Eight months ago I spread the compost from my heaps onto my allotment and resolved not to make any more. I would simply shred everything that came my way and spread it back on the ground. I wrote a blog about it at the time. It seemed a slightly radical course to take and I…
Six on Saturday – 7/8/2021
How quickly these weeks roll around, with little enough sense of anything getting done. I seem to spend my days being busy but have nothing to show for it. At the moment it's raining so I have an excuse. Six on Saturday is a good filler of time when it's wet. Our host, the Propagator,…
Sterilizing propagation media
I don't propagate plants from cuttings on a massive scale and most of what I do is of easy to root subjects. I have a Vitopod propagator which gives me a suitable environment for a wide range of subjects and I have been using Melcourt Sylvagrow multipurpose compost as my propagation medium. Not everything I…
Wildside.
Wildside Garden, at Buckland Monochorum in Devon, is the creation of plantsman Keith Wiley and his late wife Ros. I am very lucky that it is almost on my doorstep but I've still only managed to visit it four or five times since it first opened. We went again last week, the 28th July and…
Six on Saturday – 31/7/2021
We went midweek to visit Wildside garden at Buckland Monochorum. This garden, created by Keith Wiley with a great deal of inspiration from his late wife Ros, is as close as any garden I know to my idea of a perfect garden. It is packed full of good plants, all planted in a naturalistic way…
Six on Saturday – 24/7/2021
This week I was minded to run with a theme of yellow, but could only find five decent contenders and wanted to include at least one white. Yellow features strongly then but not exclusively. One.Crocosmia 'Paul's Best Yellow'. All is relative. Compared to Crocosmia 'Hellfire' at the bottom of the picture it is just about…
Six on Saturday – 17/7/2021
Back on the watering treadmill but who could complain about such glorious weather. The Dahlias are beginning to kick off, which in gardening terms is my yardstick for summer proper. Six for this week, easy peasy. OneHydrangea serrata 'Shojo'. This is on the edge of my shady area and gets very little direct sun though…
Vine weevils.
There seem to be a growing number of 'gardeners' who are happy to leave 'nature' to take its course in their gardens. They are happy, or at least prepared, to put up with the damage wrought by slugs and snails, want dandelions to be regarded as desirable wild flowers and eschew the use of any…
Six on Saturday – 10/7/2021
We had one of my sisters staying this week, so instead of sorting my saturday six on friday, they have been done this morning. It rained all night and the garden is drenched. It's drizzling still but hopefully will brighten up so we can do a bit of preening for tomorrow's opening, which yet again…
Six on Saturday – 3/7/2021
That's both the summer solstice and the calendar midpoint passed. Half way through Wimbledon too and the Brits are dropping like flies. Blight in some of my potatoes too. A very ordinary summer. Picking six things in the garden at this time of the year is about choosing what to put in, what to leave…
garden ruminations 