Berries, pods & tribes

Tom's taking some simple steps to prolong the life of some of his plants and he's prepping for winter and the seaward Christmas.

Hi, Tom.

How's it going?

Hello.

You must have realised recently with the darker evenings, it's getting dark much earlier than usual and still quite dark in the morning.

There's a wind chill factor now whereas it was a nice warm breeze before.

And one or two of my favourite shrubs I've noticed, they're just starting to turn, that's the deciduous types, like the forsythia, yellow forsythia, which flowers about April, May period.

The leaves of that are turning, and so too is the viburnum bodnantens, dawn and other cultivars that emerge from it, it's a deciduous shrub which flowers throughout winter with those beautiful pink clusters of fragrant flowers where the leaves of that before they fall they've been turning reddish rather than green and they'll brighten up the color just before they fall more of that later of course it's just the beginning but it is there and while this is happening i also note that there are some containers from summer with still summer plants in, the bedding plants, and there's still colour there.

So please don't give up on summer yet.

What you can do is what we've been doing all the year through.

As soon as the flower fades, no matter what it is, then remove that flower and that encourages the plant to give you more.

Give a little autumn feed to your container and hopefully keep the show going for as long as you can.

On the other side of the coin is the plants that are starting to fashion up or shape up now to give us some colour during winter.

I'm talking about beginning with the berries, the fruiting, the ornamental fruiting plants, several of those looking really good at the moment.

And you know, this early in the year, the holly, we have two hollies, the basic holly, the green-leaved one, and a variegated leaf tolly and both of them of course are female, truthfully female I checked when they first planted them in May when they flower that there was a male and female part attached to the flower which means it's going to give you the fruit that you desire really for Christmas time and they have had the biggest crop ever this year it's quite amazing and at the moment just as we leave september move into october i haven't seen so many berries on the holly before Now, that raises a problem because a few weeks forward, fast forward a few weeks, and we're getting closer to Christmas.

And that's when the birds start to go with those berries as they ripen up.

And quite often, it comes to the Christmas week, I want one or two sprigs of holly with berries on to put around the pictures indoors, the paintings, etc.

And there's just very little left.

So what can we do about it? Well, in the past, I tried to net both of the trees, but they're quite tall now.

So I net a little bit, one or two little branches, and wrap the netting around as tightly as possible, allowing for not damaging the tree, of course.

And if you've got a bit of a thicket of net, then the birds can't get to those fruits, the berries, and They're not in danger of being entangled in loose netting.

That's one of the ways I tackle it.

Another one is, if you cut some of the leaves, prune one or two of the stems off with the leaf and the clusters of fruits on, the berries, and put them in a bucket of water in the garage, stand them in that, and it's amazing how long they will remain fresh.

Now, we're now about 10, 12, what is it, something like that, double-figure weeks away from Christmas celebrations.

I shouldn't be talking about Christmas this early, but the garden centres are full of trinkets and things related to it, so I'm going to mention it anyway on air.