Gardeners' Chat

[MmePoppySeedDefage]

Chat. For gardeners. About gardening, but we can go off piste and chat about things like non-gardening clothes, or food or whatever, without being told off

Sprouts don't need tomato feed, save that for fruiting veg. You don't want them to produce flowers. Manure will be fine.

Maybe this explains why I can't get things to grow, I'm using the wrong stuff

I am currently looking after 3 trays of seedlings for a friend.

I'd had them 2 weeks, and hardly anything had grown. To compare, stuff I sowed after she had left them with me, is now larger than the stuff she had.

So on friday I scraped back an inch of the compost, and added a top dressing of my own sieved compost.

Overnight, they all started to look healthier and the melons all grew one extra leaf when they had done nothing for 2 weeks.

I suspect the issue is that the bought compost is full of large bits of woodchip, and this is taking all the nitrogen from the soil leaving little left for the plants. Or you are sowing too deep.

Or that this same compost is too big to allow seeds to get the right conditions for germination.

I've been sowing all my seeds on an inch of coir, over a couple of inches of my own compost. And potted into my own compost.

Try sieving the compost you are sowing seeds into, and maybe on a half inch or less sized sieve, even one of those small plastic ones you get in kits from Wilkos or garden centres. Seed sowing compost needs to be light.

If you buy compost that still looks like the thing it was, it isn't ready. Take it back and get a refund. this is why many bags have little corners torn off to see what is in the bags.

Does anyone know what tool Monty was using ho chop branches off his trees in gardeners world this week. They were just amazing (I’m sure very expensive but probably worth it for us with hundreds of trees). They had red handles

Just a pair of bypass loppers as far as I can see.

i think they were just loppers but super sharp! I was also struck by them. Like a hot knife through butter

It’s much more straightforward than the horticultural shelves in shops would have you believe. If you’re growing leaves (lettuce, spinach etc), use general purpose fertiliser, if you’re growing flowers or seeds (beans, courgettes etc) use tomato feed. May not be the optimum solution, but for non-commercial home use it’s fine.

Oh sorry, badly worded, I meant brand. They were amazing

General observation - our fruit trees are not doing well this year. The cherries mostly seem to be dropping off, shrivelled and undeveloped. Worse, our apple tree (which had always been prolific) seems to have ONE apple developing.

Is it just us?

As far as I've seen ours are okay and so are the ones where I work. I wonder if the blossom got frosted?

Something has definitely slowed ours down, and some of the trees have mildew which is new. On the other hand, there are lots of Conference pears coming along.

We have 2 apple trees, one has no fruit this year and the leaves are fine. The other has loads of fruit but the leaves are shrivelling a bit - aphids I think.

Both mildew and fruit dropping off can be the result of drought

We had an early warm spell in January followed by a deep freeze in February, and a lot of people's rhododendrons (including those at the Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, where we went this week) are not doing well because a lot of buds froze. Did anything like that happen in the UK?

It happened in Ireland - my camellia, usually covered in pink flowers, had about six, all at the back of the bush between it and the house wall - all the other buds on that bush and on another one died. We had three separate very cold snaps during an otherwise mild winter and it was fairly disastrous, but on the whole it seems to have damaged top growth and buds, not roots.

I'd figured the mildew was probably the result of drought- we had rain today (about 5mm) and there is great excitement.

Lots of pears at the moment, although we’ve had loads before at this time of year but “don’t count your pears before they’ve dropped” as the old saying goes. Dunno about the apples yet, blossom’s only just gone, too soon to tell.

My apples are forming ok but the woolly aphids are rife this year

I've notice a a few of my cherries have gone brown, but a few have reddened too. I've only begun watering it for the first time this year the other day. It's not rained in the Midlands for the past three long weeks' so hopefully, they will revive.

@Kucinghitam Do you feed yours? If so, what can you recommend? My 5yo "Sunburst", a black cherry had lots of flowers this year, more than any other year, so I'm hoping I'll get a good crop (last year's was abysmal, though given the heatwave.)

Hello can anyone tell or help me where I can buy a spare blade for my lawnmower I have looked everywhere with no luck nightmare 😞 the make and model is

TITAN TTB833LWM 1700W 37CM ELECTRIC LAWN MOWER 230V (325KH)

Many Thanks

Have you tried Titan themselves?

@Nachtvlinder I don't feed my fruit trees anything special, just a regular topping of home-made compost. The apple tree was already here when we moved in. We planted the morello cherry tree in our first year here, so it's 7+ now.

I think the falling cherries must be due to the drought. The complete lack of apples is a bit more of a mystery - DH reckons we had less apple blossom than usual in the first place.

We invariably have one good year followed by one bad year with our apple trees. Probably a non-pruning issue, although have heard many people say the same re good year/bad year.

I had an apple tree in my previous garden, never pruned, and that alternating year productiveness was what I observed.

You’re supposed to thin apples, otherwise a good apple year allows the tree to rest on its laurels and have a year off, and you establish a pattern of biennial bearing which, once established, is very hard to break. I’ve never worried with 8 trees because they’re not in synch, so I just have a slightly different mix of varieties each year.

Wasn't a problem for me - it wasn't a particularly nice apple so I tended not to use all the apples anyway, but good advice so thank you @MereDintofPandiculation