Lush foliage and pretty flowers
Weekend gardener
Blue sky vine
One of the loveliest blue-flowered plants is the blue sky vine,
Thunbergia grandiflora. The sky-blue to lavender-blue trumpets with a pale greenish throat are borne in pendant racemes that continue to produce new flowers for many weeks.
Grown on a sturdy pergola, the vine becomes a layered, leafy roof while the trailing ends hang in green curtains to the ground making a private outdoor room for the summer. The lush foliage covers new fences quickly.
Thunbergia grandiflora is native to India and Myanmar. It grows alarmingly fast here during hot summer weather but New Zealand is much cooler than tropical India, and the blue clock vine isn’t able to make seeds here so it doesn’t spread.
Although the blue sky vine flowers all year long in frost-free areas, even the lightest frost will slam it to a brown pulp overnight. Resurrection is guaranteed, however, because it sends up strong new shoots from the plump, tuberous root mass in spring.
Keep a close eye on your worm farm
Worms don’t like hot weather, and if the temperature in your worm farm is higher than about 25C, they will actually start to eat and reproduce more slowly – and if it goes over 35C, they will either die or make a mass exodus.
In the ground, most worms retreat deep in the soil at this time of year and wait for rain, but they don’t have this option living in a worm farm. To help keep the surface conditions in your worm farm cool and moist, give them a few extra layers of damp newspaper on top of their food scraps.
Many worm bins are made from black plastic and will heat up quickly on a sunny summer’s day, so be sure to site your farm in a spot that enjoys plenty of shade and give its inhabitants a squirt with a hose every now and again. Open the drainage tap first and put a bucket underneath, then catch the runoff. Dilute a bit more if necessary – until it’s the colour of weak tea – and distribute liberally around your seedlings, cuttings, pots and beds.
Harvest garlic before it dies down
Gardening lore would have you harvest on the longest day, when in fact you should lift your bulbs as soon as the green leaves start to yellow and die off. The bulbs won’t get any fatter now, and leaving them in the soil too long reduces their quality and keeping ability. What’s more, if there’s a rainy spell, all the cloves in the mature bulbs can start to sprout!
Lift garlic on a warm, dry day, using a garden fork to gently uproot the bulbs. Brush off loose dirt then hang the cloves in a dry, airy location for a few days.
If any bulbs get damaged during the harvesting process, eat them first as they won’t store well.