Well, its been a while however thought I had better get back on the bike and add a bit to the blog. We have had the dullest, coolest and dampest summer I can remember. The plants have loved it, reinvigorating themselves after 3 or 4 years of spring summer and autumn droughts. Some of the older trees near the house, acers, walnuts, magnolias and the koelreuteria have really struggled and this season has been a bit of a respite from the previous dry years, hopefully they will have restored a bit of root! Around the garden the plants are looking lush and in good health however even this year we have strangely still lost a number of plants, some of them quite old, we think as a cummulative effect of the preceeding droughts sometimes compounded by an injury allowing in disease. As my father always says regarding animals " a lot of metabolic diseaes are just a flash name for starvation!" and so I think it is with plants, if they are getting enough nutrients from the soil which an adequate rainfull allows they are usually robust enough to fight off most infections. The last few years have weekened the health of a number of plants and even with a kind summer like this we have still lost a few plants across a wide range of genus.
At this time of the year we are doing our pruning, lifting branches that are inhibiting the growth of other plants, letting in light for lower growing plants to flower. It is always a good idea to do the prunning while there are still leaves on the trees so that it makes it possible to assess how much to take off as if done without leaves it is easy to not take enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment