News - Page 57
Everything's coming up roses in Belfast as the city celebrates its 38th annual Rose Week – a city-wide festival for everyone who loves roses.
It's a chance to stroll around one of Ireland's most beautiful rose gardens, the stunning International Rose Garden at Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park. With more than 45,000 blooms and a huge variety of roses from cluster and large-flowered to miniatures, it's an unrivalled chance to find that perfect...
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Keep the greenhouse pest free by staying alert for signs of pests and diseases. This is the time of year when many come out of hiding and start to feast on your tomatoes, cucumbers and melons, turning them from healthy plants to sickly, mottled and struggling ones – so it's worth taking action early.
Use a yellow sticky trap as an early warning of trouble ahead: you'll often see greenhouse pests like whitefly on s...
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Plant autumn-flowering bulbs now for an injection of late colour that will have your garden performing at its peak right into winter.
Showy autumn flowerers are a great way of pepping up your borders if they're prone to late-summer flagging. Pack containers for a sunny spot on the patio, or fill your borders with the season's last hurrah.
Here are five late-season spectaculars you'll find right now in our garden centre:
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See a garden fit for a President as the Donegal Garden Trail opens for business with a new addition to its sparkling lineup of the county's best gardens.
'Irish Garden for the White House' was created by Ireland's best-known designer, Diarmuid Gavin, for the US President in Washington DC and is currently being built in the gardens of the White House. For the first time you can see an exact replica at Castlefinn, Co. Donegal, a walled garden p...
Read more...Mother Nature is very clever. She knows that if every apple is allowed to develop, none will reach their optimal size. So she allows some to fall at this time of year.Sometimes it's necessary to help her along. Where there are clusters of 3 or more apples in any one bunch, take out the largest, known as the king apple, so that the others can develop to their optimal size.
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July's plant of the month is the dahlia, a real glamour puss and a flamboyant star of the late summer border. Gardeners can't get enough of them at the moment: maybe it's because they're such great value for money, providing spectacular colour from mid-summer until the first frosts.
There's a variety to suit everyone, from the simple, large daisies of the 'Bishops' series to tall, showy cactus types like striking deep red 'Spartacus'. Pompons like 'David Howa...
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So many gardens peak in July: this is when the delicate shades of early summer give way to the joyful colours and scents of high summer. Make sure your personal fireworks display lasts with this month's key jobs.
General tasks:
Trim hedges now that birds have finished raising their first broods, snipping new growth back to a sharp, neat shape.
Save water to ease the pressure on domestic...
For a short time each year, elder trees flower. Their flowers are used to make delicious Elderflower cordial. Flowers are collected from elder trees growing in hedgerows & other wild & uncultivated places. You’ll need about 30 flower heads to make cordial. Elder trees are flowering now, but only for a few weeks before they’re gone again for another year.
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Keep crops going through autumn with some clever planning now. The veg garden may be at full throttle, with new potatoes, asparagus broad beans and peas on your plate and gooseberries and rhubarb for dessert – but if you don't look ahead your harvest will come crashing to a halt in a couple of months' time.
A late sowing of veg now means you can replace your earliest crops the moment you've harvested them, giving your veg garden a second wind which will las...
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Sow next year's spring display of wallflowers, forget-me-nots, hollyhocks and foxgloves – all of which are biennials, meaning they flower in their second year. Start them now and by autumn they'll be fat clumps of leaves, ready to throw up flower spikes to brighten up your garden next April and May.
You'll find dozens of varieties on sale in your favourite garden centre right now as seed. Hollyhocks come in single or exotic-looking double b...
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