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.

The Veg Bed 2012

As this warm weather seems to have brought all my veg plants in pots on in a ridiculously fast way, I thought I'd better get my plans for the veg bed down in print before too much has happened. Over the last few weeks I've put the new raised bed around my veg bed, to stop the grass path at the back and sides creeping over it, and I've planted up some broad bean plants that I had sown in paper pots about a month ago. I've also sown a row of peas, a couple of rows of snap peas, a couple of rows of carrots, a couple of rows of spring onions, and a few mangetout. The peas have started showing already with the soil warming up so much.

Anyway, here's the pic of the raised bed as it is now, with the smaller veg bed under the fence behind it -

After learning from a few disasters from last year's veg growing, like that I tried to stuff way too much in and blocked the light off for a lot of the smaller plants, I've arranged the bed so the shortest to tallest matches the sunlight, and shadow, and I've spaced things a lot better this year too. I hope. This is the plan -

For the small veg bed under the fence I've added all the climbing plants that will get reasonably tall (the mangetout gets to 7', the french beans I've never had them taller than 5' before I've had to pinch the tops to stop them going any higher because of the canes they were on, so I'll see how tall they get this year. The fence has also got pea and bean netting stretched across it this year. Last year I tried to control the 7' mangetout plants by stringing twine across the fence posts as the plants grew up. It wasn't ideal, and it wasn't taught enough to hold the plants reasonable flat against the fence. We'll see how the netting works this year.

Redskin Peppers



Tumbling Tom Tomatoes



I've got a few Redskin pepper plants and some Tumbling Tom tomato plants on the go too (most of these seeds are the ones I picked up in the Wyevale 50p seed sell off last year). The tomatoes will go into hanging baskets on the fence, like last year. That worked well. Although I do need to get a couple of larger than 10" baskets, which were too small really. The pepper plants I might keep on the kitchen windowsill. I did that the first year I grew them and I had a reasonable crop of pretty small, but very tasty peppers. Last year I tried growing them on the patio in pots and they did nothing. I think it was too cold for them. And by the time peppers formed on them something was burrowing into them, so I didn't get any of them. We'll see how the weather looks in the summer as to where they end up.

The giant glazed pot that I got from Homebase (along with my strawberry planter) in the damaged pot sale, I think I'm going to put a courgette plant into it. Courgettes get too big for the veg bed. And they are fairly ornamental (before the powdery milldew gets to them at the end of the season), so I'll put it on the patio.

Think that's all the veg I've got on the go. And the plans for all of it. Here's to a long, hot summer. (We are in drought here, no hosepipe ban yet though. Not that it matters to me, I water all my stuff by hand anyway. What a slave to grow your own I am.)

Another quick update

This time it's on my £5 (originally £15) Strawberry planter that I bought a few weeks ago in a fortunate visit to Homebase when they were selling off the damaged pots cheaply. I noticed that on Aldi's special buys for today they had a pack of 6 strawberry plants for £2.99. Perfect, I needed six. 5 for the 5 intact cups on my planter, and one for the top. So I zipped to Aldi and got a pack of Elsanta. I've had Elsanta before (before the evil weevil got them). I liked them. They fruited well and were tasty. I know people can get all snobby over taste, and that some are bred for supermarket mass-production, but Elsanta suits me. There was a choice of another 2 varieties, Christine (early season), or Red Gauntlet (late season). Elsanta is a main season strawb (in case you were wondering).

After getting the plants I popped over to Poundstretcher. They sell bags of 20L Multi Purpose for £1.29. It's quite good stuff, although this bag had a few large twigs in it. But generally the compost is light and fluffy stuff. And 20L is a good size for me to pick up and carry to the car. Another reason to buy.

Back at the ranch and I've planted up the planter. I've blocked the broken cup with a piece of broken terracotta pot that I had for crocks. I could have used some of the compost bag turned so the black interior faced outwards and made a barrier for it that way. Or, in fairness, I think if I'd have put a strawberry plant into the half cup it would have blocked it up enough so the compost didn't escape. But the broken cup is facing North, so I'm not sure a plant would do very well in that cup anyway. And I know people moan about these type of planter that the plants don't get any water because they are in the cups, but even my smallish plants' roots went through to the main bit of the planter, so if I water over the whole top surface they'll get watered. It's only really the crown and leaves in the cups, which i think is good because they aren't supposed to sit in damp and wet.

So, there you have it. A planted up strawberry planter for under a tenner. Bargain. I only used half a 20L bag of compost to fill it, so I've got some for potting on and earthing up the spuds in bags. The plants should last me a couple of years if I can keep the evil weevil out. And the pot should last too, if I keep it in a sheltered spot over winter.

I actually think even at full price these planters are not bad value. You can get them in terracotta like I've got, which is that lighter sort of peachy terracotta. It's heavier than the darker terracotta. The planter is fairly weighty even before it's filled with compost, so I don't think it's going to blow over. This is it in terracotta - http://www.homebase.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=110&storeId=10151&partNumber=200596 (Keep an eye out for a 15% day, if you fancy one. They must be due one soon.)

A quick flower update

These daffodils have just appeared from my £5 for 50 Morrisons bulb pack. They are really nice. Kind of pastel lemon yellow petals with a darker lemon yellow centre. Multi-headed. And they are tiny. Only about the size of a 50p. I'm in the process of trying to identify it (what I mean is I've put a pic on the Gardener's Corner forum for the member to identify for me, I will update if anyone gets it. Edit - they're one of the Jonquilla family of daffs - they're very goon on GC).

The other flowers doing really well, apart from the yellow tulips on the post before that are from the same bulb pack, are my pansies that I bought in the autumn. They've flowered all winter, and are putting on a really big flower display at the moment. I confess, I keep forgetting to deadhead the plants, but they are flowering away in spite of that. Very good value in the end. (I nearly fainted at spending around £6 on 6 plants when I bought them. Very unlike me to spend that sort of money on plants.)




I'll do a quick veg update soon. I've got a few young plants, and I've just sown some beans, mangetout and peas, so the veg season is starting again. Brilliant.

Our New Shed

We did it. Me (Bodgit) and the other half (Leggit) managed to put our new storage shed together. It's been an epic paint and build, but we've got there. Gawd knows how people manage to build a 'proper' sized shed from scratch. I'm not bad at DIY, or at instruction reading. And I'm pretty good at interior flat pack furniture building. But this seemed a challenge to put together, even with a picture and text instruction sheet. One of the problems was the sheet had been photocopied, probably one too many times, so the pictures were practically blurred out. Especially the ones where the text instruction was a bit vague. This is where the bodge bit of the build comes in. We just did what we thought was the best solution to the bit we were stuck on. It probably wasn't the best solution, but it got the build moving again. And as it took us about 7 hours to complete this build, due to various hold ups, any solution to keep it moving was used. I may need to go over the shed again with some after-build fixes. Like sealing some of the gaps that are there from where even an electric screwdriver couldn't get the screws tight into the panels. And there's a couple of splits in the wood where some nails came through where they weren't expected.

Other than that though, it's a nice shed. It looks good from the outside. It's just the right size for what we need. It fits the space perfectly. I'm pretty pleased. It was a nice price too. Considering I've seen a very similar shed in the main high street stores and online shed sites for, at it's cheapest, £140. But that shed has only got 8mm panels, this shed has 12mm panels and was only £118 with free delivery. We also had a problem with the staple of the hasp and staple door catch being broken. One call to the supplier and we've got another one on it's way. No problems at all there. Very good customer service. So this is the shed - http://www.elbecgardenbuildings.co.uk/Storage/3x2-Shire-Shiplap-Tall-Store - although the one in the pic isn't actually what you get. The actual shed you get is this one - http://www.map-gardenfurnishings.co.uk/Public/Products/ProductDetails.aspx?product=00337&mid=36&desc=Shire+Handy+Store (this one is a particularly dear option, but it had the shortest link to add to this blog). As you can see from my pic of our finished shed, the 2nd link pic is the shed you get.

I forgot to mention something else I've picked up for the garden recently. I've been keeping an eye out for a raised bed for the veg bed. Just something to stop the grass path I've got round the top edge from encroaching onto it. This month I've had a go at tidying up the growth from winter and the grass was halfway across the bed. Anyway, I noticed on Homebase that they had reduced their 2 x 1 metre raised bed from £30 to £20. Perfect. That's the exact size of my veg bed. So we went along and picked one up. After a bit of swearing when trying to fit it in the car  (2m is just about the size of my car interior, the other half had to ride home in the back while the raised bed took up his front seat and all the way to the back of the boot), we got it home. They were all stacked up at Homebase in a big wet pile, so I tried to look along the length to find the straightest pack. Turns out it was still slightly warped when we put  it together (bare in mind if you get one of these that there are no pre-drilled holes, so you need a drill and an electric screwdriver might help get the screws in too). The gaps in the joints aren't too bad though, and it's doing the job that I wanted. It's got in built stakes in the corners so it hammers securely into the soil. Plus as it's pressure treated I don't need to treat it and I can keep is as bare wood which matches my trellis on the fences. I like that. This is the one (still reduced too) - http://www.homebase.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=110&storeId=10151&partNumber=773453 - I should have mentioned it earlier though because they've just had a 15% weekend at Homesbase this last weekend. Nevermind. They'll soon have another one. They seem to be every other week.

The pots you can see next to the raised beds are the old potato bag compost from last year that I planted a pack of 50 bulbs that I got from Morrisons into. I think the bulbs cost me a fiver. Not too sure what's in them. I've had a few miniature daffs come up and open so far. There a lot of tulips on the way. Don't know what colours they'll be though. All part of the fun. I'll try and update as things open up.

More Shed Chic

In honour of us getting our new shed, I decided to create some decoration for it. I had an ornamental bird box that has seen better days. The paint that had been used originally I don't think was for external use because it was all flaking and peeling off. The roof wood was warping and cracking. I don't think shops should be allowed to sell things aimed at the garden unless the materials they use are weatherproof. Or they should state it's for interior use only. Anyway, I also had some vintage plates with chips in the rims, so I decided to try my hand at Pique Assiette. Basically, it's mosaic made up of broken china, or ceramic. I sanded back the paint on the bird box, cut up a couple of the plates and added the mosaic to the front of the box. I then painted the rest of the wood with weatherproof paint.

I painted the roof blue to match a shade in the tiles and then I artificially aged the roof by overpainting it with some green wood preservative. I'm quite pleased with the end result. For a first attempt. To be honest, I've always thought things made with the Pique Assette technique were a bit, well, twee. But I think my bird box has a touch of vintage style about it.

The shed isn't here yet. It's due next week. I will get a picture of it in all it's glory as a before and after blog. It might even get me started on the Moroccan Courtyard I've been threatening to create because the shed will be one of the boundaries of that area.

I've just gone and found my original plan for the garden from April 2011. The shed is going exactly where I planned it. The pond is in. The new lawn and bee border are made. It's coming together.

Shed Chic



Mosaic Heart Slate Flower Pot Garden Hanging Decoration


This week we had to buy a shed due to our old garden storage finally giving up the ghost. I spent hours trying to find one in the size that would fit the space (very small), within budget (very small), and that looked like it wouldn't blow away in a light breeze. Not easy, but I have finally found a tool store that is perfect. I am really looking forward to sprucing it up, when it arrives, with a lick of paint and maybe some decoration. (If the quality of the shed is good, and the delivery service is good too I'll recommend the shed and the place I bought it from. Actually if it's all rubbish I'll warn you off them, so you'll hear from me either way on this.)

Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to sit in it and survey my garden (there's just enough room for a set of shelves and a garden rake). But, it got me thinking about how I would dress up a full-sized summerhouse / garden room shed.

Every week I pick a selection of items from one of the craft sites that I am on as a themed collection called a Folksy Friday. As this week's Folksy Friday is my pick for a complete shed makeover, I thought it might be interesting to anyone reading this blog too. Quite a large selection too because there was too much to choose from. Click on the link to see the collection on my Pinterest board and see what you think -

*** Folksy Handmade - Shed Chic ***

***