Keeping a garden interesting gets more difficult as autumn slips into winter. The climate here is not warm enough to have nearly as wide a choice of material for winter display as for summer, nor is it cold enough to force me to shut up shop altogether. I have a choice, I can give up…
Author: Jim Stephens
Gardener, no-dig allotmenteer, camellia enthusiast.
I love colour, it cheers me up.
Retired nurseryman.
Six on Saturday – 23/11/2019
Just after I'd posted last Saturday's six, I loaded up the car with crocheted cacti and assorted other crafteries and took Sue down to Lanreath Church where she was partaking in a craft fair. With about four hours at my disposal before I had to collect her, I went across to Lockengate to visit one…
Focus on Ferns – 4
I started a series about the ferns I grow, posting blogs in April, May and June this year. It had been my intention to work my way through all the ferns I have but as with so many good intentions, it didn’t happen. Almost everything I included in those blogs was a plant growing in…
Allotment update – 19/11/2019
It wont have escaped the notice of any UK gardeners that it’s been very wet lately. I try to stay off my rather fragile silty soil in such conditions as it’s structure is rapidly degraded by my big feet. Today though was the third dry day we’ve had in a row, practically a drought, so…
Six on Saturday -16/11/2019
Commercial horticulture relies heavily on covered space. Uncertainty is the enemy and the weather is one big part of that which can to a degree be controlled by growing crops under glass or polythene. The nursery where I worked for 30 years had several polytunnels and three glasshouses. The biggest polytunnel was 63 feet wide…
Six on Saturday – 9/11/2019
If the forecast yesterday was right, last night was probably the coldest night of the autumn so far, though I have no thermometer outside so I don't know how cold it went before it started going up again. It was raining by six o'clock. The Dahlias and Impatiens in the garden will tell me. Yesterday…
Six on Saturday – 2/11/2019
It's absolutely sluicing it down just now, as it has been for several hours. The wind has dropped a bit though. Good thing I did my pictures yesterday when it was only drizzling. One. Camellia yunnanensis. I went down to Trelissick on Thursday to a meeting about a study day on Camellias that I'm going…
Six on Saturday – 26/10/2019
It's not great for taking pictures in the garden so I brought a few things in and tried to get good pictures of them. Took a couple in the rain too. One. I'll start and finish outdoors, pretty much the order the pictures were taken. This is Camellia sasanqua 'Navajo', which just about had its…
Six on Saturday – 19/10/2019
As the seasonal sine wave heads downwards I find myself taking pleasure out of ever smaller things in the garden. It doesn't seem forced, just natural. A smattering of flowers on the Daphne, a few late patches of blue from the Corydalis, the first bud opening on a camellia. The few things that are still…
Carrots
The picture above is of some carrots that I dug up on my allotment two days ago. As I explained back in June, I have taken to sowing carrots in deep pots and planting them out as an undisturbed pot full once they are a couple of inches high. I started to do this because…
garden ruminations 