Camellias

Camellias are in flower. Yay!  

For me there’s no better flower to signify the coming of spring, well apart from snowdrops, crocus, daffodils and pussy willows. We’ll have the Hawthorne hedgerows with us in no time.  Maybe I am getting a bit ahead of myself there but there are so many plants that are producing colour at this early time of year if we take a bit of time to look around. For now though it’s the camellia attracting my attention as there’s one I walk past every day.

Camellia

In temperate regions like ours, gardeners have embraced the camellia as a favourite hardy evergreen shrub. If space permits, they can be grown to full size but will also be happy in a small garden or even a container. 

The camellia is a long-lived shrub, so could be something that you choose to put in the ground for your grandchildren as you might plant a cedar or an oak. However, even as young plants camellias have huge appeal and will produce ravishing blooms on the smallest specimens. My mother in law had one that was just a twig in the ground but still had a bouquet of flowers on it.

Camellias suit today’s much smaller gardens. Their elegant glossy, evergreen leaves look good throughout the year. They are happy and will still bloom in shade: often a challenge in small gardens. In fact, early morning shade is important to prevent the sun’s rays from destroying frozen flowerbuds.

If you have acid soil and semi-shade they could grow in the open ground. No special treatment is required, just keep an eye on the watering so they don’t dry out in summer. Like most ericaceous subjects, camellias are light feeders and require only a light annual application of a lime free ericaceous fertiliser to keep them in peak condition.

Camellia Growing Tips

There are a few types to choose from. Camellia sasanqua flower during late autumn, through winter. Camellia japonica and Camellia × willamsii flower from early spring.

Grow in pots

If you don’t have suitable soil, try growing the plant in a large pot.

Pruning and training

Camellias don’t need to be pruned regularly but, if they outgrow the allotted space you can trim them into shape after flowering. Hard pruning is best carried out in March, but it will be a couple of years or more before they flower well again.

Deadheading

Deadhead your camellias when the flowers begin to fade.  This keeps the plant looking fresh as spent flowers will turn brown and can look unsightly. However, it doesn't significantly improve the flowering for the next spring, so it's something you can do if you have time.

Winter protection

If you are growing Camellia sasanqua in a container this will need some winter protection in most parts of the peninsula.  Likewise, if you are growing Camellia japonica and Camellia × willamsii cultivars they may need protection. Move the container nearer to the house or to a sheltered corner. Wrap camellias with horticultural fleece. Alternatively, move potted camellias into cold a greenhouse or cool conservatories in spells of freezing weather. The ones near me never get any protection and they have survived years, but they are planted into the ground and not a pot which will make all of the difference.

Propagating

You can propagate camellias from semi-ripe cuttings, hardwood cuttings, layering and grafting.

Take semi-ripe cuttings from mid to late summer; they often root better if slightly wounded by taking a 1.5cm (⅝in) strip of bark off the base of the cutting.

Take hardwood cuttings in the same way as semi-ripe cuttings, but between autumn and late winter. They can root in just three months.

Postcard Gardens at Bloom 2020

Bord Bia calls for entries to Bloom Postcard garden category

Bord Bia is calling on gardeners to submit entries for the popular Postcard garden category for Bloom 2020, which is set to return this June bank-holiday weekend from May 28 to June 1, in the Phoenix Park, Dublin 8.

Postcard gardens offer passionate amateur gardeners, garden clubs, community, and grow-it-yourself groups a chance to showcase their talents to over 115,000 visitors attending the event.

The Postcard gardens are small but perfectly formed 3-metre by 2-metre plots which can be used to represent a club, locality, special person, or character from a community. They have been popular in other garden shows recently too.

In 2019, schools, communities, day-care centres, and resource centres from around Ireland brought themes such as autism, mental-wellbeing, climate change, and children’s literature to life through flowers, planting, art, and woodwork.

Longford Town Guild, Irish Countrywomen’s Association received Best in Show for their Postcard garden, Fork to Fork, which demonstrated how we can turn the tide on unsustainable consumption by using the earth around us to feed ourselves.

If you have a group that could rise to the challenge you can get the application form from BloominthePark.com and the closing date to apply is Monday, March 2, 2020.

Adding Meat or Dairy to the Compost Pile

 Bio Diversity in the Tidy Towns

Meat or dairy

Are you ever tempted to throw your meat and dairy waste into the compost? Have you had people shouting at you not to do it? I’m sure you have so I though a more scientific explanation would help make up your own mind. 

It can seem a bit frustrating that you can’t just compost meat and dairy, but you can, it’s just a question of balance and being careful.

It’s not that meat and dairy are hard to break down in compost bins, the issue is that it’s too easy for them to decompose. 

The main reservation is pests, mice and rats love a warm cost compost pile. There’s also the worry that disease causing bacteria growing in home compost. The solution is to get the pile up to a high enough temperature to kill the pathogens. Temperatures are all important for killing weed seeds too and we do struggle here sometimes for those temperatures to be reached. Situating the pile in full sun helps with this.

The main reason for the meat and dairy being a problem is how delicious the animal protein is to soil microbes. Composting is all about getting friendly soil bacteria to break things down for us, but we don’t need it to get too excited.

Good composting relies on the balance of two elements – Carbon and Nitrogen.

Carbon makes up the chemical foundation for almost all of life’s favourite molecules including proteins.

Proteins also contain a lot of nitrogen, which means that animal products, which are more densely packed than proteins than vegetables contain more nitrogen.

Experts have determined that the best ratio of carbon to nitrogen in compost is somewhere between 20:1 and 30:1 with vegetables being somewhere in the middle at 25:1. Something like a chicken carcass is 5:1 and when bacteria see all of that nutritious nitrogen in the compost they start to grow really fast, that uses up oxygen. When the bacteria use up all of the oxygen in the pile, that favours the growth of other bacteria that don’t need oxygen to live.

The pile switches to anaerobic, or oxygen free decomposition. The chemical products of that process are very smelly like hydrogen sulphide which smells like rotten eggs.

So, if you casually throw all of the leftover meat and dairy products into the compost, you’ll more than likely be left with a slimy putrefied mess instead of lovely sweet-smelling usable compost. Putrefied compost can actually contain chemicals that are toxic to plants although it can usually be salvaged by drying out and adding more green matter such as wood chips or paper products which contain a lot of lignin – a tough component of plant cell walls which doesn’t contain any nitrogen. Bacteria can still eat lignin packed materials but they just slow down the over enthusiastic microbes.

Scishow, an online science programme says that producing compost by the Bokashi method can help. This relies on an anaerobic process on purpose. You add cultures of friendly anaerobic bacteria instead of the poor, smelly ones. Once things like meat scraps have been treating the Bokashi way they can be added to the compost pile with less risk of the whole thing going stinky.

Tidy Towns Initiative

It’s never too early in the year to be thinking about and getting involved in the Tidy Towns Initiative. It can be a great motivator for getting every aspect of the garden ship shape and ready for the judges in late summer. As a past judge you can always tell a garden that’s been frantically tidied up just for the inspection, in some cases it can improve things of course as the unkempt look is quite popular now.

The Tidy towns Initiative we know, and love started its days differently to the UK. The UK Tidy Towns was set up after WW2 on the premise that it’d be great to get the towns and villages looking great again. It was, in reality used as a method of getting tax inspectors onto your property to be assessed to see if any tax avoidance was going off.

Here in the Republic it was started 37 years ago with no hidden agenda (That I know of) to get communities together, brighten the place up, take pride in your living space and of course to attract tourists.  Tidy Towns was originally linked to a single competition, first by Bord Fáilte, then the Irish Tourist Board, and now by the Department of Rural and Community Development.

Over the last few years there have been a lot of changes to the competition. More and more initiatives are concentrating on biodiversity and sustainable issues. The pollinator award is a good example and Buncrana hold the National Pollinator award for 2019 showing that we here in Inishowen take eco initiatives seriously.