Gardeners World episode 2 2019: As spring approaches, it is time to get going with sowing seeds and Monty recommends varieties to sow now for months of summer colour. With conifers enjoying a revival, he also plants up a pot to give interest all year round.
Adam Frost is inspired by a visit to York Gate in Leeds. Famed for the use and manipulation of plants to give structure to the garden, Adam shows us how we can replicate parts of its design for our own gardens. Annual climbing plants are an easy and inexpensive way to fill our gardens with colour and the head gardener at Parham House in Sussex shows us what varieties have proved to be a success in his trial at the gardens there.
Gardeners World episode 2 2019
Wild daffodil
The wild daffodil is smaller than horticultural varieties, with paler petals and a deep yellow trumpet-like tube. The leaves are grey-green, thin, long and flattened. It grows in groups so can be quite an impressive sight.
Grow your own spuds
Potatoes are a versatile vegetable that is eaten all year round. The tubers vary in size, colour, texture and taste and can be grown from spring to autumn. Potatoes require an open, frost-free site with deep, fertile, moisture-retentive and crumbly soil for high quality and heavy yields. Improve soils by adding organic matter, such as well-rotted manure, in the autumn.
Before planting, supplement with a general fertilizer, such as Growmore or blood, fish and bone, applied to the soil surface or spread along the sides of the drill during sowing, at the rate of 1kg per 10m (2.2lb per 33ft) row. Half of this amount will be enough if the garden is known to be fertile.
Winter-flowering shrubs
There’s something especially valuable about shrubs that flower in winter’s short and often dreary days. Seeing these delightful and resilient flowers taking frost, rain and snow in their stride lifts our spirits. Many are fragrant and can be cut for indoor winter posies.
All about yew
Yew (Taxus baccata) is a handsome native tree or shrub whether planted in a contemporary or traditional setting. It is a classic choice for planting as a free-standing specimen, as topiary, in containers and makes an excellent, long-lived hedge. Careful selection, soil preparation and planting will ensure successful establishment of these timelessly fashionable plants.
Juniper
A prickly, sprawling evergreen shrub in the Cypress family with short spiky leaves. Juniper blooms with small yellow flowers, followed by ‘berries’ – actually fleshy cones, that start green but ripen to blue-black. These are famously used to flavour gin and certain meat dishes particularly game and venison. Used whole they impart a bitter, crunchy bite to savoury dishes. In fact, the word “Gin” derives from either genièvre or jenever – the French and Dutch words for “juniper”!
