Just as we were going away on our little holiday the garden exploded with new colours! The rhododendron at the bottom is now covered in big bright pink flowers, the irises came out and now even the spindly rose hidden in the rhododendron is getting ready to open its petals!
It’s super exciting!
Although the weeds were also busy growing over the week, so I first spent some time removing baby St John’s Wort, blackberries and OMG so much fucking Mares Tail! I think the rest of my life is going to be pulling up that bastard weed, although blackberries are also pretty strong in our garden too! I think the birds drop a lot of seeds from the nature reserve behind our house which has plenty of them growing wild.
With that done I had some seedlings I’d been keeping inside to pot up and move to my outdoor grow houses now the weather is warm. I always forget how long that job takes!
It was very hot when I did this and some of the seedlings got too warm in the direction sun and wilted.. oops.. but most bounced back from a good soak in the shade!
The only plants I had germinate (from my many packets of out of date seeds!) were dwarf cosmos, snap dragons, a few diathus (aka pinks), a singular harlequin sunflower, 3 tomatoes, some lavatera (rose mallow) and calendula.
A lot of the cosmo, snap dragons and the tomatoes had gotten very leggy and weak from being inside too long so I tried putting them a bit lower in the pots for more support. Once they get stronger more I’ll plant them out into the beds and containers.
We also went to B&Q for some bits and fence paint. I couldn’t resist “rescuing” a few plants. Everything there was very dry and in dire need of a good water, but I found a few healthier looking specimens and left them to soak in a bucket of water for a couple of days to perk up while I got ready to plant them.
Before planting anything else in the raised bed I wanted to paint the fence, because that’s going to be difficult to do without trampling things! The bed is about 4 foot deep so you can’t reach the back from the wall/ground. I think I’m going to put some of the broken paving slabs in strategic places to have somewhere to stand in the bed for fence access and weeding.
Painting the fence was a grueling chore! The neighbour owns it and she chose a nice-to-look-at horizontal double panel but it’s so fiddly to paint you have to use a small brush. I know she regrets her choice because while I was hacking the ivy the other week she was out painting her side and grumbling to me about it! She’s 94 years old and painted that fence herself, she’s incredible!
It took me about an hour to do each panel (I did at least finish listening to Watching You by Lisa Jewell!), I got three done before we had to go out for Eurovision. There are two full panels (awkwardly behind trees) and a large lattice piece left to do.
It looks so much better though, like a new garden!
Then yesterday I planted my new purchases and some of the bidens my Mum had gifted me. Hopefully I put them in good spots. I get anxious over where to place things and if they get the right amount of sun, or how they’ll grow with the what is already in the bed… I forget around so much it takes me ages!
We also got a metal trellis thing from B&Q for the clematis that by miracle I did not kill when I had to hack it all the way back earlier this year!
I might get another trellis for this mystery rose we have. It’s bizarrely growing behind this big conifer – no idea why it is in that spot – and has grown up two massive stems as it tries to get into light! This is a mostly over the neighbours fence, so I’m going to try tying it over and see what happens. I think from researching that it’s a rambling rose?
What I really need to do it draw myself a plan of the garden and write on it all the plants I’m slowly identifying, and when I need to give them special attention for pruning etc!
Since the mess of shrubs at the back have been in bloom they’ve been easier to identify, and turns out they are all ones I should cut back after their spring flowering. That is definitely good news for getting things tidier by the end of summer! I’m going to need to get right under them so I can dig out the monster brambles that live back there.
Lots of progress made this week! I even found time to enjoy sitting outside relaxing in the warm weather! 😎
beautiful!
Thank you!