My Patch – A Garden update: June 2019

June 3rd – The borage has started to form buds 🙂 

I wanted to plant some plants in the garden this evening but first I had to make the decision to pull up the Forget-me-not!  It was taking up a huge amount of space and the majority of flowers had gone over.  I am sure it spilled lots of seeds so I’m sure I will have lots more next year.  

I managed to plant out 18 common fleabane, 6 lady’s bedstraw, 6 red campion, 10 oxeye daisy and into a pot, 4 marigolds. 

June 4th – The cat has decided to use one of the garden pots as a toilet! I have discovered that last year the scarlet pimpernel had self-seeded and is growing again this year 🙂 I planted out another 2 teasel, 2 perennial flax and 3 birds-foot-trefoil, put 8 field marigold and 3 borage in pots and tidied up the tomato area!

June 5th – planted out some of the herbs; mint, thyme and marjoram in a trough container and also potted on the cucumber.   Its the first cucumber I have tried to grow so we will see how it goes! 

June 6th – Planted out 5 cornflowers, 1 marigold, 1 common fleabane, 1 red campion, 6 oxeye daisies, 1 rudbeckia, 2 love-in-a-mist, 4 birds-foot-trefoil, 1 teasel and 2 perennial flax! I moved a sow thistle to the field. One of the poppies has started to flower 🙂

June 7th – I noticed today that the hazel has started to develop this years fruit

June 10th – It has been raining heavily all day.  What I had forgotten is some of the trays on the racking don’t have holes in the bottom.  I had put the plants out to get acclimatised and… well…. bless them they went for a swim today!  I had to go out in my waterproofs and rescue them.  Thankfully there were not too many but I had to find any empty pots or trays I could to put them in, they have been moved to the glasshouse to dry out!

June 11th – I put out the stakes for the sunflowers I would have done it sooner but it has been raining on and off for nearly a week.  I have had to put the tomatoes back in the greenhouse as they are too wet and looking a little unwell.  There are however 5 baby tomatoes starting to appear.

June 14th – I thought it best to start to feed the tomatoes seeing more fruit is appearing.

June 17th – The red campion in the pot has started to go to seed, the lavender and scarlet pimpernel are starting to flower and the cornflowers and roses are starting to show their first buds 🙂 

I had to remove a few nettles that had crept into the garden to put in the sunflowers.  I checked them over before removing them and put them over the fence in the field so any creatures I may not have spotted could safely escape.  I planted out 7 sunflowers, 6 rudbeckia, 6 field marigold, 2 bird’s-foot-trefoil, 2 love-in-a-mist, 6 oxeye daisy, 6 red campion, 1 lady’s bedstraw and 4 borage in a pot!

June 18th – Tonight I only managed to plant 6 rudbeckia and 4 marigold’s in pots.

June 19th – The cat has trashed the rudbeckia!  I have dug them back out but I don’t know if they will survive.

The Penstemon I bought earlier in the year has started to come into bud, the cornflower and marigold have started to flower and I found a black medick in the raised bed. I like it when wildflowers start to fill the bed without me having to plant them.  

I decided the best way to try and deter the cat was to put some hawthorn in the pot!  I just hope it makes him think twice!

I planted into pots, 4 borage and 10 zinnia.  I staked the tomatoes and tidied the left side of the garden as it was just untidy; it was starting to annoy me.

June 20th – The borage has started to flower 

I planted out 6 cornflowers, 6 lady’s bedstraw, 6 common fleabane, 6 red campion, 4 love-in-a-mist, 2 perennial flax, 3 oxeye daisy and 9 bird’s-foot-trefoil.

June 23rd – The cat has pooed in the pots AGAIN, but not just one pot THREE!!! he’s now killed three of my zinnia!  I’ve stupidly planted more as I guess he will probably dig them up again 🙁 

June 24th – deadheaded roses and removed some of the weeds from the front garden. It looks better than it did – honest! – it still needs more work.

June 26th – I planted the buddleja into the front garden.  I had to dig though the gravel and cut the weed suppressing membrane and then dig a hole to put it in! hopefully it will be happy there and won’t mind too much that it is surrounded by gravel. 

The love-in-a-mist, marigolds, sunflower, and poppy are all flowering, or starting to.

June 27th – The jasmine has been producing lots of growth so today it needed to be supported.  I couldn’t tie it up so some canes have been weaved into the top of the metal support to make it a little wider so it is all held up (I forgot to take a photo!)

June 30th – the sweet pea has started to flower 🙂

30 Days Wild 2019 – Day 03

If you have been reading my garden blog posts you will be aware I have been growing wild flowers from seed to plant in the garden and also the field.  Tonight I spent an hour planting out as many as I could into the garden. They really needed to be planted out before now but I’m new to all this and still learning; though I have a feeling they will all be okay 🙂 I keep forgetting that we are only at the start of June and at this time last year I was only just sprinkling seeds in the beds hoping they would germinate, so feel I have made more progress this year. 

The flower bed I have been planting isn’t very big but even if you only have a few pots on the patio, adding wildflowers to the garden is a great way to give additional support to our pollinators. They will also look amazing too 🙂

Tonight I have planted out red campion, oxeye daisy, common fleabane and lady’s bedstraw.

Rewilding the field!

Okay so the title of this blog is probably a tiny bit misleading… well… at the moment anyway!  As you know I spend a lot of time inspecting what is in the field and the garden next to the field.  I love the view through the garden gate into the ‘secret garden’ of the field beyond.  

As my knowledge has increased I have noticed this year how ecologically barren the field really is.  Yes the field margins look lush and green, but if you look closely there is very little diversity in the plant life.  So I have taken it upon myself to ‘rewild’ it a little.

Now the farmer that rents the field sprays it with what we assume are insecticides and herbicides, from what we can tell he uses direct spraying so hopefully it won’t destroy all of what I am trying to create.  I should add that the owner of the field has given me permission to work on a patch of the field to see how it goes.  The patch I have decided to use is just outside the garden fence.  There are a few of reasons for this A) easy access B) the farmer can’t cut it down before they harvest the crop as the combine can’t cut that close to the corner! and C) it is full of common nettles and cleavers. 

To start work I had to clear a path through the nettles and cleavers to be able to actually get out into the field.

I then began to clear the cleavers doing my best to leave as many nettles and cow parsley as I could; I did discover that although I thought there were lots of nettles, there wasn’t, it really was all cleavers.

Pulling the cleavers up revealed no life underneath them at all, it was just soil.  I did feel bad pulling up the greenery as it looked horrendous leaving bare soil; however I know, if all goes to plan, the results will be better for our pollinators than leaving it as it is. 

A few weeks ago I moved a prickly sow-thistle from the garden and put it out in the field.  I was pleased to see it survived its move and was even in flower, I was more pleased when a bee came along and had a look at it.  It dawned on me that the only obvious flowers in the field were the cow parsley.  I am hoping that as summer progresses I will see more of a variety appear but I don’t hold out a lot of hope. 

I thought I was going to clear a ‘good patch’ of field margin but when it came to it I cleared a little patch!  Partly this decision was down to the fact that everything I was pulling up had to fit in the garden waste bin!  It was already partly full and what I had removed would have filled it three fold!

However the little patch was enough for me to make a start, I planted out some teasels and cornflowers to see how they fared.  I decided five of each would do, as if they didn’t take to their new home I didn’t want to kill lots in one go! 

When I checked on them the next day they looked quite happy 🙂  I do plan on watching the field more closely this year to see what plants naturally occur, then maybe next year I can boost their numbers by growing more from seed!  I may need a bigger greenhouse!

In the next week or so I will be planting out more teasels, cornflowers, oxeye daisy, common fleabane and red campion and maybe even clearing some more space!     

My Patch – A Garden update: April 2019

This month I have concentrated on trying to get the garden into a tidier/cleaner state for the planting out of the flowers when they are ready.  It has meant a lot of work so other aspects have suffered a little! 

April 1st – the basil has started to grow 🙂

April 2nd – as it is meant to be frosty for the next few nights I thought I would leave my cowslips and garlic mustard outside to ‘chill’.  They are meant to have a period of cold to start germination so I thought it can’t do them any harm as they don’t seem to be doing anything anyway! I tidied a little more of the glasshouse and found another five terracotta pots I will be able to use.  They will all need a bit of a clean, I just need to work out if I have any shorter plants which I can put in them; probably birdsfoot trefoil and sweet williams.

April 8th – tonight I potted on some of the sweet pea, sunflowers and borage.  I know I should have probably potted on the sweet peas earlier but I wasn’t sure where to pot them on too!  I knew I needed a deeper pot, I still have more that need rescuing from their small trays.  

Last year I removed a purple/red coloured steamed plant from the raised bed as it was in the way of the bird feeder!  I put it in a pot as no one knew what it was – thanks to @porridgebrain on Twitter who posted an image of her peonies I discovered what it was! It is still alive! I have removed all of ‘weeds’ from its pot and moved it to a sunnier spot – I plan to put it back into the raised bed but in a more suitable location.  

April 9th – This evening I decided I needed to take some images of the garden before I started to tidy/clean.  It does look a bit of a mess and its starting to make me stressed!  I know gardening isn’t meant to create stress it is meant to reduce it, but when there is so much to do it gets a bit much.  

I also potted on more of the borage and removed the ‘weeds’ from all the pots in the left garden.  The mint looks much better now I can actually see it is growing; I think it will need to be re potted this year.

April 10th – I finished potting on all of the borage today; I think I should have potted them on when they were a little smaller.  I have 73 plants in total.  I was going to sow some more though I think that will probably be more than enough for this year! 

April 11th – my common fleabane has started to sprout 🙂

I have only just thought about taking photos of my seedlings so I know what they look like in future years – I hope the flowers will seed themselves in the garden so next year I need to know what they look like so I know what is growing!

April 12th – So today I jet washed the left side of the garden’s patio; it only took 10 hours!!

April 15th – the mint has started to grow 😊  I have sown more rudbeckia as for some reason it hasn’t germinated.  

April 16th – sowed red campion, tall marigolds (I collected seed form the garden last year so I don’t know exactly what they are!) and perennial flax seed which I also collected from the garden.  

April 18th – painted the left fence, ‘weeded’ the raised bed and one of the love-in-the-mist has sprouted.

April 19th – was also a busy day, I moved the garlic mustard from growning in the right hand patio to the raised bed in the hope that it will survive, jet washed the patio, looked at repairing the garage guttering so a water butt can be fitted; we had to remove one of the branches from the hazel tree as it had caused the guttering to break.  I also potted on 62 cornflowers, potted on the rest of the sweet peas and put up a bee hotel 🙂

April 20th – I concreted 90% of the right hand patio – it took all day!

April 24th – Potted on 37 cornflowers and  33 teasel, the marigolds, red campion and the new batch of cornflowers and rudbeckia have sprouted.  I wasn’t expecting the perennial flax to germinate but it is doing quite well.

April 25th – Potted on 36 teasel and 21 sunflowers.

April 26th – Tonight I tweeted a photo of a tiny daffodil looking flower that is located in one of the window boxes.  @Mark_Couper replied to let me know they are daffodils; a variety called ‘new baby’. At least now I know what to do with them when they are relocated out of the window box, as at the moment they are surrounded by ‘weeds’ and very little compost!  

April 27th – today I visited a nursery sale with my Mum.  We went last year; this year I was going with a list of what I wanted to buy.  I managed to find only one plant on my list echinacea, I did also buy martin’s spurge as I thought it would look nice against the green of the fence and also add some foliage in the winter as I believe it is evergreen.   

April 29th – tonight I concreted where my potted plants are going to go so I will be able to start moving them about later in the week.  It will be nice to know some are planted up and are ready to just grow!  I have a few large pots that I assume had shrubs delivered in them, the pots have been kept for years so I have started to utilise them.  They aren’t the most attractive; black with handles on the them but I intend to hide them behind the more ‘attractive’ pots!  Tonight I put some borage in one of them.  I have probably made a mistake when putting 3 plants in one pot as I have read they can grow rather large, I think it might just be trial and error this year!  I also thought I probably needed to plant out the Martin’s spurge as their roots were coming out of the bottom of the pots.  I know they will expand and fill the pot; maybe when they do they can be separated into two pots.  By potting the plants out it meant I had some more small pots I could then use for potting on the remaining sunflowers 🙂 

Also throughout this month… the strawberries, field forget-me-not, garlic mustard, red campion, lilac and choisya ternata have all started to flower 🙂 

So far this year; total number of plants grown from seed and potted on…
99 cornflowers
73 borage
27 sunflowers
69 teasel