Hot. Cold. Hot. Cold.

The Garden in June

I don't think most of the plants in the garden know if they are coming or going with this weather. I have a lot of things doing very well, and some seem to be a bit behind.



View from Moroccan Courtyard


Thought I'd show the view I've got from my desk out into the garden. (Our self-built shed's still standing. Bonus.) I look up over the Bee Border, up to Woodland Corner where I can see the birds on the feeders. Still got the Goldfinch coming in. Plus one Woodpigeon, which is very good and just cleans up the dropped seeds under the feeders and leaves my veg bed totally alone. There's a gang of sparrows that like to strip my garden twine to shreds to use as nesting material. And they are pecking at the pea foliage again this year. Only the peas though, nothing else in the garden. I've also gained a few blackbirds who are doing very well as getting rid of a few slugs. Pays to have these feeders and bits out. You do need quite a variety though to get a good range of birds. I've got a niger seed feeder for the goldfinch. A seed feeder with sunflower seeds and hearts also for the goldfinch, but the sparrows like them too. A fatball feeder is used by the sparrows and also starlings (who eat a lot of grubs off the ground, so they are welcome, if a little noisy). I put out a few raisins on the path for the blackbirds. I had a bag of seed that was very messy in the feeder, so I've started putting a pile of that on the path for the woodpigeon who eats it all up without chucking it all over the show (I had allsorts of stuff growing under the seed feeder when it was in there), and I put a slice of bread onto the tree stump that they all eat (apart from the goldfinch). Complicated business this bird feeding.



Woodland Corner


Woodland Corner, where the bird feeders are, is looking really good at the mo. The foxgloves that I've grown from seed are flowering now. Very pleased with the success I've had with them. And the colours are just right. The ferns are looking really fresh green, and the cranesbill has been flowering with really intense purple flowers. I put some of that rigid mesh net stuff on the back fence for the clematis and honeysuckle to climb up, and the sparrows have been using it to cling onto and peck things out of the fence. As this year the leaves all seem to be intact on the climbers, I think the sparrows have cleared out all the earwigs that lived in the fence slats and chewed the leaves to pieces last year. So I'll let the sparrows off the pea leaves.



The Bee and Butterfly Border


The Bee Border that I planted up in early autumn seems to have all survived the winter and has started to put on new growth and flowers. The orange dots are the Geum flowers. I've got a blue Centaura Montana in flower, and the Veronica Royal Candles is putting on lots of spikes, so hopefully that'll flower well soon too. I picked up a pack of allium bulbs (in a sale, of course, £2 for 10 mixed I think it was), and planted them in there too. I wasn't entirely sure if they'd survive. The soil in that bed is shocking. Practically pure clay and totally undiggable when it's wet. But, they have survived, and the first ones are flowering now





Purple Sensation? Allium




I think they are Purple Sensation. They look great. And go very well with my purple, orange and blue theme in there. I've seen some bees walking around on them too, so all good.

















The Veg Bed and Container Fruit Garden


The best plant for the smaller bumblebees though is my Crimson Flowered Broad Beans in the Veg Bed again. They are doing very well. The peas and snap peas next to them are just starting to flower now. The sweetcorn next to them is not liking this hot/cold weather at all and are refusing to get any bigger. And the spring onions and carrots in front of them have been a bit of a disaster. I think the soil needs bulking up. It's the consistency of very dry compost in there and when it's got wet, then baked, has meant it's formed a crust where the seeds have found it hard to push through. When they have started to grow when it's been wet they've been mown down. Probably by slugs living in the soil. (I need to get the birds into the veg bed.) Same story with the French Beans that were going to climb the netting on the fence behind the veg bed. I just can't get them going without them being eaten, or drying out and dying. So I've decided to use my bargain glazed pot (the one with the slight crack down that I got from Homebase for £7, you can just see it in the righthand corner of the pic) and I've added a wigwam of canes and I'm going to try and grow some beans and some sweet peas up them in the pot. The strawberries in my strawberry pot are doing ok still. A few fruit on there. The blueberries in the purple pots have got lots of berries on. The thing that's gone mad is the raspberries in pots. I have discovered that they've rooted into the ground under their pots so they have got massive this year. I'll leave them until they fruit, but I'll have to sort it out after that and try and get the canes back into bounds.

You can probably just make out, on the Veg Bed pic, these hanging baskets of tomatoes. I've upgraded from 10' baskets, which weren't big enough, to 12' baskets. Picked these up from a car boot sale for a quid each. Very pleased with that. They are the stiff basket types, not those flimsy ones you can get that look like they've fall apart as soon as you add any weight to them, or water them. I've got Tumbling Tom tomatoes in the baskets. No sign of the tumbling yet, but the plants are nice and bushy and there's plenty of flowers on them. They look a lot healthier in these bigger baskets. And I'm going to keep on top of the watering this year and not let them dry out too much which I did last year.

Not that I have to worry about watering at the mo. It's throwing it down outside again. Flaming June.