‘Drumstick’ is so tasty and signals growing season ahead

It pokes its head up over the ground and I fall in love with it every time. It’s perfection in an early spring plant with little delicate flowers combining together in perfectly formed rosettes, opening up into balls on top of slender, but sturdy stems. I often think it should be called the lollipop primula as this is the effect that each stem creates.

It’s the pale mauve variety that I like most, though they also come in shades of cerise pink and pure white. When you think about what the weather has thrown at us over the last few weeks and then admire these little beauties emerging through the snow and ice, it’s impossible not to be

awestruck by the wonder of nature once more. For me, they are one of those plants that are harbingers of the spring and the growing season ahead. When I see them opening up, I know that winter is finishing and that soon, temperatures will begin to increase once more.

Primulas in general, have that effect and it’s a genus that includes a range from the aforementioned, P denticulata and Primula veris (Cowslip) to Primula vulgaris (Primrose) to the candelabra Primulas which flower quite a bit later in the season.

You will see garden centres at the moment awash with spring bedding plants and in particular F1 hybrid primulas. These are great for show now and for a splash of instant colour, but they tend not to like the amount of rain we get in these parts and the flowers need to be pinched out regularly to ensure continuity and so they don’t start to rot.

Plant them with a good amount of grit to draw water away from the roots so that they are not sitting in an overly wet soil which can also lead to fungal rot. All that being done, I still regard these Hybrid bedding plants as being just that, bedding and thus seasonal, and I do not rely on them coming back from year to year.

I will use some of them now in pots and containers for some immediate impact, and then I will plant them out beneath shrubs in the garden where I won’t miss them if they don’t come back next year and if they do, then I regard it as a bonus, a nice surprise.

The daffodils are well and truly up now too, and of course, these are the ultimate spring plant. Many of the taller growing varieties will have succumbed to the recent heavy snowfalls and are now lying on the ground looking quite bedraggled, while many more will once again have illustrated nature’s resilience by shaking themselves free of snow and standing up proudly once more. I have pots full of the dwarf daffodil, narcissus Tete a Tete growing in my garden, and when the snow was at its heaviest I couldn’t even see them, though they were in full flower — such was the level of snow which was all about, but as soon as the thaw came, they were doing their thing as if nothing had ever happened.

This variety should be planted in the autumn for flowering now, but all is not lost if you forgot the seasonal bulb planting task, or if time simply ran away on you, as there are pots brimming with flowering daffodils available now amongst the primulas, in garden centres throughout Ireland.

Filling pots with colour is great at this time of the year, as it really lifts the spirits by injecting some cheerfulness into the outdoors. It can be nice if your planters are big enough to include a shrub, such as an early flowering Camellia as a centrepiece in the pot.

These spring beauties carry their spring flowers in swollen buds throughout the winter and unfortunately, again due to the extreme cold, many of these buds may have been burned by the frost and snow and will be quite brown in colour an when they open out. Those that have been in flower already will almost certainly have been burned by the conditions.

There is not much that one could have done to avoid that occurance this year, such was the weather, but wrapping them in horticultural fleece may have just saved them.

Also positioning them in a more shaded part of the garden where they are not exposed to the harshest of the early morning sun, will also help to prevent this browning of the blooms.

Prevention beats cure for weeds

Before we know it now we will see the weeds before our eyes and wonder where the time is going. The best cure for weeds is to cancel the gym membership and get out there and take them out by hand with a trowel, shovel or hoe.

Prevention, however, is always better than cure and most of us already have more than enough to be doing in the garden and will be only too happy not to have an extra bed to hand-weed.

So now is the time to take action. Avoid using damaging weedkillers later in the year by applying a mulch around your plants now. There are many options available to you from gravel and slate mulches to all the different grades of chipped bark.

I particularly like the Composted or Superfine Bark. It tends not to blow around like some of the bigger chips and creates a nice tidy look and benefits the soil as it decomposes.

Apply mulch to a depth of 3-4 inches to ensure that new weeds can’t germinate beneath.