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.