Gardening With Annuals

You can eventually get pretty far down with hardpan, particularly if you put some muscle into it. Gardeners who want plants to put down deep roots or who want to put in a tree but don't want to dig and scrape for what seems like forever can rent a power digger or hire a professional to do this sweaty job.

B is for bedrock
In some areas, not even scraping the soil gets the hole deeper. It is possible that you have bedrock — a layer of some type of rock underneath the soil.
It is tempting to try to plant in the softer soil above hardpan or bedrock. But it's not wise. When water comes in — hose water or rain — it sits above the hardpan or bedrock almost as if its contained in a bowl. The roots reach down until they are blocked by the hardpan or bedrock. Then they become waterlogged, and if the situation continues, the roots will eventually rot.

In warm weather, hardpan and bedrock cause additional problems. Plant roots, instead of reaching deep into the soil, are confined above the hard layer, in a shallow layer of soil. Being shallow, the soil dries out very quickly and plants wilt very soon after being watered.

How high is the water table?
Natural water under the earth can be very deep down or almost just below the surface. When it rises above the surface, as in streams or floods, you can easily see it. But if the water is just below the surface you don't notice it or even think about it. That is, until you start digging a planting hole. In addition to other drainage problems, you may see water seeping into your hole. You will either have to plant in another way (in a pot or a sunken container, for example) or consider installing some type of drain line.

Basically, a drain line is a downhill trench with the high point at your targeted planting area and the low point where you want the water to emerge. The trench will have to be lined and pipes installed. You may prefer to use a professional landscaper for this job.

Dealing with drainage problems
Dealing with drainage problems depends on what you want to plant. If you have hardpan, dig down to a minimum of 30 centimeters for a small plant and 1 meter for a small tree. Replace all soil with good topsoil. For a deep-rooted plant such as a tree, you may want to dig down as far as possible, fill the hole with good soil, and then create a raised mound about 60 centimeters high. Alternatively, use containers or raised beds.

Masterminding mulch
MULCH IS ANYTHING that can be put on the surface of the soil without Injuring the plants. Mulch reduces topsoil erosion, helps keep soil from baking In the sun and drying in the wind, and discourages the sprouting and growth
of many weeds. Mulch also helps limit soil movement during the winter Sudden /lasts, alternating with sudden thaws, make the soil shift, disturbing plants. In the vegetable patch, mulch scattered underneath such plants as cucumbers, marrows, or unstaked tomatoes acts as a cushion. This cushion decreases vegetable contact with damp ground, a situation that encourages rot.

When to mulch
In deter weeds, apply mulches in early spring before seeds sprout, or germinate. To control water loss during hot summer months, apply mulches after the ground warms tip in spring. If you place a mulch too early, the soil stays cool and plant growth slows. [his particularly affects vegetables such as corn, cucumbers, melons, and early-ripening tomatoes, which need warmth for a good start. To protect more delicate plants from winter frosts, apply mulch straight after the first hard frost of the season.

Do not apply mulch on seeded areas or around emerging seedlings. This will encourage damping off, eliminating qourtinq new plant growth almost overnight.
If you're growing seedlings, wait until they have become reasonably sturdy before you start mulching around them.

Picking the perfect mulch
As with soil improvers, lots of different substances might be used as a mulch. Some are organic and some are not. The best mulches are inexpensive, easy to get, and easy to use. Organic mulches disintegrate over time, but you can then dig them into the soil, which is quite beneficial.

Mulches can be made from all manner of substances, such as spent mushroom compost, rotted garden compost, chipped bark, shredded bark, and coconut shells. There are even decorative mulches, such as gravel, pebbles, or glass beads. I'm going to go into a bit more detail about mulches on the next few pages.

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Guide To Gardening

Pebbles

Gravel, pebbles, or crushed rock make an elegant mulch, and they are often used for the front of the house, where looks are everything. Colors include white, grey, shades of beige-brown, and a dark auburn for volcanic rock. These colors can be selected to blend with your home or patio.

Be careful when putting stone mulches close to a lawn, because mowers can pick up and throw the pieces. This can cause very serious injury to the person mowing and to passers-by. Rock mulches don't integrate into soil over time, the way organic materials will. They tend to scatter onto adjacent pathways, so put down more rock about every 5 years.

•The muted shades and smooth texture of pebbles look particularly attractive next to plants of different hues of green, such as golden creeping jenny and bugle. The effect looks voy natural.

Black poluitherte

I call this black bin-liner plastic, which, to me, describes it better. Sold in rolls from about 30 to 120 centimeters wide, black plastic makes a functional, if unattractive, mulch. Sunlight doesn't penetrate the plastic, so weed germination (and thus weed survival) is minimal. An added benefit is its heat-holding capacity Planting within black plastic is simple. You carefully cut a hole in the plastic where you want your plant to grow. Then you dig a planting hole, backfilling with a mixture of soil and organic matter. Plants sited within a plastic mulch stay about 5 degrees warmer than their plastic-free neighbors. Those few degrees can mean the
PLASTIC MULCH
survival of tender plants when the weather fluctuates.
Many gardeners use black plastic covered with a layer of bark chippings or gravel.
The covering enhances the plastic's appearance, endurance, and safety. Plastic without a covering can be slippery when wet. Covered, it is less exposed to the elements and to damage caused by foot traffic. If you do decide to use this lightweight material alone, you will have to weight it down. You can do this with either soil or rocks.
Black plastic will shred after a few years. If unprotected, plan on replacing it in 2 to 3 years. Note that plastic is not the best choice on poorly drained areas, because it holds the moisture in the ground.
Wood products
Bark chips, usually brown or reddish-brown, often come from pine, cedar, fir, or Scandinavian redwood trees. Quite natural looking, bark chips make a very attractive mulch. Some gardeners put a layer of black plastic beneath the bark to help keep weeds away. Bark chunks, available in various sizes, tend to scatter or thin after a while. Plan on augmenting them every 2 to 3 years. The larger the size initially the longer bark chips last and the less they tend to scatter. Another option is to use small wood chips in various sizes. Spread them in a generous layer that
BARK CHIPS is around about 7 centimeters deep. If these small wood chips are used continually and not mixed with anything else, you may need to add a bit of extra nitrogen fertilizer.
If you're considering sawdust, use only well-composted sawdust. If you simply can't wait, you can mix it with shredded fallen leaves or straw bits to break it up. As with chipped wood, some gardeners like to add some extra nitrogen fertilizer to their sawdust mulch.
In some areas there is a plethora of pines, and therefore pine needles. They are quite useful as a mulch if you have acid-loving plants, such as azaleas, camellias, chrysanthemums, and rhododendrons. However, you must remember never to smoke a cigarette or use a match around dry pine needles. They are extremely flammable. Old, shredded, oak leaves are also useful around acid-loving plants.
Your recticled garden
Fallen leaves and dried lawn clippings must be used as a team in order to make an effective mulch. Using just leaves, or just lawn clippings, will eventually result in a matted, smelly damp blanket.
•Bark chunks and chips help to control weeds by blocking out the light. The mulch will need augmenting, but should last for several years.

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Arranging Cut Flowers

Perpetual and prolific

That's not all. Most biennials self-sow, but not so promiscuously that you curse the moment you introduced them. I've banned forget-me-nots from my garden for this reason. Some years, I've weeded out more forget-me-not than chickweed, but you don't have to worry about this with the ones I recommend. There will be a scattering of offspring all around the parent plant, but not willy-nilly all over the garden. You can leave the seedlings where they are, thinning them out to give them enough room to thrive, or you can transplant them to another place (see opposite).

They're invaluable in their season of flowering too. In both the cutting garden and ornamental garden, the turn of the season between spring and summer can be a momentary blip in the color bonanza. Tulips are over and the bulk of annuals haven't yet got going. Biennials, along with autumn-sown hardy annuals, plug this gap, flowering prolifically from the middle of May. The demonstration gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show are always stacked with biennials - they can be guaranteed to flower in that crucial third week of May.

Which biennials to grow
My favorite biennial is the Iceland poppy (Papaver nudicaule 'Meadow Pastels'). No one should be without this plant. It's the best cut flower on my whole seed list. If you sear the stems in boiling water for thirty seconds, it lasts a week in water. You can pick it in full flower, or in tight bud and it will open as it stands in the vase. But don't just think of it as a cut flower. I love it in the rest of the garden too. By early May it's covered in huge, saucer-sized blooms, with ten to fifteen flowers on each plant. They're like crumpled swatches of fine silk, a palmful on the end of each stem. I love the colors in this mix - pink, white, cream, primrose and orange - bright and pale together; and each is scented like a Tazetta narcissus. If you don't want mixed colors, go for P nudicaule 'Red Sail', which is just as good - a single color, the red-orange of tomato soup, but without the scent. Drifts of both these plants look good in late spring and they'll still be looking good in late summer if you keep picking the flowers - live- rather than dead-heading, not allowing them to run to seed.

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