Try tackling it Tuesday
Spring has Sprung around here and so it’s time to tackle the garden, or more specifically, how to train a plant to be a standard? Standard? What kind of Standard? The standard kind which has one stalk. There are many reasons why this is a useful exercise, most commonly for people with either small garden or narrow flower beds. If you can train the plant to do all it’s flowering at eye level then this frees up the bottom of the bed for other plants and effectively doubles the amount of blooms you can squeeze into a small space.
This is Jasmine which has many stalks as well as many runners. First find the thickest or most vigorous stalk and cut back all the others at ground level. Nick off any little sprouts that emerge from your main stalk.
Within a year you can move from a wild out of control plant to this stately one stemmed version. This of course is a honeysuckle not a Jasmin.
There will always be more sprouts at the bottom but they’re easy to remove on a weekly basis.
Be careful what time of year you attempt this tackle as you may wipe out a whole years flowers. Ideally this should be tackled at the end of the flowering season ready for the next year or just after the first flowering as here it is not uncommon to have three or four blooming periods.
Now if only everything else in my life were as easy as this! There again, ’standard’ is probably a little over-rated except by certain control freaks like me.
Cheers
So don’t forget to add your name to the “original post list” and help spread the word for the giveaway, wouldn’t like to miss anyone out.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:25 am
I thought my jasmine had a lot of blooms but yours has 10x as many.
I need to fertilize.
April 21st, 2009 at 6:25 am
What a beautiful tackle!!
April 21st, 2009 at 8:34 am
Wow. This is really fabulous info. I LOVE gardening and have never tried to train anything like this other than my wisteria. (which is shaped like a large bonsei now)
PS Jess’ blog: http://half12.blogspot.com/
Thank you SO much for being so supportive!!!
April 21st, 2009 at 10:17 am
yet another reminder that i really need to get to work on my yard!
April 21st, 2009 at 7:01 pm
That’s a lot of Jasmine
Reminds me of my friend whose name is Jasmin…hehehe.
Happy WW!
April 21st, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Great info and pics:) Happy WW.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:39 am
Hi,
I just read your comments about my font size. It looks ok to me, (and I have old eyes). Is it unreadable? If you are interested in reading it, I can copy/paste it into an email if you’d like to email me. AWEtism@aol.com.
Sorry for the problem. How now that I’m thinking about it, I can go in and edit it, I bet. : ) I’ll give that a try!
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:46 am
I changed the font. Thank you for your comment about it. I think things may look different on my monitor than other peoples. I appreciate it!
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:30 pm
your flowers are beautiful! How you have the time to do it, I just don’t know. I have flowers, but that is because they seem to thrive upon neglect…
T.