Tougher love for summer bedding pays off

Thursday, 15 April 2010

impatiens 'busy lizzies'

Reading alumna, Bunny Guinness published an article in the Telegraph newspaper recently, highlighting research that had taken place in the University's School of Biological Sciences.
The article explained how Dr Ross Cameron and Dr Tijana Blanusa, both experts in horticulture and environmental landscapes, carried out research on various watering regimes that resulted in summer gardens being kept colourful for longer.

In collaboration with the Royal Horticultural Society, Dr Cameron and Dr Blanusa have demonstrated that we are unnecessarily overwatering our summer bedding plants. By experimenting with hanging baskets and containers with impatiens and petunias they found that if you water and feed frequently, you encourage big plants with lots of growth. Whereas if you water them less, you get proportionally more flower per shoot and they will flower longer.

The article explained: "Many bedding plants come from species that are adapted to semi-desert or Mediterranean climates and will tolerate a drier regime far more readily than most gardeners imagine. Traditionally we over-cosset them, add masses of food and water, but actually we are making them more susceptible to vulnerability in dry periods."

Therefore, if watering and feeding is carried out regularly and is then interrupted, by a holiday for example, the plants will be far more adversely effected  than if they are watered carefully during the first 10-14 days and then left to toughen, so they develop a degree of drought resistance.