Guess what - More gardening!

I've had a lovely day in the garden after a good lie in.

I've got a few changes to share with you too!

It doesn't seem to matter that I've been late planting these red onions, they're quite happily doing their thing.

Considering they were free, I am delighted to see the change. When I planted them, there was just one little sprout:

And now... well you can clearly see the difference!
*happy dance*

I started a late salad bar!:

I've started off four different types of lettuce including lollo rossa, saladin, little gem and lambs lettuce, I've also started off some spinach beet and the final pot is spring onions. I am fascinated to see if the spring onion do anything after a comment left by scarybex where she said that spring onion had failed in her garden. It made me want to try to grow some - I love a challenge!

Do you remember those games of 'spot the difference'? Well, we're going to have a little go now. I've helped you by focussing in on the workstation area in the garden - and yes, i added the water and pepsi max, they're not the difference... here you go - your two pictures:


Give up? OK, one the left you'll see three brown boxes with address labels in the window... on the right you'll see there's only one left! What does that mean I hear you ask? Well, it should mean that I've planted 200 bulbs but no... it means I've planted 100 and palmed 100 off to my mother. I convinced her that she needs 100 summer flowering bulbs... and I've put the address label on already, ready to be posted tomorrow. Only 100 bulbs left to go phew!
Here's where todays bulbs went:

You can see where I've watered with rainwater after planting the bulbs. Lets hope for flowers and colour. The first lot of bulbs I planted a couple of weeks ago look promising:

You can see I had to get right down on the ground to take this one! Looking good though aren't they? Lat time you saw them they looked like this:

Such a change from such humble beginnings!

I made one new addition to the garden today. See the clock? It was a present from my mum to my husband quite some time ago and although much admired, it sat sadly in it's box until now. It's quite meantingful to us because not only does it tell the time and on the back, the temperature, but the Rooster on top is symbolic to A. He was born in the year of the Rooster by Chinese Astrology and he's quite typical to the sign. This has been one of those 'keep meaning to get round to it' jobs, but when I finally got to do it today, it took only two minutes!



Another thing to cause delight and squees today has been this:

This mystery tree has revealed itself this year. Up until now it has sat there, produced blossom and then... nothing. Now we have plums! For the first time ever! There aren't many, but there are some and that's fabulous! I am plotting what to do with plums and looking up recipes already.. but if we get something like two plums, well, I'll still be chuffed. If we have a glut of plums though... I think we'll need a chest freezer!

The heat today was a surprise, and a welcome one, but my lifesaver has been this:

It's from Tesco and cost exactly £2.95. I've spent my time in between gardening with my feet dangling over the edge, taking in the sun and keeping my roots cool!

Finally, I'm going to cross post this last picture to a few places because I would like to know what it is. Hubs says it's a honeysuckle... any of you green thumbed lot know?:



I'm gonna wash my hands (they're still dirty lol) and then get on with crocheting Piotr's daughters blanket. It needs to be finished by Wednesday! Wish me luck!

Another big gardening post....

I trogged on out to the garden and after cutting the grass with the strimmer (there was no way I was going to get the lawnmower out) took a look at the live plants that I had collected from the post office this morning. Here they are in their packaging, all lined up on the windowsill where I usually work from:

Each of these pods holds 5 plants, except for the one on the far left which holds 10. When I opened them up I was thrilled to see the way they had been packaged. I don't mean to sound like an advert for Thompson & Morgan, but the plants were safe and secure, if a little warm in their plastic houses. When I opened a jiffy envelope this morning, I plunged my hand in, not knowing what to expect and I found live strawberry plants packed in a plastic bag with a rubber band holding them all together. Poor strawberry plants! They get better treatment later, you'll see....

I thought for a little while that I'd have the company of my furry superviser, but as you can see, she was unimpressed with live plants. I think she was more interested in the noms in her bowl... and so I set about my job of planting out the live plants without her.
The first out of the packs were geraniums. I swore I would never grow geraniums because I cannot abide the smell. However, I couldn't just disregard them, especially when I read the enclosed special note. These are apparently climbing geraniums. Once they've grown a wee bit, I need to put them against a frame because they can reach up to six feet! I didn't keep an eye on which geranium landed where, but the ones I was sent were:

geranium sky rocket night
geranium sky rocket orange
the same but pink
same but scarlet
same but white

I'll wait to see which produces which colour. Should be pretty anyhow.

These look so tiny here! Remember the nasturtium I showed you yesterday? Well, I gave it some company today. You can see here a couple of begonias, the nasturtium and just off to the right you can see a 'Bidens Pirate Pearl' I have no idea whatever about these and upon finishing this entry, I am heading to google!

Here they are, I put the three of them together for now. To me, they are weird looking things and I'm not sure I like them - but, who knows.... they might be stunningly beautiful when they grow up! You can see the nasturtium to the far left :) I visit the nasturtium often and tell it to keep growing!

Five fuschias. One thing I remember my mum growing in abundance and with great success was fuschias, so when I saw a packet of these, I couldn't wait to get them in the ground. I'll show you where I've put them in relation to the other stuff:

Remember the chives, strawberry plants and blueberry plant I showed you yesterday? Well, they're there on the left of the picture, the fuschias in the centre and on the far right you can see a stray leaf from a tomato plant waving into the picture. The plan here is to cover the ground behind the fuschias with weed resistant.. stuff and place some ornamental stone chips. Then we'd like to place a large stone Buddha here and turn it into a little bit of a zen garden corner. I'm finding it so hard to leave that corner unplanted until we get the pennies and wherewithall to get the stones and the statue. Oooo just for records sake, the fuschias are:

Belle Pink Marshmallow x2
Cecilia x2
Marcus Graham x1

I have no idea what colours they will be when they finally settle and flower, it will be a nice surprise!

The final set of live plants were petunias. I know nothing of petunias although of course I have heard the name. I am going to just see what happens after putting them in some good quality compost. I know that some of these are climbing, but we'll see in time. The selection is:

Fireworks star hot pink picote
Fireworks star light violet
Fireworks star pink & white eye

Climbing surfinia Blue
Climbing surfinia Opera pink
same but pink mini
same again in pink vein
same but silver blue

Again a colourful lot hopefully.

After planting all that out I had to take a break and grab a drink. Scraps came out and I thought for one minute she might show some interest, but no, she had come to supervise from the pavement:

I think she was unimpressed with her windowsill being used as a potting shed. Easily displeased. Anyway! I mentioned earlier today that the postman bought me a pink strawberry planter. Turns out, scarybex has the same one! I've been nosing around her blog recently and I exclaimed out loud when I found that there was more than one nutty gardener out here. Wait til you see this strawberry planter!
You can just make out the teeny tiny strawberry plants I've popped in there. I've been assured that they should fruit within 60 - 90 days... I'll be watching the strawberry space lol!

Well, not all of the garden is peachy beautiful. See this dirty great pile of earth?! Well, all this rubble along with quite a few more bricks and stones were in a section of our border. I think, when the house was extended, the builders just dumped their trash in the garden. Not great. There was a standard rose in that same border and when we came across all this mess, we suddenly realised why the rose had never flourished. We still need to get rid of this pile of earth!



And this mess of rubbish needs cut up and plonked in the compost bin. The bin bags are full of ivy which previously used to inhabit the greenhouse. I'm going to double bag it and leave it someplace sunny with some compost maker. I'm reliably informed that in a year or so, it will be usable compost. I hope so, every little helps lol.

Speaking of the greenhouse, I'm not sure if you remember it from way back, but it was swallowed by a crazily huge laurel bush. I couldn't actually get near it, let alone in to it. We hired someone to come and ... trim.. the laurel down and now:

Ta Da!! It's still in need of a clean but it's clear of being overgrown and strangulated by laurel, stray trees and ivy... oh the ivy...! You can see my compost bin there and my water butt. The water butt has been there for years and I use it more and more regularly nowadays, especially when dealing with seedlings. I believe the rain water is better for the little seedlings because tap water has chemicals in it that the seeds wouldn't normally encounter.

If you can imagine this greenhouse, overgrown, with two small trees growing inside it. I couldn't see the floor for ivy and general mess. The walls were creeping with ivy.. it was disgusting and overwhelming. Well... here's what it looks like now:

I don't know what the sand is for - it was left there by the last owners and I have no use for it... The compost bin in there is full of ivy - I used it as a general bin while I was cleaning. I'll empty it into black bags eventually.

See the problem here? There's no back to the greenhouse, and the fence leads right onto next doors overgrown jungle. I just know I'm going to always be battling against laurel, ivy and weeds :\. Ah well, I'll do the repairs and see what happens.

You can see here the problems that the greenhouse has survived through! The back of the greenhouse is going to have to be cleared before the repairs are done, otherwise it's going to just happen all over again!

This section of the garden is eventually going to be a rockery, and the fence replaced. I would like to put some form of arch here to separate this section of the garden from the rest. I have an idea of an arch with perhaps a clematis or climbing rose on each side. It's a long way off, but it's an idea. You can see the laurel bushes at the back. They used to dwarf and cover the greenhouse!

This final photograph is taken from the door that leads out of our bedroom into the garden. You can see the crazy mint plant on the left, the mini workstation, the potato plants and, if you squint a little, you can see the shine of the metal of the greenhouse right in the distance. There's also the shine of the plastic of the mini greenhouse on the left, it's a wonderful invention :)

It's been so long - here's what I've been doing...

Before we even go outside, I should show you my seed selection. I've gathered loads of packets of seeds - my very first ever came from a friend on livejournal so i suppose in a way she's to blame for this fascination! Haha, gotta blame it on someone else!:



So, where to start!? Well, I'm not really interested in flower gardening, for one thing. If I'm going to put effort into something, I want a definite reward at the end - I want to eat what i tend to! With that in mind, it looks like we may get to eat at least one crop soonish: Potatoes!:

This pot of potatoes lives at the back of my official veg plot. It's actually the poorer of two pots. Here's the better of the two:

What has amazed me, is that all of the potatoes in the pots are just potatoes that we had at home for eating purposes and they started to sprout. I thought 'what the hey, give them a go' and stuck them in a little compost. They've gone bonkers as you can see! I am so pleased with them and look forward to nomming on the harvest. Thing is, I have no idea what type of potato they are and won't until they are harvested. I have a feeling that the smaller pot (the first one) has a new potato type - Tesco finest if my memory serves me. We'll see when they get pulled up!
Just to make sure we harvest 'something' we can eat, I bought seed potato sets from Thompsom & Morgan, planted them and prayed hard... they're coming along beautifully and I think they may yield good stuff too. In the foreground of the photo, you can just about make out my tiny salady type garden - here, I'll show you a closer shot:

This is a little selection of a row of mixed salad above a row of red lettuce. They're cut and come again varieties, but too small to cut yet. The row of mixed salad was only sown the other day and I'm so pleased at how quickly they've poked their heads through the soil.

A few more salady bits, you can see the line of mixed salad at the bottom, there's land cress there and I think you might be able to make out some weedy looking spinach... or maybe not - it's there though!

This wee bit of land looks a tad fallow, but honest, there's something in there. I planted out red onions a few days ago. They have yet to reassure me that they are alive, or indeed intending to do anything - but their brothers and sisters in the pot here seem to be poking their heads through:

See the long greeny looking shoot - a sign of hope surely! Of course, it could be that the red onions like the compost and are unimpressed with my soil - who would blame them? We'll see though - an interesting experiment if nothing else. The onions cost me nothing, they were given to me by a lady I went to collect some magazines from. The joy of freegle.

Next to the pot here is the first of my 'garden workstations':

See the onion pot there on the left? I call this a workstation but really it's a way of keeping some mess together. I keep a rubbish bag (empty compost bag), my current bag of compost, and my plant pots here. The plant pots didn't cost me a penny either. I put a 'want' advert on freegle and got inundated with friendly folk who wanted to give me their plant pots :)

This crazy mint plant occupies the whole of this big terracota pot. It's brilliant to see it so rampant because I bought this poor sad mint plant from the fresh herbs section in the supermarket a couple of years ago. It was reduced to 75p, it was pot bound and trailing over the pot and onto the shelf. I wandered if it had a chance at all, but for 75p I thought I'd give it a whirl. Glad I did... There's nothing like minted new potatoes.

This is my main 'workstation' in the garden. It's right near the window to the room that the cat lives in, you can see the right hand window is open because she pretty much comes and goes as she pleases and we don't have a cat flap. The garden is pretty secure. You can see the mint plant in the bottom left corner :) it gets everywhere lol. The little fold out table used to hold the post in the hallway when we moved here but when A bought a more fitting period piece, I kidnapped this. It doesn't really matter if it rots away, it was in a state when I claimed it. You can see all my essentials here, and I'll admit I tidied up before i took this picture! There's a potato planter there, on the floor. I'm waiting for the next set of seed potatos so I can plant in time to harvest for Yule. There's a bag of vermiculite which I'll be using in the greenhouse when I get that under way. My trowel and mini stakes. My little blue watering can which used to hold just enough water when my mini greenhouse was full. It's fairly empty now... which is good in a way because at this time of year most things flourish in the ground - but is bad in a way because I should be using it to sow perpetual harvests and to incubate stuff. Through the window you should be able to see 3 brown boxes with address labels on - each box holds 100 bulbs of flowering plants. I've planted 200 already... I have to keep A happy somehow! Anyway, we'll wander over to the mini greenhouse now and you can see what it's holding for me:

This is very close up.. it's a tiny pepper chilli living in a dessert pot! We might eat chillis yet!

These tiny new plants were potted out today from their former cramped home. They are courgettes. I know they're very late but I'll keep them protected and when the greenhouse is up and running, I'll find them a home in there. I'm not expecting them to produce until next year now, but I'm really chuffed to have raised them this far from seed - and the root system on each one when I moved them was so impressive. I couldn't help talking to them and telling them all how happy i was with them all!

We might have carrots! These need spacing out into the earth now, but I'm a little bit scared to do it. I had two pots of carrots and this afternoon I decided to separate and pot on one of them. When I separated them out, they had tiny puny little root systems. I didn't think they'd make anything of themsleves so they went into the compost bin and the soil went onto the garden. I hope these have rooted a little better. If not, then I've learned my lesson - I should sow directly into the earth and thin them out from there, rather than trying to over coddle them and start them in a pot.

Moving further up the garden, here's a much zoomed in upon picture of my tiny nasturtium. I didn't want to grow flowers at all, but I found out that this is edible....!

I'm impressed with this baby - because I grew it from seeds and only one out four germinated. I'll be keeping my eye on this one and praying for growth and health.

Chives, 2 strawberry plants and a blueberry plant. The chives were again another wilted sad thing from the supermarkets fresh herb selection. I have to give it a haircut regularly otherwise it gets really out of hand! The two strawberry plants look very sorry for themselves, but they were only planted on Saturday. They haven't quite recovered from shock I think. The blueberry plant is a thing of interest. It was another special offer from Thompson & Morgan - I only paid for postage. The lads here K and A like blueberries, and I like to grow edible stuffs... we'll see what happens!

This is my veg patch proper. Do you like my little scarecrow? Isn't she sweet?! OK, here we have tomatoes, radishes, dwarf beans, and runner beans. The runners have recently begun to literally run! I've have to replace their skewers with proper stakes.. here's a better picture:

Excuse the sunlight streaming into the picture... but it's gorgeous isn't it?! Any how, you can just about see two of the plants have gone crazy. Lets hope it yields beans! The next photo comes from the right of this section:

You can see a couple of rows of beetroot there and three tiny plants of lollo rosso. I have been so lucky with slugs so far - I haven't seen one despite nightly raids with my wind up torch and the lollo rosso remains untouched. I am impressed!

Only a couple more photos, I promise!:

These are five tiny 'Cosmos' plants that I grew from seedlings... they are flowers *sigh* but I have to keep the husband shaped man happy.

Final photo for now - This is the place I planted the 1st 100 bulbs out of those 500 I mentioned earlier - and look! As much as I am unimpressed with flower growing, I am thrilled when anything decides to grow. It's fascinating that things just need dirt and a bit of water (and talking to and stroking) they do this - utterly fantastic.

I hope you enjoyed my litte garden tour. Please bear in mind I haven't showed you the pile of dirt that needs sweeping up, of the pile of weeds that needs clearing up - the grass that needs cutting etc - I've showed you the good bits only. However, I've shown you the bit's we'll probably be revisiting over time.