots will grow to feed the buds. Some times I get good results by covering the cuttings with a box keeping the light out to hold buds back to encourage roots.

Almost finished pruning roses here, only the flower carpet and fairy roses to go, both these varieties bush up with small non hard wood branching and if large, bushes can be trimmed with a hedge trimmer. If newly planted and small prune back to hard wood at an outward facing bud. Feeding and spraying roses is next, copper oxychloride and winter oil, they can be mixed and applied together as the oil helps the copper to stick and copper helps protect new growth from frosts that occur in late spring. Best not to be applied to fresh new growth when burning may occur,

Vegetable  gardens continue to enjoy the mild weather with the odd frost helping to break down soil. Birds are nesting so cover leaf veg with shade or frost cloth to keep them off. Time for sowing seeds to germinate in a warm well lit place to be ready for pricking out into punnets to be planted out in a warm spring garden. 

Fruit Trees are still available in Garden Centres, if you would like an apple tree but feel your garden is too small why not look at apple ballerina, a very slim non branching variety of apple with Medium, red skin, Crisp and juicy, nice eating and cooking apples, similar in flavour to ‘Jonathan. Ballerina  grows to 3-4m tall by 30cm wide perfect for adding height, blossom and fruit to a small garden.
Grape pruning needs to finish soon before sap rises, to prune a fruiting leader remove all new long growth on the vine other than the fruiting leader, on the leaders prune each new growth back to the second bud. These fruiting buds should be around a hand space apart to ensure adequate sized fruit, this means removing some of the new bud growth along the top of the leader and all of the new bud growth growing underneath. Some of these new budding top growths will throw two lots of bud branch, remove the least stronger one leaving only one lot of double buds to produce fruit.

Keep an eye on peach bud burst which will most likely be early this year, a copper spray right at bud burst will help with leaf curl.
 
Cheers, Linda.