I've just been virtuous and spent some of this evening removing several types of weed from a section of the garden. This includes one sow-thistle that was at least 6 inches taller than me (OK, I'm 5 foot 3, but still...).
In the process I have cleared round the clumps of Macedonian Scabious that were planted last year and are now flowering near my head height, and discovered that we have a single surviving cream/yellow snapdragon growing under all the random wild geranium. The weeds have all gone to the council brown bin, which is full to the top. Hopefully it'll sink a bit before tomorrow evening so I can create some more clear ground to put this year's seedlings into
I noticed a few buds on the runner beans this morning.
I suppose we still have to go through the stage of the first flowers being broken into by nectar thieving insects before the pollinators find them. All those fallen flowers and empty stems are so frustrating!
I have a place on my patio where I could not seem to get anything to grow. I put a pot of pebbles there and filled it with fake succulents. I thought they looked very real. I am right I just caught the gardener watering them. He said he has done so twice.
I love freshly picked runner & other climbing beans, and have always grown them (even winning prizes in my younger days), but I have struggled to grow them ever since we moved here.
Every year, just as I am looking out for the first little beans to appear, we get strong south-westerly winds blowing up the channel, shrivelling the leaves, untwining the stems from round the poles and blowing away the flowers.
I have moved all the containers to the opposite side of the garden in the hope of giving them protection from the SW, but yesterday evening, all last night and this morning they have been battered by a north-westerly, which has shrivelled the leaves, breaking many of them at the axils. and loosening (so far) the stems.
I am feeling very despondent.
I tell myself I should garden With not Against, and adapt to the conditions. But I pine for a healthy climbing rose - such as I can see in nearby gardens - but I don't have anywhere with the soil and the aspect.
I tell myself I should garden With not Against, and adapt to the conditions. But I pine for a healthy climbing rose - such as I can see in nearby gardens - but I don't have anywhere with the soil and the aspect.
We have great success with roses (my favourite is la reine Victoria, grown as a low climber) but utterly fail to grow aquilegias, a personal favourite, which if I remember correctly you consider to be weeds. 😂
I tell myself I should garden With not Against, and adapt to the conditions. But I pine for a healthy climbing rose - such as I can see in nearby gardens - but I don't have anywhere with the soil and the aspect.
We have great success with roses (my favourite is la reine Victoria, grown as a low climber) but utterly fail to grow aquilegias, a personal favourite, which if I remember correctly you consider to be weeds. 😂
Weedish. I'm happy to have them flower, but if I didn't cull them thoroughly (knowing they'll be Back) they would engulf the entire garden.
Colours of aquilegia? Don’t know about others but I ve got white , cream, pale pink, bolder pink, pale blue, pale lilac, darker lilac, positively purple, a pale pink and almost red, and some pale lilac and darker purple.
But annoyingly I cannot count on the seeds coming true the following year.
I too get the range from white through pink to blue and purple, sometimes even variegated. This year there was a clump in a deep pink, which I hadn't seen before.
Out to the garden centre, looking for plants for the rockery. Got a couple, but also fell for a yellow foxglove and a particularly lovely golden heuchera.
The vast majority of my aquilegia are a really dark purple-blue. That version tend to be considered weeds a lot of the time, as they have spread everywhere! I have a couple of plants in pale pink, which I'm hoping will reappear next year, as they looked good.
Finally planted out several things this morning, much more space having been cleared by @Sandemaniac yesterday. So that's zinnias, cosmos, French marigolds and amaranth finally in the ground. I was going to plant the sunflowers out this afternoon, but it's started to rain, so they can wait a bit longer.
I'm probably not the best person to ask... I grew some last year for the first time! Last year's seedlings managed nicely at the foot of the garden up by the panel fence. North-facing site with sun in the morning, and they flowered in late summer.
Since they coped OK with that semi-shady spot I put this year's ones in on the north side of the low wall between our front garden and the road, in a bed next to the council-mowed grass verge. I'm hoping for something nice and bright, since right now all I've got flowering there is a pinkish snapdragon and some purple alliums.
Most of the time, once I've planted flower seedlings in the ground, watered them in, and possibly scattered some slug pellets (not metaldehyde), I just leave them to survive (or not) by themselves!
Rose of Sharon, have you tried dwarf French beans? If it is wind that is causing the problems, they might be easier to protect. They are productive over a much shorter time than runner beans, but can be successionally sown.
@Ethne Alba. One of my favorites because they last so long as cut flowers. They do like sun, and dead head for more blooms. If you want bigger flowers remove smaller side blooms and dead head bigger main bloom back to next set of leaves.
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I grew zinnias from seed last year and they did very well without all that much input from me except watering. I grew them underneath my bean frame. They kept flowering right up to the end of the autumn.
My courgettes have been enjoying the heat wave. That round one needs picking because it's going to look like a football soon.
Mine are triffids, in the greenhouse in pots. They have also had tomato feed, and we ate the first of what will be many fruits yesterday. I can see that at some point I will have an organ of baking cocoa and courgette muffins. What a shame.
Rose of Sharon, have you tried dwarf French beans?
I tried growing dwarf French beans in the past, but I have a couple of major problems with them - originally slugs & snails, which is what set me on to the climbing ones many years ago, and nowadays, a bad back - I can't bend to pick them.
The only veg I can grow at ground level are the kind that I can grab hold of and 'harvest' with the swift slice of a sharp knife. Anything that requires me to spend time fossicking among low growing leaves for edible bits get abandoned to the molluscs after a few attempts.
I have a couple of very small tomatoes forming and flowers on the cucumber so I'm feeling pleased. Also the end of the garden that was a wilderness when we moved it is now beginning to flower. It's a mixture of perennials and grasses.
We have the purple aquilegia, that came up from London in our pots and is now appearing in various other places. It would be nice to get some in different colours.
We have 2 herb beds, and much of them is about to flower. This is brilliant, as bees positively adore herbs, so soon we will have that dozy summer sound of many bees. Also butterflies, which have been scarce up to now.
Runner beans are obliterated by the winds here, but I am rather wondering about French beans. In pots . On a Table.
(Another one either unable to bend or wont to end up sprawled in the veg plot.)
I've grown runners for a few years now and their usual spot gets the sun but catches the wind when it blows strongly, funnelled between the houses. I used to grow in a row parallel with the prevailing wind and it sometimes blew flat but last year I put up a wigwam to reduce wind resistance and had no trouble.
I have no trouble keeping the poles upright and secure, but the beans themselves suffer dreadfully in the wind. At the moment the leaves look like old rags hanging from the poles. Happily the one cluster of flower buds that had formed do not seem to have suffered (they are quite low, so didn't get the full force of the wind). Of course, whether or not the first flowers will actually form beans is always questionable.
What with my back, the wind, the snails and the foxes, it's a wonder I get anything to harvest!
We have a beautiful old flowering dogwood tree that must be about sixty years old, but seemed to be dying a year ago. We wanted another, so planted a new one a few yards away. This year they are both flourishing, and we are wondering if they are somehow nourishing each other. They are a lovely sight together.
I have read that trees share water and nutrients through I believe their root stystem.They send distress signals about drought and disease and they change their behavior to help each other. I love thinking that.
@Graven Image on that subject, you may enjoy this book on all the ways plants sense and communicate with the environment and each other. I read it recently and found it fascinating.
@la vie en rouge Thanks for the suggestion, I just ordered it as I am sure I will truly enjoy reading it. I use to talk to an old oak that survived a forrest fire near our house. I would tell it that I was sorry that it had burned, and happy it was recovering. Well that is when nobody else was around to think I was nuts talking to a tree.
Small progress in the garden, one courgette plant has a female flower (the first, and currently only, one this year). Not being prepared to leave nature to take its course, I picked a male flower from a slightly distant plant and introduced them to each other.
Phase 1 of what seems unlikely to be a courgette glut this year.
Runner beans flowering nicely, but still no sign of baby beans.
Lettuces looking good, it's a good job Mr RoS enjoys salad.
Tomatoes are setting well, but I need to get more lettuce seedlings planted out if we're to have lettuce and tomatoes at the same time. I doubt the cucumbers will catch up before the summer ends.
I planted a small raised bed with Swiss chard at the w/e, and it has perked up nicely.
Leek seedlings still looking very weedy. Due for planting, at ground level, in a couple of weeks, and my back will not like that. Also Florence fennel, now overdue for sowing.
I hope the results from both will justify the pain.
I used to have a favourite tree I put my arm round, and chatted to. Good company. Our fruit are doing OK, a lot of blackberries coming, rasps not bad, various currants ditto. Tiny grapes on the vine. Its the thornless blackberries that are looking good, dunno why, huge shoots, covered in fruit.
After having been told off by the person who planted up the end of our garden for not watering enough I've been our there every day trying to make sure our new planting scheme survives. I think most of it will be OK, but if we end up with a hosepipe ban I'm not sure what will happen.
In other news our neighbour, who is also a landscape gardener, is coming to sort out our too much decking problem on Wednesday. Hopefully we will eventually end up with some raised beds that we can use to make a kitchen garden.
Even with kind neighbours giving me access to their hosepipe so's I could fill water butt, buckets etc, it's going to be a struggle to keep everything going. No rain forecast until the 23rd - which is when we go on a brief (and nearby) holiday natch.
My Sunflowers are 8 feet tall. So tall in fact I can hardly see them, as they have all turned toward the son with their backs to me. I hope my neighbor on the other side of the fence is enjoying them.
they have all turned toward the son with their backs to me.
I hope your neighbours are enjoying them too.
[tangent]Your typo put me in mind of a couple of memories that made me smile, from my conservative evangelical days. For a while I had an Earnest Evangelical Boyfriend (EEB) with whom my Eldest Brother (EB) once had the following conversation:
EB: So, what star sign were you born under?
EEB: I was born under the sun.
EB: Oh - Leo?
EEB: No. The Son of God.
That then put me in mind of an amusing talk I heard, back in the day, by one Jeff Lucas (anyone remember him?) who was illustrating how he would, as an earnest evangelical, use any conversation to introduce the Gospel. Eg: "Would you like a sandwich, Jeff?" "No thank you, for I have the Bread of Life."
Comments
In the process I have cleared round the clumps of Macedonian Scabious that were planted last year and are now flowering near my head height, and discovered that we have a single surviving cream/yellow snapdragon growing under all the random wild geranium. The weeds have all gone to the council brown bin, which is full to the top. Hopefully it'll sink a bit before tomorrow evening so I can create some more clear ground to put this year's seedlings into
What I need now is stuff to plant now which will fill the gaps into late summer/autumn.
I suppose we still have to go through the stage of the first flowers being broken into by nectar thieving insects before the pollinators find them. All those fallen flowers and empty stems are so frustrating!
Every year, just as I am looking out for the first little beans to appear, we get strong south-westerly winds blowing up the channel, shrivelling the leaves, untwining the stems from round the poles and blowing away the flowers.
I have moved all the containers to the opposite side of the garden in the hope of giving them protection from the SW, but yesterday evening, all last night and this morning they have been battered by a north-westerly, which has shrivelled the leaves, breaking many of them at the axils. and loosening (so far) the stems.
I am feeling very despondent.
I tell myself I should garden With not Against, and adapt to the conditions. But I pine for a healthy climbing rose - such as I can see in nearby gardens - but I don't have anywhere with the soil and the aspect.
Weedish. I'm happy to have them flower, but if I didn't cull them thoroughly (knowing they'll be Back) they would engulf the entire garden.
But annoyingly I cannot count on the seeds coming true the following year.
Even worse
Some varieties Just Vanish completely!
Out to the garden centre, looking for plants for the rockery. Got a couple, but also fell for a yellow foxglove and a particularly lovely golden heuchera.
Finally planted out several things this morning, much more space having been cleared by @Sandemaniac yesterday. So that's zinnias, cosmos, French marigolds and amaranth finally in the ground. I was going to plant the sunflowers out this afternoon, but it's started to rain, so they can wait a bit longer.
I ve been given two plants by a neighbour and am keen to keep them alive!
Since they coped OK with that semi-shady spot I put this year's ones in on the north side of the low wall between our front garden and the road, in a bed next to the council-mowed grass verge. I'm hoping for something nice and bright, since right now all I've got flowering there is a pinkish snapdragon and some purple alliums.
Most of the time, once I've planted flower seedlings in the ground, watered them in, and possibly scattered some slug pellets (not metaldehyde), I just leave them to survive (or not) by themselves!
[/list]
My courgettes have been enjoying the heat wave. That round one needs picking because it's going to look like a football soon.
The only veg I can grow at ground level are the kind that I can grab hold of and 'harvest' with the swift slice of a sharp knife. Anything that requires me to spend time fossicking among low growing leaves for edible bits get abandoned to the molluscs after a few attempts.
We have the purple aquilegia, that came up from London in our pots and is now appearing in various other places. It would be nice to get some in different colours.
Runner beans are obliterated by the winds here, but I am rather wondering about French beans. In pots . On a Table.
(Another one either unable to bend or wont to end up sprawled in the veg plot.)
The only requirement for truly huge courgettes/zucchini is to have several small children who loathe and despise them. That guarantees a bumper crop.
I've grown runners for a few years now and their usual spot gets the sun but catches the wind when it blows strongly, funnelled between the houses. I used to grow in a row parallel with the prevailing wind and it sometimes blew flat but last year I put up a wigwam to reduce wind resistance and had no trouble.
What with my back, the wind, the snails and the foxes, it's a wonder I get anything to harvest!
Phase 1 of what seems unlikely to be a courgette glut this year.
Runner beans flowering nicely, but still no sign of baby beans.
Lettuces looking good, it's a good job Mr RoS enjoys salad.
Tomatoes are setting well, but I need to get more lettuce seedlings planted out if we're to have lettuce and tomatoes at the same time. I doubt the cucumbers will catch up before the summer ends.
I planted a small raised bed with Swiss chard at the w/e, and it has perked up nicely.
Leek seedlings still looking very weedy. Due for planting, at ground level, in a couple of weeks, and my back will not like that. Also Florence fennel, now overdue for sowing.
I hope the results from both will justify the pain.
Hopefully, now one pollinator has found the plants more will follow.
(Mr Alba not always being amenable to or available for watering tasks)
So we ve lost some veg: beetroot/ chard/green lettuce.
But others are coping : red lettuce/ kale/ leeks.
In other news our neighbour, who is also a landscape gardener, is coming to sort out our too much decking problem on Wednesday. Hopefully we will eventually end up with some raised beds that we can use to make a kitchen garden.
Not bad for a last June germination!
I hope your neighbours are enjoying them too.
[tangent]Your typo put me in mind of a couple of memories that made me smile, from my conservative evangelical days. For a while I had an Earnest Evangelical Boyfriend (EEB) with whom my Eldest Brother (EB) once had the following conversation:
EB: So, what star sign were you born under?
EEB: I was born under the sun.
EB: Oh - Leo?
EEB: No. The Son of God.
That then put me in mind of an amusing talk I heard, back in the day, by one Jeff Lucas (anyone remember him?) who was illustrating how he would, as an earnest evangelical, use any conversation to introduce the Gospel. Eg: "Would you like a sandwich, Jeff?" "No thank you, for I have the Bread of Life."
[/tangent]