Can we smell Spring from here?

A generally mild Winter has confused the crap out of the plants. Some early germinators have already been kiaboshed by a recent sharp frost. Will Feburary slap more over-keen upstarts in the chops?

The usual suspects

Hellebores in pink...

...and white

 

Mini iris is more of a surprise

Nice to see last year's multi layer bulb pot still has some go in it.

 

&... erm... a dead mole

This wee one didn't make it :(

Multi-layered bulb pot

Last Autumn on Gardeners' World, Monty looked at getting a succession of flowers in a container by planting multiple layers of different bulbs. Seemed like a great plan to me. We inherited a few weedy pots with the house & the largest of these would be ideal for experimenting with this technique.

Then, I just happened to be mooching around a local supermarket when I spotted some Spring bulb offers. Little boxes of all sorts of things. I checked the flowering dates on the packets & picked 4 that would flower in sequence, if all went to plan.

2 for £5? I'll take 4 :D

*Edit* An eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that I haven't explained the planting arrangement. Sorry.

I thought I'd taken photos of the planting up but no. I may've hallucinated that bit. Deffo losing the plot.

Anyhoo: the bulbs' boxes suggested different planting depths. IIRC I put them in 3 layers: tulips on the bottom; then a middle layer of 2 types & a top layer of 1. I tried to place the bulbs so they weren't directly over each other, so the stems of the lower ones wouldn't displace the higher ones. As they were all due to flower separately, I placed them evenly around the pot, so it didn't look lopsided.

Sprout!

They're ALIVE!

Cut to... Spring & from the kitchen window we can see some shoots. Yay! They haven't all died horribly due to overcrowding. A good start.

First flowers up were the mini Iris:

Little irises...irii?

What absolute gems.

They all came out blue, not mixed as it said on the box, but I'm not complaining - they were beautiful.

The daffs also made a show but I forgot to take a photo. Sorry. The box says miniature, but that must refer to the flower head as these had long long necks. A nice surprise was that they were double headed, a bit like the Tete a tetes I bought the other year.

At the mo, these gorgeous tulips have just done over:

Golden globes

They should call this one Fruit Salad

I've not seen this type before, with circle after circle of petals. Stunning.

& we still have the honeybells to go. No sign of their flower heads just yet but the box says May-June so it may be Midsummer before we see them up here.

Thus far it's been a great show in front of the kitchen window, so I'm declaring the multi-bulb pot experiment a success :)

End of April catch up

Crikey, nearly a month since my last post. Is it because I've been too busy doing actual gardening? Of course not.

But that doesn't matter as it's been a fairly sunny round here this April. Admittedly some of the showers have been a tad, erm, white & lumpy, & the temperature has been up & down like the Assyrian Empire. But the garden has clearly decided Spring is here & is just getting on with it. That's the spirit!

So how's everything getting along while I've been maximising my quality sofa time?

Bay cuttings

When I pruned the bay last year, I had a go at taking cuttings from the trimmings.

2 pots, 3 stems per pot, over-Wintered in the greenhouse & they seemed to be going well. But I've been as slow to get started as Spring has & the other week Hubby spotted the cuttings were wilting. With the weather heating up (a bit) they weren't getting enough water. So I've moved them outside & given them saucers, to help them keep some of the rain they catch.

Some green left on the Autumn's Bay cuttings

As you might be able to spot in the pic, at least 2 of the 6 cuttings still have green in their leaves, so hopefully they'll strengthen as Spring progresses.

Magnolia flowers

The week before I put the stairs into Stinky Dog Corner, I bought a couple of trees: a Himalayan Birch, for the top of those steps; & a Magnolia for The White Corner, bottom right of the garden. To be honest I didn't think the Magnolia's flower buds would survive a March planting, but 3 or 4 look like they might just hang on in there. Yay!

New tree: Magnolia Manchu Fan

Old bulbs

In The White Corner, the Magnolia joins some other white plants put in previously. A few years ago I started thinking about playing with some colour theory to make the garden feel a bit longer: strong colours nearer the house; paler ones further away.

So a few years ago, I declared (in my mind) the bottom right end of the garden The White Corner, & I put in some white tulips & pale daffs.

Tulips & daffs in The White Corner

I love the pale green on these tulips, & the flowers are huge.

So, normal sized daffs, fairly large tulips, large tulip-shaped magnolia flowers... yep I've just realised that my colour/distance illusion is going to be shattered cos it's not accompanied by an illusion of scale: large flowers in strong colours nearer the house; small flowers in paler colours further away. Doh!

Hellebore

Also new to The White Corner this Spring, planted underneath the Magnolia, is a white Hellebore... Well it was white when the flowers were new. I didn't realise the flowers would change colour as they aged & set seed.

White (& pink & gold) Hellebore flowers

Bonus!

Dwarf narcissus

Dwarf Narcissus in the Eye bed

The bulbs I planted late last year are going great guns & have brought much joy between the snow showers. The daffs were 1st up & have put on a beautiful show regardless of what the weather has thrown at them. Fair play.

New tulips

2 sorts of tulips went in at the same time as the dwarf daffs. The orange Shakespeares have come & gone & to be honest I was a little disappointed - their colour wasn't as punchy as I'd hoped. Hopefully the Synaedas will be more zesty when they make an appearance... & that should be an "if" cos none of the tulips currently maturing are orange... they're all purple:

The Queen Of Night tulips are starting to colour up

Wow! Looks like these Queens are going to be suitably regal. The purple edges look very much like the dupion silk of my wedding dress.

New Alliums

Last of the new bulbs are the Alliums. I've had them before but they don't seem to stick around in the beds, so this time they're all in pots so I can keep a good eye on them.

The first Allium flower head makes an appearance

The leaves are suitably & noticeably oniony, which I really like. Hopefully when the flowers explode, this tall slender pot won't get toppled.

Onions

I planted them! I found a little time a couple of weeks ago to get them in the ground:

They're alive! The shallots are sprouting! Yay!!!

I've got 2 of these module trays, plus I planted 10 out in the central Twisty Hazel bed. Most of them have started to sprout, one so vigorously it was pushing itself out of the ground... I maybe shouldn't firm down the soil in the seed tray so enthusiastically...

Salads

Hubby's done a great job of keeping an eye on the Greenhouse Gutterbeds:

Lower pipe: over-Wintered coriander & parsley.
Upper pipe: this Spring's mixed salad.

The parsley & coriander in the lowest row have struggled through the Winter - not really vigorous enough to harvest, but hanging on in there. I guess if we plant them out into the main greenhouse bed they might make for a good early crop.

I'm really good at buying seeds I never plant, so this time Hubby's stepped in & put some Spring salads in the middle gutter. A mixed leaf selection closest to us, some little gem lettuce in the middle & some flat leaf parsley at the far end. Hopefully we won't have to wait so many months to harvest these.

Weeds

& of course the early weeds are making a Spring dash too, but I did manage to get in some mid-week weeding recently. My compost bin's never hot enough to properly deal with serious weeds like dandelion & burdock, so I usually put them into my Council garden waste bin. But this time I thought I'd give Alys Fowler's soggy rotten bucket suggestion a go.

Bad-asses in the bucket

But Hubby came in this afternoon & cheerily announced:

"Whatever's in the bucket is sprouting nicely..."

The leggy buttercupy things are loving it in there. I've given them another mushing but if by next week the bucket looks more like a pond, into the Garden waste they go.

Hopefully, at some point soon, I'll get out there & sow some more seeds, & fill the gaps the weeds have left.

Can I keep on top of the weeds this year? Only time will tell.
Let battle commence!

Bargain, or weakness?

I've done it again. I've splurged unexpectedly at the supermarket. But, but, it was the perfect plant. Honest.

The rationale

• They're hellebores - an item on my fantasy plant list (I'm compiling that at the mo & will it share with you another day).
• They're white - fitting my colour scheme for shady corner, & being woodland souls shade is what they like.
• They're face up - many hellebores have droopy flower heads, but not these.
• They're 2 for £5 - a bargain, surely...?

Hellebores are in flower right now & so there was a huge display in the garden centre on Saturday. & the garden centre wanted £20 per plant.
TWENTY QUID!?!
They were big plants, I admit, but still... I'd want a tree for 20 quid.

So today, when I saw the perfect plant 2 for a fiver, it just had to be done.

Too pretty not to...

Now I just have work on being unrepentant about impulse buying.