Pollinate your sweetcorn

Now is the time to pollinate your sweetcorn, or at least help them to pollinate each other. Corn pollen moves about the place on the wind, not the hairs of bees and flies. Pollen from the flowers at the top of the plants needs to get to the silky tassels of the immature cobs below.

Shaking the plants around a bit might help if the days are still. If you have wisely planted blocks rather than rows it’s usually unnecessary to do anything at all, as wind is never far away in our breezy island nation.

Crank up the water supply to fatten up the corn cobs and give a liquid feed with nitrogen-rich fertiliser.

Don’t harvest too soon. Wait until the silky tassels are dark brown and dry, and the ears point off the main stem at an angle.

To pick, gently twist and pull. For the sweetest kernels, pick corn just before cooking.

CHOP, DROP & SHRED GARDEN WASTE

Don’t waste your garden waste. It’s crazy to send garden debris off to the green waste recycling depot and buy it back as compost when you can make good use of it in the garden.

We gardeners never seem to have enough mulch to go around so it makes sense to use as much of our green waste as possible. You can turn it into compost if you like but you don’t have to.

Chop and drop is the easiest way and laziest way to return humus to the soil. There’s no need to barrow weeds, deadheaded blooms, spent vegetables, lawn clippings, hedge trimmings and so on off to the compost bin and barrow it back months later when it’s matured into compost. Just let them lie on the soil surface where they fall to add to the mulch layer.

A bit more work is involved if you chop the material into smaller pieces but that does help it break down more quickly. I use a shredder but hedge clippers or secateurs and a bit of patience do an adequate job.

As a bonus, chop and drop mulching lets self-seeders like cosmos, nigella, cleomes and poppies carry on from season to season.

The only things I don’t turn into mulch are diseased plants and the roots or bulbs of perennial weeds like docks and oxalis.

DEADHEAD TATTY FLOWERS

My grandmother always said that an hour spent deadheading was better than a morning’s weeding when sprucing up the garden for visitors.

She was right. Not only does the garden look fresh but the plants are stimulated to produce more blooms.

Some flowers can be nipped off onehanded while holding the hose in the other hand but others need 3 more specialised techniques.

Never cut alstroemeria stems.

When picking for the vase or deadheading after the seed pods form , always grab hold at the base and pull up the whole stem.

To deadhead roses, use secateurs and cut back to just above the node where a leaf stem with five leaflets joins the main stem.

Many newbie gardeners (including me!) have cut off new dahlia buds by mistake when first learning about deadheading. Rounded buds are new flowers before they open. Long, pointed ones are old flowers that have closed

GET GROWING

This column is adapted from the weekly e-zine, get growing, from New Zealand Gardener magazine. For gardening advice delivered to your inbox every Friday, sign up for Get Growing at: getgrowing.co.nz after blooming. These are the ones to remove to promote another flush of buds.

Removing dried flower stems from hen and chicks echeverias (above) is a job for the junior gardeners at your place. My sons loved doing this when they were preschoolers because there is a very satisfying squeak if the stems are at the right stage of dryness.

I only grow miniature, sterile agapanthus and these too squeak when the spent stems are grasped at the base and firmly tugged.

I’ve never tried this with full-sized agapanthus. I suspect those tough cookies would win the tug of war.

Do be sure to cut off seedy agapanthus heads before they mature, especially in Auckland and Northland,where they can be a weedy nuisance.