Thread: In the garden

A dull grey day with a wind today, it was good to get into the greenhouse. I finished planting French bean and runner bean seed in pots. I had my potting mixture fairly dry, so I left a full watering can in the greenhouse.

There is a sunny day forecast for tomorrow, when everything has warmed up I shall go in and water them. It won’t hurt being a little damp, but overnight cold and sodden would do them no good.

I often save seed, sometimes I buy a new packet but with beans I find it is easy to have a huge surplus. From these I pick all the biggest and best looking seeds, I then always plant up far more than I need and when it comes time to plant out choose the biggest and strongest plants. That seems to work year on year.

Of course I also have a surplus of young plants, the yellowish ones, the ones with a missing leaf, the stunted and misshapen, these I cull mercilessly. The Third Reich would salute my mentality, there is a time and place for everything. I know gardeners who try to save every plant, they are fools.

I still have a fair number of plants left after this, and, although not as good as the ones I plant, others seem grateful for them.

Yay someone else loves gardening! Reading your post gets me antsy to get my hands dirty again.

I know gardeners who try to save every plant, they are fools.

Ouch that hurt! I'm one of those fools. Have to save every runt, orphan, red-headed stepchild.


Do you sell, or give away? Some of my hyacinths have already started to bloom, & I think the fluctuation in temps we've been having is confusing them, but I hope to have enough to give away. They're so fragrant. Also hope to have some left for the table.

Thanks for getting me in the mood to load up my gardening bucket again, Olly.

Originally Posted by Olly Buckle

Of course I also have a surplus of young plants, the yellowish ones, the ones with a missing leaf, the stunted and misshapen, these I cull mercilessly. The Third Reich would salute my mentality

No doubt these would include such plants as
אֶשְׁכּוֹלִית eshkoleet, עַגְבָנִיּוֹת agvaneeyot and שְׁעוּעִית shu׳eet.

Just kidding, Mr Bucklestein.

It is a bright, sunny day today, almost too hot to work in the sun, and I have been digging over a piece that is in partial shade from the trees along the bottom. It is intended for the celery which is still in pots in the greenhouse.

Last night I pinched the dead heads from the yellow daffodils which are in a large clump by the old apple tree in the lawn at the top of the garden. When I moved here I rotovated everything, except the apple tree, and planted grass. I was busy with the house for the first year. The daffodils I discovered growing naturalised as a tight little clump of bulbs, crammed together and growing into one another. I have separated them and replanted twice now in the last fifteen years and they have recovered enough that they make an oval of dense yellow about six foot by four in the early spring. Now they are over I have a drift of white narcissi with pale yellow trumpets at the bottom of the garden where I planted all the odd bulbs I found.

There is a vase with a couple of dozen of these in on the kitchen table, scenting the room. On the windowsill there is a narrow brass vase with four or five heads of snake’s head fritillary. They are not usually a cut flower but I do like them in that vase and I have quite a large clump which does not suffer for losing a few. Flowers are starting to appear all over the place now.

Looking down the garden the magnolia stellata is in full bloom under the Prunus autumnalis, that stays in bloom in this garden from December until the end of February despite its name. Very pretty with its dark twigs and boughs lined with little pink flowers, but, like the daffodils, finished now.

At the top end of the garden the chaenomeles is glorious with scarlet flowers, growing against the wall of the top shed. Next to it the thing I call Mongolian dogwood and the missus refers to as Jew’s mallow is covered in yellow pom-poms. Between the stones of the patio the Veronica has turned into a mound of vivid blue, and there is the first flower on one of the strawberries that I plant in big tomato pots to keep near the back door.

It’s all happening again out there.

Originally Posted by CFFTB

Yay someone else loves gardening! Reading your post gets me antsy to get my hands dirty again.


Ouch that hurt! I'm one of those fools. Have to save every runt, orphan, red-headed stepchild.


Do you sell, or give away? Some of my hyacinths have already started to bloom, & I think the fluctuation in temps we've been having is confusing them, but I hope to have enough to give away. They're so fragrant. Also hope to have some left for the table.

Thanks for getting me in the mood to load up my gardening bucket again, Olly.

I give them away, I put a little folding table out the front on the verge with a notice saying 'free plants', people still leave a few coins sometimes though. The missus hates it because cars keep stopping at the weekend and she keeps thinking we have visitors.

Hyacinths are pretty early, they are already there in my garden. I have never bothered to grow them 'properly' but every so often some one gives us one in a pot and when they have finished I put them in among the crocus. They take two or three years to recover, but as you say they smell great.

Have you ever considered how much seed most plants produce, a runner bean hundreds, a cabbage thousands, heaven knows how many acorns come from an oak tree in its lifetime. Only one is reqired to survive to replace the parent, why not have the best one?

The back of our house faces south and the back door originally led into a tiny kitchen. We built a new kitchen on the side and the old one has become the back hall. The new part extends a couple of feet further than the original, and across the corner, to the left of the back door, created by this is a trellis, with a jasmine growing up it that extends on over the back door, filling the upstairs with its scent in summer. Between the jasmine and the back door is a rosemary bush which started flowering during the winter and is still going, on warm days the bumble bees are on it until the very last of the light. Most of the area around the door is paved, but on the right is a small area of earth with a sage plant and mint, this stops the mint spreading all over the garden. The path runs to the right past the new extension and there is a narrow bed under the kitchen window, the jasmine and rosemary are in one end of it, but further along there are thyme parsley and oregano growing, as well as pinks and various bulbs, an ornamental sage against the wall one end and a passion flower the other. The path is fairly wide and I place the strawberries I have in pots on the path, along the edge of the border, in early summer.

Ah, that is sweet! Our daffodils are just now coming up. Our decorative plum bloomed and something with yellow flowers with four petals too. You make me want to get out and mess around my property too. And I love green beans.

^Must be forsythias. Spring has definitely sprung, although we had a cold snap & I hope it hasn't stunted anything. The hyacinths seem too have slowed to a crawl. Strawberries? I'm jealous. Have you tried tomatoes? Overripes will drop seeds that will spring up the following year, but they can get out of hand.

^^Yes, Forsythia! You are awesome.

Have you tried tomatoes? Overripes will drop seeds that will spring up the following year, but they can get out of hand.

I tend to use bought seed from known varieties, but a friend saves the best tomato from the best plant until it is very ripe, then treads on it in the bed inside the greenhouse door, he pricks out his new years crop from there next spring.

Originally Posted by Eluixa

Ah, that is sweet! Our daffodils are just now coming up. Our decorative plum bloomed and something with yellow flowers with four petals too. You make me want to get out and mess around my property too. And I love green beans.

You are a fair bit behind us, my daffodils are gone and the forsythia has finished, and that is in the small bit at the front of the house that is North facing and in shadow a lot of the day.

Originally Posted by CFFTB

Have you tried tomatoes? Overripes will drop seeds that will spring up the following year, but they can get out of hand.

Originally Posted by Olly Buckle

I tend to use bought seed from known varieties, but a friend saves the best tomato from the best plant until it is very ripe, then treads on it in the bed inside the greenhouse door, he pricks out his new years crop from there next spring.

I don't know about the Nthn Hemisphere, but here, tomatoes being easily the most promiscuous of all plants, we encourage our bees to mess with cross-pollination and as a result keep coming up with new varieties. One that we chanced upon a few years back was insect-resistant, sweet and of a good size, whereas, normally, sweet tomatoes are tiny, and big ones attract fruit fly.

Old joke:

"We put cow manure on our strawberries."

"Really? Have you tried clotted cream? It's delicious."

I started a bad jokes thread elsewhere, thank you. He said primly.

I have been digging, it is something I try to avoid, and with forethought one should be able to avoid it. I am somewhat annoyed with myself, I have discussions with other gardeners about the sort of customers who call us up on the first summery, sunny days requiring our services, when we arrive the garden is overgrown with weeds and they say something like, “I was thinking of growing some vegetables this year”.

If I had known I would have come last Autumn and covered the ground with weighted down old plastic bags, then I could have turned up now and lifted them to reveal the odd twisted dock or dandelion that had enough root to survive, the ground would be soft and damp under the rotted grass and I would lift them easily with a fork.

As it is the customer and I are looking at a piece of overgrown meadow, the plants have sucked the moisture from the ground and it is rock hard. I usually suggest a sheet of builder’s plastic with grow-bags on it for the first year or “I will never get it dug over in time to plant.”. That is a bit of a white lie, take it steady and you can get through a lot of ground in a day, but what is a pleasant job on a cool, damp autumn day becomes murderous in hot sun and I can think of better ways of using my life.
Gardening is like life, the less prepared you are the more work you do in the long run.

Digging is not good general practice in my gardening book. Digging breaks up the structure of the soil, it cuts worms in half takes their homes away; it creates an artificial environment for the plants. It is a practice for occasional emergencies and to expedite some things that would take years. When ground has become infested with docks or is very compacted it can take a couple of years to recover it by other means, for example.

So why have I been digging, well, my brother in law gave me a tray of celery seedlings, and they prefer the damp, partially shaded conditions that are found at the bottom of the garden in a part I have not brought into use yet, so I have dug over a small square (They do better in a grid than a square) and have then dug in a couple of barrow loads of compost, they should do well there, but I will be weeding out seedlings all summer that would not have been there if I had been prepared and mulched.

Originally Posted by Olly Buckle

Digging is not good general practice in my gardening book.

So how do you aerate the soil? Stretch out in a prone position and use a pea-shooter to fire oxygen-charged bb's into the ground?