Sun in the sky you know how I feel

It is still winter, but in a good way!

Still hunkered down, mostly. But did step out to the garden for a bit, to top up the bird food and for some tidying up around the beds.

Trusty hand Bruce came over to help with planting the roses I mentioned in the last post. Planted three bare root roses in ice cold soil, topped with a layer of frost. Lopped off the dried holly hocks stems and dried stems on the sedum.

New sprouts of sedum have grown from the base of the old stems, cute as buttons at this stage.

The warmer days have persuaded the tulips and daffodils bulbs to come up early too, but they will slow down when the weather gets colder come February.

We absolutely have to have the garden looking its best this year, through every season. Have been tipped off that Hunter's Farm is the place to go for some bargains. I saw this flower planted in large troughs in one of the public squares last October and noticed that it has remained in bloom throughout the winter. Definitely the kind of hardy colour we want in our garden. Turns out this is Polyanthus Primula, or the good ol' Primrose, and it is right on top of my shopping list, along with winter jasmine and  honey suckle.

Hunkered down for the winter

We did intend to get out and dig for England over the autumn. I got help for the some of the hard digging and created a new bed at the back of the garden. We could have lots of climbing roses there, I thought. We set off in earnest to the fancy garden centre and before long we had a trolley loaded with bulbs of all sorts, as well as the sedum  have been looking for. At the till, we realised that that we had nearly 200 bulbs of narcissi and tulips, but no  coherent planting scheme. That plus a time-starved week ahead and we decided to we put all the  bulbs back on the shelves with a plan to return the next weekend when we knew which bulbs we needed. Next weekend never came and eventually we missed yet another November with no new bulbs. A right disgrace. Anyway, I can at least share that Spring-Summer 2012 is going to see lots of tulips of the Parrot variety, not in our garden though, but most certainly in a lot of gardens up and down the country. 

The last new addition to our garden were six beautiful sedum with pink blossoms. We just about managed to plant them between days of blustery weather and very wet soil. Sedum are winter hardy and provide a carpet of ground cover, just what we need to fill up the gaps in our front bed. We did pick three bare root roses from David Austin, but they too remained potted over the winter - cannot be a good thing, but hopefully not a crime. 

On a more cheerful note, the warmer than usual November meant that the oriental poppies continued to grow and both plants appear to have established well.

We also bought some cyclamen at the garden centre at a deeply discounted price and the label said it would not last the week. A little TLC, a large pot, indoor placement and a whole month later, the cyclamen are thriving and bringing fabulous colour against the bleak hues of winter. 

Earlier on we had a sunflower bloom from a seed past its expiry date, well, a year or so past its expiry date. Should try my luck with the other seeds next year.

Last night we brought our geraniums indoors at 1.00 am, just before the next major frost. They continued their display well into December, probably confused by the warmer winter as the poppies were.





















Signing off for the year now, with a lot of promises and
plans for the next year.  Hope the birds will be fine over the winter.

Oh Sweet Pea

Spring makes way for summer and it is the turn of a whole new generation of plants to keep us enthralled.

The best surprise of all was to find the gorgeous red begonia emerge from hibernation. When this plant withered away last year, I wondered whether it was a natural process of over wintering or whether we had left it out on the patio too long and the harsh frost had got to it before we could bring it indoors. Instinct kept me from emptying the pot to house another plant. But the pot remained neglected all the same, propped against a wall near the compost bin. Sheer joy, when nine months later, I find tiny little leaves coming up for some water and fresh air.  The leaves are bigger this week and looks like we will have those beautiful blooms again.

The roses this year have been celebrating something pretty important as they make a spectacular appearance. I helped wire them to the supports and dead heading has been tough to keep up with. The floor of the rose bed is carpeted with petals. I had sprinkled a few leftover wild flower seeds from the rake 'n shake box and they have taken root and are in bloom as well. The bees sure are happy to have them wild flowers around.

The veg that we planted has made great progress and this morning we had very elegant courgette flowers. The beans are doing well too and so are the tomatoes. The carrots  have been less of a survival story and we will be lucky to get one carrot this year.

The strawberries looked fabulous a couple of weeks ago and our neglect meant that they dried up in the high temperatures in recent days. But they have been  rather forgiving and after a drink, have soldiered on.

The other joyful surprise has been utterly exquisite sweet pea in our hanging baskets. Grateful for the beauty these plants bring to our lives.

There are some signs of life from the sedum seeds and hopefully we will have a few robust plants for our front garden. The hostas this year have had very vigorous growth and there are some flowers in bloom there too. Other summer entries are the achillea which looks close to bloom in a range of pastels, the hydrangea which is competing with the lavender for room to grow and the buddleia cones.

There have been a few casualties too, but nothing that a little nurture and nature cannot fix. Clematis is growing well, though I fear for the dry leaves, are they just due to the heat or this clematis wilt? There is blackspot on the roses. And shiny red lily beetles have made a meal of our lilies and stripped them of leaves. The peach tree is full of leaves and a small little peach, with very limited traces of peach leaf curl still evident. The crabtree is now shooting out branches laden with purple berries. One branch in particular leans over the bird bath and the berries seem to make a Ribena of sorts for the birds that want a drink! I did move the branch further away eventually.

After pottering about in the garden we love to come up to the bedroom window and survey our backyard and it is looks like a happy place for all its residents.

Of French Beans and Papaver magic

It has been so hard to keep pace with the garden this week. We have a corner of our garden that is planted with roses and practically overnight, they are full of roses and buds ready to bloom.

We also had high drama from the French Beans. The seedlings grew a few inches high and were expecting to be replanted into a larger space and, more importantly, be provided supports to climb on. When the bean shoots do not find the support they are looking for, they abandon leaf production and send out long tendrils in search of something to climb on to. Now, these pots were on a window sill with nothing but glass on one side. So, looks like the seedlings had a conference one night and decided to support each other. The next time I peeked in to see how they were doing, pairs of shoots had coiled around each other and formed two spires each almost three feet high. The protest worked! I decided I had to give these guys some support immediately and took the pots outside and placed them at the base of the cane tepee frame we had used last year that still stood in the garden. The beans were duly pacified and behaved well till the weekend when we had some time to plant them in the soil all good and proper. Who knew French Beans could throw tantrums like this!

We also have had to abandon plans to have a formal veg bed, partly due to our laziness and partly due to a paucity of creative ideas on where to create it. We will use spaces in our flower beds to plant veg. So the courgettes went in next to the beans along with stakes. In another bed, we potted some of the prolific mint to give away to friends and created space for six small tomato plants. In the same bed, we also carved out a neat little area near the lavender for the carrots. Relieved to have got these into the ground giving them a better chance of growth and survival.

Went on a shopping binge at a Garden Centre recently and Mr Macaron who gravitates towards species exotic was trying to convince me that we should load our trolley with this plant which has flowers the size of saucers and was so irresistible to bees that the bees came along with the pot to the trolley. Turns out they are hardy and will tolerate our alkaline soil, so I had no excuse not to have them. Soon our trolley was filled with two large Papavers and three Papaver Gnomes, which as you guessed, is the smaller version of the same. I have to admit that the Papaver is most expressive flower I have seen in recent times - one of Nature's Grand Designs.

The rest of our trolley included anthemis, salvia (which harks back to my childhood days, when we had an assortment of salvia in our garden), lily-of-the-valley, digitalis, agapanthus and seeds of sedum.

So we had lots more planting to do. We also inaugurated our barbecue, though I did worry whether all the heat and smoke would scare away wildlife that our garden attracts in small measure. There are blue tits who are regular visitors to the bird feeders. Spotted a beautiful ladybird while removing weeds the other day. And we watched in fascination as a collared dove picked up bread crumbs from the bird table, carried it to the bird bath in its beak and dunked it in water to soften it. Quite like how we dunk biscuits in our tea!

There is more to do, but we are exhausted! The lawn was mowed too, I noticed. Hoping that all the new plants will take to their new home and settle in nicely with their neighbours.

Over the summer, we have plans to create a little bench somewhere, clear out the overgrowth along the south wall and plant more roses in the rose corner.