Seeds and Stuff - May 2019

I am absolutely loving my garden this year - the garden has never been so full of bees and birds - the birds have been balancing on the Digitalis purpurea, eating all the green fly and other nasty wee beasties.   The weather has been rather strange - we had a very hot spell back in May, but since then we've had monsoon rains and it's been so cold that the heating has kicked back in again!  Flaming June?  I don't think so!

I've sown a few seeds and have had some success with the courgettes and tomatoes (which, incidentally, are being potted on later today once I've got my sorry arse over to B&Q for more compost!) and I have a few hollyhocks although most of them have been eaten by slugs and snails, little blighters.

I think - although I'm quite nervous - that I'm going to give the tamarisk one almighty chop this year - it's so bowed over that it lays on the ground so I need to try and get a stake in it to keep it more upright going forward.  I'm so thrilled with it to be honest - considering it was a twig that had fallen off Mum and Dad's tree from many years ago, it's enormous now and the trunk is really thick.   But it definitely needs some care and attention now.

The Cercis siliquastrum has been beautiful this year and is absolutely covered in leaves now.   At the beginning of the year, I lopped off the bottom branches to try and lift the crown and it's worked really well, in that other things can grow underneath it, so I've already put it in my diary for 1 January 2020 to do some more crown-lifting.   I love it when things work.

My Lewisia cotyledon has been a wonderful surprise - the flowers were stunning.   I had read that they like being planted on their side as they don't like their feet being wet and it's definitely worked - albeit in a bit of a laying-down-on-the-table-in-its-plant-pot kind of way.  I need to find a spot in the garden that I can plant it sideways - I'm thinking probably the bed down by the shed but I need to do a lot of other digging out of there.   

(I've got some big project ideas going on this year - I'm going to chop the Passiflora right back to get rid of the foliage, then lift it and move it to somewhere else in the garden, and plant my new Wisteria sinensis where the passion flower is.   I want something to cover the pergola but not in such a thuggish way!)

My patio has become a bit like a plant nursery with all the pots of seedlings - but it's been fab, I've really loved making all these plants for free.

The garden has just been glorious this year, I've been very lucky.

(This photo really makes me laugh - it's me looking very proud of my grass plants!  I sowed grass seeds into modules and it worked!   For one of my garden customers, I've been trying to rejuvenate their lawn - I've been sowing loads of grass seed there and then planting these little plug plants also to fill the patches - their lawn is looking lush!)