A big thanks to Mike & Julia from outside Coventry for some snaps from their great garden. As before we are going to let Julia’s brilliant pictures do the talking, and there’s some wonderful stuff here as ever. As Mike said in his email “Things are happening in our garden”. They certainly are!
Cheers for sending these pictures over and may your garden carry on looking great for the rest of this year!
STOP PRESS: Julia has just come back with the plants featured in order as in the blog post. Thanks Julia!
Allium
Salvia – hot lips
Alstroemeria
Geums with wallflowers in front
Geums with a lupin type bush which I have never seen before and am not quite sure what it is
I think it’s a penstemon
Yellow poppies and geranium
We’ve just heard from The Rhythm Doctor who sent us some pictures of wild garlic last post. “We saw this strange flower the other day in the same area as the garlic”, it turns out to be the common toothwort.
Turns out the plant is a bit of a parasite “The genus produces no chlorophyll and parasitises host trees, often hazel, beech and walnut, to acquire nutrients” more here. Cheers RD that is one strange looking plant!
A big thanks to Debby H who sent us some pictures of how things are getting on gardening wise in north London. First are the cosmos (above) which are looking healthy. Those inner toilet tubes seem to be working well as plant pots by the way.
And above are the tomato seedlings which are sown in an interesting way as we usually sow one to a pot, but this method seems great. The tomatoes as well as the cosmos are ready to be repotted, and Debby has given us a great idea for further sowings.
Above is the azalea in her garden is looking great. As she wrote “I just found that the azalea is a type of rhododendron.” We didn’t know that.
And Debby has just got back from a break in Suffolk. “By the coast near to Dunwich the whole area was covered in the most amazing yellow flowering gorse bushes” “It went on for miles. I have never seen it looking quite so spectacular.” Brilliant stuff Debby, cheers for the update and we look forward to more pictures this year.
In a post the other day here we were discussing our impatience about putting tomato plants outside in the garden. Yesterday we saw a Facebook post where someone down here in London had taken a picture of their tomato plants outside in the garden with “Now there’s a good job done, all of my 30 odd tomato plants are outside in the ground. I doubt if there’ll be a frost now…” Looking at next week’s weather, it looks brilliant during the day and not too cold in the evening so we’re now even more confused than ever.
We had a plant on the kitchen windowsill with two flower trusses begging to go out and today we gave a broken council food recycling bin a good clean out and put a few holes in the bottom and now the two trussed plant is in it and up near the house. It should be well hardened off anyway and tonight it’s covered in bubble wrap just in case. It’s one less plant on the kitchen windowsill.
Above is the food recycling bin with the tomato in it and funnily enough it fits in with the other plant pots including one of the cuttings from Honor Oak Park station geraniums (we now think they are really pelargoniums) which is now flowering!
With the pictures Debby H kindly sent of her garden in the last post, she also sent us some pics of how her cosmos seeds were doing. “I planted some cosmos seeds on Thursday afternoon. By this morning (Sunday), they had germinated!” (pic above). How good is that?
Then on Monday she sent us pictures of how quick the seedlings have grown (taken about 25 hours later after the original photographs). As she said “I find the growth since yesterday to be quite amazing” and we agree!
She also sent some useful information about the seedlings that we didn’t know “…cosmos plants have long roots, even when they are small, so egg-boxes didn’t work well last year. This time, I have tried to use the cardboard insides of toilet rolls. I put these in a plastic trug planter thingy to keep them upright and stable.”
Now that is a great tip Debby and good luck with the seedlings. We sowed some yesterday (Tuesday) and hoping we get some quick germination results too. Thanks again.
STOP PRESS: A picture from today (Wednesday). They are looking great Debby and ta for the update!
Thanks to Debby H who is away in Tenerife at the moment where it’s a lovely 23 degrees. She sent us some pictures of the garden of where she’s staying at and it looks fantastic. We love this view above.
The bird of paradise/crane flower (strelitza) there looks well established (above) and we did a plant search on the plant below using Plantnet and it came up with agave. If we’re wrong on that, please do let us know but it’s great to see all these brilliant plants on their home turf so to speak and in their full glory. Cheers again Debby!
(Picture from Dan S off Foursquare from 2024)
It was great weather today and this morning on the way back from the dentist we helped prune the wonderful collection of geraniums at Honor Oak Park train station.
Well, we were given a pair of secateurs from behind the ticket desk and cut five bits off the massive geraniums so we could use them as cuttings. We stuck 3 in a large pot indoors and put a couple in the cloche outside after dipping the end in some cutting powder. We’ve never taken cuttings on the outdoor variety before but they’re supposed to root easy. Perhaps in the summer it may be a better time to do it but let’s see what happens. More on taking Geranium cuttings from Gardeners World here.
Did you know there was a punk band from Saitama, Japan called Geranium? This is 17 minutes of them on full pelt mode but the first tune is one of their catchier ones (from the good old days of 2007).
And below here’s more of an ambient Geranium themed tune by The Ambient Zone called Red Geranium. A track featuring Chris Coco and Nick Cornu on chilled out guitar. From the good old ambient days of 2021.
Cheers to Mike and Julia from near Coventry for a picture of their new basil grown hydroponically and we must say the basil is looking far better than ours that we’ve started to grow on our kitchen windowsill.
Also thanks to Debby H for sending us some pictures of the first flowers in her garden. “Our snowdrops had their flowers eaten by something, which was disappointing. We have been more successful with the dwarf daffodils (tete-a-tetes?), which are now beginning to flower.”
“We have had primroses/primulas for quite a while. They are the conventional yellow colour but there are also a few red/purple ones. Lovely to have some colour in the garden.” Debby’s right
We here at Weeds hope everything is starting to pop up now in your gardens, if you’re not in those parts of the world that are covered in snow at the moment.
Thanks to all at Thompson & Morgan blog for including a tip of ours in their new article “Money saving garden tips: cost-effective seed sowing” here. It’s a great article and a great blog to check out.
By the way we hope that anyone who has sowed early like us is having some success and the seeds are starting to germinate. Looks like the chili seeds we had that said “Sow by end of 2023” haven’t, but that’s a risk you got to take with out of date seeds. Good luck with what you stick in your seed trays!
Weeds up to me knees 