My Garden Highlights - JUNE

[Music] june is the month when box clipping starts in earnest they used to say that it started on derby day but i think with climatic warming and things it can be a bit earlier but it's when they start to get fluffy and this is what i call fluffy as opposed to the birds on my right which are more felt and have been clipped and i think when you've got a shape like a bird it's more important that it looks cut quicker where something like a ball if it gets fluffy it just looks like a fluffy ball but a bird that gets fluffy you think what is that and you don't really register what it is so if you're going to do quite complicated shapes it is worth keeping on top of the job i think it's all about confidence you see people doing it so immaculately but really its practice makes perfect i am by no means perfect dave who helps me in the garden one day a week is much much better than me and the more you do it the more confident you get the easier it becomes so i'm determined to keep trying i don't want him to do it all i want to be as good as dave one day that's my aim but i have picked up some good tips from him and i found one of the most important things was i used it with tiny little hedge cutters but i think then you start to have rivets in them and stripes as you cut to slightly different lengths whereas when i use a meteor size hedge cutter and i notice that that's what dave does he gets a much smoother curve to his balls and to the chicken surprisingly enough so that's i think that's one thing and then when i've done it over with the bigger shears i then will use little clippers just to get any little sprigs that you've missed and it's important to look after your hedge cutters i think we're very bad at looking after kit or i know from my experience i can be and so i do wipe them when i finish with a damp cloth to get all the gunk and gunge off and then i'll use a lubricant on that i'll just spray it on afterwards run the hedge clippers for a bit and then spray it on the other side and run the hedge clippers for a bit so you're putting them away nice and clean ready for reuse professional hedge clippers will get them sharpened several times throughout the season but i think if you're an amateur you might send it away to be sharpened maybe once a year or something like that and it is worth it it really is worth it you'll get a much cleaner cut you do not want to clip when it's wet because when it rains if there's box flight around which most people might have a bit of the spores will just burst and go all over and start to infect other plants so you are really spreading the disease if you clip when it's wet or if it's going to rain within two or three days of you cutting so that's a big one to remember the other thing is when it's very hot if you cut in very hot sun then you can see you get a little bit of yellowing like we've got on the bird to my right won all these in fact and that's because after they were cut it got very hot so the way to avoid this if you can is to either do it in the evening at the end of the day when it's cooler so the leaves have all over night to heal through before the next load of bright hot sun or you put a fleece over the top of them and that helps avoid it but it is really it doesn't look like this for long it seems soon seems to grow out and looks much better what i dislike in common with many people is sweeping up the bits and so i tend to use a cloth on the ground i used to try with a bed sheet or a bit of black plastic but it's just too flimsy and when you scoop it all up and try and tip it into a bow it tends to sort of flop over and bits fall out so i've gone to a heavier weighted black fleece or if i've got enough a bit of off cut of butyl liner from a pond and i put those on the ground and then just lift it up so i do like to clip with something underneath it a lot of people are aware now of two distinct problems with box one is the box blight and one is the box moth and if you want more information on how to deal with them look at my two videos one on the blight and one on the box moth we've been talking about box so far but obviously you taxes is a wonderful plant to clip and it's becoming more and more popular now because of the problems that people are having with box and i think that's much more relaxed as when you can cut that i remember talking to the head garden at hidkit gardens and because they've got miles and miles of view hedges there they just clip them throughout the year and i tend to clip them when they look messy and when i've got a herbaceous board or lots of plants in front of you hedge then i obviously want to do it before the plants get going otherwise it's a nightmare to fight along the back of the plants without treading on them and picking up the cuttings so i then try and do those quite early on in the season and then i like to have lovely crisp you through the winter months so maybe the autumn is another good time to do them so you've got a lovely sleek hedge all through the winter but do be careful with any hedge if birds are going to be nesting in it i.e between march and august in the uk then you make sure you don't cut the hedges then i mean they often don't nest in these type of hedges and you can just check the hedge beforehand and if it's free of nesting birds then you're fine to cut it of course structure is great in the garden and i think topri is one of the best ways to achieve that [Music] i came back from having done my first chelsea garden ever in the early 90s it was a windy and willow's garden and we used lots of iv for ground cover because it was a garden for children and i had lots of bare earth to fill and i had tiny little hazel plants and i'm just sitting on one of the stumps which i've just cut down now so you can see how fast they grow i was in love with ivy then because it grew fast but now i'm finding ivy a bit of a pain it just spreads and it seeds everywhere and it climbs up everything it has huge benefits of course for wildlife for bees because it flowers throughout the winter well in january december you've often got ivy flowers which the bees love when they come out of the hives to defecate in winter they go and use the the ivy flowers so it's got its pluses but it just gets too rampant we've had such wet winters that it's really seeding well all over the place and now i'm feeling i would like something else and i think this would be a lovely position for a rose meadow i'm lifting the hazel so i've got more light coming into here and i'm clearing the ivy it is a mega strong stuff you can see why it's such a successful coloniser because everywhere it runs along the ground it root tips into it now i did exactly the same thing on the other side but there i just pulled the iv out by hand which is fine but this time i used some glyphosate and i have to say it's killed it really well i'm sure when i pulled it all away and cleared it some will still be there and there'll be ivy seats but once you've removed the most of it i find it quite easy to keep on top of it and then i'm going to enrich the soil i'll probably put a load of green waste on the top and then i'll have great fun choosing my favorite roses to go in here and i'm going to go for big old-fashioned shrub roses and i won't have very many although i will increase the area i'm going to take it right up to the edge of the comfrey and i'll do a path of some sort in between that will wind through it so i can get down to the greenhouse path and that path will stop the comfort encroaching too much this way because country does encroach you have to contain it and then i think it'll be lovely to see how this area develops i don't want you to think that i hate ivy at burley park up the road from us they took the ivy off some old oak trees and they noticed the oak trees went into huge decline so they think in some way that it wraps itself around the trunk and it actually provides a nice micro plant climate which the oak really enjoys and it doesn't start a climbing upper tree really into the until the tree is in the very later stages of its life when it's no longer expanding massively so whereas before they used to think that ivy was a killer for trees and that used to strangle them they're now thinking that actually it has some beneficial activity and of course it's massively good for wildlife too i did remember in japan when we were working there there was a huge typhoon and all the trees that had ivy on them blew down and those that didn't didn't they stayed up and that was purely the wind resistance because they were so much thicker with the trunks and the ivy all those blew down and the national trust say the ivy on buildings is fine as long as it doesn't get up into the roos and things and as long as you clip it every year or so because then it actually protects the wall and you don't get such a massive freeze thought action that you do in in winter when the when the frost comes and freezes and thaws and actually erodes the stonework or the brickwork it actually performs some sort of insulation effect when i'm taking iv off a building or a wall you i have to do it carefully if you just go in and rip it off you pull it out and you damage the water so what i do is i just cut the ivy off at the bottom and this sometimes is really thick so you might need a saw to do it then all the iv on the wall dies obviously because it hasn't got any roots attached to it and then when it's all dead you can pull it off more gently and more carefully and then when it grows again from the stump that you've cut you just spray it with a weed color and i find that the quickest and most efficient way to do it so i do like ivy i just want to control it and i want to contain it so i'll keep making sure that any new bits that grow back i'll pull them out and to be honest i think this won't be a major problem it's certainly much much easier to deal with i find than many perennial weeds like bindweed and things like that i'm here with my watercress this is one of my favorite easiest vegetables i think people always assume you have to have running water streams but in fact it's very easy to grow in the soil we have got it growing in our stream down there but i would never go and pick that because we also have sheep and sheep can have a disease called liver fluke and it's a parasite and it goes between sheep and humans and it can be spread by the watercress so you should never ever ever pick wild watercress when it's growing anywhere near that sheep could have grazed i grow it here in a raised bed i actually grew this from seed this time but when i first started i just bought a bunch from a supermarket picked it um plopped it into a glass of water and literally within about four days i had little roots coming off the shoots i then potted it up into a pot in the greenhouse kept it quite moist and i picked it and it lasts for a long time i have the beds outside it will now go up to flower quite heavily when it gets dry but i'll produce some more and put it in the greenhouse in a shady place and then i'll have it right through the winter so you can easily have watercress 12 months a year it used to be a really staple diet they used to have watercress sandwiches because it's very nutritious it's delicious i use it a lot in pastas you can make a pesto from it loads of it in salads but instead of just having a garnish on the top i go full out and have loads watercress chopped up with tomatoes or cucumber or whatever you fancy so it's a wonderful thing to have and if i lived in a flat i would have this in my window box i think rather than panz is because i just think it's so lovely and useful and so tasty this raised bed is actually lined i put in a polythene liner and i put a few holes in the bottom so when i water it it is much more water retentive than all the other raised beds around it because we are so dry here over in the east midlands it just really helps it and it also protects the wood of course and you need to put holes in the bottom if i just have a solid liner on the bottom and up the sides the water inside it would become stagnant it would come anaerobic it would start to rot and the plants would die so it has to drain but you want to slow the drainage down so this is my number one crop i think probably that i will always grow other crops you dip in and out of use thumbnails not others but watercress i will always grow full of iron totally delicious and wonderful you

Channel: Bunny Guinness

Views: 39,268

Keywords: bunny guinness, garden design, growing watercress, growing watercress in soil, growing watercress from supermarket bunch, ivy - friend or foe, is ivy bad for trees, ivy and oak trees, ivy on walls, ivy on housese, getting rid of ivy, using glysophate on ivy, cutting topiary, cutting box balls, shaping topiary, how to cut box, yew topiary, bird topiary, using hedge cutters to cut box, small or large hedge cutters to cut topiary, watercress, box and yew

Id: DK1GkBYJVvQ

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021