Out now

Here's what's out in my garden this week.

James Gallway.  

This is a nice tough rose but can't decide if it is a climber or not - more a large bush that needs support.

It has lovely glossy leaves and seems to resist rust and blight and bugs pretty well.

The wrong poppy - this is a rogue red which comes up year after year - it has been pulled out, dug out and even poisoned!

I've decided to learn to love it.

The pretty little white thing flirting round it is called Bowmans Root (Gillenia Trifoliata).  Well worth having if you can find it.

 I love this iris.  it is just about starting in the garden after three years!  We dug it up from a B & B where some friends were staying - with permission!  hey had stunning borders absolutely choked with it.  My two little bits have struggled to get going in a north facing border (they do like to be sun-baked) but finally we are seeing some flowers.

It is an unusual one and could be Iris Spuria

Pretty common but no less nice for that and a real doer - this is masterwort (astrantia - probably major) - no idea what variety.

It will flower most of the summer.  Not spectacular but incredible if you get up close and personal.

The white is the beginnings of the False Goats Beard (Astilbe) just starting to come into flower another stalwart.

 The peony i have in a tub - thin it bneeds feeding as it only seems to manage two not huge flowers a year so far.  There again, when my sister gave it me about three years ago it was only a few inches high so its doing OK.

This is a sentimental plant as it is from my sis before she decamped to Canada and in memory of my mom and the red peony of her home.






 I can never get a photo of this odd little primula to do it justice. I think it is the capitata part of the primula family.  it starts out covered in white farina (looks like it is covered in talcum powder) so it looks very odd, but then it progresses to this. 

This is a really tough sweety - why oh why didn't I note its name.  It is a very small white shrub a friend bought me in a pot last summer.  I tucked it into a corner before we left for the winter not really expecting it to survive.  When I was home in December it still had a few flowers on it and as soon as it could get going this year it is off.  it is another one where you have to really look at it to appreciate it.  The pretty little white flowers have an even prettier centre.

Let me know if you know what it is.






I don't do any good with roses - mine are always scabby with rust and covered in greenfly and more bald than leafy and the flowers get smaller and smaller and less and less every year.  The exception to this were the two beautiful and bountiful Blush noisettes that I had on the patio.  These are the two that we have had to dig up for the forthcoming conservatory.

Right now it looks as if the younger of the two might have survived the move but the other one has given up the ghost.  If one makes it through to next summer I will buy another to replace the dead one.  Fingers crossed.

I suppose roses should be regarded as fairly high maintenance; they need spraying several times a year and feeding often and I never seem 'to get round to it'.  Maybe now I have a gardener every couple of weeks?????

Garden day

Just had a tiring but nice day sorting out the garden - actually demolishing part of it and checking out the lotty.

We have a prize-winning foxglove (self-seeded) in the corner of one of the beds.  It must be a good eight feet tall, quite perfect and unsupported.

The patio area filled with roses and lavender and pots was always the best part of the garden.  Happily and sadly we are adding a conservatory and they all had to go.

I hacked the roses down to about half.  They are already loaded with buds and first flowers so it couldn't be a worse time to move them.  To add insult to injury they have gone to replace two rubbishy Iceberg roses that have never done any good.  So we will see if the adage of 'never plant a rose where a rose has been' is true.  Mind you I presume we will never know what killed them when they keel over.

I chucked a gallon of water on each and talked to them nicely.  I'll let you know if they make it or not.

Over at the lotty my jersey royals are doing very well.  I hope to be attacking them very soon for the scrumptious baby stage.

The middle bed has tiny raspberry bushes in it and they seem to have taken OK just need to bulk up a bit!

I filled the rest with all sorts of seeds:
- Dwarf beans.  'Speedy'  by name and by nature as they claim 'from sowing to eating in 7 weeks'.
- Red cos lettuce - Rosedale.
- Red spring onion - Furio
- Purple carrot - Cosmic Purple
- Tomato - F1 Sweet 'n' neat Cherry
- Cucumber

I don't have great hopes for the tomatoes or cucumber this far north.

From my third box I picked about six pounds of rhubarb and still have this lot left ready to fatten up.  There was no black membrane visible before I pulled the rhubarb, it completely filled to box. 

The strawberries are loaded with their first batch of fruit ready to ripen and are a good size.  Really should be feeding them!  Make a note.  Incidentally a good all-purpose food to save you buying lots of different things is a tomato food (cheap one from Home Bargains at the bottom of Brandlesholme Road).  The basic rule is that anything where you want fruit or flower can be fed with pretty much the same thing.  If you want roots then it needs something else.

OK over to the fruits of my labour - Rhubarb Crumble.

The spoon is a table spoon to give you an idea of the size of the dish - serves four generously or six if you are posh.

Rhubarb, plus tablespoon water or orange juice or whatever takes your fancy - just enough to make sure the rhubarb stews down nicely.

100 g cold butter cut in cubes
75 g caster sugar
175 g plain flour
good pinch of salt

Cut in ingredients with a knife or rub in with finger tips or much, much better,  get a pastry blender - dirt cheap - as little as £4 - Google them.  You can make crumble or pastry in minutes.  Make double the amount and freeze half for another day.

Cover the rhubarb with the crumble - don't press it down just make it level and bake for about an hour at 180C .  Just keep an eye on it after about 40 minutes as ovens vary.

There is a more precise recipe at the top of the blog under Recipes and one for a really nice rhubarb and orange pudding.  Enjoy.

Hello again!!

Hello again to anyone who manages to re-find me!!  So much for quitting the blog.  I am back again.

We just had a great meeting with our new Community Development Officer and she is very enthusiastic about getting the Lotty moving forward so it seems sensible to crank up this blog again as our check in place for Lotty folk (and others).

My own garden is being (partly) taken care of by a lady called Joan who has cleared the weeds out of two of my three borders so the garden is starting to get knocked back into shape.  Hopefully by the end of the summer it will be looking OK again.  Watch this space.

Sad to say....

I'm afraid I am giving up this blog along with gardening!

I have been under par for the last six months - long and boring story - and have had to 'employ' someone to do my garden.  Those of you who garden can imagine what that's like!!

So it seems idiotic and a bit 'Lady Penelope' to report on what my gardener is doing........

Huge thanks to those who have travelled along with me and this epistle - its been great.

(Today I bought a magnolia Stellata (Leonard Messel)! not quite the size of the one above..... but one day .....)

Fellow lotties

Anyone wondering if we are still chasing the powers that be to get more work done on the lotty this is the latest missive: 

Sorry for not getting back to you but I have now been moved to another Neighbourhood.  I will pass this on to your new Neighbourhood Co-ordinator along with an outline of where the project is up to.  The new Community Development worker starts in May so she will be also contacting you.

So I am afraid it is just a case of watch this space.................

Finally!

Finally managed to get to the lotty and do some planting.  To be fair I am not in the best of health right now so everything is a struggle and physical hard work is low on the list.

Any way Ken and I tootled round and checked the site as usual, including the two sheds.  We had been told there was a leak in one over the winter but couldn't see which one so need to get to the bottom of that.  It will give us a reason to 'chase up' the powers that be.  We did try to get some answers about what will be done when but, as often with these things, there isn't anyone 'responsible' for it since Donna left.  Her boss got it dumped on her until it could be passed on - so you can see how that's working out.  We'll do our very best to crank it up again but I am not hugely hopeful.  These sort of things are great when you have a motivated and hard working person shoving it along.  We can't do much if anything ourselves as we aren't 'official' so we can't order and pay for the stuff to get done; all we can do is keep asking......

I had a similar experience with the Junior Lotty Club.  I prepared six months sets of projects/work sheets/kit and suggested prizes etc; I did three of them here before I went to Naples and set up a system for the others to happen and within a month it had died a death.

So, as far as I am concerned,  I am sad to say I am pretty much at the point of shoulder shrugging and just getting on with my own stuff.

If you remember at the close of the season we covered our plots with cardboard to keep the weeds down.  It worked just brilliantly.  This is what they looked like.

We just removed the concrete and bricks that held the cardboard down and the beds were immediately ready to plant up - not a weed in sight and no digging necessary.






I take that back we are still removing huge chunks of concrete.  We dug three pieces this size out of half of one bed.

I have no idea if it was just incredibly lazy on the constructors part or an attempt to save on volume of soil but it is beyond annoying.  Even if you have the most rudimentary understanding of growing things you must realise they don't grow through concrete!!

Incidentally all the concrete and bricks we used on the cardboard is stuff we dug out of the beds last year.

The rhubarb/strawberry bed just needed a bit of a tidy up.  They had spawned three extra plants which I have left in and two others had succumbed to the winter.  I replaced these with the runners I'd potted up in the autumn.

So, after doing that and removing the debris, this is ready to do its thing.

I am surprised to see flowers on some of the plants already.

I will be removing several thousand baby sycamores over the next few months - the beds were smothered in their seeds.

Last year I boned on about not knowing why folk make such a palaver about strawberry runners - pinning them down and cutting them off and potting them up etc.  I just take them off the mother plant and pot them up .  I take more than I need  - so instead of the six I thought I might want, I did ten.

Here they are stuffed round the side of the dustbin and utterly neglected for six months. Only one didn't make it, leaving me nine new plants.  Two of these replaced the lost ones at the lotty and I added in three more and the other four have gone into troughs in the greenhouse in the hope of getting some early strawberries (under glass).

There is little or nothing to see in beds A and B but they are planted!

B has three raspberry canes at the edge of the bed.  I know they are a tad pathetic but as they were under a pound from somewhere like Lidl - worth a shot.

The rest of B has the usual salad stuff - mixed leaves, radishes, spring onions.  I hope I will be putting in dwarf beans in a couple of weeks and maybe some spinach.

A has got my International Kidney spuds in it.  I have done a naughty and put potatoes in the same place as last year but it wasn't blight ridden and any way I've found this variety doesn't seem to get it even when growing cheek by jowl with those that do.  So I stuck to the one variety this year and will be munching on Jersey Royals in a few weeks time I hope.  They go on to make good mid size and then large potatoes too so they last the two of us all season.

Free plants from Gardeners World

Honestly, no catch, Gardeners World do these offers every so often - I have had them and a friend has too and they are just what they say they are.  

48 perennials for Free just pay cost of postage which is £5.65

Ideally you'll need to put them in pots to get to a decent size before planting out - but a real bargain if you do...............

(Thanks H for directing me to it)

Here's the link just click:   Free offer