Gardening with Pat Duke: 'Spring HAS sprung so it's time to look at roses and tomatoes'

Being a pragmatist and keen to get on with things I’m firmly in the ‘spring has sprung’ camp and won’t have anything to do with those saying winter isn’t over yet. 

They are generally the types who ring the local pizza take away correcting the spelling of Hawaiian. 

The one common denominator for all of us however is that we need to prune our roses by the end of the month. I for one approached my first attempt at rose pruning with shaking secateurs but it's really quite simple and on a bright day is surprisingly relaxing.

The reason we prune is to promote more flowers by re-energising the plant. Their prized flowers grow on vigorous new shoots that start to grow in spring. If we didn’t cut them back, the plant would just grow long and straggly with low energy and unable to produce even half decent flowers. 

Pruning now is future proofing the plant by cutting back last year’s growth. Most gardeners cut them back by half or a third, removing dead or crossing over stems as you go. 

Wherever you cut, it needs to be no more than half an inch above a bud as that bud will eventually make a new stem with a flower. 

Cutting any higher will ensure you have that dead wood that looks unsightly and is a risk of disease. 

The trick is to do it on a 45 degree angle (for water run off to prevent rot) parallel to the bud so both are facing the same direction. Look for a bud on the outside of the stem to reduce the number of inward growing shoots and retain a favourable shape. 

Following these rules for floribunda roses and hybrid tea roses will ensure that year after year strong flowers will come back. Giving them a multi purpose feed and dropping a spadeful of manure on the roots in October is all the care they really need for a long life that justifies the expense of buying an established plant. 

On the Plot

Now the sun has made a reappearance from its winter sojourn, thoughts turn to the more glamorous sun loving plants to grow. 

The totem of this category is the tomato and it needs to be planted from seed around now. 

You could buy established plants later but you’d be restricted to the uniform ones chosen by garden centres for their own reasons and not yours. 

Many people have space to grow four varieties either including ‘Moneymaker’ or not. Non-commercial growers like us grow bush varieties producing smaller fruit over a longer time frame. 

‘Tigerella’ is a prolific fruiting British tomato that has attractive yellow stripes and had been popular for half a century so it stood the test of time. 

A reliable plum variety is ‘Sweet Cassidy’ that also has yellow stripes but seems to keep coming until the sunlight wanes in autumn.

 ‘Sungold’ is a very sweet orange cherry tomato that I've seen growing in many an allotment greenhouse and is very popular for good reason. It’s easy to grow and produces over a longer period than most. 

If you want to grow a beefsteak variety then ‘Brutus’ is a beast that can grow up to half a pound/500g in weight and needs some serious support in place to stop it bringing the plant down under its weight. 

Growing tomatoes is a privilege of gardening. It gives you not only a vast choice, but is also a sharp reminder of how restricted we can be by modern growing methods and varieties more suited to mass production and storage. 

If you are fortunate enough to have access to a greenhouse then there’s no stopping you with exciting Mediterranean fruit and vegetables, whilst most of these flourish outdoors, this makes them susceptible to the dreaded tomato blight.