News - Page 103

Now is the perfect time to sow French, climbing and runner beans into pots under cover. It’s a great year to do it, as 2017 has been declared Year of the Bean, so there are loads of new varieties to try plus old heritage favourites returning to our shelves too!

Sow runner beans

Most climbing beans are frost tender, so it’s worth waiting till late spring to sow as the risk of late frost is much lower. Sow about 5cm deep in small pots...

Flowering cherries all belong to the Prunus family and offer such staggering variety you’ll find one for every spot in the garden. All offer a long season of interest, with spring blossom and yellowy-orange autumn colour. Some are even at their best in winter, such as copper-barked Tibetan cherry (P. serrula) and P. x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’, which flowers from November to February.

For spring blossom it’s hard to beat snowy white ‘Taihaku’, the great white...

Now is the time to start frost-tender vegetables including courgettes, cucumbers, French beans and squash. You’ll find these on sale at the garden centre in Lymington both as seed or as young plants, ready-grown for you. These plants are destroyed by cold weather so can’t be planted outdoors until after the last threat of frost has passed: luckily they grow at lightning speed, so it doesn’t matter that you’re starting them off later in spring.

Handsome, versatile, and in full flower in winter and early spring when there’s little else around: every garden should have a viburnum. Many of the winter flowerers are fragrant – snip a bloom-laden branch in December to bring indoors and fill the house with perfume – and some also have handsome blue, red or black berries.

Many are evergreen and all are more or less maintenance free: just trim back to size if they outgrow their space. Find them a warm, shelt...

Give spring bulbs a little TLC now and they’ll bounce back even better next year for an even bigger and more colourful display.

Spring Bulbs

As blooms fade, pinch or cut them out to stop the bulbs wasting energy producing unwanted seedheads. This make sure that all the plant’s energy goes back into the bulb and encourages bigger clumps to form.

The only exception is bulbs you are naturalising in long grass, like snowdrops, cro...