A new angle

I've become interested in bee-friendly gardening recently, I hold environmental studies entirely to blame...

While i never expected the most tropical of flowers to be bee food, i never realised quite how few garden plants were bee-friendly. For instance, impatiens and begonias don't do much for them, wheras wildflowers like lungwort, cherry blossom, foxgloves are very good :)

Unfortunately, because less wildflowers are being used in gardens these days as people favour easy bedding plants and stuff, gardens are less bee-friendly places. This, coupled with post-war intensification of farming methods means that alot of important wildflower meadow habbitats have been lost. Its up to us jolly gardeners to do something about it by planting the odd drift of nectar rich flowers so that we don't loose anymore precious bees.

Lists of suitable flowers are all over the tinternet, and the Bee Conservation Trust is a useful place to start.

Although its getting a little late for seed sowing i've been doing a bit of last-minute ordering so i can hopefully get some late annuals in and some perenials ready for next year.

Some examples:

• Cornflower
• Sea Holly
  
• Harebells
• Cowslips
• Bugloss

I now officially love mum's heated propagator :) everything grows so much quicker, its really noticable. The corn poppys i put in were about half an inch tall, whereas the ones on my windowsill were barely chitting. The verbena was grown to about 1.5cm after a week when the website i ordered the seeds from said they'd take 20-90 days to germinate.

I even have little lavender seedlings (although i've lost my packet of seeds for those ):

My windowsill is growing greener and in dad's greenhouse i even have some alyssum popping up, the french marigolds have been up for a couple of days, the clarkias growing and even the sunflowers and nastursiums i put in aaages ago are finally showing signs of lIfe.

(I would take pictures but left my camera at a friends house on tuesday)

The clearing of the front garden borders is still slow-going, but the rains stopped (finally) and the grounds dried out a little - before all the roots were snapping off. I'm gonna have to burn my big piles of ivy i've been tugging up soon. Instead of getting the whole garden done by the end of the holiday i now hope to just get the first side sorted, then will have to start working evenings after college on sorting the rest.

Went to tatton park today and had tours of the amazing mansion and old hall, which are really fantastic and incredibly interesting (i would reccomend going), we went breifly into the gardens but its that time of year when nothings really out yet and we were too knackered to appreciate them by then so have decided to go back later. I'd quite like a rhodedendrum now though...
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Mum bought me a plant with thin purplish leaves and which is supposed to have purple flowers, i think its called a Hebe, or something like that. Mum suggested planting it in the big border at the opposite end of the garden to where i am atm.

I also have a mystery seedling amoung my first little batch of verbena, its about twice as tall and has two little spade-shaped leaves which are a normal grass green and branched out from each other, compared to the verbena which have slimmer, pointyer leaves which are a darker shade. I'm interested in finding out what it is :)

Last but not least have finally re-filled the propagator, with most of what i've planted already, have tried some seeds that werent reccomended for there but which have been growing sloooowly/not at all on their own (e.g. columbine, echinachia, nigella.....) It may have an adverse affect but i would like to see.

The Ipomoea which i tried softened over night in warm water, and not softened is showing the difference, but not by that much.

Softened: Tops of all three seedlings, one raised above the soil with the leaves ready to unfurl
Unsoftened: Top of one seedling.

Rain + clay soil = weeding nightmare

The rain continues its relentless downpouring and i've resigned myself to having to deal with tougher weeds; our ground is very clay-y and with the rain it makes it impossible to weed without snapping half the roots off so any attempts at clearing the borders are counter-productive.

My tallest sunflower is about 2 1/2 inches though :) and its top little leaves are open.

The mini rose on my windowsill which i (almost) killed in the frost is surving on one of its parts :) there were four shoots comming out of the ground orignially (dunno whehter it was four separate plant or just one...?) but three died when i left it in the car over night during a hash cold spate, but i have loads of new leaves on the surviving part :)

even if one of the bits i had to cut back has gone mouldy...

Lots of things seem to be going mouldy this year. Mum says its because its so damp and cold at the moment and there's loads of moss around where we live so the spores make it worse or something....? don't know how true that is, but laods of my seeds are going mouldy and the roots of plants. Part of me isn't sure whether the ends of baby seedling's roots are supposed to be like that, but its a bit frustrating. Just hoping they'll grow through it because i can't think of anything i can do.

Put some lavender, verbena, cosmos, corn/field poppy gys... something or other in mum's heated propagator yesterday, so hopefully in a while some of that will come through. Not entirely certain how many of those should have gone in it, so i put some pots of the same in dad's greenhouse (which is now apparently mine, but due to the dead tomato plants, big thing of woodshavings and massive box of tool-type stuff i have to step over it still seems very 'dad's' to me. Will be interesting to see which comes up first :)

Also experimented with some Ipomoea, because i read you should soak the seeds over night in warm water because the shells are quite hard, so i did that for some ''morning glory'' ones and they doubled in size and you could see the pale bits of seed showing through, so i planted some of those in two pots, and some un-soaked ones in two others, put the big pots in dad's greenhouse and the little ones in my room so they can have a race aswell.

My yellow carnations are comming up and the first two of my third batch of ''inkspots'' ipomoea (the purple and white ones that mum originally got for me). the old sutton's sunflower seeds appear to be dead though :( might have to buy some more or try another of mum's packets.

The nasturshiums (excuse the spelling) from best before 1989 have moulded though, but the bedding stocks from 2001 are doing just fiine :)
-apart from the ones with the furry roots like i said earlier in mum's greenhouse.


Weeding yesterday i also had troubles telling appart some of the young buttercups from the peony. Think i killed a couple of canturbry bells aswell becaue i thought they were one of those annoying underground nettle roots or yet more ivy. Bunged them back in the ground anyway so they might survive....


Its the annoying thing about weeding someone else's garden thats been left alone for too many years... theres just the odd cluster of plants dotted around that have somehow survived and spead and i'm obliged to do my best not to kill them. Can't help having a certain amount of respect for anything thats survived our garden though....

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.