Category Archives: Guest Gardeners

More from north London

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Cheers to Debby H again for sending us an update on her garden. It’s looking great by the way! These two pictures of the ornithogalum are brilliant. You can see on the picture below that four flowers are now clearly visible. They are something else.

Also the cosmos (below) are still going strong and the flowers are still well colourful.

As Debby wrote “Finally, the zephyranthes bulbs are blooming. We have never managed to get more than one or two flowers in a year. Now we have four coming at once! Amazing what a change of compost will do!” That plant is great. We’ve never grown those before but probably will now as there’s all sort of varieties out there. We were influenced with the cosmos and will look into these bulbs too. That’s what gardening is all about, being inspired by what other people grow in their garden. Cheers Debby!

More Midlands garden news

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Thanks to Mike & Julia for sending some updated pics from their garden near Coventry. This time it’s cerise coloured sweet peas and pink poppies which were spurred into action with a bit of overnight midlands rain. They plants look like they loved those night showers.

And below are another few pictures from their Crete holiday. Cheers again for the ace pictures, Mike and Julia!

North London garden news

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A big thanks to Debby H for sending us some pictures of what’s going on at the moment in the plant pots and flower beds in her north London garden. The ornithogalum above and below has started to produce more flowers and looks great.

The pictures of the cosmos (below) in her last post here influenced us to run out and get a plant for ourselves. It’s now in a pot  and with its great flowers they’re a new favourite of ours here at Weeds.

The phlox and the sedum (below) are looking healthy too, unlike some of the plants in our garden. We’ve been doing a fair bit of watering here but there’s only so many times you can go up and down the garden with a watering can.

We stopped the hose a good few years ago after Gerry Hectic recommended a great episode of Gardeners’ World which was about conserving water which shamed us from using said hosepipe. What was funny we were going to get the hose out yesterday and when we unravelled the thing we noticed that the outside tap was stuck in the “Stop” position. Someone somewhere was making sure we didn’t use that hose!

The golden rod looks gigantic and the flowers are starting to open and the tomatoes are looking healthy too.

Cheers for the pictures Debby as they are appreciated here.

Meanwhile, back in the Midlands…

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Thanks again to Mike and Julia for the pics of their back garden when they returned from their holiday. “We now have two sunflowers and those purple things in our wild patch are chicory. The flowers close up at night when the bees have gone home.” Brilliant Mike!What we love here is they’ve got an olive tree, called Olive (of course). She’s in the top laft hand corner of the picture and as Mike says “seems to be benefiting from the high temperatures”. Excellent!

And here’s a great rich coloured clematis and a “Ms Mars” sunflower, all looking wonderful. That’s it with holidays when you come back you will notice the difference in your garden.

Hey, what gives in Crete?

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Cheers to Mike and Julia for sending us some excellent horticultural snaps taken on their holiday to Crete. It was mighty hot out there they told us and it’s something else to think that plants actually survive the intense heat out there. The pomegranite tree is looking great and one we’d love in our garden.

Do enjoy these great pics.

We think they’ll be a follow up to this post as Julia has taken a good few pictures and they all look great! The above is the crimson bottlebrush that we have in the front garden and hasn’t really done all that well this year and we imagined it was to do with the heat. Thinking about it, we imagine Crete is possibly on average, a little bit hotter than Forest Hill.

Great photographs Julia and we’ll do a part two in a couple of days time as they are all great. Thanks for sending the holiday pictures as it’s great to see what grows elsewhere in the world. Do send us your worldwide plant pics to one deck pete at gee mail dot com.

Calling all the Skywatchers out there

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A big hi to Rich R up in the Lake District for sending us this great picture yesterday. As he said “Saw this weirdness in the sky this evening. I wonder if such a phenomenon has a name?” We have no idea what it can be, anyone out there in Weeds land can tell us what it actually is? It really looks great and we have never seen anything like this before.

Is it someone messing around with a mirror or a ship of extraterrestrials landing from 60B, Who knows? Talking of the great planet 60B (the second planet from the sun Kruger if you have forgotten) here is for the millionth time is our favourite ever clip from youtube. You can’t get any better than this.

More guest gardens

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Cheers to Debby H for sending us some great pictures of her garden again. We’re loving the ornithogalum which has just started to flower. As she said “Hopefully this is the first of several” and we hope so too!
“The golden rod is amazing. It’s about 6 foot tall. The flowers are nearly ready now.” They are looking good. She’s been away in France for a few weeks and is just managing to get on top of the weeding. That’s it what with the weather we’ve been having, rain then sun, sun then rain. The weeds love that sort of weather they really do. “The slugs got all my rudbeckia that I planted out just before we left, the dahlia disappeared too.” Those slugs eh?
“On the other hand, the cosmos are doing well. The flowers seem larger than last year, perhaps it’s all the rain!” The cosmos do look nice, they’re an attractive flower. We’ve only grown the annual version a few years ago and they came up great and then we forgot to sow them the year after. Sadly they didn’t self seed.
“We planted phlox last spring. It didn’t do much last year but it’s starting to flower now.”
All things in garden are sadly not all rosey as the pear tree (above) is not very happy though and there doesn’t look like there’s any fruit coming on it this year sadly. As well as little black eggs on the tree, which she’s sprayed a few times, she also had to treat it for rust. We wonder what is up with the pear? The strawberry patch looks very healthy though!
Thanks again Debby and do keep sending us these updates as the garden is looking great.

There’s a sheep in me garden what am I gonna do?

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Thanks to Rich R in the Lake District for sending us a pic of a woolly intruder in his back garden the other day. We like the look on the sheep’s face who could be thinking “What is this human doing in MY field?”

One advantage is there’s a good chance that may be some sheep droppings left which could be a pain in the neck but looking online it looks like they’re high in both phosphorus and potassium which is great for the garden. Just like the classic horse manure it has to have time to age (as it’s far too strong and if used straight away would burn the plants) and you can even make a compost tea out of it to apply to the garden in liquid form. We’d suggest a thick pair of gloves if you intend to pick some up this weekend. Cheers for that Rich! More on sheep manure here.

Pictures from Kyiv

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Cheers to Wlad (US7IGN) in Kyiv for sending us some pictures a fortnight or so which we’ve only got around to posting now. The first is how his good mate Sergiy (UT3UFD)‘s indoor banana plant is doing (above) and as you can it’s looking healthy! Love to know how his date palm is getting on.

And here’s a nice picture of how Wlad’s Dill and Potatoes make a good combination in the same container. We’ve sowed some Dill here a few years ago and actually got it to grow but didn’t really do anything with it sadly as we weren’t into the herb at the time but the Dill above is looking healthy. More on how to grow Dill here. Cheers for the pictures Wlad.

Something very special from far far away

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A big shout to Jesse Yuen (of RTMFM’s North of The River Swan) for letting us know that he’s moved into a new house in Perth and that in the garden they have a wonderful looking Foxtail Agave (above) that’s actually flowering! As Jesse said “Flowers are rare for the plant and each one only flowers once in their life, after 10-15 years.” and he also said “It’s like ours is welcoming us to the new house.” We agree with you there! What a great housewarming present.

Jesse also said “All over Perth you can see them flowering, and the members of local gardening Facebook groups are speculating that because we had a really dry, long summer, they are in shock which has bought on a mass flowering season.”

He was saying the bees are going bonkers for the flowers and told us “Apparently once it finishes flowering the big head dies off and these smaller “pups” take over” (above and below).

Absolutely wonderful stuff Jesse and best of luck to you and the family for the new house and hope everything goes well with the move and getting settled in! More on the wonderful plant here.