Maintain begonias for maximum appeal
Keep your plants looking beautiful by regularly removing faded leaves and feeding weekly
With eight weeks until our first flower show of the year, one of the main jobs this month is dressing the Begonia rex plants by removing old, dull leaves and confining them to the compost heap. We remove any damaged leaves too, and are often able to take leaf cuttings from them, ensuring a supply of young plants are available for next year.
As the growing year is well under way, we always keep a tub of plant food powder or bottle of liquid feed to hand as we feed all our plants once a week. We follow the manufacturer’s instructions on
dilution rates and never apply more than the stated dose as this can cause the roots to rot. The only other additive I use is seaweed extract, which isn’t a feed as such but more a vitamin supplement. This can be added to the liquid feed or applied at another watering. It can be used on outdoor garden bedding varieties as well as hanging baskets and those in the greenhouse. We’ve suspended yellow sticky traps, cut into strips, between the greenhouse plants. These are an effective way of trapping flies of various types, with the most common around my plants being the small, black sciarid fly (fungus gnat). Sciarid fly causes no harm to the plants, but they lay their eggs on the pot soil and the larvae then feed on the plant roots, leaving them vulnerable to infection from other pathogens. Adult flies are attracted to the sticky trap, removing them from the egg-laying cycle. There’s also a biological control, Steinernema feltiae, which seeks out the larvae.