Painting the roses red. We're painting the roses red

OK, so we're not painting the roses but we have started spraying them.

Last September, Nymans gardens organised a greener gardening course for National Trust gardeners. Nymans has become a showcase for good environmental practice and has spent the last few years developing their infrastructure and working practices to promote this, from cooked food composters to electric mowers charged by photovoltaic cells on the shed roofs. It was a really interesting day and I would recommend a visit to see it all.

One thing I took away from the day that I thought would be useful, and easy to implement on our project was the care of the roses. Nymans uses a four week spraying routine throughout the season, starting when the leaves appear. The great thing about this routine is that it only uses natural products.

Each week a different product is used which benefits the plants in different ways. All of these products can be used on a wide variety of plants including fruit and vegetables.

Pete giving the roses their first spray

The first week SB Plant Invigorator will be sprayed on the roses. This is a urea based product that helps against pests, mildew and is a foliar feed. We have used this in the past and it has produced noticeable results.

Week two uses a garlic and seaweed product. This protects against fungal disease and insect attack.

The third week we will differ slightly from Nymans. They use a nutrient rich compost tea sprayed on the plants as a foliar feed.  The tea is "brewed" from a special, prepared blend of compost and nutrients in a large container full of water. Air bubbles are pushed through the compost mixture to produce the tea. It is fairly expensive to set up and purchase the compost mix, but it produces a mixture with a precise level of nutrients. We unfortunately don't have the funds to set up that system so will be using a slightly different product. Compost tea can be produced by putting compost into a hessian sack and suspending it in a water butt. This will also give a nutrient rich feed but will not be as precise as the brewed product. We will be using a liquid produced from our two wormeries. Wormeries are composters that use worms to break down light vegetation such as vegetable peelings to produce a fine compost and nutrient rich liquid. I will talk more about wormeries in a later post. We will dilute this liquid to use as our foliar feed.

The last week of the routine is milk. Not a fancy prepared mix or blend, just plain full fat milk. This is supposed to help against mildew as well as mosaic disease on cucumbers.

I am looking forward to see how well this routine works. Hopefully by using it throughout the season we shouldn't see anything other than healthy roses but I will keep you updated with how it goes.

The Vine House

On the north wall of the Walled Garden is the vine house. It was built at the same time as the Walled Garden and housed a number of grape varieties. At some point the vines were removed from the top end of the vine house and in the bottom only two vines remain. After they were removed the top half of the vine house was used to grow flowers for the house and over winter plants for the garden. The two vines are a variety called Muscat of Alexandria which is a very old grape with a sweet taste used in desert wines.
For the last four years our volunteer Alan has been growing tomatoes in the vine house and last year started growing chillies.

These have been really popular both with our visitors and property staff and something I wanted to develop as part of the restoration project. This year we are growing fifteen varieties each of tomatoes and peppers. Our choices were based either on varieties we had grown before such as the tomato Legend or chili pepper Scotch Bonnet, or simply that they had an interesting name, like the pepper Aji Pickled Frog and tomato Bloody Butcher. The tomatoes are a mixture of sizes from cherry types to Beefsteaks and the chillies range from the mild Elephants Trunk to the tongue melting Habanero 7 Pot.

To display the chillies we are going to place them on benches that will lift the pots off the ground and make then more prominent. The volunteer carpenters based at Scotney built us three low level benches which we just need to paint and fix the slats together. However the three benches contain a whopping eighty four slats and painting two coats of primer, undercoat and gloss on all of them is quite a task. However once they are finished they will be quite impressive.

A selection of the 84 slats along with 6 new air vents

You may have seen last week I wrote about the shading we had put up to stop the sun scorching the grapes. Unfortunately we also have another issue in the vine house and that is powdery mildew, a fungal growth that appears on the leaves of the grape vines. It then spreads to the fruit which causes them to split and we have lost the last few crops because of this. One thing we can do to try and combat this without using chemicals is to increase the air circulation. We have installed two air blowers to move the air around within the vine house and we are also replacing the six lower air vents that run along the front of the vine house. It will be interesting to see if it makes a difference this year, but lets hope so.

A whiter shade of pale

This week we put shading up on the vine house. Last year we had problems with sun scorching our grapes. The glass on the vine house was acting like a giant magnifying glass and causing the grapes to turn all brown and wrinkly. As we are developing the vine house this year (check out our next blog) it was an issue that needed to be dealt with.

There are a variety of different methods of shading but the most appropriate for us was a roll-on liquid.

Using a roller that extended up to 5m Roger even managed to reach the very top of the vine house

The shading isn't permanent and will only last for one season, so next year we will have to paint it on again. It also has the advantage that on cloudy and wet days the shading will turn clear to allow more light into the vine house.
It wont drastically reduce the heat in the vine house but it will stop direct sunlight falling on the grapes and should stop them getting scorched .