Monday, July 18, 2011

Adventures of a newbie gardener

I am amazed that things I've planted haven't just died. This is my cottage garden bed - or will be next year when the plants have established and begin to flower. I hope. If you recall they didn't have any labels on them when they arrived so I didn't know what they were or how big they'd grow so my planting has been a bit hit and miss. But what matters is that they've survived and grown.But not as much as the plants that planted themselves. Like these poppies, which completely hide my French lavender and one of my new rose bushes. When they've finished I'll gather the seed pods and scatter them elsewhere - listen to me: I sound like a proper gardener!
To fill a space in the garden I scattered a pack of mixed annual seeds but I think I scattered them too closely together. There are supposed to be four different flowers in this patch but the cornflowers and one of the others - I only recall the name of the cornflower - seem to be doing best and overpowering the rest. I did try to thin them out but felt like a murderer.

This is one of the three plums on our Victoria plum tree that I planted two years ago.
The tree is flourishing as you can see so, maybe, next year well get a better crop. That solitary one is quite low down so I live in dread of George discovering it. He already devours raspberries straight from the bush before we get a chance to enjoy them.




Meanwhile Husband's aubergine plants in the greenhouse are truly flourishing. Unfortunately they're all leaf and no fruit so Husband has taken a brush and buzzed around a bit to try to fertilise them and encourage some aubergines to form.
Earlier in the year I ordered from the gardening catalogue their bargain offer of 66 geranium plants. Trouble is I was a bit late ordering them and they were very little when they arrived so they're only just starting to flower but at least now I can walk past the shop displays that advertise one geranium for £1.99 and say, 'See how much I saved us!'


1 comment:

Rose said...

Congratulations, Liz--I'm very impressed with your successes. Especially those poppies--I've planted poppy seed for several years, and this is the first year I actually had any plants. I grew aubergines (we call them eggplants) one year and they did produce fruit, but I could never tell when they were ripe:) Gardening is a lot of trial and error, I've discovered, but the nice thing is that you get to start over every year and learn from your mistakes.