It is the nature of allotments that both inputs and outputs are almost always little and often rather than big, one off events. Ideal for blogging if you're into all the minutiae, not so much if you're not. My Kestrel potatoes now have blight and I will take the tops off in preparation for lifting…
Hydrangeas
Hydrangeas are to an extent the victims of their own success. There are very few plants to rival the mophead macrophylla hydrangeas for providing the maximum flower display for the minimum of effort. As a result they are absolutely everywhere and familiarity rapidly breeds contempt. The good news is that they are also a rare…
Wordless wednesday 6/7/2016
End of month view, June 2016
There's no getting away from the fact that foliage has had a better time of it this month than flowers. Growth of just about everything has been prodigious, except for the things I've failed to protect from slugs, but flowering has been patchy. Foxgloves, mostly self sown pinks, a few planted whites, have been great…
Potting.
Back in November I noticed fruits on Fuchsia glazioviana growing in the garden. This is a quite small grower with often good leaf colour so well worth growing. I wondered if it had picked up pollen from something interesting, so I picked a few fruits, extracted the seeds and sowed them. They germinated very quickly…
Allotment update
It feels like about the midpoint of the season. I have now pretty much filled all the space I have, but looking forward a month or so I shall have a lot of free space where peas and potatoes have been harvested. Today I sowed perpetual spinach, beetroot, chard and cabbage in the hope that…
Wordless Wednesday 15/06/2016
Flowers in my garden 14/06/2016
Plant Profile: Camellia ‘Night Rider’
Camellia 'Night Rider' possesses the sort of qualities that would lead one to expect it to be massively popular, yet it is but rarely seen. Raised in New Zealand by Os Blumhardt, its parents are C.'Ruby Bells' x C.'Kuro-tsubaki'. It first flowered in 1980. The flowers are dark red and the petals waxy textured.…
Conifers
Conifers have become a somewhat tricky subject to talk about. As indifferent to the zeitgeist as I like to see myself, even I know that they've been deeply unfashionable for at least the last twenty years. You probably have to go back to the 1960's to see the start of what now looks like a…
Gastropods
My relationship with slugs and snails is a simple one; they vex me greatly so I kill them. I read somewhere, probably Twitter, that this year was going to be a bad one for slugs and snails because it had been such a mild winter. That is to say, it was going to be a…
garden ruminations 