YORKTON - Thank you to all of our gardening friends who attended the Yorkton and District Hort Society Spring Plant Sale last week, it was great to see you all again! Thank you to our Hort members who contributed plants, helped to set up, and worked at the sale. Your help makes the event a success! We also thank the Parkland Mall for all their help with our projects, not only our plant sales but our Annual Show in August. (FYI: our Annual Fruit, Flower and Vegetable Show will be on Wednesday, August 9).
While we are handing out bouquets of thanks, we also have to send a huge “thank you” to our friends at the Yorkton Public Library. The Library has been an excellent home for our monthly meetings, a great central spot for enthusiastic gardeners coming in from all locations in the city and countryside, and we appreciate all the help you give us in so many ways. Thank you to our friends at the YPL! The Hort Society is taking the summer off, but we will be back again with our first meeting in September.
And of course we can’t miss a bouquet of thanks to our friends at Yorkton This Week for your ongoing support; we thank you for continued assistance and kindness. Our archives have wonderful pictures from the paper of past shows and plant sales, pictures and articles that span decades and helped local gardeners know that we were here and what was happening with us! You helped to make that history happen, YTW, and it’s absolutely fantastic, thank you!
Now, let’s go out to the garden.
Are you familiar with ninebark? The fancy two-dollar name is “physocarpus” and it is a member of the rose family. (Spirea would also be a cousin). It’s a very pretty shrub with lovely bark in shades of cream and light mocha, making it a nice choice for winter interest in the garden. It is easy to grow and doesn’t have any pest problems. In the late spring, gardeners can enjoy dainty clusters of flowers, which turn to interesting red berries later in the summer. Foliage may be green or a very dark burgundy-purple, very striking in the garden.
This is a shrub that you can prune, or not, depending on how big you want it to be. A mature shrub could be almost eight feet high and wide, if left to its own devices. If you are looking for a new shrub, this is one to try!
I will keep you posted on the ninebark “Diablo” that we have in our garden. After years of only slight pruning, the ninebark (which was about seven feet high) looked a little poor this year. Some branches were very patchy with new foliage, and others appeared to be dead. What to do? We did some homework and read that it can be cut back, so we did so, to about two feet high. Our homework said that this will be good to rejuvenate the shrub, so we’ll see what happens. Sometimes gardeners just have to take a chance! The ninebark has a varying life expectancy of fifteen to thirty years; ours is probably close to thirty years old and has given us nothing but beauty in all that time. We hope it still has some zip left and will come back from the root.
If you have a mugo pine in your yard, now is the time to do candling. “Candles” are the long slender shoots on the mugo pine branches. They should be pinched in half before the end of June; doing this relaxing task will significantly increase the thickness of your mugo pine, so it is an important job! Visit the hort society ay www.yorktonhort.ca; thank you to our friends at YTW for their great work. Have a nice week!
