Garden Rescue<\/a> together. The main focus of the programme is on design, not so much the implementation, but they do show bits and pieces of the actual work as well, including planting.<\/p>\nTheir way of planting bushes is surprisingly different from mine. I follow the standard Swedish recommendations: dig a big hole, mix up the soil with some cow manure, plant, water thoroughly. If there’s one thing all the books and articles and blog posts agree on, it’s the importance of a good-sized hole. Some say 60 cm wide and 40 cm deep; some say two or three times the diameter of the root clump. But the folks in Garden Rescue dig really, really small holes, often barely larger than the pot that the plant came in! And they do nothing to improve the soil, even when it is more gravel than soil.<\/p>\n
I wonder how well their bushes and trees develop and grow. I wish I could see those gardens three to five years later. I haven’t done any real experiments with smaller holes, but I have two unplanned data points – the elderberry and the staghorn sumac that were among the first things I planted. I just plopped them in the ground, in holes just large enough to fit the clump of roots and soil because I hadn’t read any gardening books yet.<\/p>\n
In the first two or three years they barely grew at all. A few years later, when I saw how much better all my more recent bushes were doing in their big holes, I dug them up, made proper holes, added fertilizer to the soil, and put them back. The difference was immediate – both bushes really shot up. The sumac was later killed by deer, but the elder is growing very nicely to this day. So I’m going to keep following the Swedish recommendations, even though it is more work. I’d rather do more work up front than be forced to replant later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another day, another hole. What would a Sunday evening be without some digging? Though I am getting a bit fed up with this endless digging. I am looking forward to getting this done so that I can do other things in the garden. Mow the lawn, prune the raspberries, plant something other than bushes. Well, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,22,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-house_and_garden","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12878"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13187,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12878\/revisions\/13187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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