Weather continues unsettled

I have moved the containers with the delicate plants indoors, where we can trip over them until mid-April. And I potted up all the other seedlings/little plants into larger pots. Amazingly, I did not cover the entire world in compost while doing this, which is a first.

The plants all seem happy so far, although the trays holding them now take up nearly the whole kitchen table. When we move house, whenever that is, I am holding out for lots of south-facing windows with broad sills. Or possibly a greenhouse. This house has smallish windows, which makes it very efficient to heat but cuts down on the places you can put plant-pots.

I also, rather daringly, re-potted the lovely yellow orchid which sits on our bedroom windowsill. The poor thing had big thick roots coming out of the bottom of its pot and spiralling round and round the cache-pot, but I was a bit worried that, this being so, I'd damage it getting it out of the pot. We'll see. I didn't snap anything off, or gouge lumps out. We've had it about a year and it's flowered beautifully (it's now on its third flowering stem) so I'll be sorry if this turns out to be a mistake.

Looking down from the bedroom window, you get an aerial view of the lawn, which is my next major concern. My mother has a theory that if it's green and growing in your lawn, and isn't a dandelion, it's grass. You could just about believe this if you squint at mine with half-shut eyes. If you don't, there are big lumps of clover, and large patches which are a sort of lime-green and are definitely moss. Irritatingly, the neighbours on both sides (neither of whom have anything in the way of plants in their gardens) have lawns which look much better.

I wouldn't mind the moss that much - it's soft and green, isn't it? which is mostly what I want from a lawn - but two summers ago, the weather was dryish and all the moss died and left big brown swathes which had to be pulled out and re-seeded. The wet summer last year obviously brought it back with a vengeance.

I must do something about it soon if I'm going to, because we want to be able to put the guinea pigs on the lawn during the summer, which means we can't put fertilizer or weedkiller on it for some weeks beforehand. Sigh. It's not so much that I don't want to do the work, but the lawn's going to look pretty scruffy for a while once I've yanked out all the unwanted stuff.

The only pretty ring-time

I'm beginning to feel I was perhaps a tiny bit over-optimistic getting started with vegetables so soon in the year. March is coming in like a lion.

Last year I left buying bedding plants a bit late, and there was hardly anything left, so I didn't want to make that mistake again. So a few weeks back, during a rare visit to a garden centre, I bought some little petunias and geraniums and impatiens and things, and was encouraged to plant them out by a bit of mild weather (and the fact that they were rapidly outgrowing the big tray I keep pots with seedlings in). So I planted up a few containers which had had annuals in them.

Disaster. It then became very windy and rainy again, and they're all looking a bit battered. Some of the impatiens (supposed to be a hardy variety) have lost almost all their leaves. Fortunately, I have more I could replace them with, but it's a waste of money and I feel like a failure when things die on me.

The vegetables are cheaper since they're mostly grown from seed, but more effort. Right now I have five courgette seedlings, all of which have their first real leaf, which is apparently the point at which you should plant them out. And this is probably true, since last time I waited until they were much further on, and the wind and rain promptly battered their papery leaves to shreds. It seems that leaves which emerge amid wind and rain are tougher than those which emerge in the shelter of your kitchen. You're supposed to plant out only the strongest seedlings, but all of mine look equally sturdy just now.

On the other hand, all the advice I seem to find says that courgettes shouldn't be planted out until April or May in the UK. By which time they'll have many more than three leaves, and the same thing will probably happen again. Actually, going by my Flickr it looks as though the seedlings were still on the kitchen table on the 24th of April last year.

So I don't really know what to do, other than invent a suspended-animation machine. I did buy some cloches (very expensive cloches, considering they consist solely of a piece of moulded polythene) in the hope that these would ward off the wind and the slugs. But do they provide enough protection for me to plant them out now? Or should I just pot them up and wait?

I could plant them out, see what happens, and then start again with some new seeds at the end of March if they all die, I suppose. But I don't want them to die. Perhaps I am too sentimental to make a proper gardener.

The sugar snap pea seedlings that I planted out last week (under very expensive cloches) seem to be doing absolutely fine, but then they are meant to be a cool-weather crop. I sowed early spinach the same day, but I'm not expecting to see green bits for another week.

I also have tomato seedlings (not grown from seed), but they're definitely getting planted up into bigger pots before I trust them to the great outdoors.

The seven chilli-pepper seedlings on our bedroom windowsill are looking good and showing signs of their first non-seed leaves. These are actually J's babies, but since he tends to get a bit nervous that he'll kill plants, I suspect I'll be doing the potting-up and so forth.

The garden is beginning to look quite spring-like, despite the wind and the rain that raineth every day. I have lots of Tête-à-tête daffodils flowering, some bigger ones flowering in pots and about to flower in the ground, grape hyacinths, polyanthus, and the signs of tulips and dicentra on the way.

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.