Gardening Tips Your fortnightly gardening tips for indoors and outdoors

Prune shrubs which flower on this year’s wood, like buddleias and fuchsias, back to about 12” from the base.  Keep planting trees, shrubs and roses.  Prune your clematis: those which bloom in high summer down to about 3ft from the base, but earlier flowering hybrids less severely.  Firm soil around plants dislodged by frost.  Clear, weed and feed your herbaceous border, keep planting lily bulbs.  When snowdrops, helebores etc finish flowering divide the clumps.  Apply manure or compost to tubs containing permanent shrubs and plants.   Sow lettuces and cabbages under cloches.  Sow broad beans and onions outdoors in fine weather.  Plant Jerusalem artichokes.  Complete pruning of apples, pears and bush fruits.  Keep planting fruit trees and bushes.  Spray peaches and nectarines against leaf curl, keep spraying fruit trees with tar oil before buds open.   Prepare your runner bean bed by working in lots of manure or compost.  Place seed potatoes in trays in an airy, frost-free place.  Prune autumn fruiting raspberries and cut back newly planted canes to about 10”.  Start to scatter slug pellets, sow parsley in good weather.
Plants under protection.  Sow seeds of petunias, geraniums, antirrhinums tomato and wild strawberry in slight heat.  Start off begonias and gloxinias in compost.   Fumigate or spray the greenhouse if necessary, aerate as much as possible on fine days. Bring in bowls of bulbs from your garden to force for the house.  Re-pot large house plants, removing dead roots and placing in larger pots with fresh compost.
Lawns.  Prepare ground for lawn sowing, dig and remove weeds, aerate established lawns, check for moss.

  SHERINGHAM EVENING W.I.

After a break from formal meetings in December for our annual Christmas Dinner, held once again this time at the Burlington Hotel, it was ‘back to business’ for the Institute in January.  Two long-standing committee members, Helena Beresford and Joan Cozens, having stood down at the last AGM, we were pleased to welcome four newcomers to the committee.  We were also able to welcome three new members to the Institute and the return of a former member, and trust that they will enjoy our meetings and activities.  2006 promises to be another active year for us - the scrabble, craft and walking groups all have their first meetings of the New Year in January and a meeting has been arranged to discuss and plan our entry in this year’s Carnival procession during Carnival week in August.  The station garden team continues to tend the Anglia ‘One’ station, as it has done for the past 20 years under the leadership of Maureen Cook and at the January meeting the Certificate of the Silver Award won by the team in the ‘Railway Station’ category of the Anglia in Bloom Awards 2005 was on display.  Our entry for the Norfolk Federation Rose Bowl Competition, a recipe for a successful WI - was read to members.  We are, of course, hoping that our entry compiled by five of our members in the form of a poem will be looked upon favourably by the judges. Several interesting outings are being planned, including a trip to the Snowdrops at Little Walsingham in February, a visit which had to be cancelled, with great disappointment, at short notice last year due to bad weather.  After all the essential business and notices had been dealt with, the meeting finished with a lively Beetle Drive under Mavis Sturgess' guidance.
Celia Dolton.