Your gardening questions answered: What’s wrong with my jasmine?

We’re visiting with Dale Dailey today.

If you’ve watched the cooking competition show Top Chef in the past decade, you’ve probably seen Kristen Kish. The Korean-born, Michigan-raised chef won her season in Seattle in 2012. Since then, she’s appeared regularly as a guest judge and, most recently, landed the role of Top Chef’s new host. Taking over for the original host, Padma Lakshmi, after 19 seasons, Kish has some big shoes to fill. But her long-running history with the hit reality series, along with starring on the celebrity cooking competition show Fast Foodies, and hosting cooking series such as Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend and Restaurants at the End of the World, for which she also serves as a producer, have her primed as a great new face of the show.

Q: Any advice on the best way to tackle creeping buttercup without using weed killer? It’s starting to take over some of my flower beds, where it’s smothering perennials and smaller shrubs. MJ, Co Kilkenny

You can sense it in the slowly stretching evenings, the higher skies, the shifting quality of light, and the noisy chatter of birds. And you can see it in the flowering hellebores, witch-hazel and sweetly perfumed daphne, as well as the snowdrops, daffodils, cyclamen, aconites, crocuses and dwarf irises that have pushed their snouts through cold, wet soil to burst into determined, brilliant bloom.

The soil must have adequate drainage; otherwise, air may be excluded, and the more beneficial micro-organisms may be destroyed. Soils which have poor drainage are often sour and acid. It will be necessary to improve this acidity by applications of hydrated lime. Wet soils are cold ones, and this means that plant growth is severely retarded. The situation is even more critical in the northern, colder parts of the country. Waterlogged soils cause roots to rot and a combination of all these problems can produce complete failures in some gardens.

Q: Could you please recommend a good peat-free seed compost? I’ve tried a few over the last few years but haven’t had great results. I’d really like to do the right thing environmentally but am now at the point where I’m sorely tempted to go back to using a conventional peat-based compost. CF County Kerry

Sketch image from a garden planting plan recently created for a GardenAdvice client

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Anyone who knew Angela Jupe, the late landscape architect and garden maker, will remember her particular love of snowdrops, or Galanthus, as this genus of dainty bulbous perennials is properly known.

February marks the transition from winter to spring. Although the chill may persist, promising signs of the upcoming new season are scattered throughout. Bulbs cautiously break through the soil, and daylight gradually begins to appear.

We’ve been to our fair share of local Manchester parks and gardens, that’s for sure! But which do we recommend?

HAPPY SPRING!