GARDENING GaRDENING MoNTHly by Richard Cumming Orchard Park Whatever space you’ve got, it Starts With a Pot!
WHAT STARTS with a pot you might ask? Well a whole range of things and this is one of the projects we are working with this year to help get youngsters, nongardeners as well as the converted, thinking about gardening in a way that is easy to understand. The baby-boomers [born 1946 - 1960] often benefitted from the advice handed down from their parents who in many cases were gardening to produce essential foods before and
during WW2. Later generations lost out to some extent as the need to garden reduced and the size of our gardens shrunk. But it is still one of the most useful, creative and therapeutic activities known to man. The satisfaction of growing a beautiful, useful or tasty plant is enormous and the exercise you can get is as good as going to the gym. Yes I know, there are a hundred ways to ruin your back and knees gardening but most of them can be avoided by approaching the work in a sensible manner - like any
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physical activity. After all, you wouldn’t start a gym session without warming up, would you? So, ‘It Starts With a Pot’ is all about an easy way to start, perhaps sowing a seed or planting a bulb that will grow right in front of your eyes. Making a new plant from an old plant is also a good way to get going; it might be a cutting, a layered shoot or a piece of a perennial plant dug from the garden. There are so many ways to experiment. Then the pots themselves can be anything that holds compost and water but allows drainage; it might be an old bucket, a teapot, a wellington pot, an ancient Chinese jardinière, a regular terracotta or a plastic pot. Starter pots should be small as if the pot is too big the plant or the seed will get lost. Then once growth has started and the plant has reached a size that fills the pot, it should be moved to the next size up or if with other plants in a mixed arrangement given more room for its roots to develop. This could be a fun project for everyone this year and certainly gives lots of opportunities for
schools to get involved. We will be running workshops and competitions at Orchard Park and hope for some great creativity and even the wild and whacky!
Plant of the Month
I know it has been a wild and wet winter but there are an awful lot of plants out there flowering fit to bust! Some of the winter and spring bedding has taken a beating but pansies and violas are so resilient that they quickly recover with a few days good weather. March is the perfect time for a garden spring clean after the winter, re-invigorating and livening up existing flower beds, borders and containers. Pansies are the perfect spring plants - along with primulas, forget-me-nots and wallflowers and are perfect contenders for patio pots, hanging baskets and window boxes, ideal and easy to plant. Pansies and violas are two of the most popular bedding plants and are great for filling the gaps in borders once you have cleared away bedraggled or dead plants. Their names are often used