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

I have just picked and eaten my first ever homegrown grape.

It was a bit tart, but definitely edible. Considering the summer we've had, that the vine is outdoors, and we're pretty much sitting on the 55th parallel, I'm rather pleased.

Nice one!

Black Hamburg.

Most still have quite a way to go, but I only planted them for leaves really - never expected actual fruit.

Wow, they look great! A neighbour’s internal conservatory roof is completely covered with grapes. Apparently the trick is to have the roots outside and the plant/fruits inside - in the UK at least.

When you say you’re growing for the leaves, do you mean for garden interest or for cooking?

Mainly the former, although I do have plans to stuff some.

It’s really tedious to stuff them, they take about a teaspoon of stuffing each. It’s something I intend to do more often but manage only about once a year.

I suspect I will rarely (if ever) actually do it, but I like knowing it's an option.

Found this digging my garden anyone know what it is

Horsetail? Asparagus? Bamboo?

I'm not quite sure of the scale.

I don't know, but having carefully dug up and dumped a gnarly weed that later turned out to be my very best oregano, I'd suggest planting it in a pot for a week or two until it puts up leaves just in case it's something you want to keep.

It looks to me like an iris tuber. Put it in soil lengthwise and see if anything shoots up.

That'd be my bet too. Worth replanting and finding out!

None of those.

it’s clearly something that has been well-slugged, so potting it up and growing slug-free might cause it to put out roots and leaves and give a chance to id

About .5cm wide

Almost any chewed off perennial then. You’ll have to grow it!

Given that it's been devoured by slugs, I'd guess it's not horsetail or bamboo. Unless you have supernatural mutant slugs.

Another vote for planting it up and seeing what grows!

It's planted will let you now what emerges we have had the house 18 years there are some iris in my pond and some old plants from bulb but I've never plated whatever this is .

We were doing some gardening yesterday afternoon, when suddenly from our back neighbour's house there was a sound like a loud irate lawnmower.

"Weird," I thought, "they don't have a lawn?" Also, I thought, "Sun's just gone behind a black cloud, is it going to rain?"

Straightened up from weeding our flowerbed, looked at the sky, and it was indeed a cloud - of bees. There was a tornado of bees in neighbour's back garden!

No idea where they'd come from, and they started swirling around all the neighbouring gardens. We beat a tactical retreat indoors to watch - eventually they all settled in a big dripping cluster on back neighbour's eaves. Quite fascinating.

Unfortunately I don't know what happened to them after that, as we decided to use the enforced pause in our gardening to have tea and biscuits, and when we looked back outside the cluster had dispersed, with only a few stray bees buzzing around.

That's an early swarm - 'A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay'.

I found myself in the middle of a bee swarm once, there were thousands of them swirling madly around me but they were intent on settling the queen, so completely ignored me. It was one of the most exhilarating things I've ever experienced. Also involved in that scene was a male blackbird who looked around himself with great puzzlement, which was very funny.

OK, I need Big Help. Our other back neighbour (with whom we share the whole width of the back fence) is Not a Gardener, and in recent years her plot has been the source of all manner of invasive weeds. Every so often she gets a bloke in who seems to deluge her garden with Agent Orange, and is perfectly happy with the resulting sterile landscape.

On our side, I've worked hard to create a lovely sanctuary of much-loved plants. So we've been keeping on top of them as best we could with vigilant cutting back and digging up accessible roots, while leaving our plants intact. So far, this approach has worked to minimise the HORSETAIL INVASION.

But this afternoon I've realised we are losing the battle with her weeds. It wasn't so much the horsetail which DDs and I spent ages crawling along the ground snipping/digging up today.

It was the discovery of the FUCKING BINDWEED. Precisely one week ago, we saw no sign. Today, we found bindweed wound all over the trees and shrubs, up to a height taller than me - it had come through the back fence in several places and launched a simultaneous assault. We have unwound and removed as much as we could. But it's nearly impossible because we can't access the source behind our plants.

I think I'm going to have to buy weedkiller, which is not something I ever like to use in my garden. Not least because I don't want to risk damaging my own plants. I see that Roundup Gel is discontinued, so what does the thread suggest for killing bindweed?

You can mix the round up with wall paper paste and smear it on the bindweed ( wearing glove, obvs). I've done that and it works well.

With your neighbour, I had similar with a neighbour's bamboo which was trying to take over the world. I spoke to them about it and it turned out that they hadn't planted it and weren't desperately keen to keep it, so we started a combined effort to destroy it. That kind of bamboo is an absolute beast, the sort that covers entire hillsides in SE Asia, and the only real option was poison. We're now on year two of weekly spraying during the growing season and it's finally starting to back off. With a friendly approach to the neighbour you might be able to persuade her to do the same.

Editing to say that I don't like using weedkiller either but regard this sort of thing as in extremis.

I'd second Roundup. I also don't like using it (not least after watching my mother's Parkinson's disease) but am prepared to use it (properly gloved, making sure it only goes on the plant, not the ground) to get rid of bindweed, ground elder, Russian vine. Not sure about horsetails. My pond needs a very major overhaul and one of its problems is water horsetails - I'd love to get rid of them but am not sure whether that would be possible without going all year zero and getting rid of everything back to bedrock.

From what I've heard this stuff works: https://www.progreen.co.uk/weed-control/horsetail-marestail-control/

Thanks - I see it is available in Ireland so I'll hold it in consideration.

I always remember the awful warning in the National Botanic Gardens about 25 years ago - they built lovely replica native habitat beds - a raised bog, a limestone pavement etc etc so they could grow and showcase lots of native plants. In one of them they planted a very rare horsetail.

The rare horsetail looked around and said 'goody, lots of space for me' and that was that. I'm not sure what the NBG did - they were very anti herbicides for a while, which is great, but realistic when confronted with rampaging Equisetum? not sure.