Autumn colours in north London

Thanks to Debby H up in north London for this picture above. “The garden plants may be coming to an end for this year, but I think the colours are lovely in the sunshine. Here’s a picture of my golden rod and peony plants, with the french lavender in the middle.” That bed looks great and there’s still a good bit of colour on show.

Let’s see weather permitting, if we can still get some pics from our gardens to stick on the blog well into the autumn, pictures please. Great stuff Debby!

More from a north London garden

Cheers to Debby H for sending us some pictures of her garden in north London now that the summer is sadly coming to an end (how quick has this year been?) The first (above) is of the Zephyranthes Robusta (AKA Rain Lily). As she told us “These bulbs have flowered so many times this summer. We thought that we had seen the last for the year, but amazingly it has performed again!”, great to hear!

There’s also the Ornithogalum “The flowers have now grown. Unfortunately, one of them broke off, possibly due to the wind, but we still have 8 flowers.” Even though the picture is a little out of focus it gives us a good idea how they have done this year.

“Our sedum has flowered and is looking very pretty” above.

Debby also has a self-seeded ragwort (we think) which if it is, has a nice flower but has its problems as it is poisonous to horses and other livestock and causes minor skin irritations so it’s better to leave those gardening gloves on if you ever are wanting to pull one up.

Cheers for the update Debby, the garden is looking great!

A report from north London

A big thanks to Debby H for sending us some pictures of her garden that’s come on a bit since she went away for few weeks. The above is of the first cosmos flowers.

Above is the radio related Marconi red pepper which is doing very well and her second pepper plant (below) is looking good too.

And her giant daisies (below) are coming along nicely!

There’s been a couple of suprises, one being a fuchsia that she thought was dead has come back to life and her ophiopogon (below), which is now flowering (little pink bell-like ones.)
It’s good coming back from being away and seeing how much has changed in the garden. Cheers for those Debby!

North London Report

Thanks to Debby H for sending us some recent pictures of her garden. This may turn into a two-part post as she sent us some great images.

We must start with the cosmos (above) that have been planted out and you can see still in the cardboard toilet roll inners. As Debby said “(it) makes the planting much easier, which is good when you have dozens of plants” and she’s right. The loo roll inners look like a part of the display too. A winner all round!

Here’s a couple of pictures of French lavender (one under the netting protecting some strawberries). We bought a plant of the same a few months ago and we do love the overall look of it.

And we love the blossom on her red robin tree (below). She said that it seems to have more blossom on it than previous years this spring.

“The peonies are doing well (above). Here’s a picture of one of the flowers just opening (below).” Great stuff!

Thanks again Debby and we’ll post your other pics later this week.

It’s all starting!

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.

And the cosmos still keeps coming

We’re in Storm Bert at the moment here in SE23, it’s windy and very dour when you outside. It’s always good on days like this to have something to cheer us up so a big thanks to Debby H for sending us more cosmos pictures taken this week. We must rememember it is late November and as Debby wrote with the attached pictures “Come snow and frost, the cosmos plants struggle on valiantly!” and she’s right. Cheers for that Debby!

On the stereo we have this playing in the background to cheer us up despite the bad weather. It’s a bit of an off kilter bit of dub by the great Bjørn Torske called Dub Vendors (the B side to the single Disco Members from 2000.)

Another report from north London

A big thanks to Debby H for sending us pictures of her garden now everything’s starting to hot up in the growing stakes.

Above is the Iris which is now flowering with some rather colourful geraniums below it.

The peonies (above) are great, we’ve got one with a deep red/purple flower but we’re liking the ones in white! We can see some staking going on here, in our garden the bush tends to grow out a bit competing with other plants for space and then flops over a bit after the rain. That’s where the staking comes in handy. Loving those white blooms.

Above is the ceanothus bush which is going at great guns and we’ve just read the plant has nitrogen fixing properties. New thing to us!

And finally the zephyranthes flower which is “slightly battered” as Debby described it but it still looks great to us. Cheers again for the pictures Debby!

(North) London Calling

A big thanks to Debby H for sending us some pictures of what’s going on in the flower pots and flower beds in north London at the moment. “The picture (above) is of our begonias which are now flowering. They nearly died the winter before last as we put them on the bathroom windowsill. They didn’t like it at all. Probably not enough light. They spent all last summer sulking and doing very little. However, it seems that they have now forgiven us, and are rewarding us with flowers.” Brilliant, good luck with them!

“Here’s a picture of our first bud on an iris plant that’s growing in a shady part of our back garden.”
“Also here’s photos of two front gardens near us. One garden has a lovely lot of irises. The other has an impressive array of Arum-Lilies.”
Excellent stuff Debby! It looks like we’re well on the way now weatherwise!

Spring is here (or just around the corner)

Cheers for Debby H for getting in touch with us today. She sent us a pic of daffodils in full bloom in a council maintained bed near her home in North London (above) and they look great!

Debby has recently started off some tomato and cosmos seeds. The cosmos seeds were straight off the flower heads of the plants they grew last year. After being left in a box all winter they were sown a couple of days ago. As she said: “We just scattered the whole dead heads on earth/compost and covered them over. We didn’t bother to try to separate out the seeds first. Within two days the little things were germinating madly!”  (Photo above). That is crazy! The seeds must have had exactly the right conditions that they loved as two days is good going for germination.

Debby told us a great tip that she used with the cosmos seedlings (pic above): “I re-planted some of them in an egg box as they were growing too densely. The idea Is that, when they are ready to go outside, I will cut the egg box into individual sections, then plant each section separately. As the egg box is made of cardboard it should bio-degrade so I won’t need to remove the seedlings from the box partitions before planting them.” That is a top idea, we have been using some biodegradable pots from B&Q but this idea is better. What we usually do with our egg boxes is chuck them on the compost heap but we reckon we’ll be putting seeds in them!

Cheers Debby, thanks again and look forward for more pics soon!