Plants by post

A month or so ago, I took a tentative step into the world of ordering plants over the internet. It's a bit nervewracking; what if the plants that arrive aren't in good condition? What if you're out when they arrive, and they wilt while waiting at the depot?

Neither of these things happened. The pansies, patio pinks and clematises turned up a few days ago and have duly been planted. They all arrived in good condition, packed ingeniously in a sort of plastic pot-cum-protective-greenhouse inside a cardboard box. The clematises were a lot tinier than I was expecting, but they're supposed to be hardy for immediate planting outside, so I'm crossing my fingers.

A winter vegetable collection appeared this morning: five plants each of "Offenham Flower of Spring" cabbages, "Sakura" calabrese (chunky broccoli), and "Hungry Gap" kale. The latter is really for our guinea pigs, which consider kale to be a fine delicacy (let's hope the slugs don't). These were rooted in compost, but came loose in plastic bags inside a cardboard box - they arrived in perfect condition as far as I could tell, though. Planting them was a muddy job. It hasn't rained in the last few days, but all the rain over the summer has made our clay soil very heavy and claggy.

I'm amused that the calabrese is called "Sakura", which is Japanese for cherry blossom. I've looked it up on Google Images, and it's definitely not pink. Maybe it refers to the season at which it's ready to eat?

The new sowings of spinach and salad vegetables haven't done anything very impressive. I suspect that it's been too rainy and cool for them to get off to a good start, and the plague of slugs got what did appear. We've also not had any visible flowers on the squash; there are buds - they've been there for a while - but they don't seem to open, which doesn't bode very well.

However, we have had some tomatoes off our plants, and there are a lot more to come - my cousin gave us a glut of hers, though, so we're not yet picking them to ripen indoors. The peas never produced very heavily; I think they don't get enough sunshine where I put them. The few pods we had were delicious. We have beans ready to pick, and a lot of flowers.

Bedding

Should, in future, this blog acquire any readers, and should those readers be interested enough to read the archives, the reason for the long silence was that I had an essay to hand in, and then immediately went on holiday. (We went to Bamburgh. It was very pretty; lots of long walks were taken.)

However, I’m back now.

I’ve just come in from the longest gardening session so far this year. I do love the light evenings in the summer; you can get quite a few garden-hours in before night falls. And it’s not late enough in the year for the midgies to be out in force, either.

Last Sunday, my very kind and lovely mother accompanied me to buy bedding plants. I’ve never done this before and had not much idea what I wanted, or how many I needed. Mum always says she buys too few and has to go back to fill in the gaps. However, my garden is about a quarter of the size of hers, and I just managed to fit all mine in.

I got: a tall pink primula, pinks (only one plant, but “a pink” sounds a bit odd), sweet williams, trailing lobelias, and lots and lots of petunias. Mum had a variety called “Million Bells” last year which I particularly liked – the bells are small, and it flowered pretty much right through into winter. So I got some of those (in bright pink and pale pink) and some bigger petunias, mostly purply-blue, though there are some white, red and magenta ones too. Mum also gave me a yellow daisy thing (the name of which I’ve forgotten) and a lupin, also pink.

(For someone who doesn’t much go for pink as a colour, I seem to have a great many pink flowers in my garden right now. As well as all of the above, I have roses (pink and yellow), a mysterious thing I thought was a passionflower but now seems to be pink jasmine, and the most wonderful paeonies. None of which I can take any credit for, because they were all here when I arrived, but they’re lovely nonetheless.)

I also got around to enlarging the flowerbed nearest the house. It’s the only one we can really see from downstairs, and abuts the lawn, right next to the fence on the left side. This makes it quite difficult to mow that corner of lawn, and I’ve been feeling for a while that I could do with more space for flowers. So I took a quarter-circle out of the lawn, which solves both problems and makes everything less boringly rectilinear. It also gave me somewhere to put my purple hebe and quite a few of those petunias.

J, for his part, mounted a trellis on the shed for me, as well as making improvements to our burglar-alarm system (which isn’t gardening but is pretty impressive nonetheless. He didn’t even set it off).

So everything looks quite good now. Unfortunately, by the time I’d finished and got the earth off myself, it was dark, so I haven’t got any photos of the great works yet.

I shall take some tomorrow, when the plan is (if it’s still dry) to weed-and-feed the lawn and plant out my veggies, possibly not in that order.