Three Questions

by Diana Greenwood Mead

CLICK HERE to email your question and if it is featured we will send you a SupermarketGuru tote bag to say thanks!

This week Diana's Gardening Column has gone global and we have three short questions for from Iowa, Sweden and France!
The first question is from Jennifer Gallagher from Iowa who writes:

Help! My kids and I love strawberries, so thought it would be fun to grow our own this year. I planted them in potters and put them on my back deck. There were several strawberries that were getting big & starting to turn red. Then the next day they were all gone. This morning I caught the squirrels taking more. How do I stop the squirrels from taking our strawberries?

Hi Jennifer,
The first answer that I can think of is to find a way of caging them that isn't too unattractive.
It is war, you understand!
Many people hate squirrels and call them rats with tails – many other people (me included) cannot help but admire their cleverness and single minded determination to get at, not just food, but the choicest food available!
The answer is to defend your crops from the little darlings any way you can. A fruit cage is traditional but ugly on a deck, so could you perhaps put them up in the air as window boxes fairly high on a suitable wall? Since acquiring a very small garden I've taken to gardening vertically and have three big window boxes one above the other on a windowless wall all growing herbs – and they could well be used to grow strawberries.
The only thing you have to think about is watering – each of my boxes has a flowerpot sunk in it which I can easily fill with water in the evening.

The next question is from Cheah in France who writes:

Hello I would like to know if my Bougainvilleas are still alive or if they are dead.
They were outside in pots protected from the cold in winter here in the north of France. In February the temperature dropped around 0 for two or three days and even though covered the leaves dried up. I brought them inside and all the leaves dropped off. Two of them are old plants in the form of little trees and two are about 3 or 4 years old. This was the first time I left them outside.
It is May now and I am still waiting for buds to appear. My question is how long should I wait for signs of life to appear?

I hope by now the Bougainvilleas are leafing up and looking good.
Gardeners always say, leave it until at least mid June before you decide that a plant has had it – if it's on the edge of it’s temperature zone it may well green up quite late. A very simple way of telling if a shrubby plant is still alive is to rub just a little bark off with your finger nail – if there is green underneath - it's OK and if it's brown, sadly it's headed for the compost heap.

I have Bougainvilleas outside in the south of England and they do struggle a bit. It's not the temperature so much as the light level – they need long hours of bright sunlight to flower well, so you will never have the overwhelming canopy of colour that you see in the Mediterranean although they are fun to grow (and surprisingly disease free).

Lastly from Robert in Sweden who also sent a photo of his problematic plant:
Dear Diana,
I was recently given a plant which, shortly after I was given it, started to lose leaves (at least the one to the right).
Why is this happening? I gave it a few milliliters of water just to ensure it had some water since it was taken from the store. Was it too much? Too little? Isn't it getting enough light?

Dear Robert,
Your pretty little plant is drowning! I'm fairly sure from your excellent photograph that it is an Echeveria – a sun loving succulent that is usually written about in the same sort of books as cactuses.
You can't just take it out of it's bath and put it in some gritty soil straight away – it would probably die of shock, or at least be pretty unhappy for quite a while.
Keep it in a light place and dry-ish. Add a little gritty cactus compost around it's roots. As the container it's in will have no drainage holes, at some point you will have to lift it out and re-pot it into a pot which could sit inside the decorative container.
Keep it warm and sunny and it will eventually reward you with some exquisite little yellow or yellow and orange flowers.

Happy Horticulture
Diana