April 2022

This has been a fairly busy month in the garden, with good weather to boot. The shed needed a good clear out, so after a grubby afternoon it is now relatively tidy and organised. The potting bench created there last month has been well used for potting up cuttings of tarragon (taken from a reduced price pack of herbs in the supermarket), repotting many houseplants, and repotting sempervivums into small terracotta pots. I think that these will be much happier now they are in a very well drained compost in smaller pots; I half-filled the pots with grit before adding the compost which had been mixed roughly 50:50 with sharp sand. The pots were then topped with grit. Other plants to be repotted include Cercis seedlings, strawberry runners from a friends garden, Pineapple lily, Japanese Anemone, perennial hardy Geranium, perennial half-hardy Geranium, and a random bronze grass seedling I found.

Outside the shed I have cut the grass twice as it is growing well. I may well do 'No Mow May' though to encourage wildflower growth. I have weeded the area around the Hydrangea and blackberry bushes, and planted the Sarcococca 'Little Gem' nearby, then mulched it. This should then flower early next year and provide much needed winter scent. The old vegetable beds have been weeded, straw put around the strawberry plants, and a potted champagne rhubard planted out. The grass between the beds was trimmed but has grown back up again! 

The curved border has been weeded and old stems cut down. Fuchsias have been pruned too. The Euphorbia that usually comes up has not reappeared unfortunately. I have weeded and tidied the border under the bathroom window and planted three evening primrose plants I had lying around.

The garden is looking really lush and green right now, with the majority of plants throwing out new shoots and growing well. The foxglove plants have thrown up flower spikes, and these are getting taller by the day - they will look fabulous in a few weeks when in full bloom. The Gingko is breaking into leaf, as are the roses, Fuchsias, and Cercis. There is plenty of wildlife too, with the compost bin brimming with woodlice, as well as slugs and snails and at least two slow worms. So exciting to see them! There are blackbirds, robins, blue tits, sparrows and pigeons too, as well as the flipping cats. I have seen wolf spiders and zebra spiders, bumblebees, honey bees, other bees, butterflies, red ants and brown ants, and aphids. 

Plants in flower include:

Berberis darwinii, Bergenia, Bluebells, Celandine, Cowslip, Dandelions, Euphorbia, Forget-me-not, Hairy bittercress, green Hellebore, Honesty, Lamium galeobdolon, Lungwort, Primroses, Rosemary, bugle, violets, daisies, English marigold, annual Geranium, red deadnettle, scarlet pimpernel, three-cornered leek, yellow-flowered Sedum, strawberry, Aquilegia.

March 2022

After what has felt like a long winter, the lighter evenings and slightly better weather of March allowed me to get back outside and start doing some jobs.  There was no reason not to get out there earlier, but there wasn't actually much that needed doing!

I have begun weeding the side borders, mostly removing hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) and annual geraniums. The climbing rose has been pruned back hard, as has the mallow although this was mostly dead stems. New stems are now sprouting up. The dead stems of fennel flowers have been removed too and composted. When I pruned the Spiraea I discovered some branches had rooted where they touched the soil, so these have been removed and potted up, to plant elsewhere or give away. I continue to dig out self seeded brambles wherever I see them, as they are a little irritating! I do have a large, thornless blackberry though which is now trained in great loops against the fence. Next to this is a Japanese Wineberry; there is only one stem on it at the moment, but it is very long, so I have trained it up and around a bamboo tripod and hope to get some fruit this year, with more stems for next year.

Other jobs included cutting back Verbena bonariensis, and taking cuttings from the prunings, cutting back the oregano, gritting around Iris germanica to try and dissuade the slugs from eating them (not a hope!), sowing seeds of sunflower and nasturtium, and moving my pots of cuttings and seedlings to the bottom of the garden where they currently reside on a four tier greenhouse frame by the shed. I might have popped to a garden centre and bought a couple more Irises too! Oops.

I have decided to make the lean-to by the house less of a workshop, so to this end I removed a couple of shelves in the shed and now have a potting bench there. I think that this will work better as all the pots, compost and grit will be in one place.

Quite a lot of wildlife is around, and I have seen a queen wasp in the shed (removed), a few bumblebees, bee flies, brown ants, slugs, hundreds of woodlice in the compost bin and wolf spiders on sunny days. The temperature got very warm for a week, then plummeted back down and snow flakes were seen briefly. There are birds of course; blackbirds, sparrows, starlings, herring gulls in the skies above, and pigeons (one of whom appears to have had a scrap with the neighbours cat - feathers everywhere). 

There have been a lot of flowers! I am quite impressed for this early in the year. The flowers are:

Dandelions, English Marigolds, Primroses wild and cultivated, Hairy Bittercress, Berberis darwinii, Cowslip, Sarcococca 'Little Gem', purple Crocus, Lungwort (Pulmonaria), green Helleborus, Rosemary, lesser Celandine, Scabious, Forget-me-nots, Bergenia 'Rotblum', Euphorbia purpurea, Bluebells, Lamium galeobdelon, Selfheal, and Honesty (Lunaria annua).