Gardening With Caro

Looking forward to a brighter future

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Caro Sanders is a garden designer based in West London who loves helping home owners in London and the Home Counties transform their gardens from ugly ducklings into beautiful swans.  She can turn her critical eye on any patch of land and offer helpful advice to potential sellers as well as new buyers wanting to make the garden their own.  Trained in Garden Design at Capel Manor College, she creates gardens little and large, and believes that everyone is entitled to a great view, ideally from their own doorstep.
Contact details:               www.carogardendesign.co.uk          info@carogardendesign.co.uk
                020 8566 3750

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It’s a funny thing, but gardening folk need to live in different times.  Everyone else is happily rooted in the here and now, but we need to conjure up the future.  Prune this plant now, get beautiful flowers then.  (Or not, if you happen to be pruning just before the flowering season.  But that’s another story.)

  Right now, it’s time to think about what you want to see in the garden next spring. Yes, I’ve already swept past Christmas, New Year celebrations, February doldrums and the like and we’re into the glorious awakenings of the garden heralded by the magic of daffodils, snowdrops, anemones, tulips and the other wonderful colourful plants that light up the beginning of the new season. 

To get those then, you need to be planting now.  Of course the garden centres do sell pots of daffodils in flower BUT the brilliant thing is, you spend very little and have infinitely more choice if you pop a few bulbs in the ground now and wait for nature to do its thing. 

A few basics:

Bulbs look like onions.  Don’t eat them. (It often says that if you buy them in packets, I’ve not tried them myself.) 

They should be firm and fresh not saggy and wrinkly.  Like all the best things in life.

Plant them deep.  If the bulb is 3cm big plant at least 10cm down. Don’t think oh well it’s got a bit of soil on top, that’s fine, now I’m off to watch the Bake Off.  Stick at it.  That way you’ve got a good chance of them coming up for more than one year.

If, as is pretty likely if you live in the Ealing area , you have heavy London clay soil, then sprinkle some grit or sand into the planting holes for the bulbs to sit on, so they don’t get wet bottoms – perish the thought - and rot away before they even get started. 

Frighten off the bulb-munching squirrels by sprinkling chili powder liberally around the bulbs before covering them up.  Really.  And don’t put your hands near your face at all during this bulb-planting exercise.  Otherwise will definitely be tears before bedtime.

Tulips apparently like to be planted in November.  No I’ve not heard them say so, but that’s what Bulb Experts say (it’s to do with them not getting a particular tulip disease) so you can hang on till then for tulips, everything else can go in the ground now.

Bulbs look great in pots too, and little bulbs like crocus and smaller daffodils look good in the lawn, in roughly scattered drifts.  Yes, drift is a word associated with bulbs.  Wordsworth himself probably used it.

Don’t want to panic you but bulb companies and garden centres do run out of stocks as the weeks tick by, they only have so much stock and it won’t keep till next year.  So if you want a beautiful spring garden you need to act pretty quick. 

Last but not least – never make a note of what you planted where.  Then it’s a glorious surprise for you too.  I love that bit. As always – have fun!  And then, only then, can you watch the Bake Off.  You deserve it.

 

 

 

 

Caro Sanders



1st October 2014