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The gardening thread

Today's garden was tough. Got stabbed 3 times in the finger by their Berberis, then I felt a pain in my armpit. Got bitten by this little fecker. I retrieved them and put them on the ground and it was still giving it legs in the air ' you want some' style.
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Inevitably I've changed my mind - the crazy diagonal trough was only there because I was going to have to run a feed pipe in any case... I lose a secont channel where things are really easy to harvest, but the diagonal was difficult to reach anyway.
Once the green waste pile has gone and the timber deployed, I may rejig it all again ... this bit is going to be the patio.

The new layout will use a second identical pump which I happen to have for some forgotten reason - but I will need to fit a flow sensor to the new feed.
It still makes sense to have the output failure warning though - should have me covered ... and having two pumps will mean the current unit will have increased flow and redundancy.

The extended gutter will be covered with black polythene.

A shame about the three half metre offcuts - I should have bought at least one 4 metre pipe and chopped it in two ...
I don't even have to waste irrigation pipe as I pulled a roll of domestic plastic plumbing pipe out of a skip and confirmed that I can use irrigation fittings with the help of a heat gun.

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Somewhat appropriately, my Abyssinian banana and cannas have just arrived ..

I'm going to have quite a tropical "patio area" - I just planted up a hopeful tub of nicotianas - thanks to a neighbour throwing out a load of pre-loved compost - and there will be ricinuses and daturas and a couple of bonus brugmansias rooted from bits I accidentally snapped off one of the ones in the front garden ...

My camera chose to freeze at this moment :-

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I have taken more photos in the last month than in the previous couple of years . Thank you Calamity1971 . Anyway,the garden has gone a bit cottage-core with old style plants such as potentillas and geraniums. Here is the slightly surreal gazania. a mish-mash of annuals and a massive scented -leaf geranium.
 

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campanula said:
I have taken more photos in the last month than in the previous couple of years . Thank you Calamity1971 . Anyway,the garden has gone a bit cottage-core with old style plants such as potentillas and geraniums. Here is the slightly surreal gazania. a mish-mash of annuals and a massive scented -leaf geranium.
Click to expand...
What's the pink flower? Is that a gazania? Looks lovely.

I'm loving my gunnera. I sit and have my morning brew next to it. Always wanted one and now I wouldn't be without it.

20220622_185721.jpg20220622_185237.jpg

Real triffids at last.
 
Are these....
20220622_130639.jpg

Just bigger versions of these...
20220622_130655.jpg


Pretty sure they're both weeds as well as my garden has gone a bit chaotic since my daughter moved back in with her crazy dog :D
 
BCBlues said:
Are these....


Just bigger versions of these...



Pretty sure they're both weeds as well as my garden has gone a bit chaotic since my daughter moved back in with her crazy dog :D
Click to expand...
Top one looks like common mallow - related to lavatera, hibiscus, cacao, cola, durian ... second one is Herb Robert (a geranium) - though there may be something else mixed in with it as some of the leaves look wrong.

Whether they are "weeds" is up to you.
 
friedaweed said:
What's the pink flower? Is that a gazania? Looks lovely.

I'm loving my gunnera. I sit and have my morning brew next to it. Always wanted one and now I wouldn't be without it.

View attachment 328508View attachment 328509

Real triffids at last.
Click to expand...
O, lovely. 2 of my offspring are insanely keen on what they call 'hardy tropicals. Latest plant they consider a must have - tetrapanax papyrifir.
Yep, it is a gazania ' Christopher Lloyd'.
 
Yep, I would consider buying plugs for delphs (if the price was right). In fairness, I wouldn't bet the farm on having much of a showing this year...but they are perennials and will be fully mature , with a well established root system, for next May/June. I would probably pot them up and keep an eye out for slugs and snails, planting them in the border in September...but mostly because small plants can easily vanish in the unruly chaos of my beds and b.orders
 
All of my plant-buying gambles for the year :facepalm:
At least I think / hope that's it .. even on my garden scale I have far too many plants that I'm potting up in stages until I settle on a home for them all ...

Hopefully some of them will give me something this year ...

I'd half-expected the cannas to be germinated to some extent but they were lumps of rhizome which presumably had been kept in the fridge ...

Still, hopefully the banana will get a fair bit bigger - it's going in the middle of a big patio tub - surrounded with a ring of helichrysum (straw flower )- then an outer ring of French marigolds - so at least that's now a home found for those ... I steeled myself and plucked off the first flower buds yesterday ...
Hopefully the spare nicotianas and helichrysums will be offered to my neighbours in the next day or two ... along with a crazy number of spider babies I will have left after using a fair few as my token "bedding" plants ...

I suppose the lobelias should at least flower - if not at their full height.
I had always assumed they were South African, but apparently they're from north and south America - like most of my garden ...

Lobelia cardinalis, the cardinal flower (syn. L. fulgens), is a species of flowering plant in the bellflower family Campanulaceae native to the Americas, from southeastern Canada south through the eastern and southwestern United States, Mexico and Central America to northern Colombia.[2]
Click to expand...

allthe plants.jpg
 
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bimble said:
Cornflowers. I love them so much. Seeds germinate within about 5 minutes of touching the soil and then they do this for months, actually they’re so blue the camera can’t cope. What a brilliant flower.View attachment 327605
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I have no idea what it is like to grow them, but in terms of appearance they are absolutely my favourite flower without any comparison. I know there are some that come in different shades, but the vibrant blue ones is where it's at.

When I die I don't actually want flowers, but if anyone does slip up and get flowers, let them be cornflowers.
 
Baby clem seems to be doing ok. It’s growing at least.

At this stage do I leave it alone to just climb vertically, or is there any benefit in trying to train it into a zig zag from side to side on the trellis - for better coverage? Or perhaps it will branch out horizontally at a later stage?

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clicker said:
That looks so healthy and lush. Love the reddish castor oil plants on the right...did you grow the seeds once, did it work?
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I didn't want to take any chances so sowed too many seeds of everything.
And my OCD means I struggle to bin healthy plants and I have no real life friends to share plants with ...
 
MrCurry said:
Baby clem seems to be doing ok. It’s growing at least.

At this stage do I leave it alone to just climb vertically, or is there any benefit in trying to train it into a zig zag from side to side on the trellis - for better coverage? Or perhaps it will branch out horizontally at a later stage?

View attachment 328614
Click to expand...
Just leave it to settle in. It won't do much (that you can see) this year...but it will be building a root system...which is more important (at present) than anything going on above the soil level. The new stems are very fragile and easily snapped so as long as it can get some purchase on the trellis, it is doing OK. You could, temporarily, run some thread between the diamond shaped trellis gaps...just to allow for extra support for those winding tendrils.
 
gentlegreen said:
I didn't want to take any chances so sowed too many seeds of everything.
And my OCD means I struggle to bin healthy plants and I have no real life friends to share plants with ...
Click to expand...
O gentlegreen...we are so in the same position...and I can't even claim to have OCD. Far too much of everything. However, I am abandoning any pretense of growing vegetables at my allotment and going all out for creating stock beds...because next year, I swear, I am going to install a Dutch trolley outside my house and have a plant stall. I have grown literally hundreds of plants. most of which are casually given away.
Just off to the allotment now, to try to shoehorn Bishop's Children dahlias (12) Rubenza cosmos (16) and red flax (12)...somewhere.
 
I've planted up my planters with helichrysum and nicotiana - so I need to give the rest away locally - but of course I had to pot up 15 of each "just in case" .. :facepalm:

I suppose our problem expands to fill the space we have ...
I recently had 240 litres of compost delivered and thought that was that, but I bought a 60 litre planter yesterday and have four 30 litre ones being delivered this week ...

Jebus wept is it really Thursday ????

:D
 
Do you sow your cornflowers in spring or autumn, bimble ? September sown cornflowers look like entirely different plants. We sow seeds in late summer because we want to build up a sturdy root system and maybe have some earlier blooms. This is always noticeable with sweet peas, larkspur, lavatera: the resulting plants are usually flowering a good 3 weeks earlier than the spring sown annuals and are often more robust and floriferous. Wioth cornflowers, the difference is staggering. A single cornflower is 4ft tall and 3 ft wide with hundreds of flowers, branching out from every leaf axil. Looks more like a shrub. In comparison, the spring sown plants are basically a gracile single stem with half a dozen axillary branchings. In a mixed meadow sowing, the spring sown plants look far more comfortable...but for sheer border impact, the ones sown in autumn are simply stunning.
Apols for lecturing (again) - get carried away with enthusiasm
 
that is fascinating i had no idea. Well, september sowing it is then. But that means they live in greenhouse all winter?
 
gentlegreen said:
I didn't want to take any chances so sowed too many seeds of everything.
And my OCD means I struggle to bin healthy plants and I have no real life friends to share plants with ...
Click to expand...
I probably would not have ripped the piss if I knew about your OCD. Your garden has come together, looks much tidier. I really enjoy reading your hydro adventures. You are the only person I know who does hydro for vegetables.
 
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