Jungle Drums

We started the day with a meeting. I try to get everybody together one day a week so we can run over how we’re doing, where we’re heading, urgent tasks that need completion and projects we want to achieve in the near future. We began today’s meeting at 9am with a cuppa and cake. Surprisingly the cake was mostly refused – too early for cake apparently. It was gone by lunch time however.



We usually have meetings last thing in the day but as it was SNOWING it seemed opportune to sit in the warm office and run over a few things.
I had to break it to the guys that the first job of the day was digging a trench in our windswept car park so that we could erect a rabbit fence. Talk about troopers. They steamed through it and Lucy got down to a vest, despite the north easterly wind sweeping across the field. The wind chill was enough to take your breath away.



This afternoon however they had a much more interesting project. They’re building a walkway with bamboo poles in a series of arches for our gourds to scramble over. It all looks a little Heath Robinson, using canes we harvested from our clump of Phyllosatchys vivax aureocaulis and wire and string. I’m leaving them to it, so they can use their skills, imagination and ingenuity. They have a plan apparently.
Meanwhile Di’s shut herself away in the relative warmth of a greenhouse and has gone into potting machine mode. Heucheras, Grasses, Musas and Ensetes and lots of exotic bedding which we’ll need to keep warm during this cold weather.



So while we’re usually watering, filling up our sales benches and serving customers at this time of year, the cold weather has meant that all but the very keenest customers are staying warm at home, and the plants aren’t drying out very quickly. We’re keeping busy however, getting ahead with numerous other jobs. Once the walkway is finished we intend to build another vertical garden in our Edible Jungle. When the weather gets better we’ll be well ahead of ourselves and able to focus all our attention on customers with any luck.

Dahlia 'Chimborazo'

Dahlias have had a rather old fashioned image. Often associated with Grandads’ allotments, earwigs and endless staking and tying, they’re not considered the coolest plant on the planet. Too right they’re not cool. They’re Red Hot! These Mexican exotic beauties are justifiably becoming more and more popular and we love them here at Urban Jungle.


Dahlia 'Blue Boy'

Three years ago Jamie brought in some Dahlias to grow in our Edible Jungle amongst the Cannas, Gingers and vegetable plants. The first year they grew brilliantly. It wasn’t a particularly wonderful summer and many of the Cannas and Gingers were reluctant to put on a really good flowering display. We had to admit the Dahlias that summer were the star plants in the garden.


Dahlia 'Nonette'

Of course last year, 2012, was the coldest, wettest and dullest summer on record. Some species of Canna and Ginger didn’t even manage to produce a single flower – others began to bud up so late that the frosts nipped them before they had a chance to open.


Dahlia 'Honka Surprise'

But the Dahlias didn’t seem to mind the wet and cold one bit. They bloomed magnificently. In fact it almost became a chore to dead head them every day. We had vases of Dahlias in our pay hut, on the tables in our coffee area and we were able to make lovely bunches to take home.


We don't bother shaking much soil off

After digging them up from the garden in late autumn we shook most, but not all the soil from them, labelled each tuber and simply stacked them on trolleys in a frost free greenhouse. That was in November and we’ve completely ignored them until this week. We’ve never cleaned the soil off the tubers, cut back fine roots, dried them, and inspected them regularly, as usually recommended. That seems to just make extra work – and we’ve never lost any yet.


Dahlias stacked on trolleys in a frost free greenhouse

Now is the time to start to prepare them for growth. It’s amazing to think that these lifeless-looking knobbles will grow into magnificent flower-pumping machines by mid summer.


Slicing through a Dahlia to increase stack

Of course we want to increase our stock so we’re dividing them too. Each tuber is sliced through the neck into two or three pieces with dangly tubers still attached. They’re then potted in to 2 or 3 Litre pots in good quality compost and left in the greenhouse. We’ll keep them on the dry side until the weather warms up and we start to see evidence of shoots and roots.
Watering and feeding will then begin in earnest. We’ll nip out the growing tips to make them into bushy plants and take a few cuttings from each to increase stock even more.


Dahlia imperialis

Did you know that Dahlia tubers are edible and can be cooked like a sweet potato? The flower petals can be eaten too and look sensational sprinkled over a salad. They’re also essential for the bee-friendly gardener, especially the single flowered specimens.
If you want to grow them as an edible crop we recommend Dahlia imperialis which is a magnificent tree-like Dahlia that makes incredible yam-size tubers. Sadly, it’s reluctant to flower in the UK but is nevertheless a stunning architectural beauty. It’s also very hardy and one of the few Dahlias we leave in the ground, protected by a thick mulch of straw.


Stacks of Dahlias. We'll spread them out once they start to shoot

We’ll have stacks of them this year to plant out and for sale and may be some to eat too. Dahlia collection.

The Edible Jungle is a garden that we create every summer at the nursery to grow on our Cannas, Gingers, Dahlias and Bananas. We combine these with highly decorative edible plants and annuals for cut flowers. A beautiful and productive garden that doesn’t look a bit like an allotment. We don’t use any chemicals in this garden.
But we have a problem area. Every garden has a patch where the soil is dry and impoverished. We have a strip of ground in our Edible Jungle under birch trees. This area gets the sun for most of the day but the trees suck up all the moisture and no amount of additional soil improvement or irrigation seems to make any difference. We’ve tried growing Runner beans and Sweet peas here in the past but the results have been less than satisfactory.

23 straw bales being moved into the garden on a rare, gloriously sunny day.
This year we’re going to try growing them in straw bales. Straw works much better than hay and is considerably cheaper. The bales cost £3 each from our local farm shop and should last 3 years. Not a bad investment - £1 a year. Compare that to the price of a Grow Bag. After 3 years they’ll have rotted down sufficiently to be able to dig into the soil as a conditioner.

Straw bales in place topped with a generous helping of super rich fish waste.
The straw inside the bales needs to have decayed somewhat before planting our crop. Ideally we would have put the bales out 6 months before planting. As we’ve left it a little late we’ve placed on top of each bale a good layer of fish waste that we collected when we cleared out our Koi pond filters last year. And the guys will be adding their own special ingredient daily. This should really accelerate the rot down – urine is the ultimate fertilizer, and it’s free and environmentally friendly. We’re not squeamish, and if you are, you should be aware that urine is completely sterile and free from bacteria – safe enough to drink in fact. Allegedly. Anyway, we’ll continue to do this until a week or so before planting in late May/early June. Visitors are also welcome to make a donation!
When it’s time to plant up the bales, after the danger of late frosts has passed, we’ll simply squeeze the little root ball into the top of the bale and water regularly. We may need to give some additional feed through the season – the straw bales are going to be planted quite intensively, and they may run out of steam after a while.
Runner beans are actually tropical plants and were originally introduced as ornamentals. They provide a lush screen of foliage and their flowers can look beautiful. Apart from the abundant crop they can produce in a good year, they have another use too. They are legumes and have nitrogen fixing roots. This means that they’ll also add nutrients to the straw bales and help to feed the pumpkins and squashes that we intend to grow with them. We’ll add some nasturtiums for decoration, and to conceal the bales, and I think we’ll have a winning combination.

Canna 'Wyoming'. Gorgeous orange flowers stand head height above lustrous dark foliage.
In another area, under a large conifer we’ll be using the same method to grow some ornamentals such as Canna Wyoming (Cannas), under-planted with Dahlia ‘Sarah’, a beautiful single scarlet Dahlia that the bees find irresistible, and some trailing Ipomoea to conceal the bales.

Dahlia 'Sarah'. Intense red flowers for months and months.
It’s always good to try something new.

The undersides of Colocasia 'Fontanesii'

Colocasias are dramatic plants and give a taste of the tropics to a bedding scheme. These tender perennials are commonly called ‘Elephant’s ears’ but are not to be confused with the hardy perennial Bergenia which share the same common name.

Bergenia 'Overture'

This is why we have Latin names; we can all be sure we’re referring to the same plant. Capable of reaching quite enormous proportions in a single season, they can be finicky to keep healthy through winter. Over the years we’ve tried so many different methods but this is what we’ve done for the last three years and we have a pretty good success rate now.

Colocasias freshly dug with soil shaken off

In late autumn, before the frosts we lift ours from the ground and shake off most of the soil, removing all but the newest leaf. If you grow yours in pots, downsize them.

Colocasia 'Thailand Giant. Big plants crammed into 2 and 3L pots

We’ll pot these in to the smallest pots we can cram them in to with very little compost. Just enough so that we can give them a tiny amount of water without then drying out completely but not so much that they’ll sit in cold soggy compost. We’ve found that a minimum temperature of 8 degrees centigrade is enough to keep them alive, without wasting too much on heating.
By early February they’re looking pretty sorry for themselves but as the temperatures begin to rise (on a sunny day it can reach 30 degrees centigrade in the greenhouse) they begin to grow and it’s time for their next round of treatment.

The bottom of this tuber has rotted so we've cut it off and dusted with Sulphate

We remove them from their pots and inspect the tubers. Any that have rotted completely are discarded but many will be showing some signs of decay but are easily salvageable. We cut away any rot and give them a puff of Flowers of Sulphate powder. You may find that they have multiplied and if the baby tubers come away from the parent plant these can be grown on separately.
Next they’re placed in compost on a propagation bench set at 25 degrees centigrade. If you don’t have a propagator at home you can pot them in to trays and place in a warm spot in the house for a few weeks.

It's freezing outside but this batch of Colocasia and Alocaisa offsets will be snug in the propagator

Almost immediately they begin to produce new leaves. They’ll also be producing new roots. We don’t lavish them with water at this stage – that comes later, but we keep them just moist.

After a few weeks like this we lift them, carefully prising apart the roots and pot them. Again we’ll use very small pots till the roots become established. Once they’ve made a good root ball we’ll pot them on, lavish them with water and feed and by mid to late May they’ll be ready to storm away in the garden. In a good year with plenty of warmth and rain the growth rate is phenomenal.

High maintenance but we believe they’re well worth every minute of love and attention.

This year we’ll be stocking the following. For sale on the website.

Colocasia ‘Black Magic’

Colocasia esculenta

Colocasia ‘Mammoth’

Colocasia ‘Thailand Giant’

Colocasia ‘Sangria’

Colocasia ‘Noble Gigante’

Colocasia ‘Dragon Heart’

Colocasia ‘Ruffles’

In spring, the eagerness shown by some people to bed out tender and half-hardy plants leaves me flabbergasted. This year I knew of so many friends who got just a little carried away by the mild weather, in March no less, and brought their Bananas and Cannas out of winter hibernation. Of course, just a few weeks later they were beaten back into submission by some really nasty frosts.
And now, with most exotic plants growing in full glorious splendour, those very same eager beavers have already dismantled their gardens by digging up or wrapping their tenders.

Noooo! These are the golden days for exotics, when they are looking their very finest, and they should be enjoyed up until at least the very end of this month. That’s the whole point of using these plants in the garden. They are still giving a spectacular performance when most other plants have long since had their final curtain call.
We’ve had a couple of nights of frost but not serious enough to do any damage and I only know of one person whose Dahlias were blackened. This simply means they are spoilt for the remainder of this year. They won’t have sustained any damage that will affect their performance next year.
We didn’t give any thought to winter protection, or start preparing the garden for winter until 7th November last year, and even then all our plants were still looking fairly pristine. Had we known how mild the winter would turn out to be, right up until February, we could have left many of them in the ground much longer, possibly even wrapped in situ for the whole winter. Ah, but isn’t hindsight is a wonderful thing?

Ensete ventricosum 'Maurelii' - Pic taken 7th November 2011 as we prepared to lift the garden. Most plants still looked amazing even in the gloom. Ensetes haven't been amongst this year's winners having made little growth.

In October, growth above ground may be coming to a standstill but underground structures – bulbs, tubers and rhizomes, which are essentially food storage organs to enable the plant’s survival over winter (or through drought periods), will be bulking up by converting sugars into starch. For us gardeners this means stronger plants to take through winter and bigger plants next year. Frost blackened leaves are our cue for protecting Cannas, Dahlias and Musas in winter. We’ll blog about the treatment we give these in a couple of weeks time.
Our Dahlias are providing us with new flowers daily and show no signs of abating. By regularly dead-heading we’ll keep them in bloom for at least a couple more weeks yet. And they are of course providing late nectar for the bees.

Dahlia 'Chimborazo'

Dahlia 'Honka Surprise'

Dahlia 'David Howard'

Dahlia 'Firepot'

Dahlia 'Moonfire'

Many varieties of Canna are still putting on a magnificent show of flower, but some, due to the poor summer, are only just producing buds. Hopefully we’ll get to enjoy a bloom or two from these before the frosts. And as for the no-show of flowers on some? Oh well – there’s always next year.

Canna 'Ermine' - has flowered for several months and still producing buds.

Canna 'Endeavour' - Flower buds only recently formed - will they open?

Canna 'Intrigue' - No flower buds this year but gorgeous foliage.

Canna 'Cleopatra' & 'Striata' - Both have produced a few flowers this year but are valiantly making new buds.

A few Ginger species didn’t seem to mind the cool weather this summer, and produced luxuriant foliage and amazing exotic blooms, but others have been lagging behind and have little chance of flowering now. When we lift them we’ll keep them in the green and should still get to appreciate their flowers, albeit inside the greenhouse. There’s nothing that lifts the mood quite like the fragrance of Hedychium coronarium in the greenhouse on a dull winter’s morning.

Hedychium greenii - A reasonable show this year but I love them for their foliage alone.

Hedychium coronarium - If you look closely you can see a bud forming.

Hedychium gardnerianum - Masses of flowers and look at the number still to come. Didn't mind this summer's weather at all.


We will of course lift the Abysynian Bananas (Ensete maurellii) before any harsh weather, but the Musa basjoo will be wrapped outdoors later in the winter. These are still growing strongly and won’t need any protection until after they’ve had some frost, with any luck after Christmas. I like to wrap them after the foliage has completely died in the frost (but before any really penetrating frost turns their stems to mush). We’ll be blogging about winter protection for bananas soon.

Musa basjoo in the backround. In the foreground are young Musa 'Mekong Giant' which have put on really good growth this year..

In the mean time we’re cleaning and preparing the greenhouses in readiness for their winter guests. And as usual we’re scratching our heads wondering quite how it’s all going to fit inside. Somehow it always does.