Now that we are officially in British Summertime you can easily spot the rapid changes in deciduous trees. It is hard to miss the many flowering trees all around us at the moment. There are flowering cherries and other fruit trees, apricots, plums, damsons, apples and pears as well as flowering magnolias, and willows (think catkins). A particularly beautiful phenomenon at this time of the year is the mass of blossom and this is made all the more stunning by the fact that these trees all produce flowers before they produce leaves. In botany the pattern of putting forth flowers before the appearance of the leaves is known as hysteranthous. It’s significance is that if a mass of flowers come out together then this is likely to attract more insects, and if at the same time there are no leaves then this facilitates wind pollination. Interestingly enough some plant scientists have found that the reason for hysteranthous, the sequence of flowering before leaf unfolding may be due to a large difference in heat requirements between leaf buds and flower buds, with flower buds having a much lower heat requirement compared with leaf buds, hence flowers buds opening first.
This week we will continue with some seed sowing in the greenhouse, as well as potting up our larger seedlings and feeding our small plants including tomatoes, dwarf sunflowers, Zinnias, Gazanias and Canna lilies.
Outside in the garden we have planted our seed potatoes in three different beds. We are now waiting to see when the first growing tips emerge above ground before earthing them up. ‘Earthing up’ means drawing up soil around the potato stems as they grow in order to protect the shoots from frost damage in late spring and to ensure the developing potatoes aren’t exposed to light, which would turn them green and inedible. Our potato varieties this year are Apache, Salad Blue, Casablanca, and Pink Fir Apple.
We will wait a few more weeks until the soil temperatures are consistently higher (above 7 degrees) before sowing our vegetable seeds directly into the ground. However this is not far off.
Good vegetable growing condition include providing plants with sufficient water, so before sowing seeds in our vegetable beds we will be checking our leaky pipes. This is the underground irrigation systems we use to water our plants. The leaky pipes ‘leak’ water along their lengths (it is a porous pipe) and in this way ensures that sufficient water reaches the root zones of the vegetable plants which is exactly where it is needed. This is an efficient way of watering plants because the water goes directly to plant roots and by being below ground it also cuts out water loss through evaporation.
