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Gardening resources and tips, etc.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Suffs » Sun May 30, 2021 11:32 am

Ah, that's a different matter ... Himalayan honeysuckle aka Leycestaria formosa is a lovely plant in the right place. Bees love the flowers, birds love the seeds (hence them arriving unpurchased in many gardens). It can rampage a bit if left to its own devices, but so can many choice plants. It's easy enough to control ... once it gets to the size you want, then every spring remove one third of the old stems at the base ... it'll send up new stems and keep renewing itself like that. :D

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby scullion » Sun May 30, 2021 12:23 pm

its other name is 'pheasant berry'. the fruits are edible when ripe, taste like caramel, but unpleasant when underripe.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Amber » Mon May 31, 2021 12:25 pm

Thank you, I’ll keep on letting it grow for now, and see what happens. :crossed
As you can tell we’re not very green-fingered here. :oops:

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby ZeroCook » Tue Jun 01, 2021 11:26 am

.
Japanese knotweed is quite edible, I saw recently while looking online for something else. As one does :D

e.g.
https://www.ediblewildfood.com/japanese-knotweed.aspx

http://www.eattheweeds.com/japanese-kno ... le-edible/

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=japanese%20kn ... =-1&ia=web

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby scullion » Tue Jun 01, 2021 12:25 pm

yes, but it's a very slow way to eradicate it!
it's the one thing i used brushwood roundup on years ago when a little patch arrived in our garden.
the council have done a good job of getting rid of it from the verges, scrubland and stream surrounds round here, thank goodness.

there are more interesting things to forage.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Suffs » Tue Jun 01, 2021 1:00 pm

Many years ago a friend in the backwoods of Suffolk found a large stand of JKW in her new garden ..... they fenced it round and kept chickens in it ... after a few (well several) years it was gone and never reappeared as far as I am aware.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby PatsyMFagan » Tue Jun 01, 2021 1:03 pm

Suffs wrote:Ah, that's a different matter ... Himalayan honeysuckle aka Leycestaria formosa is a lovely plant in the right place. Bees love the flowers, birds love the seeds (hence them arriving unpurchased in many gardens). It can rampage a bit if left to its own devices, but so can many choice plants. It's easy enough to control ... once it gets to the size you want, then every spring remove one third of the old stems at the base ... it'll send up new stems and keep renewing itself like that. :D


Ah yes... as others have said, something else entirely... my neighbour had this in her garden and I then found a baby had crawled over the fence. She was quite put out that one had the audacity to grow in my garden ;) :thumbsup :roll: .. Her's eventually died off and so did mine - I think they are quite short lived plants :?:
Last edited by PatsyMFagan on Tue Jun 01, 2021 3:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Stokey Sue » Tue Jun 01, 2021 2:28 pm

According to a thing I found online the trick with Himalayan honeysuckle is to cut it right back in winter like some clematis

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby KeenCook2 » Mon Jun 07, 2021 8:47 pm

I just saw this and was reminded of the discussion earlier in this thread https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... asive-weed

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Wic » Thu Jul 01, 2021 3:54 pm

We seem to be the target for every garden pest under the sun here, from vine weevil through to rabbits and squirrels. The moles have just arrived to add to the fun. However, I found something really cheerful this morning, which made me laugh.

Having given up trying to grow strawberries outside - see above - I have started to grow them in troughs which I overwinter outside and then take into the greenhouse as soon as the fruit begins to set. This means there aren’t a great mass of strawberries, but we do get a few bowlsful, which is better than none. I went out to pick some today and was ferreting about among the leaves and realised they weren’t all strawberry leaves, there was a positive thicket of oak. The squirrel had obviously stashed a collection of acorns in there!

Anyone want to grow an oak tree? I have quite a lot here!

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby herbidacious » Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:19 pm

:)

Good idea with strawberries. It slugs and woodlice that get mine. I grow them in pots which I put on benches, which helps a bit, but I really just end up eating them in ones and twos whenever i go down the garden. Which is ok. I am growing some in a felt 'crib' this year which I am hoping may deter slugs and snails.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Stokey Sue » Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:28 pm

Wic, are you Beatrix Potter? :D

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Wic » Thu Jul 01, 2021 6:37 pm

Well, Sue, I haven’t got any sheep …. More like Mr. McGregor, I expect. At war with rabbits!

We are not quite in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farms, so we have a lot of wildlife. None of it seems to be on our side, apart from the robins who quite like us. Oh, and the blackbird. I feed him grapes every morning and he sings the first line of 'On Ilkley Moor b'aht 'at' . Dozens of times a day!

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Wic » Thu Jul 01, 2021 6:44 pm

Herbi, slugs used to be a problem on the strawberries, but I checked the troughs before I took them into the greenhouse when the fruits were just beginning to form, so they were clear, and touch wood slugs haven’t followed them inside. I don’t think woodlice have attacked. Well, not so far. They probably will now they’ve been mentioned. Not that I’m pessimistic, of course …

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Stokey Sue » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:29 pm

Wic wrote:Well, Sue, I haven’t got any sheep …. More like Mr. McGregor, I expect. At war with rabbits!

We are not quite in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farms, so we have a lot of wildlife. None of it seems to be on our side, apart from the robins who quite like us. Oh, and the blackbird. I feed him grapes every morning and he sings the first line of 'On Ilkley Moor b'aht 'at' . Dozens of times a day!

:lol: :lol:
We have robins here in the woodland over the road but none of the rest, just foxes and parakeets, noisy urban wildlife

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby herbidacious » Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:59 pm

Wic wrote:Herbi, slugs used to be a problem on the strawberries, but I checked the troughs before I took them into the greenhouse when the fruits were just beginning to form, so they were clear, and touch wood slugs haven’t followed them inside. I don’t think woodlice have attacked. Well, not so far. They probably will now they’ve been mentioned. Not that I’m pessimistic, of course …



ha ha! I so hope not! The slugs and snails have been out in legions over the last week or so since it got cooler and has been a bit wet. They seem particularly keen on my sunflowers and hollyhocks/mallows. And the new, not very established French beans. I wonder if it's too late to sow more French beans.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Pampy » Thu Jul 01, 2021 11:30 pm

Wic wrote:I went out to pick some today and was ferreting about among the leaves and realised they weren’t all strawberry leaves, there was a positive thicket of oak. The squirrel had obviously stashed a collection of acorns in there!

Anyone want to grow an oak tree? I have quite a lot here!

I gave my sister a couple of oak trees that I had started from acorns and she's doing them as bonsai. She got them about 12 years ago and the largest is about 15 inches high.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Wic » Fri Jul 02, 2021 11:12 am

DiY Bonsai is very impressive, Pampy. She must have a lot of patience and a very green thumb. I don’t think I’m in that league!

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Wic » Fri Jul 02, 2021 11:28 am

Here in the countryside, we don’t have noisy urban wildlife, but there are few days when it’s quiet. Tractors, lorries, hedge cutting, cows, sheep, mowers - it’s not exactly what people think of as a rural idyll!

As to wildlife, we always have foxes in the garden at night, and the odd badger. On one momentous occasion the cows got out from the field at the end of the lane and wandered round the garden. It was soft after the rain so their feet sank quite deeply. That took a bit of fixing, and some patches of the grass are still greener where they got a bit over excited.

Never a dull moment, really.

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Re: Gardening resources and tips, etc.

Postby Stokey Sue » Fri Jul 02, 2021 3:32 pm

I have something eating plants

I have been wondering why my French marigolds weren’t flowering, but couldn’t see anything other than the absence of flower buds, I could find the problem

Over the last few days something has eaten the tops off the marigolds and chomped 3/4 piment d’Espelette (chilli) plants. Oddly the very similar pepperoncini in the next pot are fine and flowering fit to bust, luck or more heat in the leaves perhaps

Bearing in mind I only have pots on a first floor terrace, and I’m pretty sure I’ve neither snails nor aphids, I’ve either got some kind of caterpillar or the crickets I had last year, probably too well camouflaged for me to see

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