Guest post: a limestone garden in a hot, dry summer

We have been here almost 10 years and started pretty much with a blank canvass of 2 lawns, and when we started digging it was clear the soil was very poor, and worse! We are on good old Oxford clay but it is also quite stony.

Once the 2 gardens were set out, one the kitchen garden and the other lawn/shrubbery/flower garden, we had one big load of manure to spread about and dig in. As we have chickens, over the years they have contributed considerably to improving the soil, but every year we still add bag fulls of manure in some form or another so we can grow pretty much anything. Acid lovers, like acers, I grow in pots. Hydrangeas are happy in the ground, but of course will only be pink, not blue because of the soil here.

However, this year all this added soil improver had not been enough to stop our ground turning into concrete with cracks that you could get your hand down. Everything started off very promising but once we got towards the end of July the garden really started to shut down. No amount of watering could really keep up against the heat so we concentrated on keeping the pots, greenhouse and some of the veg watered. We have a number of water butts around the garden which lasted about 2 weeks and we are on a water meter so it became very restricting the amount of tap water we ran off.

Lavender, Phlomis, Sisyrinchium, perennial geraniums, Centaurea, Achillea, Alchemilla mollis, Eryngium, Cistus, Echinops, all tolerated the heat but didn’t flower for very long. Hollyhocks stopped flowering half way up their stems, and after the first flush of roses, they stopped flowering completely. Crocosmia leaves dried up and there are very few flower heads. Euphorbia ‘Fireglow’ died off completely, even though I was watering it. Centranthus, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the heat and carried on regardless, as did Aquilegia.

The well established shrubs survived ok. Some hydrangeas wilted a bit so I ran the hose on them and they rallied. Unfortunately our Magnolia stellata gave up, which I am very sad about.

Interestingly, now we have had some rain and lower temperatures, one of our roses is a mass of buds so that is pleasing and some of the ground cover plants are starting to recover.

The fig tree has gone bonkers and produced masses of figs. Now all we need is the sunshine to ripen them!!!!!!

from Jennie Moss, August 2018

Roses

Rosa Paul’s Scarlet

I was really pleased with a new solution for our south-facing terrace beds: Rosa ‘Paul’s Scarlet’ has put on a fantastic show for a first June in place, and now in July it is sending out new shoots aplenty, so I’m looking forward to more.

It has been fed in spring, fed while flowering and had a bit of extra water, because turns out it is susceptible to powdery mildew (Podosphaera pannosa) especially in dry soils – which of course is what we have. Bizarre as it sounds, spraying the rose with diluted milk while it is sunny is reputed to control the mildew, and it does seem to have done some good. At least, the mildew didn’t get any worse and was largely imperceptible. And no smell of bad milk, I’m glad to report although I did get some traces of the spray visible on the leaves after a particularly enthusiastic (and entertaining) spraying session. Another component of an integrated control approach is to deadhead carefully, removing the waste. The council composting bins can have the detritus, as our compost wouldn’t necessarily get hot enough to kill the fungus.

I have copied the training of this climbing rose over bamboo ‘half-circle’ loops from Waterperry Gardens and so far I’m finding it works prettily underplanted with winter and summer savories (Satureja montana and S. hortensis), and Salvia. Really the salvias should be too big but I think the conditions are fierce, which has conveniently limited their size.

This rose is even from an appropriate period for our 1930s house, as it was first introduced in 1916 by the William Paul company.

Bibliography:

https://garden.org/plants/view/3818/Rose-Rosa-Pauls-Scarlet-Climber/

http://homeguides.sfgate.com/care-pauls-scarlet-roses-24607.html

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Blueberries in pots

Blueberry flowers in April

Blueberries are a great fruit, ripening here in Oxfordshire at the end of the traditional strawberry season and delicious as a handful on top of a bowl of muesli, for instance. They’re also not cheap in the shops, meaning that a glut of blueberries feels like a real luxury. Plus they freeze well enough for subsequent use in baking. My three bushes (various varieties) don’t provide enough berries for large volumes of blueberry jam.

However they are definitely calcifuges. They will not survive the conditions in calcareous soils over limestone, nor watering with ‘hard’ water. I keep mine in purchased ericaceous soil in pots and last year was lazy about fetching rainwater to water them, using tapwater more regularly than before. Thus two of the three bushes had yellow leaves, dying stems and little fruit. This spring I re-potted those two bushes and found a couple of surprises. First, when I potted the young bushes I had used limestone rubble for drainage, which was not clever. And secondly the worms had been busy and about a third of the soil in the pot was well-mixed with our calcareous soil. With these assaults on their root environment combined with my lazy watering regime, no wonder the plants were looking ill.

I repotted the plants with brocken crocks for drainage and some fresh ericaceous compost, and placed the pots in the middle of paving stones on the patio, in the hope that will stop the worms. I’m going to get some feet to lift the pots off the ground which will probably be more effective. Watering hasn’t been an issue yet this year (we’ve had a lot of rain) but we have another water butt closer to the blueberries, for when/if summer finally arrives. I feed the plants with ericaceous plant food too.

The plants are looking healthier and the blackbirds are beginning to check to see if the fruit is ripening yet.

Unripe blueberries in early June

JSTOR Daily had an interesting article recently on the ‘Delicious Origins of the Domesticated Blueberry‘ and I totally agree that blueberries are a great plant, with pretty white flowers in spring and ornamental, garden-worthy bright red leaves in the autumn. They’re worth some fussing to keep them going; peat-free ericaceous composts are available.