THE UPS AND DOWNS OF SUMMER

Hello, what a topsy-turvy summer this is turning out to be! One minute it is pouring with rain at the nursery, the next it is blue sky and sweltering heat. Now that the Met Office have revised their prediction for the rest of the summer - perhaps we can simply take it as it comes!!



Here at the nursery, the air is heavy with the scent of LIME trees in flower - if you have not experienced this before - it is a rather musty scent - very sweet - produced from a very small yellow flower(SEE PHOTO ON LEFT). Bees adore it, and get quite hooked on it - definitely one of the high points of late summer.


On the down side - a lot of customers are reporting problems with pest and disease on their plants - particularly MILDEW on apples and roses. This is linked in with the weather - predominantly caused by dryness at the roots - so always worth giving your plant a good soak and a mulch - and removing as many of the worst affected leaves and destroying them. Another continual problem is that of the poor old conker trees or HORSE CHESTNUTS - they are now starting to suffer very badly again with that wretched leaf-miner. I have already seen trees that are almost completely defoliated - we were rather hoping that this year would not be so bad - but that does seem to be a false dawn now - although the problem has appeared later than normal. It does not seem to kill the trees - they re-leaf in the spring as normal - but it must weaken them with a reduction in their food source. This can often leave them open to the other more serious BLEEDING CANKER menace - when the trunk oozes black resin - this is often fatal for the tree. I was reading an interesting piece in a magazine that a compound based on a garlic compound is being trialled by the RHS and FORESTRY COMMISION as a prevention for the dreaded canker - and has the side-effect of making the leaves smell of garlic putting off the leaf-miner - can you imagine us all spraying our conker trees with garlic in the future!!??
Until the next time,
RICHARD