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The gardening thread

Rutita1 said:
gentlegreen

Little update on the different bamboo roots you sent me...they live and are beginning to grow! :cool:
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:cool:

You clearly have the knack :)

I think you'll like the miscanthus - you can get a posh swishy clump very quickly - and it's very manageable.

The bamboo on the other hand is a real triffid - you should see the dozen shoots that have appeared in my garden over the past week - some people have narrower wrists !
 
I have space envy when i read this thread. Have been living in my current home for about 15 years. And i don't have an inch of empty soil left now to dig.
When i moved in the couple before had a rose fixation... a line down both sides of the garden of 3 foot high rose bushes and sod all else. The plan always was to choose shrubs that would give me coverage and ever green colour...berries and flowers a bonus. That worked well, but that's just left me pots to play with.
There was an old shed at the back off the garden that i knocked down... suddenly i have space about 10 foot by 15, on concrete no soil. At the moment i am looking at a display of crap i found in the shed.. They may be milk crates but in a half light squinting - i am in morocco :)
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I squidged my first lily beetle yesterday. :(
The previous two I tried to feed to a spider, but they dropped through the web and into a pool of water where they drowned.

A shame you can't make cochineal from them.
 
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That's my 'good luck' monster. Because it'd scare kids I told them if they grabbed his finger they could make a wish. It is half man and half horse, I think it's fibreglass - very heavy. has been chained to the apple tree for about ten years and hasn't deteriorated a dot. A friend rang me ten years , he was baby sitting for his sister in deptford and said he had found something that'd be brill for my garden - i said , obviously, what is it? he faffed a bit and said it was hard to explain - half an hour later and this turns up.

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Its attached to the back of the house - cacti and geranium cuttings mostly...aloe vera and this other rosette forming hanging plant that just keeps sending off shoots that i can't even give away any more.
 
Hubcaps and sculptures! :cool:

I have been collecting interesting pieces of wood, tree stumps and the boobly tops of old ornate garden fences. I am planning on building a totem. :)
 
I like things that move and send off light amongst plants - blank cds or two of those crap ones you get free in newspapers, glued together, shiny side out , hanging amongst the branches or hanging loosely on a nail through the centre hole and dotted along a fence send off lovely rainbow colours.

eta - fishing line is handy for hanging bits and bobs up - almost invisible.
 
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Moved my Prunus Mume Beni-Chidori tree yesterday. I planted it in the autumn about a metre from the back wall but have since planted what will be a bamboo hedge behind it to I've moved it 2 m into the garden to give it some space. It had grown quite a bit so was surprised how little extra root growth there was from the root ball I planted. Should recover pretty quick I hope, gave it 2 buckets of water to help it on its way.

When I came in to get my reward beer after mowing the lawn and gardening I saw in next door garden that our local pair of foxes have had 6 cubs and we sat and watched them for an hour before the Mum took them home :cool:

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I now have as many mushroom trays as I need for my salad experiment and had the last of the multi-purpose compost at Aldi .. and incidentally found I had more bags of compost lurking around the house than I'd thought I had.

I watched a video the other day where an optimistic French gardener insisted that three containers of cut-and-come-again salad is all you need, but I'm somewhat sceptical.

Perhaps I'll start with three - and if I find I can't keep up with eating it, I might see what else I can grow in the other six to nine trays - I reckon even baby beets and round carrots might work in 3 1/2 inches of compost - or perhaps I could double up the trays on the floor ... and / or I go back to plan A and make some raised beds with planking - I ought in any case to be using the spaces between the tomato plants.

Automated irrigation will be essential.
 
clicker said:
Love the stone trough in the background too.
Click to expand...

The house has just been sold and builders have gutted it and are stripping the garden and chopping down all the trees. So far I've had a lovely iron framed garden bench out of the skip which just needs one wooden slat replacing, and if that trough goes I'll liberate that too :)

We also now have a great view of the Shard and all the skyscrapers in the city from our landing window. The builder chopped one 60 foot Eucalyptus down by climbing a ladder to the top of the roof line, then sawing through the trunk above his head :eek:
 
The watering season has begun.

I think cleaning out my "potting shed" (my 50 concrete block folly of 1992) will be a target this year - sod the rest of the house.
It'll mean I get my grey and roof water recycling sorted out - but I have recently decided that I also need a "summer kitchen" and I can easily run a hob in there - hopefully re-connect the water supply as I don't really trust hitching up my water computer to the outside tap I fitted inside the kitchen door.
 
gentlegreen said:
What a shame.
If it's literally all grass, you can't even have pots.
Are you expected to mow the bloody stuff ?
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Yes, I am expected to mow the stuff which I don't like, partly because he hasn't left me anywhere to put the cuttings, I can't be bothered to take them to the dump, so I stopped picking it up now.

There is a paved area, I could have pots.
Did have as it happens but the ex took the best of them when we split.

I have a small quota of inside plants, a Christmas cactus, Cali Cheese plant and a couple of others whose names I don't know. One has been in intensive care since I let it dry out and die back. I am treating it a little like my own bonsai project, so far it is going well. Strangely satisfying, little by little.
 
The biggest bit of gardening this evening was getting those plants that were settled in their pots out into the greenhouse - so the nicotiana affinis and the ornamental amaranth ..

nicotianaingreenhouse.jpg
So that's 4 weeks from sprinkling the seeds on the surface of some compost...

I pricked out the nicotiana sylvestris (the 5 foot triffid tobacco), the heliotropes and the rudbeckia rustic dwarfs.
So all 45 positions under the lights are re-occupied. (far too many of them by my paranoid "emergency" seedlings - the smallest of the litter - several in a pot.)

prickedout.jpg

I'm trying very hard not to bring the top shelf into operation - not that 200 watts costs much to run - maybe 50p per day / £3.50 per week.. and makes this type of gardening possible for me - i.e. a lot easier.

So tomorrow I have 45 pots to sow with the last raft of seeds I bought and they'll sit on the wire shelf above getting free bottom heat from the lamps - easily 25 degrees C. I think I probably will need to supply some light to the middle tray to give me enough time for the next batch of plants to be ready to go out in the greenhouse and thereby free up space on the bottom shelf.

My one (so far) healthy Datura seedling is looking just like the pepper seedlings - but I can almost see it growing - hopefully a proper triffid.
If I end up with only one, it will be difficult to put it out in the front garden where I only see it a couple of times a day - and the Pink Brugmansia should be ready to flower this year.

I strongly suspect that both plants will be in containers and sunk into the ground alternately or sequentially.

So we're up to about 75 pots now after 4 weeks - plus maybe another 45 tomorrow.
 
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weltweit said:
I have a small quota of inside plants, a Christmas cactus, Cali Cheese plant and a couple of others whose names I don't know. One has been in intensive care since I let it dry out and die back. I am treating it a little like my own bonsai project, so far it is going well. Strangely satisfying, little by little.
Click to expand...
You can do things amazingly cheaply using seeds - and bulbs - as I'm finding out rather late in the day.

I only use generic black pots - to my eye they disappear into the background - or maybe add punctuation.
 
A lot of weeding today, some transplanting of sweet peas, lavender and fruit bush (red berry) from pots into planter frames I have made from scavenged wood and a little placement playing with random things I have collected to make the place interesting...This part is at the back on the left which leads from the allotment part to the wilder firepit area. Everything well watered once the sun had gone off of the garden too! :cool:

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The lovely painting is some community art (by an ex-neighbour, with permission) I saved from my old estate and will be put up on the wall behind the fruit bush. Will just have to wait until I have someone else here as two hands are not enough. :)
 
no pics, but today I "did work" in my mini-garden for the first time since I've lived here. 6 months.

It was just picking out dead plants and weeds, but I feel like I've achieved a lot. And now I have a big space to put things in :cool:
 
Fez909 said:
no pics, but today I "did work" in my mini-garden for the first time since I've lived here. 6 months.

It was just picking out dead plants and weeds, but I feel like I've achieved a lot. And now I have a big space to put things in :cool:
Click to expand...

This is wonderful. You now need to take pics and share them. :)
 
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