Disaster strikes

The weather has well and truly turned, I have found this out the hard way. My small greenhouse propagator took a reasonable about of damage from the elements the other night. The forecast wasn’t for high winds but, we got some rather hellish gusts during the night and the guide ropes snapped. Obviously this made the whole unit fall over and all the contents went everywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think most of the plants will survive, I had to refill some of the pots with compost but no damage was done to any plant. The majority of plants are cuttings so I’m hoping that the tumble will not affect any possible viability.

 

Although, as some of the stems were lying spilt on the floor out of the compost I did spy some beginnings of roots. This has excited me a lot as I have never had a cutting set root and be successful before.

 

 

 

 

As you can see the damage was bad, the bottom of the structure was bent and buckled. I managed to twist and pull it back to shape. It’s not perfect but it is back in shape (sort of) and the main thing is that the structure is back to being strong

Identity unknown

I have recently received 20 bulbs, at a glance I'd they are all spring bulbs but some look like they might be lily's.

 

I would have ordinarily checked at source what the bulbs were. Unfortunately as they were from someone, through someone I knew this was not possible.

 

 

The majority of the bulbs i believe to be daffodils (well this is more an un-educated wild guess) mixed with a few crocus( again wild guess) . There is one bulb that's interesting me, it is rounded but elongated, I do not recognise it. I'm mostly looking forward to seeing what that bulb turns out to be. I suppose I could Google it and find out but to be honest I'd prefer to wait and see.

 

Obviously Im planting the unknown, so Im going to plant all the bulbs in multi-purpose compost. I have planted the larger bulbs in the larger pots and the smaller bulbs in the smaller ones.

 

 

 

Nothing will happen now until spring but as soon as the first shoot comes through i will be straight on here all excited telling you all about it.

 

 



Planting out Crocus bulbs

As autumn is firmly upon us, it is now time to plant out our little springtime beauty's. Of course i'm referring to the spring bulbs and today i'll be planting crocus in my lawn.

 

As modelled perfectly by Charlie my "helper"

 

 

One thing I have learnt, through bitter failure, crocus need to be planted naturally to look good. To achieve this all we did was hold the bulbs at waist height (Charlie's shoulder height) and dropped them. Excuse the laundry but we live in a busy household :-)

 

The bulbs will drop nicely and will spread out in a naturalistic way. I've covered the majority of the lawn simply by dropping handfuls of bulbs whilst walking around.

 

Now comes the tedious bit, going around planting them about 50mm deep in the position that they dropped. This job, for me, was made all the more harder by the fact the previous tenants had planted over a gravel path.

 

 

To plant, I stuck the shovel in roughly to depth lifted the lawn slightly and placed the bulbs the correct way up. As you can see I was digging down on to the buried gravel path, which made it hard work every time I stuck the shovel in. However, every cloud has a silver lining I now have superb drainage directly under the bulbs.

 

The picture below denotes by way of my finger pointing, the bottom of a bulb the bulbs should be planted with the top pointing skywards.

 

I hope you enjoyed reading, I really enjoyed planting these with my little boy and can't wait for the first crocus to poke through. I will be sure to blog when they do.



Climbing Rose

I have been looking forward to pruning my climbing rose for the first time, however I have read online at gardenseeker i shouldn’t yet. The issue I have is that the plant was only planted last year and on advice from the site it suggests that a climbing rose should be left for two or three years. This is to establish a good horizontal frame work as you will get more flowering shoots from horizontal branches.

In the first three years you should train the branches in to a good horizontal framework cutting surplus branches off.

I have not been training the branches this year, as i was unaware this would provide good flowering stems. So, my plan of action is to cut back most of this year’s growth and train next year’s growth in to the required framework.

I want to end up with something looking like this.

I found this on a site with a good explanation of how to prune your climbing rose. I believe it was a blog site so I think I will follow and get some tips, remember I do not profess to knowing much about gardening.

Anyway, my weekends plan was some what scuppered by not being able to prune and blog. So i will have to just settle for a bowl of the Wife's lovely leek and potato soup. Sadly the ingredigents are not from the garden.

Three Common Attributes Of Successful Blogs | Spice Up Your Blog

Three Common Attributes Of Successful Blogs | Spice Up Your Blog

Thoughts about spring

Spring seems along time away, but is it ? The ground works for a beautiful spring display have to be laid now, it can be alot of work for seemingly no return. But come spring, time spent now thinking about the planting of daffodils, tulips and crocus to name a few can pay truely magnificant dividens in Febuary-April.

 

This weekend my efforts will be spent planting out groups of crocus. I'm going to plant the bulbs in the lawn to give a natural look. Planting the bulbs in groups will also lend its self to a more natural look.

 

I will take plenty of explanatory photographs for a blog at the weekend.

 

I'm still learning, i'm trying to give you as accurate information as I can however if you know something I don't, or even if you have something worth mentioning please comment and i'll try to include the information.

 



Cosmos Seed collection

I've been wondering when I should be collecting my cosmos seeds. I've not dead headed it for about two or three weeks now, but before now i've been thinking arghh how do I know when to collect their seeds.

 

Today i've cracked it, as I was looking over all the dead heads I noticed a few were looking very open and very seed like. This made me think that they were ready.

 

 

I have taken pictures of a head that isn't ready and one thats open and ready.

 

Seed head not open and not ready.

 

Seed head open and ready to collect.

 

 

The seeds are the dark bits, they are fairly obvious. You can the difference between the two pictures.