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The gardening thread

I think I'm going to have to put my brugmansias out - they're taking up so much room indoors ...I will just have to keep an eye on the weather and throw a cloth over them if it threatens to be seriously cold at night..
One site threatened 2 degrees C next Saturday / Sunday ...
 
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contadino said:
I can't believe how idyllic this spring has been. 1st May today ("Fratelli in Lavoro!") Potatoes sowed, peas sowed, tomatoes overrunning the greenhouse, everything chomping at the bit to be planted out, and a weather forecast with the lowest nighttime temperature of 9 degrees for the next 2 weeks.
Click to expand...
and it's rained pretty well all today so water butts are filled up and ground watered nicely for a couple of days, all ready :thumbs:
 
yes I have thought of siphoning off the bathwater, although I've got five water butts and a full old oil drum
 
two sheds said:
yes I have thought of siphoning off the bathwater, although I've got five water butts and a full old oil drum
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I would have to start actually taking baths :D

But once I have squashes out in the blazing sun, perhaps I will change my ways - I have a suitable hole in the wall
 
I wondered why my ginormous begonia corm from last year was being so sluggish. ...
Hopefully I caught it in time.
Given the other one was completely disappeared by vine weevil grubs you'd have thought I might have checked .. clearly they were enjoying the new growth.

But I have five corns sprouting indoors so I should have my two for the front door baskets and four for the two larger corner baskets in the back garden - one key reason for the "pergola" thing

Similarly with the ancient woody Voodoo fuchsia - which I potted up into better compost and made cuttings from some newish growth that accidentally snapped off.
I have six new plugs fattening up ready for later.

The Clover compost I bought last week is far too nice for my baskets so I will venture out tomorrow and see how many bags of cheaper compost I can haul home on my bike with the aid of my rear basket and Ikea totes ...

All the grubs are hopefully in a suitable spot to be enjoyed by the birds and the compost is in quarantine...



feedthebirds.png
 
I hope in later years to get more into the shady spring buttercuppy things.
As it is, I always manage to forget to water my dicentra :p
So it will depend on me having a part of the garden where they look after themselves ...
 
Oh yes so it is aquilegia! Google says the flowers are edible. Maybe I'll give them a try....

gentlegreen said:
I hope in later years to get more into the shady spring buttercuppy things.
As it is, I always manage to forget to water my dicentra :p
So it will depend on me having a part of the garden where they look after themselves ...
Click to expand...

Well this one is doing pretty well by itself (we didn't plant it so it wasn't going to get any help from us!). Can send you some seeds if you like :D
 
Late to the party but that is definitely aquilegia smmudge - I have quite a few volunteers growing about the place.
unfortunately, this year, the rabbits seem to like it - but are just nipping off bits to taste.
 
smmudge said:
Oh yes so it is aquilegia! Google says the flowers are edible. Maybe I'll give them a try....



Well this one is doing pretty well by itself (we didn't plant it so it wasn't going to get any help from us!). Can send you some seeds if you like :D
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Thanks for the offer - maybe when I move to my new place :)

WildFood UK says the flowers are edible and I trust them - and the leaves if you're desperate and you boil them to death ...
The only really edible product of that family is nigella seed - but even there I think you probably shouldn't overdo it.
(I believe the oil from those is marketed with similar hype to CBD - as a magical cure "Big Pharma" don't want you to know about ...)
 
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heinous seamus said:
The leeks I had leftover from last year have all started to flower. Time to chuck them on the compost heap?
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If you don't need to plant something else where they're growing, you could leave them to flower for the bees and even try to collect the seed once flowering is over, but they won't be worth eating by now.
 
Not pretty, but rational ... the overlap of gardening and engineering ...

Firstly the supports for runner beans.
I don't have enough canes - and I'm not about to actually buy some - but it seems logical to make use of the new fence so I'm engineering a structure from battens I stripped out of the kitchen - tied-in to the fence posts ... it'll be fine once there are beans on it and I'm hoping to throw annual climbers up every available vertical surface too ...

I will probably have to chat to my neighbour about pruning out more of the bay tree ...

And my porch hydroponic unit is roughly there - bar working out how to incorporate compost planters at each end - for nasturtiums and purslane .. and I hope to try to fit a separate hydroponic unit in the middle too so I can use flowering nutrients better suited to nasturtiums.

It doesn't have to last very long so I've just slapped a load of PVA on the whole thing - though I might even get out some vinyl silk emulsion for the public-facing bits.



bean structure.jpg

porchthingy.jpg
 
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Since the birds weren't interested, I had to deploy the death bricks on the vine weevils :(
I released the random caterpillar and the rose chafers and grubs at the end of the garden ...
 
StoneRoad said:
gentlegreen - as I'm sure you have realised - unless you keep on "pinching out" the growing tips, you'll get very few beans, all the flowers will be high up in that Bay tree !
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I hope to get nextdoor to prune the bay a bit more as they worked miracles with the rest of it.
Yes I'll only let the beans get to a height I can reasonably reach...
 
The sweet peas are popping up after only a long weekend :)
I rubbed them on sandpaper and soaked them for 24 hours and they have had bottom heat of around 22 degrees C.

sweetpearapid.jpg


Based on someone on a FB group, I have high hopes for the ipomoeas I sowed shortly afterwards.
 
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I cycled a mile and a bit downhill to get more compost today - I had visions of carrying two 40 litre bags, but when I picked it up I realised it was too heavy so I made do with one bag of "growmoor" - shamefully also peat-based - £3.99 so half what I paid for the mail-order clover - but clearly significantly lower quality but will do for containers maybe blended with other stuff.

Tomorrow I plan to do another naughty bus trip to town to Wilco because I probably need another mini mini greenhouse - or a bigger one if they have any as I'm going out with a bang, garden-wise and have even more seeds on their way . :oops:
If they have any I will also bring back a couple of bags of compost.

The weekend batch of ipomoeas are up and I just received mina lobata and smelly night time alba in the post and seeds roughed-up and soaking now ...

moreipomeas.jpg
 
As before. Wilco only had the teeny weeny greenhouses - probably just as well as I also had to carry two 50 litre bags of compost to the bus stop and that was pretty well my limit.
I grabbed a bag of discounted and well-chitted Pentland Javelin early spuds as a token gesture towards completeness as I don't routinely eat them, but home grown spuds are a special treat.
Not going to do much without water though ....

The rest of the winter kale and broccoli patch is getting peas...

----------------------------

So compost -what I can remember ...
1 20 litre bag of hideous Aldi crap - several years old and only useable in extreme moderation.
2x20 litres Westland - £14 ? - 35 p per litre - carried 1,5 miles
25 litres Westlands + 30 litres nasty Wilco MP carried on bus
2x60 litres clover - £26 - 21.66p per litre delivered
1x 40 litres "growmoor" - somewhat light on nutrients probably- £4 - 10p per litre - cycled home
2x 50 litres Westlands - £10 - 10p per litre carried on bus

Total 375 litres.

And 100 litres of sieved magical mystery soil from the garden that probably has too much unrotted plant material in so will be used in moderation.
Plus what I recovered from the tubs of miscanthus and various planters that have forgetmenots in at the moment...

I find myself with far too many ricinus communis which will need 15 litres each in buckets and I hope some love-lies-bleeding seedlings appear soon as I made sure to chuck the seeds everywhere - so I should have something for the back garden ornamental area that was totally unplanned ... in fact prety well the whole back garden is unplanned...
 
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StoneRoad said:
currently, OH is investigating "mini" greenhouses online ...

thanks to the rabbits, plants are going to need extra protection.
Click to expand...

Make sure they have foundations. The cheap ones usually blow away in the first storm. Need a good anchor point


I knocked up some decent ones from pallets and eBay covering but didn’t have the rabbit problem (the deer didn’t get in though)
 
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