Gardeners World episode 20 2012: By the end of August, gardens are full of colour and produce. With a Bank Holiday to enjoy in his garden, Monty Don is busy showing us how to plan late summer colour in our flowerbeds.
Carol Klein visits East Yorkshire, in search of the harebell, one of her favourite wild flowers. She also visits a fantastic historic garden to appreciate the harebell’s cultivated cousin, the campanula. Rachel de Thame celebrates the success of her project with a group of army wives at a Didcot military base as they harvest the blooms from their cut flower garden for the regiment to enjoy at a celebration lunch.
Monty is also sharing viewers’ tips on how to overcome the onslaught of slugs and snails as well as showing us how to successfully reseed bare patches in the lawn.
Gardeners World episode 20 2012
Cut flowers
Save yourself a fortune and grow your own cut flowers. It’s so easy to do, as our group of novice gardeners from the Vauxhall Barracks in Didcot soon discovered. With a bit of help and lots of encouragement from Rachel de Thame, they’ve managed to turn what was a car park into a vibrant community garden. See how they got on when local florist, Jo Wise, turned up.
Many garden plants can be enjoyed as cut flowers and foliage in the home, offering cheaper and diverse alternatives to florist flowers. Borders can be adapted to provide cutting material throughout the year. Alternatively, dedicate a part of the garden to growing cut flowers.
If space allows, dedicate a part of the garden to growing just cut flowers. The advantage of a cutting garden over picking from borders is that it avoids depleting beds and borders, as well as providing a more productive planned area for the cut flower gardener.
Plant or sow in rows; this makes weeding, staking and picking so much easier. Take the final spread of plants into account and allow access between the rows. If planted too close together, plants will fall into each other, get tangled and may be damaged, making them less suitable for harvesting. As taller plants are often grown for cut flowers, robust supports are usually needed.
Reseeding a lawn
Lawns often develop a bald patch when they don’t get enough light. This is very often the case beneath a tree, where the roots of the tree only make the problem worse by sucking up all the moisture. Monty Don has a go at rectifying the situation in his own garden at Longmeadow.
