1/6/2007

Home and Garden

Food for thought

Go crazy with containers

by Jim Coggins, Notcutts Garden Centre manager, Bagshot

Out of the millions of hanging baskets and containers which will be planted throughout the country during the next few weeks, how will yours fare this year? Will you be the envy of the neighbourhood? Or have past experiences resembled a dried up Christmas tree on Twelfth Night? Fear not, advice for beautiful baskets and pucker planters is here!

Plenty of food and water. That’s the name of the game when it comes to having plants to be proud of. Its hot, thirsty work being out in the sun all day and all that growing which we expect them to do means they’ll get extremely hungry too. Get this right and you’ll be well on your way to the perfect patio.

Most composts, especially the multi-purpose types, and particularly the ones we all like to snap up at bargain prices, will contain only enough fertiliser to feed your plants for the first six weeks after planting. So if you’re planting up your basket this week, your plants could be starving before June is out, a time when they’re growing most actively of all and not even near their peak.

So if your plants are totally reliant on you for their food, what do you do? Fortunately, this is easily put right if you use a slow release fertiliser at planting time, such as Osmocote Controlled Release Plant Food. Simply mix this into the compost at planting time and you can be sure that all of your plants basic feeding requirements will be taken care of for the rest of the summer without any more intervention from you. Don’t forget that this type of fertiliser is excellent for use elsewhere in the garden on both established plants as well as planting new ones too.

While we’re talking about compost, never make do with garden soil or reuse old compost when planting your baskets. It won’t contain as many nutrients, but it will contain weed seeds and there could be a few pests or diseases thrown in for good measure too. For the sake of what quality compost costs, the superior performance you get will justify the expense every single time.

Now to the watering bit. We’re all very conscious of not only the work involved in watering, but the also the need to conserve water too. Most gardeners have already discovered just how effective water retaining crystals are, so I’m probably preaching to the converted. If you haven’t yet tried it, you really must do so. Not only will you save yourself lots of time (and water) but your plants will be considerably more healthy as they won’t be suffering the stresses of greatly fluctuating moisture levels in the compost and they’ll be much less likely to suffer from mildew too.

My final suggestion involves feeding again. While the slow-release fertiliser will take care of basic feeding, you can achieve optimum results by supplementing this with a liquid feed too. Try feeding between one and four times a week with a liquid feed such as Miracle Gro Plant Food and you’ll see exactly what I mean. Enjoy!

First printed in: Aldershot News and Mail