News - Page 54
Plant for autumn colour to keep your garden looking gorgeous well into the first frosts. It's a great time of year to get new shrubs and trees into the ground and there's a fantastic range in our garden centre, all brilliantly colourful at this time of year. Here are a few of our favourites:
Toffee apple tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) adds scent to the autumn display, releasing a sweet perfume like toffee apples as it drops its yellow, red a...
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Time to put the veg garden to bed after a fantastic year, with enough summer sunshine to coax fruit into a frenzy and filling basket after basket of beans, fat pea pods and elegant courgettes.
As the summer harvest slows, though, it's time to get the veg garden ready for its winter rest so it's in perfect shape for doing it all again next year. Follow our step-by-step guide and you'll be raring to go ag...
Plant your bulbs this month as autumn is the key time for getting daffodils, crocuses, winter aconites, muscari, hyacinths and of course tulips into the ground. Choose from the rainbow of varieties now available in our garden centre, then follow our ten golden rules so they're raring to go next spring.
Get the timing right – plant most bulbs now, but leave...
Start a school garden and you'll join a small army of enthusiastic youngsters learning while getting their hands well and truly dirty all across Ireland.
This week sees Ireland's first-ever school garden education conference at the Marino Institute in Dublin (www.mie.ie). It's a fantastic way to learn about school gardening, whether you're already running a school gardening club or...
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What to do in the garden in October:
Autumn is in the air this month, with the leaves turning and the nights turning chill, bringing on one of the year's most spectacular explosions of colour as the trees turn red, yellow and burnished copper. Keep the fireworks going with our must-do jobs this month:
General tasks:
October's plant of the month is the heuchera, the plant that changed the way we look at leaves forever. Heucheras take coloured foliage to a whole new level, with varieties in every shade from deepest near-black through red, silver, amber and lime-green. Their sheer diversity allows you to experiment with different effects whatever your gardening style: in fact no garden should be without a few of these versatile grow-anywhere plants.
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Stock up on spring bulbs to fill your garden with colour just when you need it most, as the chill of winter gives way to the warmth of a new gardening year. Plan your display carefully and you can have colour from December right through till May with bulbs you can buy and plant now.
Among the first to peep above ground are winter aconites and of course snowdrops. Add brilliant blue
Love your conifers for National Conifer Week this week – a perfect chance to get to know this wonderfully diverse yet often misunderstood group of plants.
You'll probably find at least one conifer in your own garden – a recent poll carried out by the Horticultural Trades Association found almost a third of garden owners had one. And no wonder: easy to care for and fitting in anywhere in the garden...
Stake taller asters as they're top heavy in full flower and very vulnerable to being knocked over by the heavy rain and gusty winds of autumn. A little extra support at this time of year does wonders to keep your clumps perky and upright.
You can use all kinds of material to stake your plants but try to make them as unobtrusive as possible. Something as simple as whippy offcuts from summer shrub pruning...
Bring out your apples! There are apple days happening all over Ireland this autumn and it's a great chance to find out what that mystery variety growing in your garden is, as well as sampling different apples and discovering more about them.
Apples have been part of Irish history since mediaeval times: over 70 distinctively Irish varieties are still grown today, with such memorable names as 'Lady's Finger of Offaly', 'Maiden's Blush' and 'Blo...
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