rain, rain, go away...

Had another frustrating day. Weather was fine early on but didn't go out as was going to town with mum. By the time we got back it was the middle of a rainstorm. Was tempted by a pink climbing rose in sainsburys for only £2.99 but mum persuaded me out of it with promises of better things at the garden centre. Unfortunately we ran late and had to pick up my brother from the train station for five o'clock so never made it.

On a brighter side my next batch of seeds arrived. I've got some verbena which i intend to experiment with mum's heated propagator with, some white cosmos, gypsophila, pink and white field poppies, aprocot clarkia "apple blossom" and some blue ipomoea.

Talking about Ipomoea, mum bought me some purple and white stuff a few months ago which i've started to plant (and fell in love with because it grows so quickly :P) but for some reason i assumed it would be like petunais; lots of flowers and reasonably short, no taller than a foot or so... how wrong could i be? Took a closer look when i was ordering the blue stuff and read 'climbing plant, grows to 6'-12 feet'. woops. anyhow, hopefully i can get it to climb the hedge, dunno if its possible or not but roses do it....?

Trip to town wasn't worthless though, got some books out of the library including one on thrifty gardening, another with some good cottage garden ideas and this other one called 'How to grow practically anything' Its not very in depth but seems pretty perfect for a novice like me. I particularly like the idea of making a bee hotel out of a flowerpot filled with cut off bamboo cane. It also shows a method of sowing a wildflower meadow (unfortunately one that involves digging up the first few cm of soil bah humbug!), which is something i'd like to try with the orchard seeing as theres a relatively empty bit which is quite sunny and mostly grows with weeds. I'm sure the bit that says you should start in early autumn can be overlooked....

One thing at a time and i should probs finish the flower borders before i start any crazed schemes. If i leave it till next year perhaps? sadly that means i might miss the flowering as i'll be away at uni (hopefully), and might have to start august-september instewad of oct/nov, but we shall see :)

Tomorrow i have the joys of going boating avec ma famille dans le matin (and it'll probably rain) then a party at one of my friends houses in the evening, but hopefully in between (if the weathers not too bad) a bit of weeding or persuade mum to take me to the garden centre.

The begining...

March.
This year i've been given permission to take over the front garden, my mums got a bad back and various other problems, so shes only able to cope with the veggies and the rests gone wild.

I've had a thing for gardening since i was little but never got very far with it, either because of lazyness or there being too many bugs and creepy things crawling all over the place (the patch i always used to start with had a big red ants nest in it. every year i'd get about half an hour in then get the heeby-geebies) but this year i've been too full of that spring-time urge to grow things and its my last year at home so i thought i'd have a go. :)

Unfortunately because its been neglected for so long its sort of re-claimed itself. Theres the odd patch of lungwort surviving, some primroses dotted about, a peony, some rosebushes, daffys and hyacinths, but other than that its all buttercups and nettles.




Oh, and junk. My dads an engineer and he likes to dump various bits of metal and stuff all over the place. Note the cement mixer in the background....

Anyway he has hayfeeever so i'll probably get my own back this summer :S

During my research i noticed cottage gardens being mentioned in refrence to certain plants (e.g. carnations), so looked them up and they seem to be the perfect solution (as luck would have it we even live in a cottage :P) The general gist i got was that they can basically be a little bit of whatever you fancy all mushed together in a pleasing jumble (at least more so than landscaped gardens), and that they're good if you have a limited budget (the parents don't seem willing to fund me, so the most i can afford is a packet of seeds here and there), and limited time (i'm a full time student so thats a given :P).

It was raining today (i never realised weather could be such an inconvenience :P), so i decided to start a blog to track my progress, more as a note to myself than anything.

I'm probably starting late in the year; my college schedule hasn't allowed me the time up till now and the weather has been ghastly (what can i say, i'm a wuss) The last week of term was spent with dreams of flowers and seedlings floating round my head, so as soon as we got let out for easter i've been digging and sowing frantically trying to catch up. Unfortunately due to my late start my seeds are still doing their buisness underground and so my dug patches are sitting bare, but theres so much weeding needing to be done it probably doesn't matter.

Being locked out in the rain gave me a good start though.

This is an example of what the borders are like at the moment. Solid moss and weeds, with ivy vines snaking underneath, all made that bit tougher to dig through by the hedgecuttings that weren't picked up. I think it took me about six hours over three days to get a 2.5m x 1m section cleared. I dug up at least 6 ash saplings, counted 12 thorns in my hands afterwards and took 4 trugs full of weeds to the chickens. and made a massive pile of ivy that i'd had to rip up. I told my mum about it and she nodded understandingly and said it was 'soul destroying'.

This might not seem too bad by normal gardeners' standards but im new to all this and a teenager, therefore lazy by nature :)

Hopefully by summer it will all look very different and that the weather forcast is wrong and the nasty weather we had today won't continue (i'm also out a lot this week - the stresses of being a teenager with loads of eighteenth birthday parties to go to :P), so i'm a bit worried about getting the ground cleared before the weeds get too entrenched, but fingers crossed that with a bit of hard work it will work out.