(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!