Strange But True...I think

In ya face other seeds!  The coconut takes the biscuit when it comes to size.

My lad came out with an interesting fact that the coconut is the largest seed in the world. It never occurred to me, but thinking about it I have never seen a bigger one so it must be true.  Here are some other interesting facts about the horticultural world that we have probably never thought of  that I cobbled together from other websites.  Just a word of caution if you are studying the subject, don’t use any of this article as I cannot vouch for its accuracy!

Tree Facts

• In one day a full-grown oak tree expels 7 tons of water through its leaves.
• Oak trees do not have acorns until they are fifty years old or older.
• An orange tree may bear oranges for more than 100 years. The famous “Constable Tree,” an orange tree brought to France in 1421, lived and bore fruit for 473 years.
• The General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park, California, is the largest tree in the world. It weighs more than 6000 tons.
• The bark of the redwood tree is fireproof. Fires in redwood forests take place inside the trees.
• The banana cannot reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by hand. Furthermore, the banana is not a tree, it is a herb, the largest known of all plants without a woody stem or solid trunk, so it shouldn’t really be in this category.
• Oak trees are struck by lightning more often than any other tree. This, it has been theorised, is one reason that the ancient Greeks considered oak trees sacred to Zeus, God of thunder and lightning.

• The rings of a tree are always farther apart on the tree's southern side. Woodland workers often read tree rings to find the compass points.( During midsummer the leaves of the compass plants invariably point precisely north and south.)

• Cork comes from the bark of trees. Specifically, it is harvested from the cork tree, which takes more than ten years to produce one layer of cork.
• While known as a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer, Leonard da Vinci was the first to record that the number of rings in the cross section of a tree trunk revealed its age. He also discovered that the width between the rings indicated the annual moisture.

Orchids

• Orchids are grown from seed so small that it would take thirty thousand to weigh as much as one grain of wheat.
• The Orchid is named after the male genitalia. Its botanical family name Orchidaceae, means “testicles” in Greek and may derive from an early notion that the orchid possessed aphrodisiac qualities.

Bees and Honey

• A bee could travel 4 million miles (6.5 million km) at 7 mph (11km/h) on the energy it would obtain from 1 gallon (3.785 litres) of nectar.
• Pollen from trees such as hazel and willow is full of protein. It provides essential food for bumblebees early in the spring, before there are many flowers about.
• Honey will not spoil. In fact, honey in Egyptian tombs has been tasted by archaeologists, who found it to be still edible.
• It takes the nectar of about two million flowers to make one pound of honey.

Fruit

• Apples float but pears do not.
• The cucumber is not a vegetable; botanically, it is a fruit, so are the eggplant, the pumpkin, the squash, the tomato, the gherkin, and the okra. Rhubarb, however, is botanically a vegetable, not a fruit.

What are They?

• A peanut is not a nut. It is a legume.
• Bamboo is not a tree. It is forest grass. Bamboo can grow up to three feet in a 24 hour period.
• The onion is a lily, botanically.
• Humans share one third of their DNA with lettuce (and 50% with a banana!)

That’s a Lot

• A garden caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.
• There is an average of 50,000 spiders per acre in green areas.
• It takes 4,000 crocuses to produce a single ounce of Saffron.
• The giant puffball, lycoperdon giganteum, produces 7,000,000,000,000 spores, each of which could grow into a puffball a foot in diameter and collectively cover an area of 280,000 square mile. Fortunately, only one of the spores actually becomes a puffball, and all the others die.

And Finally.....

• When first introduced to Europe, potatoes were blamed for causing syphilis. Both were indigenous to the New World.
• Washing a chicken egg will strip it of natural coatings that keep out bacteria; it will rot very quickly thereafter.
• The nasturtium derives its name from the Latin nasus (“nose”) tortum (“to twist”). The flower's smell is so powerful that to inhale it was considered tantamount to having one's nose tweaked.
• Celery has negative calories! It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.

Bulb Planting

 The mint cutting is coming along nicely

Coming along nicely

My mint cutting is coming along extremely well.  It’s been two weeks since I plopped in unceremoniously into a vase full of water and the roots are growing at a fantastic rate.  It doesn’t take much to entertain me so looking at the roots on the kitchen windowsill is just enough excitement for me as I wash the pots.  Small pleasures.

I had a comment this week about how the roots in water don’t seem as strong as conventional soil grown roots.  They are right; the roots that grow in water haven't come across much resistance in and have just glided through the smooth liquid without a care in the world.  A thick gel might help a bit to get them accustomed to a bit of opposite force or just planting them into the soil when new roots appear.  But I have found that as a rule these cuttings are generally grown for the enjoyment of just watching the roots grow, children especially fid them fascinating. Get one of the Buncrana Camera Club to film the process in stop motion and it’s nearly as dramatic as the Swilly hotel fire video Adam Porter took last week!

Just as you thought there was a bit of time left to sit back and relax in the garden, I am here to bring you down to earth with a bump and remind you that it’s time to get the spring bulbs in.  If you are like me and can only plan one day ahead then be prepared for a shock as bulb planting means having to plan 6 months ahead!  People manage it though and the fact that garden centres have got them stacked floor to ceiling certainly helps to remind us that the time is now. 

Planting Bulbs for Spring

I’ve brought in James Kilkelly from the gardenplans forum to give the heads up about successful bulb planting. James also runs a Garden Design Diploma Course check out the Academy of Ireland website.

“Plant spring bulbs now and you can be sure of colour in the New Year” James tells us. "It’s almost unheard of for a healthy bulb not to flower the first season after planting."

Encourage good soil conditions.

James continues. "Almost all bulbs that you plant for spring flowering require a loose, open, porous, well-drained soil to prevent bulb rot. To reach this ideal bulb growing soil, you can take the step of amending it through the addition of soil improvers.

Start by working your soil over with a garden fork, digging in coarse sand or grit throughout the top twelve to eighteen inches of soil as you go. Do not remove any pre-existing small stones from the soil while you work it, these help water movement, providing drainage as well as warmth to the soil during winter. Along with sand/grit, the addition of organic matter such as homemade compost, peat moss or wood shavings when worked through your soil will aid bulb root development and improve drainage greatly on heavy clay soils.

Plant at the correct depth.

Too Shallow. Beware planting your bulbs too shallowly as you may experience premature emerging shoots, these are ones which are easily burned by frost. Another downside is frost heaving, where the bulbs are pushed up out of soil by freezing temperatures, if you have ever seen bulbs on the soils surface in spring, well that’s frost heaving brought on by planting too shallowly. Aside from frost, jackdaws, blackbirds and other round feeding birds can also damage shallow bulbs by rooting them out and pecking them.

Too Deep. Planting too deep can be even worse, with bulbs possibly not emerging at all due too the long trip to the surface for their new shoots.

Depth. Bulb packaging should have optimum planting depth instructions printed for you to follow, but occasionally you will come across bulbs without planting depth instructions. In this case you can usually get away with planting at a depth that is twice the bulbs height.

This planting depth is measured from the base of the bulb, resting on the soil in the hole to the existing topsoil level. Don’t forget, daffodils, hyacinths, tulips, snowdrops etc must be planted with the root plate pointing downward and the pointy top or nose of the bulb pointing upward. This gets the flower growing in the right direction from day one, and prevents the shoot from having to take a wrong turning.

Ways of planting.

If you have just dug over your bed with a garden fork, then it is possible to press each bulb down into the fluffy soil and then cover it with soil. This is a quick and easy way to go about your planting, but you must ensure the ideal bulb depth is used and that the bulbs are not damaged in the pressing process.

You may instead opt for a bulb planting tool. With its graduations down the side, this shiny digging implement is a good aid to ensure correct planting depths. However when I was starting out, a trusty hand trowel and a length of stick cut to the desired planting depth were just as good, and one less tool to buy for a cash-strapped gardener.

No matter what you use when creating the individual planting holes, you should always loosen the soil below which the bulb will sit on, adding a shake of sharp sand to aid drainage. It will also benefit the initial root development of the bulb to mix a slow release fertiliser into the soil at the bulbs base, fertilisers such as “Bulb Booster”, or “Super phosphate” are perfect for this purpose. Press the upright bulb down firmly onto this mix and cover with similarly fertiliser and sand amended soil.

If you follow the rules as to soil improvement and bulb planting depth, then you will be well on your way to flowers next spring, and the year after, and the year after that."

Red Hot Pokers

Looking over the fence at my neighbours Red Hot Pokers!

Poking around through the Fence

I don’t have the usual photograph in this week’s article with me in the foreground.  I generally like to get my face in the Inishowen Indo every week but today I have been pointing the camera lens in the opposite direction towards my neighbours garden.

I started off earlier looking at a space where Julie cleared of rubbish and old shrubs and wondering if there was enough room to create a forest garden. It’s a bit ambitious of me, but I was influenced by a documentary I watched earlier about someone who grows enough food to last a family of four for every one of his 6 acres. What made this even more impressive is that he claims to spend less than ten days a year managing the land. I spend more time than that getting my tools out of the garage.

I decided that 3 square metres wasn’t going to be enough to plant nut trees, fruit bushes, ground cover berries and have the perfect eco system, so my attention wandered over the fence to my neighbour’s grand display of flaming red hot pokers and montbretia or crocosmia as they are also known. 

Montbretia

The variety of montbretia they have is the ‘Lucifer’ and it is one of the brightest flowers on the market. We usually see the common orange types growing wild on the roadsides near farms or in the countryside where desperate gardeners have resorted to throwing them out of their car windows in a desperate attempt to get the invasive corms out of their herbaceous borders. They probably fail as leaving just one corm in the ground will soon spread and take over again.  The plants can look great if you have big borders and the flowers are good for cutting because they last a long time in water.  They have their place I suppose and do look very pretty in the sunshine but don’t take your eye off them.  

Red Hot Pokers

The red hot pokers growing in next doors garden are the tallest ones I have ever seen, maybe I should have stood next to them to give a bit of perspective, but I can tell you that they are taller than me and I am 6’, a bit less now as I seem to be shrinking with age, but you get the idea. 

Knipfolia, to give the red hot pokers their real name, or torch lily in America, are really easy to grow.  They can be grown from seed but the favoured method is by dividing up the rhizome (bulbous roots) in late autumn and setting the cut pieces into pots or a well drained spot in the garden.  They can be grown from seed as well but this is a lot slower and fiddly. If you do plant seeds from an existing plant after they have dried on the plant in autumn and put them in a frost free place to germinate in spring. 

Red hot pokers are really showy and this helps to attract a wide variety of insects throughout the summer.  Bees, butterflies and birds all gather around the rocket shaped flowers.  The plant is an ideal addition to dry spots in the garden that get full sun. You will see these plants thriving where others droop and wither in the heat.

Facebook Friends

Having amassed about 3000 friends on Facebook, I am always amazed at the high quality of images that I see every day of peoples gardens.  I’m not in the garden design business any more but if I was I would never be short of inspiration and ideas from people all over the world who have designed and built places of real beauty.  One a daily basis I look at images so varied from tiny details like putting glass marbles into holes in wooden fences to catch the sunlight to massive landscaping projects that take years to create.  One of my favourites at the moment is the giant wooden clothes peg, which is probably twenty feet high ‘nipping’ the ground where it is stood on grassland in a park.  The whole design looks so realistic and delicate although it would have taken a digger a few days to move the tonnes of soil to get the impression of the clothes peg pulling the ground up.

I know I can spend a little bit too much time on the computer in the evenings looking at other peoples creations but I find it truly rewarding and there’s a saying about how you are who you associate with. Hopefully the fabulous global design elements will rub off on me and I will come up with a perfect miniature forest garden at the back of the garage, take a photo of it and share it around the world and have people say “Why didn’t I think of that!”