Inspiration

The garden tasks you can do this summer

Article by Your Home and Garden

Get picking on the daily – it’s summer harvest time in the garden

January is a traditional time for holidays in Aotearoa. That it coincides with peak harvest can be annoying if you’re planning on heading off for a sunny sojourn at the beach or river. Unless you get someone to come and pick them for you, you may come back to a garden of marrows and seedheads. It’s the price to pay.

If you are planning on staying at home, you’ll happily be reaping the benefits of your earlier hard work. Many vegetables, the likes of courgettes, the other smaller cucurbits, peas and beans, demand daily picking if the weather is warm.

Otherwise, they’re too mature and lose their sweet succulence. Regular picking also encourages more produce. Similarly, dead-heading flowers will prompt more blooms. Keeping the actual pumpkins, courgettes and cucumbers off the ground with a piece of wood will stop them getting damaged, or even rotting, from contact with damp earth.

Pumpkin plants can seemingly scramble forever at a great pace over the warmer months. Immensely rewarding, but it usually pays to nip out the growing tips at some stage so the plant’s energy can go into helping the actual pumpkins reach a decent size. This is especially important with larger varieties.

How to: propagate hydrangeas

Now is the time to take cuttings of your favourite hydrangeas. It is so easy. Preferably in the cool of early morning, cut 10cm lengths of current year shoots that have not flowered. These are lighter coloured than older stems. Remove all the leaves except for the top pair and dip the bottoms in hormone rooting powder and insert about 5cm deep into a pot filled with damp potting mix diluted with small gravel. Create a hole with a pencil first to avoid rubbing off the hormone powder. Remembering the old adage “cuttings love company,” a number of these shoots can be poked in together. Form a mini greenhouse by putting the container in a plastic bag to seal in the moisture and store in a cool spot – under the actual hydrangea bush is fine – until roots form. Then gently remove the shoots from pot, separating the tangled roots and either plant in individual pots till plants are bigger, or plant directly into the garden.

Steal this look

A clipped macrocarpa hedge, an unruly lawn and a white chair equals an exquisite simplicity and a rare calm. It offers a brief reprieve from the hurly-burly of daily life, a quiet spot away from everyone and their demands. It may be the perfect spot to read a book, compose a poem, or somewhere to escape, hide, dally, reflect. The lack of visual distractions – no gaudy colours, busy patterns, jarring forms – makes it a perfect and easy place to meditate. One of its charms is its unhurried casualness. The hedge is not clipped to within an inch of its life, rather it maintains a casual flowing stance. Likewise, the lawn, rather than repressed by human hand, seems to grow at its own rate and in its own way. This is holiday perfection.

Consider this: garden journal

If you can remember to fill it in regularly, a garden diary or journal is a tool that grows more useful and interesting each year. A good one will help you record what and when you’ve sown, planted, harvested, clipped, fed, sprayed and so on. It will give space for recording the weather as well as your reflections, and advise and remind you the best times for the many chores. The ones we like also have a Māori lunar calendar and lunar planting guide. It is fascinating looking back and a great resource, comparing years, remembering favourite plants, when certain ones bloomed and how well and so forth.

My Gardening Handbook, $59.90 (Suck UK), from alliuminteriors.co.nz

Pretty good

Those brilliantly coloured, heat-loving zinnias may be sown now directly into the garden. In cooler districts, it would pay to sow them under shelter and planted out when bigger. The downside of this transplanting is that it checks zinnia growth. Native to Mexico and southern areas of the US, these annuals are sun lovers and like fertile, well-drained soil. Once established they have a certain drought tolerance. Plant autumn-flowering bulbs such as the under-rated but so reliable nerines, belladonna (naked ladies) and colchicum (autumn crocus).

Landscaping 101: topiary

Topiary is undergoing a quiet revolution. The tightly clipped geometric shapes and easily recognisable creatures of traditional topiary are being outnumbered by the new generation of looser forms and imaginations. The uneven crenelations along the suburban pittosporum hedge in Ōamaru combine the homeowner’s love of role play and computer games with the creative side of gardening. Billowing blobs of dark buxus across the back of a Wairarapa countrywoman’s perfectly ordered perennial border add a certain frisson of danger that all gardens need to protect them from the bland.

In the fabulous garden of Lyttelton Harbour’s Ōhinetahi, former home of pre-eminent architect Sir Miles Warren, topiary goes avant-garde with flat-topped blocks of shrubs tightly interlocking. Once massive topiary balls are being half-pruned in weird but powerful statements and whole trees are being clipped into flowing organic shapes. Deciduous shrubs are becoming more popular in topiary, the shapes their bare branches form in winter can be alluringly prehistoric.

All that is needed to join the happy throng of passionate topiarists is string, sharp secateurs, shears for the biannual trim in late November and March, a large dose of imagination and some plants of course.

With the advent of buxus blight, box is losing popularity, being replaced by the likes of yew, bay, holm oak, rosemary, tiny-leafed hebes, pittosporum, olearia macrocarpa and Juniperus chinensis ‘Kaizuka’ aka Hollywood cypress is particularly good for the Japanese art of cloud pruning. For deciduous topiary, hornbeam and beech Fagus sylvatica.

Words by: Mary Lovell-Smith