Category Archives: Garden

 Alpine strawberries really go the distance compared to normal ones – my ‘Cambridge Favourite’ plants only have a few late fruit clinging to them but my little alpines (‘Mignonette’) are still bursting with tiny, sweet, aromatic fruit.  Not on that, but they’re also still flowering! I was getting handfuls of these little things into September last year and I’m hoping for the same again.  Another great thing about these tiny, tasty plants is that they don’t produce runners – so unlike my other strawberries I’m not having to check every week for sneaky attempts to invade the rest of the veg patch.

The container garden is maturing a little – there are now fewer potatoes (3 bags have been harvested) and the older nasturtiums are starting to look a little ragged as they go into seed production mode.  Since I want seeds as both food and for next year’s ‘crop’ I’m happy to let them go.  The gladioli are throwing up flower spikes, though none have opened yet, the buddleja are starting to grow again after a midsummer break, and there have been a few additions – some little Dahlias and a spectacular, if still small, Acer.

There are a few species of plants I’ve wanted for a while and this is one of them – and about the only tree which is likely to fit in such a little garden ;)  Andy picked the type – ‘Butterfly’, which is a lovely green, yellow and red-edged variety.  I think it’s a rather beautiful little thing and it’ll stand out nicely versus our red fence where a red one would just fade into the background.  I aim to plant it in the half-barrel where the larger gladioli are currently residing, but until then it’s hiding in a terracotta cachepot.

The tomatoes are going strong – I’ve thinned out a few branches to allow for better airflow and to stop a few of them resting against the condensation-damp sides.  The nasturtiums are enjoying being planted alongside them, it seems, and with being planted so much later than the others, will hopefully give a little bit of colour in a few weeks.

Finally, the ‘miscellaneous brassicas’ rescued when my greenhouse fell over are showing their ‘true colours’.  I have one purple sprouting broccoli (hooray!), one cauliflower and two cabbages all growing happily side-by-side.

One thing I’ve really noticed a lot this year is the increased traffic of wildlife in the garden – mainly insects of course.  Above are a hoverfly, spider and tiny bee taking advantage of the flowers and shade given by my garden plants – all of which are all sitting on what was bare patio or slate-stone when we moved in.  I don’t know if I’ve noticed more bees this year or less, but I’ve certainly seen more varieties of bees.  I can’t be sure if it’s just that I’m recognising more of them, now, or if there is actually a wider range, but it’s really nice to see so many little critters buzzing around hard at work.  Unfortunately there are also a tonne of earwigs, woodlice, ants and scale insects alongside slugs and snails – I can only hope that the nesting birds and ladybugs make inroads on those as my poor turnips are starting to look a bit ragged =(  Oddly, all of my aphid problems are indoor!

My first and only raspberry and the first of my little tomatoes.  Fingers crossed that it’ll be the first of many!

Legousia Pentagonia flower – I thought I’d lost these pretty little ground-cover plants when I’d accidentally left them in the shed.  I noticed them suddenly yesterday when I went out to check on things after a weekend away from the garden.  Next to it, is a teeny tiny physalis pod!  I wasn’t entirely sure that they’d survive outside but I had just run out of room indoors and gave it a shot.  They’ve certainly done better than the tomatillos I tried to grow.

This holly bush has caused me some consternation since we  moved in.  It’s very vigorous – the picture on the left was the first time I pruned it when we first moved in and, as you can see, the height them was reduced to the edge of the fence but it’s now grown several feet past it again.  I tried at the time to just keep it from making its way over the fence but this time I decided to give it a prune to make it more of a tree instead of a bush.  I wanted to be able to get in underneath it, and maybe plant a climber up it (which I now have, a lovely white alpina type, spring flowering clematis).

The bed in which the holly bush sits is ‘next years project’ ;)

Now that I’ve (just about) caught up with my planting, stuffing the last few unfortunates into the ground in the hope that being kept in their pots hasn’t hurt them over-much, I decided it was finally time to make a start on the weeds. I actually don’t mind weeding, especially on a nice day, but I knew this was going to be a full-scale war. Especially with the creeping buttercup. Oh how I love and hate thee, creeping buttercup. Beautiful flowers, horribly invasive. If it stayed in my lawn I’d honestly let it do it’s thing – same with clover and daisies – I’m not one for a ‘manicured’ lawn – I even leave the ‘annoying to cut’ bit at the side to go a bit wild as the birds seem to like it. When those weeds start invading my veg bed, though…

From a quick look on the internet, I think I can say with fair certainty that I found these weeds: creeping buttercup, dandelions, daisies, hairy bittercress and / or thale cress, sheep’s sorrel, bugle, white clover, groundsel, rosebay willowherb, broad leaved willowherb, sow thistle, cleavers, bramble, and possibly pineapple weed, I’ll need to go back out and smell it. Oh and marigolds (calendula) since I’ve taken up nearly as many of those as all the rest of the weeds combined. There were others, but I caught them either too small to be identified or I have too fuzzy a memory of them to guess at what they might have been.

Some of the weeds I just trim back, knowing they’ll try to invade my growing space again but enjoying their flowers too much to remove them entirely – like the buttercups, rosebay willowherb, clover, & daisies. I never touch the bugle as I really like it and it isn’t very weedy in my garden.

The last and biggest ‘weed’ I took out was this privet branch:

Our next door neighbour’s privet hedge has remained untrimmed for a few years and is now very tall – I totally don’t mind this as it’s beautiful when in full flower and the birds and bees love using it as a nesting site / perches. However, when there was heavy snow, a lot of it started to overhang my fence. Most of it popped back up but I think the weight of the snow and heavy winds finally took their toll and this branch was half snapped-off by the time I took a saw to it. Now my berry bushes are less shaded and I don’t have to worry about them being dropped on from above. I have absolutely no idea what to do with a small-tree-sized piece of privet, though – pretty sure my mini-shredder won’t manage it ;)

As if that wasn’t enough for me, I’ve also been over to volunteer a couple of times at Jupiter Wildlife Centre in Grangemouth… where I’ve been mostly weeding! It’s just that time of year, I suppose – everything is flourishing, especially the weeds.

^{2011  // 2010}

This year has been an odd one – a warm spring and, so far, a wet and windy start to summer.  Last year at this time we had weather so hot I had thought  I’d find my garden dead or dying when we came back from a trip to Yorkshire.  This year, although some things got off to a head start, a lot of other things have been delayed for me.  Part of that was the long hospital stay as it meant I’ve been a bit slow about getting some of my brassicas out into the ground. The few I did plant out early are not nearly as progressed as last year’s batch, though, so I’m not sure whether it was too much early heat / lack of water, or not enough sun.

I can’t complain too much, though – the cool weather has meant my lettuces, pak choi and spinach have all lasted a lot longer than they did this time last year – where they were bolting almost as soon as they got two true leaves!

One thing I have in profusion is self-sown marigolds – a bucketful.  These aren’t even all of them as some were left in by virtue of being pretty and prolific growers.  Reminder to self: deadhead flowers, this year!

The peas sown in the bags on the wall are doing not-too-bad.  In fact, they’re doing better than their peers in the ground, hmph.  I’ve never had much luck with peas – they should, by all accounts, be easy to grow but mine never seem to take off as strongly as I see others’ plants doing.

A few more flowers have poked up, breaking the purple hegemony: the black and yellow petunia – which was supposed to be an all black variety – and this year’s first nasturtium flower.  Both the nasturtium plant and blossom are much bigger than any I managed to grow last year – I’ll be continuing to start them inside from now on!

April’s weather seems to have finally caught up with us – the last few days have brought some much needed rain to the garden. As if to make up for being a bit late, we’ve had great deluges sometimes even accompanied by thunder and lightning.   I’ve had to keep the greenhouses shut to keep out the driving rain and wind and there’s not much can be planted into the now-sodden ground but, in a gap between downpours, I nipped outside to fill some of the hanging baskets and decorative pots I had.

What amazed me was how fast the paving slabs dried after the first downpour – it wasn’t the heaviest we’ve had but it was chucking it down only an hour or so before the above picture was taken – the bag I took out to sit on, to protect against a wet rump, was totally unnecessary.

Knowing how badly my baskets suffered last year (I never got around to hanging them up, for one, whoops) I thought I’d add a little water channel – a bottomless yoghurt pot with stones in it which I can use later in the season to water directly into the roots with.  I think I remember seeing a tip about something similar on Gardeners World at some point.  Once the baskets were filled up I added some decorative wood chips on top to cover everything up and which can be lifted aside whilst watering.  If this summer is as sweltering as the last then having a way to get past a parched surface will be a boon.

Unfortunately the rain came on before I could take photos of the results and I had to run back inside.  I bravely ventured back out to get some for this post, though, and ended up grabbing some pictures of the other containers which I had already planted up a week or two back.

A little sparse, as yet, but most of these plants should grow a fair bit and I didn’t want to overcrowd them.

I’ve got high hopes for my hanging planters – they’ve allowed me to ‘take charge’ of the big wall o’ sunshine that is the left hand side garden fence.   It’s not easy to grow things in the small edge of soil that’s below it as the grass and weeds from next door try to take it over.  It had seemed a shame not to grow anything up onto the fence, though.  When Andy got me these hanging bags for my birthday I knew they’d be the answer.   Each one has a different mix of plants and I’m trying out both beans and sweetpeas to see if they’ll take to being grown in this way.  At a guess I’d say the peas will do ok, but the beans might be fussy since they won’t have much soil and they prefer to grow straight up rather than sideways but assumptions get us nowhere and as these are ‘unknown’ beans from the big greenhouse accident  I’m not losing much by using them here since I’ve replanted another batch to replace that whole lot.  At worse, they won’t thrive, as best I might find a nice way to up my veggie growing space!

Plants in Baskets:

Silver ragwort, red & white pelargoniums, nasturtiums, dianthus (white dove)

Plants in Hanging Bags:

Nasturtiums, sweet peas (Bijou mixed), beans (who knows what type), trailing ivy geranium (Mexican girl), pelargonium (Vancouver Centennial), petunias (Fanfare Dark Blue, Black Velvet), more silver ragwort, really red deer’s tongue lettuce.

The nasturtiums and red pelargoniums are seeds / cuttings from last year – I’m quite proud of both and was surprised that the nasturtium seed actually had a good germination rate.  It was a ‘Tutti Frutti’ mix packet that I grew last year, but since they were open pollinated who knows what they are now.   The white pelargoniums were something I was searching for – I’d tried a few places but most only had red or pink as single-colour boxes – the rest are all mixed shade boxes.  I wanted some nice, bright white colours to contrast with the deep red fence and ruddy paving we have.  It was only in, of all places, Morrisons that I found my pack of plain white pelargoniums!