What to do in the garden this week
Weekend gardener
Choose and plant camellias Winter is the best time to buy camellias as they are in bloom now, so you can see and smell what you are getting. Luckily it’s also a good time to plant them. There’s a lot to consider apart from flower colour. Bees can access nectar and pollen more easily from open blooms such as ‘Dream Girl’. Small-flowered types that self groom are less affected by petal blight. Some are fragrant. Japonica and reticulata camellias prefer shade or filtered light, whereas sasanquas are a little more sun tolerant. Plant in moist but well-drained, acidic soil, digging in generous quantities of compost and organic material before planting. A slowrelease fertiliser will also help.
Give potatoes a head start
Early potatoes, such as ‘Jersey Benne’, ‘Swift’, or ‘Rocket’ mature in as little as 60-70 days and these are ones to start now for delicious, waxy new potatoes well before Christmas. Seed potatoes of three or four popular varieties are readily available from garden centres. For the less common varieties and colourful, Mā ori potatoes buy online from Newton Seeds.
Chitting (presprouting) the seed potatoes gives them a head start. Spread out seed potatoes in a single layer in a warm dry place and wait until the ‘‘eyes’’ develop shoots about 1–2cm long.
Give an early crop a go inside a glasshouse, under a cloche or frost cloth tent in the garden – or even inside your house in a very sunny spot. One or two seed spuds in a 10L pot filled with growing mix will give you potatoes as soon as October.
Early potatoes are best planted somewhere that gets morning sun. In cooler regions be prepared to protect emerging shoots from frost with frost cloth, pea straw or newspaper.
Sprout ku¯ mara runners
There are two ways to start a kū mara crop: buy a bundle of runners (bareroot plants called slips) from your local garden centre or harvest your own free plants by sprouting a storebought tuber.
Simply suspend a tuber in water on a sunny windowsill or nestle a large kū mara into a pot or tray of moist sand. Within a couple of weeks, it’ll produce shoots or mini plantlets out of its eyes.
When these plantlets are about 15cm high, with their own roots and leaves, you can carefully remove them from the mothership and transplant them. Or simply bury your sprouted tubers whole.
If you are short of space, try growing kū mara in a large hanging basket. The trailing foliage is attractive, but the plants will need more attention (watering and feeding) than those grown in the ground and they aren’t as productive. The baskets are heavy, so make sure the support is strong. Kū mara can also be grown in large, 40-50 litre tubs with drainage holes or half wine barrels.
Don’t cut back frosted plants When frost
strikes the result can be blackened dead and dying foliage. Try to resist lopping off any frosted branches. Pruning off these damaged shoots will encourage new growth that will be even more susceptible to further damage.
Frost-tender fruit trees such as citrus that have been affected should be left alone and then tidied up in spring. Leave a tangle of frosted perennial foliage to keep the crowns beneath protected too.
Keep frost cloth handy to protect your plants, or spray them with Liquid Frost Cloth – a protective wax coating – to keep plants safe to temperatures down to -3C.
Plant strawberries and plan to defend them from birds
Strawberry season may feel a long way off, but strawberry plants are available in garden centres and can be planted now, although if you live in a cooler area, wait until September.
Strawberries need sun, fertile, fresh soil, and good air flow to prevent fungal diseases such as grey mould in summer. They don’t like waterlogged conditions either, so it’s worth planting the crowns on top of small mounds to encourage better drainage. This also makes it easier to lay mulch (such as pea straw, or shredded paper) in summer to keep the ripening fruit clear of the soil.
If you’re establishing a new strawberry bed, dig in strawberry food or blood and bone first. Strawberries crop well for 2-3 years before losing vigour, so it’s a good idea to replace up to of your plants each year.
Put some thought into how you are going to stop birds getting all the best berries before you do. The plants won’t need to be netted until the fruit starts to colour up, but it’s well worth planning your defence strategy in advance.
A luxurious walk-in fruit cage is the dream, but DIY chicken wire frames or bird netting pegged over hoops also work well. Bird netting needs to be secured fairly tautly and suspended well above the plants as it is not unknown for a blackbird to sit on loose netting in order to reach the berries below. It’s distressing for the gardener and the bird when its feet and wings get tangled in saggy netting.