Divide and conquer

Yesterday I finally managed to get my claws into the garden after a forced absence caused by too much other stuff going on in my life. But now the kitchen has almost returned to normal, the parents have left and my sister has gone with them and I have finally left Uni. 

This is all combining to give me some free time.

I have been planting out some of the plants I have grown this year which was a very satisfying task. Once I had done those I decided that some of the other pots which either wern't ready to go in the ground or didn't have anywhere to go at the moment needed to be divided.

I divided the pulmonaria (possibly Trevi Fountain) into a number of pots. Recently I spotted that this has also managed to self sow itself into the edge of my herb garden which I am really happy about as this is a lovely plant with gorgeous long lasting flowers and really pretty foliage. 

On top of this I have divided one more of my parsley plants to see if I can grow this up a bit more.

In addition I have potted on the strawberry runners which I took from the purple flowered alpine strawberry and that my sister took from a white flowered one in my mothers garden. From these a few more runners had started growing so these are now secured into pots starting the process again. 

I am going to have to stop doing this soon as I currently do not have space for a strawberry bed which is what is going to be needed if they continue multiplying at this rate!

I am just going to show the progress of the chives which I divided In march (here) you can see the size of the two clumps of chives in the first picture in the original post.

Here is the size of the clump left in the window box (compared to my hand as a measure):

And this is the size of the clump which got divided into the bed (again using my hand as a guide):

First Garden Upcycle Challenge...

This week I seemed to have managed to shift the weekend to the beginning of the week! I have taken today off uni and am probably going to be off tomorrow which will mean that I am going to have to be in uni next weekend to make up for it... Oh well, C'est La Vie...

I have taken today off to enable me to do some stuff in the garden and raid all the charity shops :D (Actually came away with some good finds this time) and clean my room (Sulk).

I think the sun had a lot to do with having such a productive day today and the fact that the garden smells gorgeous due to all the spring blossom...

I have finally cracked out the power tools and turned the drawer that I salvaged from the back of my dads work into a container...

This

 Plus This:
 

 Equalled this lovely easy draining container:

 Which when filled with soil was half filled with seeds. Mixed salad, Parsley and Basil. I will wait to see how well they germinate before celebrating, but fingers crossed.

I only half filled the drawer with soil so that I can have another sowing later on to give me continuous salad leaves through the summer (Well at least three crops worth, as my other container is nearly ready to eat :D )

Home Made Plant Labels

planning to grown a lot of plants from seed this year I needed a way to identify which plants were which and really didn't feel like shelling out money for those little plastic labels that all garden centers seem to have these days.
So I decided to try making my own and if I may say so myself, they seem to be working very nicely.

Here is my first How To:

I have made my labels out of an old milk bottle but you could use any of a similar type of plastic.
I cut into the bottle to remove the top and bottom, leaving a ring of plastic which was cut down one corner and opened up.

From this ring I cut out the individual tags but cutting it into strips vertically. Then cutting one end to a point. 
The lines drawn on the plastic are to show you how it was cut but i normally don't bother when cutting it myself.

After these were cut out I wrote the names of the seedlings I have onto the 'inside' of the plastic, because I didn't manage to remove all of the label on this bottle. Also the inside it generally smoother as a lot of companies make the outside textured.
Finished labels waiting to go into my pots :D

I hope you enjoy using this method, as it is much cheaper and environmentally friendly.