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The gardening thread

campanula said:
Apols in advance as I try to avoid being too opinionated about our gardening choices but every so often, I feel compelled to issue a wee warning.I read the words 'houttuynia cordata, StoneRoad and raced to the end of the thread to send you a heartfelt warning - this apparently innocuous plant is a monster of the very worst type. A rhizomatous thug which will be a running nightmare unless contained in a sturdy container. I have had the vast misfortune of dealing with several of these - they are even worse than campanula rapunculoides. Don't let it run about in any beds with perennials...but you could, concievably, plant it as a groundcover in some sort of enclosed situation.

Ah, I am also growing Bishop's Children, contadino. Keep the best ones this year, as they will make a tuber which you can either leave in the ground or dig up for next year. All the Bishop's offspring are quite good, but some tend to have darker foliage than others. I grow all my dahlias from seed or rooted cuttings and leave the tubers in the ground all year...but I do have very free-draining soil so tubers such as dahlias and cannas don't get affected by winter rains
Click to expand...
I nearly bought one of those last week. Would have gone straight in my border!
Good heads up.
Quite like this and doesn't seem to be a thug?
www.gardenia.net

Caladium 'Kathleen' (Angel Wings)

Prized for its elegance, Caladium 'Kathleen' (Angel Wings) is a tuberous perennial with large, heart-shaped, soft salmon-pink leaves adorned with bright green margins. Inconspicuous, calla-type flowers appear in summer, but they are usually hidden by the leaves. This fancy-leafed Caladium is...
www.gardenia.net www.gardenia.net
 
Calamity1971 said:
I nearly bought one of those last week. Would have gone straight in my border!
Good heads up.
Quite like this and doesn't seem to be a thug?
www.gardenia.net

Caladium 'Kathleen' (Angel Wings)

Prized for its elegance, Caladium 'Kathleen' (Angel Wings) is a tuberous perennial with large, heart-shaped, soft salmon-pink leaves adorned with bright green margins. Inconspicuous, calla-type flowers appear in summer, but they are usually hidden by the leaves. This fancy-leafed Caladium is...
www.gardenia.net www.gardenia.net
Click to expand...
hmm...

So a south American arum, tuber-hardy over zone 9 - slightly related to colocasia - coco yam / elephant's ear ..

There's also Brunnera.
 
I made the mistake of putting my bird table in a round bed and too close to a plum tree. Fat pigeons figured out that if they stand on the branches of the tree, their weight brings them down to a perfect height to gorge themselves. Meanwhile blackbirds make such a mess that the bed below has become a matt of grass, some sort of brassica and corn seedlings. Yesterday I re-sited the bird table away from the plum tree - with the knock on effect that the pigeons, now with too much time on their hands, have done for a couple of rows of kohl raab seedlings in the veg garden.

I'd get an air rifle on em if my house didn't back onto a school....:mad:
 
contadino said:
I made the mistake of putting my bird table in a round bed and too close to a plum tree. Fat pigeons figured out that if they stand on the branches of the tree, their weight brings them down to a perfect height to gorge themselves. Meanwhile blackbirds make such a mess that the bed below has become a matt of grass, some sort of brassica and corn seedlings. Yesterday I re-sited the bird table away from the plum tree - with the knock on effect that the pigeons, now with too much time on their hands, have done for a couple of rows of kohl raab seedlings in the veg garden.

I'd get an air rifle on em if my house didn't back onto a school....:mad:
Click to expand...
I had that with a forsythia hedge -sadly I have no footage of the circus trick itself ...



Apart from cereal plants I had cannabis seedlings and a datura :)
 
Sounds like I'm definitely going to have to net my kale and broccoli.
I already did that for the peas and carrots.
It's pigeon city here - just recently including town pigeons...
 
gentlegreen said:
hmm...

So a south American arum, tuber-hardy over zone 9 - slightly related to colocasia - coco yam / elephant's ear ..

There's also Brunnera.
Click to expand...
Must. Resist.

I bet my local florist has them as houseplants.

But I'm massively in need of a colour and form injection at the moment.

"

Lake Placid is an interesting small town proud of its chief product, brilliantly colored caladiums​

Florida has plenty of small-town festivals built around local products – strawberries, every type of seafood, even swamp cabbage.

But Lake Placid has a product you might not know about – caladiums – and the charming Central Florida town celebrates the colorful landscaping plant the annual Lake Placid Caladium Festival."

www.floridarambler.com

Local color: Lake Placid Caladium Festival, July 29 to 31, 2022, is about a vivid plant

This small town festival celebrates a uniquely Lake Placid product: caladiums, a colorful plant grown commercially almost nowhere else. There'll be music, food, a car show, arts and crafts plus bus tours of the caladium fields.
www.floridarambler.com www.floridarambler.com
 
gentlegreen said:
Sounds like I'm definitely going to have to net my kale and broccoli.
I already did that for the peas and carrots.
It's pigeon city here - just recently including town pigeons...
Click to expand...
Pigeons are a real problem at the allotments - everyone nets everything - but I wanted to avoid nets in my back garden as they're pretty unsightly. The kohl raab were only there due to a cock up in my rotations, really. Oddly there's a row of swede right next to them and they've been totally left alone. It's not the end of the world as I have some leeks looking for a home, and the shallots, onions and garlic at the allotment are ready to lift so I'll have space to put some replacement kohl raabs in there (netted).

On the plus side, both kale and broccoli only seem to get hit when young. Once they're more than a foot tall, pigeons don't seem to bother with them.

If you've lost peas, I doubt that's down to pigeons. Mice or rats will most likely have taken them. I never sow them direct because mice have always done for them when I've tried.
 
contadino said:
- but I wanted to avoid nets in my back garden as they're pretty unsightly. T
Click to expand...
I concur - I quite like having a rustic element to my little potager experiment, but nets are a bit of a downer - not least because the plants themselves are pretty ... I'll see how I feel when the place is greened- (and flowered-) up ...
 
Arsehole.
I will have to get my neighbour to fit a garotte wire.
He's used anti clamber spikes nearer the house, but I doubt any foxes are actually walking along the fence ...

ezgif-3-c4e10f5a9e.gif
 
I reprocessed all the crap I dug out of the carrot bed yesterday and recovered an amazing amount of lovely, hearty soil which will be very welcome as part of my container mix for the crazy number of plants heading my way - though I will plant as many as I can in the ground ...
I scored another 80 litres of "New Horizon" compost today - hopefully Tesco will keep on replenishing the stock ...

My bathroom watercress got a serious aphid problem so I had to put it outside. It's massively gone to seed in any case so I will be glad of those when they ripen.
Luckily I was able to salvage a couple of teeny offsets and gave them a good clean under the tap - just as well because Aldi's rocket and watercress salad was sadly deficient in propagating material today ...

The salad seedlings had got seriously cramped and leggy, but are taking off in the bubbler ..
You can already see the better growth rate in the kale compared to the ones I pricked out into compost ...

watercressbabies.jpg
hydrocress.jpg


kaleincompost.jpg
 
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contadino said:
I love the way bees disappear into the flowers and emerge a few seconds later. I have apricot foxgloves this year and I really like them. Your post has reminded me to sow some for next year about now.
Click to expand...

Those ones are the offspring of a plant I bought a couple of years ago. (There's also another one out of shot.) I'll need to buy another plant next year, so I don't get flowers only every second year. Was surprised they did so well in this bit of the garden, because it's prone to flooding over winter. The ones I left in a drier part of the garden died over winter.
 
Johnny Vodka said:
Those ones are the offspring of a plant I bought a couple of years ago. (There's also another one out of shot.) I'll need to buy another plant next year, so I don't get flowers only every second year. Was surprised they did so well in this bit of the garden, because it's prone to flooding over winter. The ones I left in a drier part of the garden died over winter.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I have damp sunny or dry shade and the plants in damp sunny are so much better than those in dry shade. I thought it's meant to be a woodland plant.

The new bed that I'll be cutting in a few weeks will have a patch about 2m x 3.5m just for foxgloves. I think they're one of those plants that look so good in swathes. I saw a huge patch of those purple-y ones in Pembrokeshire last year and they looked awesome.
 
I don't know why I settled on white ones years ago - but it does reliably self seed into my containers, and one way or another, I've been getting more flowering plants each year...
 
The native foxgloves are Digitalis purpurea ...
but in the garden I've also grown white, and several shades of pink or purple.
Bees spend a lot of time within the flowers, which makes catching them with a camera something of a challenge !
Have a link to some images [please excuse the Ip plug].
www.ipernity.com

ipernity: StoneRoad2013's photos with the keyword: Digitalis purpurea

The worlds largest non-commercial photo, video and blog sharing community - financed only by membership dues, without any intention of making a profit.
www.ipernity.com www.ipernity.com
 
My foxgloves are doing OK, but the leaves look horrible - and that's no matter where they're growing and with or without fertiliser ..
I suppose I ought to make an effort to PH test my soil - I'm on sandy soil over sandstone - but who knows after 150 years ... they're digging foundations into solid clay opposite and I have to go down very deep to find that ... plus I must have incorporated tonnes of compost over the years ...
150 years ago the area was all market gardens - though a bit further down the street is a culverted brook and the area behind the houses was known as "the wilderness" ...
 
I've managed to get sufficient plants outside to whittle things indoors down to one shelf.
That's 2.4KWH or 67p saved per day ...

Apart from a few kinds of seed which should be here within days, the six weeks of continuous seed-sowing and pricking out has come to an end.
I washed a load of 7cm pots yesterday - must have been over a hundred and I couldn't for the life of me remember how I'd managed to use so many with relatively little apparent effect outdoors ...

downtooneshelf.jpg
 
I happen to have an Amazon Prime account and a lot of gift credit from retirement gifts ...
So I found a £1.49 packet of Hesperis matronalis purpurea that may or may not even flower this year and it was delivered within 24 hours - so now sown - along with some seed from my own watercress. I had a mishap when harvesting them and I fully expect a small patch of watercress to sprout on my potato bed.
There are thouands more seeds ripening on the plant ...
 
There is a solitary hesperis just in front of my greenhouse gentlegreen. They are lovely, en masse, with the bonus of fragrance. They have naturalised in my wood, flowering at the same time as foxgloves. I love biennials and sow loads of them. So reliable at this to fill in at this time of year (after the spring bulbs, but before early summer perennials). The only ones I am not keen to grow are Canterbury bells (campanula medium) although I have sown the chimney campanula (c.pyramidalis). I am sowing Icelandic poppies, this year (after a long gap), along with the usual verbascums, wallflowers,, foxgloves, dianthus. I have had another relapse into delusion, because I am sowing blue meconopsis too - a mad quest, almost certainly doomed to disaster.y If you sow your hesperis now, in pots or a nursery bed, they will become sturdy plants which you can transplant in the autumn. June is the last seed sowing month (for me) until September.
 
I just potted up a campanula growing out of the pavement along my wall because the council is bound to come along later and "tidy" it up.
I could have nicked a bit or some seeds off the neighbour's wall yonks ago, but I was waiting for the plant to choose me. :D

This is where I fall down - biennials - I don't think I sowed any seeds at all last year - my only bulbs were Spanish bluebells :oops: and you need somewhere in the wings for them to fatten up - which I sort of have at the moment in my potager-thing - except why do I already have six ricinuses taking up space ?

I may have to make a special trip to a garden centre in the hope of finding something in flower now ...

EDIT:- I will technically have about FIFTY giant sunflowers if I surgically extract and replant the thinnings - though clearly those won't be quite as giant ...
 
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Johnny Vodka said:
Bought a couple more £2 plants in Morrisons today - a replacement Pyracantha (for the one I drowned) and a solanum (on a whim). Almost picked up a goji berry bush on a whim, but I have no idea where I'd find room for it.

Really good value if you're happy starting with younger, smaller plants.
Click to expand...
I got some about a month ago. 2 for £3 on perennials. Always quite healthy unlike Lidl and Aldi where they never water their stock.
 
Johnny Vodka said:
Bought a couple more £2 plants in Morrisons today - a replacement Pyracantha (for the one I drowned) and a solanum (on a whim). Almost picked up a goji berry bush on a whim, but I have no idea where I'd find room for it.

Really good value if you're happy starting with younger, smaller plants.
Click to expand...
A friend bought a £2 pink jasmine in Morrisons about a month ago and it's really healthily romping away.
 
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