Spring has Sprung around here and so it's time to tackle the garden, or more specifically, how to train a plant to be a standard? Standard? What kind of Standard? The standard kind which has one stalk. There are many reasons why this is a useful exercise, most commonly for people with either small garden or narrow flower beds. If you can train the plant to do all it's flowering at eye level then this frees up the bottom of the bed for other plants and effectively doubles the amount of blooms you can squeeze into a small space.




This is Jasmine which has many stalks as well as many runners. First find the thickest or most vigorous stalk and cut back all the others at ground level. Nick off any little sprouts that emerge from your main stalk.





Within a year you can move from a wild out of control plant to this stately one stemmed version. This of course is a honeysuckle not a Jasmin.




There will always be more sprouts at the bottom but they're easy to remove on a weekly basis.

Be careful what time of year you attempt this tackle as you may wipe out a whole years flowers. Ideally this should be tackled at the end of the flowering season ready for the next year or just after the first flowering as here it is not uncommon to have three or four blooming periods.


Now if only everything else in my life were as easy as this! There again, 'standard' is probably a little over-rated except by certain control freaks like me.

Cheers



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