Personal Thoughts
In May my wife and I celebrated our Golden Wedding Anniversary. Amongst the presents that we received were three lovely yellow rose bushes, and they were all different and all the names started with the word "Golden". This gave me the nice problem of finding a good place to plant them. I decided that I would create a new bed for them in view of the summerhouse that I built a couple of tears ago. What passes for soil under the lawn by the summerhouse is terrible. It is just solid clay. Roses need good soil, so I removed the turf which will be stacked upside down in a pile to rot, then the top few inches and finally broke up the sub soil under this. I then refilled the hole with a mixture of rotted turf, compost, and sandy soil from the other part of my garden. Some blood fish and bone fertilizer was worked in, and as soon as it has settled the roses will be planted through holes in a membrane. Preparing a bed this thoroughly is hard work, but I am looking forward to the display next year. The other topic which I am currently thinking about is gardens and holidays. If one has a small garden and plants it with shrubs or drought resistant plants leaving the garden to go on holiday is not a serious problem. If your garden contains a greenhouse, hanging baskets, bedding, vegetables and fruit holidays need more serious consideration. House plants can also be a problem. I find that with my large garden it is easiest to schedule holidays for June and September onwards. September is satisfactory because garden activity is slowing down then and a fortnight away is not a problem. June is OK providing the weather lets one get all the vegetables and bedding planted up before the holiday date. One then hopes that the soft fruit will not be over ripe on your return. The greenhouse needs a friendly and knowledgeable neighbour to do the watering, and I am lucky with that at the moment. You can get automatic watering systems which will water your precious plants automatically, and I know two people who make this work very successfully with their collections of plants, but it means getting the setting correct on the nozzles that deliver the water to the various pots, and this is not easy.
With house plants you can improvise by standing the plants on capillary matting in a tray with the end of the matting coming out of the tray and dipping into a bowl of water. If you go for this it needs to be set up a few days before the holiday so that you are sure that it is working.
Weather Records
May was a wet month with 72.7 mm (2.9" ) of rain at Kersey. The three month figure is now 222 mm (8.7" )which is well above average. The total so far for 2008 is 314 mm (12.4" ) which means that we have had over half of last years rainfall in the first 5 months of this year. When I picked up the figures from Kate she told me that in the first 6 days of June we had had another 28 mm (1.1" ), so it looks as though June will be another wet month.
The maximum temperature in May was 26 Cel ( 79 F ) and the minimum was 3 Cel ( 37 F ). These figures are very typical.
My ground temperature in mid June was 14 Cel ( 57 F ) . This is cool for this time of year .
Open Gardens
Sunday 13th July Rosedale, Bures
Sunday 13th July Woodwards, Coddenham
Sunday 27th July Tollemache Hall Offton
Hints
The main hint for this month is to carry some secateurs with you as you inspect your garden, and to systematically dead head plants as the flowers go over. This is particularly applicable to roses, and sweet peas, but most annuals will also give a longer and better show if they are dead headed, and some of the early flowering perennials may also reward you with a second flush of flowers. This is particularly true just before you go on holiday when it pays to cut off the flowers that will go over while you are away. July is a good month for cutting and drying herbs and lavender for winter use. The lavender should be cut just before the flowers are fully open. It is also a good month for lifting and dividing Irises that have flowered. Select the biggest single rhizomes for replanting, and cut half of the leaves off. Do not plant too deeply. The tops of the rhizomes should be above the soil.
The potting compost you buy for your house plants, and containers will feed them if the plants are growing well for 5 to 6 weeks. After this they will need some extra nourishment. There are various ways of providing this. The "modern" way is to use pellets of one of the slow release fertilizers. These will release their contents slowly over the season, so it is a once a year job. The alternatives are soluble fertilizers like Phostrogen and Miraclegro which you dissolve in water and then water the containers. The liquid feed needs repeating every couple of weeks. Ideally different plants require different mixes of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium and the general fertilizers which I have mentioned are a compromise. Chempac make a range of soluble fertilizers blended to suit particular plants for example one for African Violets and a different one for Cacti. These are worth using for your special plants.
John Rye


Hadleigh & District Garden Club
JUNE PLANT SALE AND SUPPER What a simply fantastic day June 9th turned out to be after days of rain and very indifferent weather generally, making lawn cutting and vital garden jobs virtually impossible. How amazing than to wake to a perfect English summer day, no wind and wall to wall sunshine all day and more importantly for memebers of Hadleigh and District Garden Club, all evening as well so we were able to enjoy our plant sale, garden meeting (i.e. wandering about) and supper to the full. The garden was still somewhat damp in places but I don’t thank there were too many wet feet, although there were plently of weeds to be seen. I thank if one stood still long enough one really could see them grow this year!
I would very much like to thank everyone for coming and making it such a successful evening and especially to all those members who helped me so much with the nitty gritty of car parking, serving, clearing up etc and of course thank you everyone for the beautiful bouquet, very, very much appreciated. Don’t forget there are still a few places available for our visit to Great Dixter on August 17th. You don’t have to be a member, just contact Carole Cranston on 823130 for details. The new season begins on September 8th. We meet at 7.30pm in the United Reform Church Community Room when the speaker will be David Holmes on “Garden Antiques”
Ruth Allen 01473 822323