Great tips for a great garden
by Maureen Lucas
AS I go around the traps, gardeners often ask me to give them hints on how to achieve a better outcome in their garden.
Here are some of my favourites:
- When potting up cuttings or plants, line the bottom of the pot with large leaves to ensure the potting mix does not run out through the drainage holes. This also gives a little bit of bottom heat as the leaves rot down, which helps the plant grow and produce roots faster. In the absence of leaves, newspaper will do a similar job but do not use old shadecloth mesh because it will strangle the developing roots.
- For cuttings, put five or six of the one type in a 20cm pot in preference to one per pot. Cuttings like “friends” to grow up with. Label them.
- A mix of honey and Vegemite makes a good “rooting hormone”. Some gardeners say they get an almost 100 per cent strike rate by this method.
- The slats from old venetian blinds can be cut into pieces and used for plant tags. Use waterproof marker pens to write the name of the plant.
- When you buy new plants in pots leave them in the pot for several weeks and sit the pot in its eventual position to acclimatise before planting. This way, any problems with the plant or position will show up early.
- Folded plastic supermarket bags (with small cuts in them) are useful to place inside the liners of hanging baskets before you fill in with potting mix. This helps to hold more water in the basket and the holes you have made give sufficient drainage. Plants grow much better this way and do not dry out as quickly.
- When designing the garden, you want lots of leaf shape, colour and texture. As I write this, my garden is full of autumn colour and although there are not a lot of flowers out, it still looks fantastic.
- As well as mulching the garden I also mulch many of my pots – they look better and don’t dry out as quickly. This can be done with thin lawn clippings or regular mulch. But for succulent plants I use small decorative gravel – usually white or cream – nothing too garish.