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Over the coming weeks and months, join me as I develop our brand new garden. As a trained horticulturalist and garden designer, I'll be guiding you through the seasons ahead, sharing tips, successes and failures and exploring some of the new and inventive products on the market. This year is the first spring season here at the Spear and Jackson garden, and I'm looking forward to cultivating a wide range of plants, flowers, vegetables and even some fruit. Its a small garden, with a modern courtyard around one side, family lawn area with raised borders around the other and to the front, a modern take on a traditional cottage border. Have a great gardening week. Lee 'The Gardener' |
Plant Problems and Diseases
Its at this time of the year when most people retire to the garden after a hard days work, or at weekends, but this is also the time of year where garden pests like to bathe in the garden too. My poor cabbages are full of cabbage white caterpillars (i knew i should have fleeced them earlier!), and the Hostas' are covered in snail holes (i cant blame the beer traps for not working, as i only filled them with beer the once!), there's box suckers on my Buxus cones, and vine weevil larvae munching through the roots of my Saxifrage. All pests that have nothing better to do than make my garden look untidy! I do however enjoy the ladybirds which come to feast on the greenfly and the cute little semi circular shapes cut out of the edges of the Rose leaves (made by the Leaf Cutter Bee).
As we continue to import plants from foreign climates, so we seem to introduce more pests to the garden. Some quite specific in what they eat, others not so. I guess each species is just carefully exploiting the other in their fight to take over the world!
Garden Pests
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Vine weevel grub
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I made a conscious decision when we build this garden to be organic, and i've managed to stick to it so far and wont be beaten by a few pesky flies. In another month's time when the cold weather returns and the nights draw longer, the Hostas' will collapse to the ground, the leaves will naturally fall from the roses and as for the cabbages, well, i never did like them that much anyway!
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