Latest Arrivals

It seems that its not only my Gran who knows me well but so does my Mum.

When she and my father came by the other day she brought with her a new plant :D my very own Lilly of the Valley

its really nice to have this now as my other scented flower is starting to die back now.

Onto the seedlings and not so much luck here this time... I planted a number of squash seeds (again taken from a store bought squash I liked) but only one seems to have germinated. But here he is starting to poke his head through. Not much to see yet but fingers crossed.

Now this lovely bloom I do not know what it is yet. It was a plant that I believe made its way into my garden from my mothers. it has been hiding away and has only just shown that it is a flowering plant. But isn't it lovely...

More of these primroses (?) they seem to have been flowering constantly for the last few months. Much to my pleasure. But they are being attacked by slugs or snails :'(

My one long flowering daffodil in the front garden. It is currently much to close to the drive so will have to be moved but I am waiting for it to be over as I don't want to disrupt its lovely 'spingness'. Hopefully I will have more flowering soon but as of yet the only one to have opened is the one that was already in the garden, the ones I planted are a bit reluctant to shine.

Getting Parcels

Everyone knows its always nice getting post, even more so when its a parcel.  Well I managed to have both waiting for me when i got home from 10 hours of uni today! Yes Yes I do realise it is a Saturday. I have a deadline of 8:45 on Monday morning so will be back at uni again tomorrow morning too :(

But enough about that, more on the exciting packages:

I finally received the Patio Potato starter kit from T&M that I was wondering where it had got to. 

And the other slightly more exciting piece of post was the letter from my Nan that I was waiting for. I had spoken to her the other day about an early birthday present for me that she was suggesting (herb plants :D, she knows me well) I also requested some more soil from her garden to add to the back bed. 

She asked me if I would like some flower seeds that she had been given for free from T&M when she had ordered some other plants. Of course I was not going to say no! but now im wondering where they can go in the relativly small amount of space that my garden has left...

But I did spot that one of them has edible flowers apparently so I might be able to get away with having that one in my Herb Garden :D

Also today I gained some of my own free seed from T&M but these were more my style and were free veg/herb seeds :)

So in total today through my door came:

Potato Vales Emerald

Calendula: Apricot Twist (Edible flowers)

Marigold: Moon

Cosmos: Double Click Snow Puff

Cosmos: Seashells

Rudbeckia: Becky Mixed

Marigold: Scarlet Sophie

Marigold: Naughty Marietta

Lobelia: Crystal Palace

Stocks: Hot Cakes Mixed

Pepper Chili: Anaheim (anyone know how spicy this is?)

Carrot: Mini Finger

Herb: Coriander

Herb: Basil

Cabbage: Primo

And a £10 gift voucher...

So many choices...

'Greenhouse' update

Well at the weekend I went out into the garden and thought I would do a bit of clearing up and potting out of the garlic which has started to show that the pots I put it into were too small already and decided to see how warm the greenhouse was. News is it was doing its job :D I even decided it was bordering on a little too warm and opened it up to let a bit of the heat out. 
During last week I returned a little early from lectures and decided to plant some of the garlic which had arrived from the very lovely Thompson & Morgan and along with this I also planted some sore bought garlic which had had a good attempt at sprouting whilst waiting to be eaten. This way I can see if the T&M bought garlic is worth the extra money for or if I can just get away with what I would normally eat. Although next year I feel I will still buy some professionally grown stuff as I would like to try some of the more interesting varieties.

This weekend the asda bought garlic showed signs that it needed to be potted into deeper pots so I used up the youghurt pots and bottoms of milk bottles that I have hoarded over the last few months to pot on these garlic cloves. Most of the store bought garlic had not yet started to sprout but I think the asda set had a bit of a head start. 


On a less positive note there have been a few nights of hard frost lately and this has even hit the plants in my new 'greenhouse' it looks like it was a good bet of mine to leave a few of the butternut plants in the house just incase. These ones have started to grow their next set of leaves. Which is more than can be said for the salad that I planted at the beginning. It is still looking a lot like seedlings and not very much like stuff that I would put on my plate, but at least it is still alive. 


Additionally it looks possible that I may have managed to salvage a basil plant from the store bought pot that I recently purchased which would be lovely since I have never had good luck at growing this in the past.

Febury in the Garden

I had not expected to have been able to do much work in the garden this month as I have a VERY busy schedule at uni at the moment. We are doing what are classed as "short fat" courses because of the way they apear on our timetables as a 3 week long block of lectures lasting all day every day. Or it is possible for them to be that lecture intensive... Luckily mine have not been 9-6 every day and have given time for us to do their assignments fairly easily. 

Anyways enough about lectures. I have managed to get out in the garden a little this month as my photos of spring appearing proved, but this time I actually managed to do some garden work. 

In the second week I planted some seeds and used the space under our stairs to germinate them as it is usually nice and warm in there. 
I planted some tomato seeds bought from Thompson & Morgan and placed them where it was nice and warm, on top of the radiator covered in a plastic bag (as it said to on the packet) and I only got two rather sickly seedlings pop their heads up. 
On the other hand my butter nut squash seeds which were taken from inside a squash I cooked for dinner last year have come up brilliantly. There was possibly one seed which didn't produce a seedling and two are a little weaker than the rest but all in all I am very happy with these seeds :D
In addition to this I planted some mixed salad seeds in a planter to be able to have some fresh home grown produce soon.

A week on and the Butter nut seedlings needed potting on so my collection of sauce pots and bottoms of milk cartons finally had a chance to shine and became a selection of small containers (after having poked holes in the base of them). 
I also found a plastic 'greenhouse' in town for a fiver so decided I would have to try this out and see if it worked or not. It is a similar size and shape to a traditional cold frame with a zip opening at the top to be able to put the plants in and then close up again. I have decided to put this on the roof area that I use to pot up plants because it has a much higher chance of getting enough sunlight to heat up during the day here. After being up for one day I ventured outside this evening after uni and found that it had blown over, unsurprisingly since I did not fix it down at all. It now has two bricks to hold it in place and we will see how this works shortly I expect. 

I have placed the salad container and most of the butter nut seedlings under the protection of this device, but have kept a few in the kitchen incase it doesn't work. 

Today I actually did some physical work in the garden by de-weeding and de-creepering  the bed I plan to try and use for veg. 

Here is a basic drawing of the bed in question. I will point out that it says newly FORKED bed and not anything else which it may be read as... 
This bed has been left from when I moved in to see what would come up over the year and not much did, there was the odd plant in the front of the bed, otherwise this section was bare. 
The back of the bed contains a Jasmin and a few other unknown (at least to me) plants and a very strange rock feature (pile). The very left of the front section of the bed has quite substantial ivy covering with a well established tree so I have limited the edge of the soon to be veg plot to where the tree is situated. 
Today I dug this over and removed all the ivy and Jasmine creepers along with a large number of stones! I was very heartened to see a large number of worms in this bed considering how little has been growing there. I also mixed two bags of soil, which have come from my nans garden, into the bed to raise the soil level. 

Now all I have to do is to wait and see if I have the same level of success with the second set of squash seeds and see if the plants survive the 'greenhouse' experiment... 

Spring Continued

So today when I was supposed to be getting ready to go to uni I might possibly have got distracted by the thought of what would be out in my garden at the moment. Since my sister got back from her weekend in London and so has returned my camera I thought I would take it out and see what I could find.

The first signs of spring in my bulb pot :D

With an additional burst of spring colour being added by some of the plants...

 

Although the slugs are trying to make a good go at reducing the display of this one...

Also the plants which got pruned rather aggressively are beginning to show new spring growth which is good as they were already established in the garden when I got it so it seems a shame to remove them now.

Although I do have to say the most exciting discovery that I have made today was this evening when I looked closely at my chilli plant that I have been 'overwintering' on the landing 'shelf' (there is no other way to describe it, technically it is a window sill but the window is much higher than the sill and stained glass so it doesn't get a huge amount of natural light). 

I have never over wintered a Chilli before and did not cut the foliage down on this one as it still seemed to be giving a good display and it seemed a shame to waste that as they are nice looking plants in themselves. 

But here it is the first sign of new growth for this year :D Ta Da...

Spring...

Well today was the first (semi) proactive step towards getting the garden developed this year and it unfortunately resulted in me spending money on plants and seeds for the garden. This might sound a little silly considering that I don't actually have anywhere in the garden that is ready to take them. But I am hoping that knowing that I have spent money on stuff to go in the garden will mean that I actually work at getting it ready for them to go in.

Most of what I bought was in seed form so this will give me some time to sort the garden before they are ready to be put in the ground. Currently the 'Herb Garden' section is the closest to being ready. It just needs to have some additional good compost mixed in with the existing soil and divided down the centre by a 'footpath' of some kind. This footpath is not going to lead anywhere but will be there to enable me to reach the back of the bed to extract herbs for cooking :D

This is one of the parts of the garden I am looking forward to the most. I do have a large selection at the moment but am looking to expand it this year.

I am still waiting for my daffodil bulbs to do more than just peak above the surface of their pot but have a few flowers to keep me going in the house. I picked up this lovely lilly from an impromptu IKEA trip the other day to help by boyfriend to get furniture for his new house and decided that the colour looked lovely and I would see if it could brighten up the dreary weather that we are currently experiencing.

Currently I am sat attempting to do work for my dissertation and the paleoclimate module I have currently but its all I can do to stop my mind wandering to planning the garden. Which is annoying since I am trying to limit the amount of planning I am doing till I actually get out into the garden and start on the bed to have a place to put all my plans into action!

So on that note I will leave and hopefully return after having hit my garden properly for the first time this year!

Sunny Days

Today is the first sunny day in a little while and has made such a difference to the garden and to every one's attitudes, Although it did have a bad effect this morning of making me sit in the arm chair by the window with my morning coffee and stare out into the garden for far too long.

Currently we are in the middle of our uni exam period and I have my last exam ever tomorrow so really should have spent that time getting ready to go to uni to revise but it was so nice this morning that that didn't happen. One thing I did find out was that we have a pair of Blue Tits using the nest box on the wall outside the kitchen so that was nice, and the other day the bulbs in the pots at the back of the house showed their tips above the soil so that is going nicely :D

Its days like today that I find myself constantly day dreaming about the garden and what the next step is and planning what I would like to do to it. Thinking it through over winter I have decided that I would like to try and grow as much veg as possible in the garden this year. See what is possible with the tiny garden that we have and with this in mind I have been thinking of what veg I would like to have and where it would all go.

I am also trying to fit in sorting the beds, (raising the bed at the back and digging compost into the one outside the kitchen window) and sowing some seeds between finishing exams (Weds Lunchtime) and leaving Southampton to go snowboarding for a week (Thurs evening) !

Realising how much uni work I am going to have next semester, with 6 weeks of 8 hours of lectures a day and a dissertation to write the garden is going to have to be as low maintenance as possible.

Here goes planning, and hoping that the sun stays till the end of the week to help motivate me to actually do work in the garden and not just dream about it...