Rearranging the South Side Garden
Hello friends,
This summer I wasn't very happy with my south side garden. The blueberry bushes weren't getting enough sun, and didn't produce many blueberries, and the gooseberry bush as always didn't produce very nice fruit for us to eat.
As I was tidying up our blackcurrant bush after we finished harvesting its fruit, the gooseberry bush beside it poked me in the butt for the very last time. I was sick of getting attacked by it, and also since it wasn't producing any good fruit, it was time to pull the whole thing out from the ground. Before you can say "where's my garden fork", I had started cutting the gooseberry bush back so I could access the inner part of the plant.
I did indeed get out my garden fork, and dug out the gooseberry bush within in a matter of minutes. The hardest part was shoving all the gooseberry bush cuttings into a green waste bag without getting stabbed by it as I did so.
With the gooseberry plant out of the ground, I turned my attention to the blueberry bushes. I dug them out and transplanted them into large orange pots which recently held dahlia seedlings (before I made the decision that I didn't want to keep them in my breeding program). After filling up the pots with potting mix, planting the two blueberry bushes, and giving them an appropriate blueberry fertiliser (acid based), I moved the pots into their final positions on the patio.
Now the blueberry plants get all day sun, and they are much happier, even putting on new growth within their first week. Their small amount of fruit from this season have finally started changing colour, after staying green all summer long. I now just have to keep remembering to water them regularly so they don't dry out.
As for the empty spaces in the south side garden, I used some of my flower farming earnings to invest in two hydrangea bushes. The south side garden gets more shade than anywhere else in the garden, and also we need some privacy on that side of the house due to a nosy neighbour. I chose the paniculata hydrangea, Limelight, for the gooseberry spot, and it has conical shaped lime green/cream flowers which are popular in the floristry industry, and as a bonus it also reaches up to a height of 2 m tall.
In the blueberry bushes position, I planted the paniculata hydrangea Sundae Fraise, which has creamy flowers which transition to strawberry pink flowers in autumn. It is a stunning hydrangea which reaches 1.5 m tall, making it perfect for giving us some more privacy on that side of the garden.
This wasn't a planned gardening project when I started out pruning the blackcurrant bush, but I'm very pleased with how it has turned out. Hopefully in the future I will get bigger blueberry harvests, and the hydrangea plants will provide us both privacy and flower farming income in the years to come.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Flower Farming This Summer
Hello friends,
One day while I was doom scrolling on Instagram, I came across a reel from a local flower farmer, searching for local flower growers to sell their excess flowers to her for her floristry business. Since I was at the time in the middle of completing Floret Flower Farm's online Flower Farming Workshop, I thought this was a good opportunity to do some practical work for the workshop, by harvesting my flowers and foliage and selling them.
In summer my home garden is full of many flowers including varieties of dahlia, hydrangea, zinnia, scabiosa, cosmos, calendula, as well as many other precious goodies including my grown from seed dahlias. Most of these flowering plants are used in the floral industry for selling as cut flowers, and also many of these plant varieties that I grow do not travel very well over long distances, meaning that local florists need to find local growers to provide them for their floral work.
I contacted the flower farmer, and within a few days she came to my home to look at my garden, and also to pick her first bucket of flowers. She was impressed with my flower varieties, and especially my dahlias and Floret zinnia plants, and she quickly got to work photographing the flowers, and also harvesting them for use in her floristry business.
One of her favorite dahlias to harvest was a Floret Petite seedling dahlia of mine, which is currently named FP6, and it is an unusual anemone dahlia in shades of pink, red and yellow. I'm very happy with this dahlia, and intend to grow this as a second year seedling dahlia next year.
It wasn't long before she contacted me again, with the intention to buy more flowers from me, which I was very happy to do. This time she taught me how to harvest all the various flowers in the garden, so in the future I could harvest flowers for her myself.
This came in handy the next week which was Valentines Day week, the busiest time in a florist's year. For the first time I harvested all the flowers and foliage by myself, and I really enjoyed the process, harvesting the flowers that usually just flowered in my garden, and then processed them ready for her to pick them up.
I had so much fun harvesting zinnias, dahlias, hydrangea, and also filler flowers like calendula, cosmos and coreopsis. I also picked foliage plants like rosemary and dogwood for her. When she came to pick up all the flowers up after they'd been harvested, she asked to pick some more, as she planned to make over 100 bouquets for Valentines Day. By the time she left, my garden had provided her six buckets of flowers and foliage, and I was so pleased to have the experience under my belt.
From here on out, she is happy to buy flowers from me whenever she has the need for flowers, and I'm willing to sell them to her. I'm very pleased with this arrangement because it's a way for me to do some flower farming without committing myself to owning a full on flower farm, and all the commitments that come with it, but it also means that any income I receive from this means I can invest it into more plants for my garden, and most likely more dahlia varieties...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky, and now also Facebook.
Pressing Flowers and Leaves This Summer.
Hello friends,
This summer I undertook the process of pressing my own flowers and leaves, with the intention to arrange them in specimen frames.
For years I've seen this done on Instagram and also Pinterest, and I wanted the opportunity to try this myself. I already own a flower press thanks to my husband making me one back in the days when I was pressing and drying leaves and flowers for my New Zealand Certificate in Horticulture, and I've kept the flower press all these years just in case I needed it once again.
So over the summer I wandered around the garden every now and then, picking out flowers and leaves that appealed to me, and then set up my flower press for pressing them.
My flower press is made out of plywood which is sealed with polyurethane, and measures 20 cm wide by 30 cm deep and 10 cm tall, and has 7 sections to press flowers. The flower press is held in place with screws, washers, and wing nuts to apply even pressure over the plywood sheets.
I cut up a large number of newspaper pages to fit the flower press, and got to work laying out the flowers in the sections.
I separated out the flowers and leaves into groups based on what flower and leaf type they were, and also how deep they were, so that similar depth flowers and leaves were pressed together in the same section.
Once the flowers and leaves were separated out, I placed them face down on two pieces of newspaper, making sure the flowers and leaves weren't touching. Two sheets of newspaper were placed on top, and then a plywood board was placed above them to form the next section.
Once all the sections were filled, I placed the last plywood layer on top, and then tightened the screws using the washers and wing nuts to begin pressing the flowers. With all the wing nuts screwed down evenly with the same pressure, the flower press was left in our dry garage for up to two weeks to press and dry the flowers.
When the flower press was finally opened, it was time to remove the flowers and leaves from the paper layers. It can be a little tricky to remove the flowers and leaves without breaking them, but the best method I've found is to pry the paper away from the flowers and leaves (instead of prying the flowers and leaves away from the paper). For more tricky specimens, I used a pair of fine and flat tweezers to slide between the paper and flowers to break the seal.
With the flowers and leaves released from the newspaper, I threw out or recycled the used paper, as sometimes the paper can develop a fungal infection from drying plants, or the paper becomes uneven afterward, making it unsuitable for pressing again. The resulting pressed flowers were laid flat in between tissue paper layers in a cardboard box for storage.
My plan for now is to continue collecting and pressing flowers and leaves, and later on in the year I will begin crafting my specimen frames...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky, and now also Facebook.
Soil Testing in My Garden
Hello friends,
As part of the Floret Flower Farming workshop, it was suggested that we get soil testing done in our gardens/flower farms to check what our growing conditions are like.
So I dug out my horticulture course book on Soil Properties, and got to work. If you are ever thinking about studying horticulture, I do really recommend Open Polytechnic's "New Zealand Certificate in Horticulture", which is a free online course for anyone in New Zealand. I completed this course over a period of two years from 2016, and it was really worth it in my opinion.
First up was looking at the soil profile in my back garden by cutting a vertical profile through the soil with a spade. The organic horizon was 3 cm deep, followed by the topsoil (A horizon) which was 9 cm deep. Next, was the subsoil which was at 12 cm (B Horizon), and only was 3 cm deep. And lastly was horizon C, which is the weathered parent material.
Things to note in the soil profile: the top soil was dark brown in colour, but contained no earth worms, and the roots from plants only penetrated 10 cm down into the ground. The subsoil layers were yellow/orange in colour and formed very dense clods that were sticky when wet. This means there is not a deep topsoil layer for plants to grow in, and the lack of earthworms means that they are not bringing stuff down into the soil to improve the soil structure. This can be amended with compost and mulch, and hopefully with time earth worms will come into the garden.
Next up was the soil composition tests, which are the thread test, the ribbon test, and the soil settling tests. The thread and ribbon tests are qualitative, and the soil settling test is quantitative. Both the thread and ribbon tests (not shown), predicted the soil type was silty clay. This wasn't surprising because the suburb of Mosgiel sits on a flood plain.
The soil settling test was next, and it's a very simple experiment to do. First, dig down to 10 - 15 cm in the garden, and get a long bottle or cylinder with a lid, and fill the container half fill with soil at that layer. To the soil add 1 tablespoon of dish washing soap (this will help break the soil down into its components). Then fill to the top with water. Shake for 30 minutes, or until the soil is completely broken down to it's individual particles and no clumps remain. Let the particles settle at the bottom of the container, and as a warning, this may take weeks to happen if there is a high clay content in your soil.
Here is the result for my backyard soil, and my sample did indeed take weeks to settle because of the clay content.
The bottom layer in the bottle is the sand layer (usually only takes about a minute to settle). The middle layer in the sample is the silt layer (which takes 1 - 2 hours to settle). And finally the top layer is the clay layer (and this took about 3 weeks to settle). Qualitatively the silt layer is the thickest, followed by clay, and then sand. To measure it quantitatively you just need to measure the total depth of the sample, and then each of component layers, and then work out the percentages of the sand, silt and clay in the sample compared to the total soil measurement.
The quantitative results show that silt makes up 61.5% of the soil, clay makes up 23.1% of the soil, and sand makes up only 15.4% of the soil. This indeed makes it a silty clay soil.
The good thing about silty clay soil is that there are a lot of nutrients, but the bad thing about silty clay soil is that it dries as hard as a rock in summer, and is sticky and wet in winter. This means that in summer it's hard for the plants to take up water. And in the winter, the wet and sticky soil means that the plants can very easily rot, especially dahlia tubers...
The best ways to improve silty clay soils is by doing the following: add organic matter in the forms of compost and mulch, add a clay breaker (to help break up the clay and silt), avoid compaction of the soil by not walking on it wherever possible, and plant strategically with plants that will tolerate the current conditions. I plan to do all of these things in my garden beds in the coming years. I am already adding Tui Mulch and Feed to some of my front garden beds (I've been picking up some bags whenever I go into Mitre 10), but this will take a long period of time over the coming year as I can afford to buy the 40L bags. The thing I like about Tui Mulch and Feed is that it contains "A two-in-one combination provides the benefits of mulching whilst the healthy additions of blood and bone, mulching straw and sheep pellets replace vital nutrients used by your plants."
The next soil testing I wanted to do was using the soil test kit "Soil Check Now Kit" (which I purchased from Gubba when they had a sale) to check pH levels, along with Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium levels. Each kit comes with a bottle of demineralised water, which is enough to do 10 tests each for pH, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.
After reading all the instructions, and making sure I had the materials needed (like paper cups, measuring spoons, and mixing spoons), it was time to take the soil samples. I decided to test a sample of back garden soil, and also some glasshouse soil. I dug down to a depth of 15 cm of soil in the back garden and the glass house, and took soil samples of each equivalent to a large handful, before laying each of them out on some newspaper, crushing any lumps with the back of a spoon, and leaving them to dry overnight. After this, it was time to begin soil testing...
Glasshouse results:
The pH in the glasshouse was 6.5, making it slightly acidic, and it is the perfect pH for growing most plants.
The phosphorous levels in the glasshouse is high, at around 7 g/m², which is good for plant growth. This high level means I do not need to amend the soil in the glasshouse for my tomatoes, cucumbers, and capsicums.
The nitrogen levels in the glasshouse are high, at around 36 g/m², thanks to compost addition in the glasshouse each spring.
Potassium levels in the glasshouse are also high thanks to compost addition, at around 7 g/m². No amendments need to be done for potassium in the glasshouse at the moment.
Overall in the glasshouse has had significant amendments done to the soil each spring, with the addition of compost before tomato, capsicum, and cucumber plants are planted into the ground. At the end of this growing season I will repeat the soil testing to see if the levels have changed, and then I can make a decision whether more compost needs to be added to the soil in the glasshouse next spring.
Back garden results:
The pH of the back garden is pH 6.75, making it very slightly acidic. Most plants prefer it slightly more acidic than this, so I'll think about how to amend the pH in the back garden at the end of this growing season.
In the back garden nitrogen levels are at a medium level, around 18 g/m².
Phosphorous levels in the back garden are at a medium level, which is around 2 g/m².
And finally, potassium levels in the back yard are high, at around 18 g/m².
For the back garden, the medium levels of nitrogen and phosphorous in the soil, along with the high levels of potassium in the soil, means that the soil only requires moderate levels of fertiliser added over the season as plants take up nutrients from the soil. I will also be adding compost and mulch to all the garden beds in my garden over the coming year to build up the top soil and organic soil layers. Hopefully these soil amendments will improve the soil structure and bring earth worms into the soil.
In the meantime I have bought two organic fertilisers from Seacliff Organics (which is near Dunedin), to test their products on my garden.
First up is their Seacliff Opulent Bloom Mix, which is a topdressing powder to sprinkle on soil around flowering plants, and I plan to use this on my Floret zinnia beds this summer. It contains Fish Bone Meal, Langbeinite, Gypsum, Potash, TM7, BioPhos, and has an NPK of 1.7 : 9 : 5. It also contains a good dose of magnesium which is needed for flowering plants.
I also bought some horticultural coconut water to try, which contains "Naturally occurring bioactive
enzymes, including acid phosphatase, catalase, dehydrogenase, diastase,
peroxides, and RNA polymerases. Coconut water is rich in b-vitamins, sugars, minerals and traces of
calcium, iron, manganese, magnesium and zinc. Coconut Water Powder is
fairly innocuous, making it an awesome candidate for regular watering to
aid general plant health."
Overall, I can't wait to get started in improving the soil health in my garden over the coming years.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky, and now also Facebook.
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