Gardening and dogs

As the weather starts to improve, gardeners’ thoughts turn to buying plants.  However there may be a hidden danger for your dog in that plant you buy.  To reduce slug damage to their young plants, many suppliers are putting slug pellets into plant pots.

Whilst slug pellets may be designed to be distasteful to dogs, they are certainly poisonous in reasonable quantities.  They are coloured blue to make them easy to see.

A friend of mine took some mail order plants out of their packaging and slug pellets fell to the ground.  Luckily she managed to get to them before her lively youngster could!

For the sake of your dog, please keep him at bay and check new plants for slug pellets.

We frequently travel on long journeys to dog shows.  To help pass the time on the journey, my lovely husband downloads the BBC Garden’s Question Time radio show so that we can listen as we drive. 

A couple of weeks ago there were three questions on moss which they grouped together.  The first asked how to get rid of moss, the second asked what was wrong with moss anyway, but the third was the one that caught my attention.  The questioner asked how come the area of grass nearest his house had no moss, but the further you got away from the house, the more moss was in the grass.  On further questioning, it transpired that the gentleman in question had bitches (no indication of breed or how many).   The panel came to the conclusion that the high nitrogen content in the bitches urine was killing the moss, but they (and I) were surprised that the grass near the house was doing well.

As you know, I have no grass so am not able to personally comment on this topic.  My mother’s garden had moss and family members who visited had bitches.  Maybe we didn’t visit often enough to have an impact on the moss.  So, over to you.  Do any of you have moss in your grass and have any of you noticed this phenomena?

To me, gardening should be enjoyable and part of that is that the weather should be enjoyable.  Well that certainly isn’t the case at the moment.  The UK experienced its second coldest March since records began and the Easter weekend was hardly the gardeners’ paradise we tend to expect. Pictures on the TV of holiday makers making castles out of snow rather than sand were rather surreal but focused the mind on the inclement weather.

I’ve wrapped up warmly and got on with the major pruning jobs, but I’m finding that the desire to get outdoors is somewhat limited at the moment.  So, what I am doing is gardening with my eyes – looking at the garden from all angles (including from upstairs windows) and planning what will need to be done as soon as the weather improves.

One job that has become obvious is that two of my hellebores will have to be sent to the great compost bin in the sky.  Last year, I thought that the pink one on the right had suffered from frost damage and so decided to give it another chance.  This year, it has become apparent that it is suffering from a virus and that now the virus has spread to the parts of of white one on the left that are closest to the pink plant.  This is really sad as both plants are fairly mature and they are right by my back door and I have enjoyed looking at them from the warmth of the house.

Like all gardeners I will make the best of this opportunity to plant something new in the space giving summer interest for this year and then next year I will have the pleasure of finding some new hellebores for the space.