Fareed Mohmed ← Gardening

Gardening · Collection 01

Flowering
Vines

Grow · Train · Bloom

Eight climbers I grow and keep notes on — soil mixes, feeding intervals, support, pruning and the pests that find them. Written for warm Indian gardens, where a wall is only ever a wall until something is trained up it.

Bloom calendar

Plan for colour every month · tap a name for its care sheet

Peak flowering Some flowering Warm-climate gardens · shifts a few weeks by region

The vines

008 care sheets · soil · water · feed · support

Growing notes

Almost every problem on this page comes back to two things: drainage and support. A vine sitting in wet soil rots at the root long before it tells you on its leaves, so every mix here runs roughly 40% garden soil, 30% compost, 20% cocopeat and 10% sand or perlite — enough body to hold moisture, enough grit to let the rest go.

Support has to be up before the plant needs it. Flame vine, Begum Bahar and red jade vine all put on serious weight, and retrofitting a trellis under a vine already in leaf means cutting away the growth you were trying to keep. Put the structure in at planting, then tie loosely and often.

The other recurring lesson is nitrogen. Too much of it and you get a beautiful green wall with nothing on it. Feed on the intervals in each sheet, switch to a phosphorus-heavy feed when you want flowers, and let a little seasonal stress do the rest.