Fuchsias in spring

A quick guide to my spring fuchsia routine

·      Ignore the mouldering mound of bubble wrap in the corner of the patio for as long as possible until you are told in no uncertain terms to shift it, but definitely not before the frosts have passed.

·      Empty the temporary ponds created by pooling water in the bubble wrap topping which is excellent at preventing frost damage and also really good it turns out at collecting the excessive rainwater we have had this year.

·      Accidentally soak feet in smelly stagnant water when tipping it away.  Swear profusely.

You will need: one wrapped fuchsia and a pair of secateurs.  Huge dandelion is optional

·      Remove outer bubble wrap wrapping from pots, lay all relatively clean bubble wrap out on the grass to dry in the sun, this stuff is expensive, one does not want to be buying it all again next year.

·      Reveal fuchsia and host of weeds you have inadvertently also provided warm and toasty habitation all winter for and find growing big and lustrously inside your pot, so much so in fact its difficult to see the fuchsia.

·      Unceremoniously rip offending weed out plus most of the soil.  Feel smug satisfaction when root the size of a carrot finally comes free.

Remove the bubble wrap to reveal a whopping dandelion you've kept toasty all winter smothering your fuchsia

·      Your fuchsia should by rights be bare and twiggy and look dead, a quick rub of a fingernail against the bark will reveal either a green layer denoting life, or a continuation of brown meaning its a gonner.

·      Cry into soup when realise two of favourite plants have drowned during winter- FYI fuchsias don't like sitting in water and the bubble wrap igloo provided no flood protection.

·      Wipe tears from face and arm oneself with secateurs (on a side note whoever came up with that name needs a slap for choosing something so impossible to spell)

Spread the wet, sodden greening bubble wrap out to dry.  This stuff is expensive!

·      Theoretically should cut 'mass of twigs' back to approximately two inches long right about where plant will probably be starting to sprout from.  However unseasonably warm winter and spring has led to many plants never going completely dormant so already several inches of regrowth.  Chop back as much as can bear/ feel appropriate.

·      If feeling super bothered remove probable covering of moss from soil and take out any free to replace with fresh, or be lazy like me and just feed regularly during the summer.

·      Place pot in desired growing position and water if not already sodden.

·      Mother can now reach her plants you've prevented access to for 6 months, everybody happy.

Pre-prune: What a fuchsia should look like at this point, a mass of bare twigs with the odd sprouting

Post-prune: How most of mine looked this year

Apples, Pears, Plums and Cherries...

Weeping cherry from beneath, I can almost stand, I'm not sure if that says more about the tree or my height

Apple blossom and buds

My mother has always had a thing for fruit trees. If she spotted a small ropey one, looking like it might just keel over at any moment she would buy it for a couple of pounds and nurse it back to health and into a huge tree.  If it could have been nibbled all the way round by rabbits as well even better.  In this way she has gathered quite a collection: two apple trees, two cherries (which obviously don’t give you fruit) a pear and that beloved greengage.  In the spring the garden is a sea of frilly white and pink blossom on green and is definitely a highlight point.  She likes to work them bees hard!  Im pleased to report that the greengage is smothered in tiny fruit so despite not being seen during bee watch they got the job done.  They don’t call them pollinators for nothing.  The blossom is all gone now and the garden is now full of colour so its nice to look back to when the palette was more muted.  I appear to have completely ignored the pear when taking these photos and the greengage had been and gone I'm afraid.

More weeping cherry blossom

Cherry Blossom- was the first out so is dying a bit here

I obviously was in the mood for a bit of cherry because heres some more!

My Experience of the Chelsea Flower Show

I thought seeing as Iv written a small essay I had better stick in a visual delight even though it has nothing to do with Chelsea.  The first highlighter pink rose in the garden

Chelsea, showcasing the pinnacle of garden design and the one time of year when there is more than one gardening programme on the TV in a single week.  Helmed this year by Monty Don I did wonder what it would be like, but it turns out I love Monty on a sofa as much as I do up to his armpits in mud!  Like a breath of fresh air, he hasn’t felt the pressure to smarten up by buying a new suit.  That old faithful blue one is back out.  What I love is he is prepared to not be a complete suck-arse and is able to say ‘isn’t it wonderful!... but I don’t like that’.  I haven’t seen an awful lot of the coverage but did enjoy watching him thoroughly question one of the judges, much to their obvious dislike, I don’t think he would have got that from old Titchmarsh, good as he was.  Monty seems determined to include the average Joe in his broadcasts and thank god otherwise those souls who just tune in to see some nice flowers and possibly some ideas of how to wedge some rusty metal into their garden would be turning over to something a little less heavy, like Eastenders after 5 minutes.  I can write arty mumbo jumbo with the best of them but last night one guy who was interviewed had me lost.  It was so bad I didn’t even get what he actually did for a living and he managed to include a sentence in which I didn’t know what a single word meant, and I am a firm believer in using a broad vocabulary in every day speech.  Whilst he was spouting on, in full flow, me and the parents could do nothing but look at each other and shrug and it delighted me that by the bemused look on Monty’s face he evidently thought the same.  His ‘Thank you for coming’ could basically be translated to ‘you’re a complete nut’.

This is my problem with Chelsea, well actually I have several problems with it but they mainly hang around this central complaint.  Everybody takes themselves far too seriously for my liking.  Bearing in mind that all the show gardens tend to be designed around having a water feature, a paved area and walkway, a bench or seated area and a covered ‘pavilion’, and Joe Swift admitted last night that if a nursery said it would have 300 iris perfect in time for Chelsea four of the gardens might use them, I don’t know how the designers have the gall to stand there and spout on about their ‘out there’ concept.  Certainly if you actually go in person you don’t have a clue why the riverbed is made of rusty metal.  Why is it impossible to design something in life just because you thought it might look nice without some great meaning?  This is probably just the cheesed off designer in me coming out here.   But I definitely have a problem with someone saying ‘I was going to cut back my garden but now Iv seen it grow wild and free at Chelsea I realise its ok’.  I doubt that, your garden probably needs a damn good prune and that’s an excuse for laziness.

So enjoy Chelsea, but take my advice and do so from the comfort of your sofa.  In reality there is not actually much there and the gardens are far smaller than they appear on TV.  Have you noticed how they never show the front edge of the garden when filming a presenter in it?  Makes it look bigger, and its always filmed from above for the same reason.  Without the designer being there to talk you through the gardens they don’t really mean very much when you see them, and good luck with even achieving that.  You can’t actually get in the gardens of course so your left peering in at the edge as you are carried past in a sea of people or reduced to looking at it through other people’s ipads as they hold them in front of your face as my mother was, although apparently it showed the colours up better.  Most people who go only stop to photograph each thing then move straight on anyway.  Leave it to the artistic camera men at the BBC who have spent a lot of time coming up with a dozen angles to film the same thing to pad out the programmes for a week and put your feet up at home.  Its not like you can actually buy anything there, Hampton Court is were you want to be going with your flexible friend and the year we went we spent at least half an hour sampling beer that was randomly being given out in a garden, now we’re talking!  You could buy a rather snazzy egg shaped barbeque that was a little out of my price range at over a grand, but maybe that highlights who this show is really aimed at.  Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed going last year, you can’t get atmosphere on TV but this year Im heading back to Hampton, a little lower brow and far more me.

Biodegradable Grow Tubes- A short Review

Please admire the abundance of moss in my lawn

Seeds are in my opinion little buggers, excuse my French.  You provide them with fine quality soil, the correct depth, warmth, light, moisture and on the whole they do nothing… nada.  It’s a miracle there are any plants at all.  Because of this complete lack of desire to sprout and succeed in life I have been trying to give my seeds the best start so I might one day finally get my hands on a home grown cucumber.  On a trip to a garden centre several months ago I was hunting for some seedling pots that the mother had seen and thought might be handy but alas, too many keen gardeners in Sussex had already been through and cleared the shelves.  Instead I plumped for these grow tubes which are meant to be ideal for growing Sweat Peas and the such like as you just plant the whole tube in a pot when the time comes and it biodegrades.

That’s a lovely theory, but my experience has been less favourable than the packaging suggested it would be.  The first problem I encountered was in even getting the compost into the tubes, they are far narrower than the average trowel so makes for a very messy business and definitely needs to be carried out over a container.  Then comes the realisation that said tubes lack a bottom so the compost you have just wedged in just falls straight back out the bottom.  So needing to be stood in some kind of container I used the bottom tray of an indoor greenhouse.  To stop them falling over as tall unstable things tend to want to do I tied them together with string as the packet suggests, watered and placed in a warmish spot.  Returning to check on them several days later I discovered a thick fluffy beard of mould.  Now this is where this growing method starts to lose me.  It says ‘tie string around the top of the tubes to keep them upright in the tray’ and ‘water thoroughly’ but goes on to say ‘if the tubes are too close together in warm damp conditions, a white mould may appear on the side of the tube’.  Forgive me, but how do you tie tubes together without them being fairly snug up against each other?  And do seeds not require ‘warm, damp conditions’, a fatal flaw you would agree.  While the mould might be considered ‘normal’ the smell most certainly is not.  It stank. 

Sat in a washing up bowl.  Im fully aware my Sweet Peas shouldn't be this leggy.  It was too warm and they shot off too quick.  Luckily I managed to save a few by cutting them down- more on this to follow in another post

 Once transferred into the garden they have been sat in a washing up bowl and old container my mother used to make soup with in the microwave as both are tall sided.  Every time it rains they collect water and have to be emptied.  It is a pain.  The tubes are only meant to last 12 weeks at which point the roots should be bursting through the sides denoting their readiness for planting out.  There is no bursting, my roots remain firmly contained and unless they somehow get their hands on a knife will continue to do so.  However my Sweet Peas are definitely showing signs of wanting to be planted out regardless so I have.  I can only hope that once surrounded by damp soil we might see signs of this bio-degrability.

Im sure that this particular brand of growing tube is no better or worse than any other.  Instead in my opinion the whole concept is flawed.  Im not even sure why you would want the tube to biodegrade anyway?  Other than to save on throwing away plastic.  The plastic segmented seedling trays I also used produced far more seedlings, and I can bung them in the back of the shed to be re-used next year.  Now that’s a selling point I like. 

Tubes nicely wedged in plastic container, again too leggy I know but thats life

Glorious Weeds

Dandelions on a sunny day

There is always a week every spring in Britain when it's unseasonably warm.  As the barometer unexpectedly heads towards 20 degrees celsius layers are stripped off with gay abandon, pasty limbs are revealed for the first time for their annual Spring burn, which, although painful is always necessary for who needs sunscreen in April?!  Monday morning in such weather would not be complete without a comparison of sauteed body parts.  Personally I will be spending the summer attempting to blend in a regrettable v-shape on my chest.

Unfortunately, like all good things, it never lasts and we are fully back to coat weather despite it being mid-May.  Having been spoilt for a few days gardening in a very small pair of shorts (I have to take every opportunity to get a bit of colour on the legs, not that I endorse tanning but we are talking alabaster here), wrapping up in full coat against the gale force winds we had this weekend is not exactly enticing.  On Sunday I laid on the sofa for a full hour working up to going outside before I gave up and went and made a grilled cheese sandwich instead.

Luckily during those few brief moments of sunshine I did manage to get out and about with my camera.  A field just outside work caught my eye as it was full of weeds, dandelions to be precise.  Dandelions don't generally set my world alight, but these specimens had all gone to seed, which may not be deemed complimentary when applied to a man but definitely in my opinion improves a Dandelion, but then a whispy ball of seeds was always going to appeal to me.  Hundreds of fluffy globes were standing tall above the grass and I felt compelled to stop and capture this scene.  Its a very narrow road and I had to trot down it for a hundred metres or so with camera in hand.  I didn't half feel stupid, I could feel the eyes of passing drivers on me, wondering where on earth I was going.  In my commitment to the cause I also ducked under the fence so I could get down and dirty with the dandelions.  I can't say Iv ever noticed them on mass like this before and I must have got to them just before they completely ripened as the air was thick with them parachuting off to their destinations a few days later.

It got me thinking about Dandelions, an obvious subject for contemplation... not.  Such a commonplace weed doesn't half have a standout name.  After a little research I discovered the name literally means 'lions tooth' meaning the shape of the leaves, and not, as I had always hoped referring to the way the flower does resemble a lions mane.  Luckily in Alice in Wonderland they did make the dandelion a little lion, although what the tiger was meant to be I still don't know.  I was so into this train of thought I called the film 'Alice in Wonderlion' briefly.  Clearly that film had a massive impact on my childhood what with first the daffodils and now this!  Apparently they are completely edible but I think I will leave them to be stuffed into the local bunny rabbit, personally I like my salad to be a little less... garden weed shall we say.  I wonder does it make rabbits wee as well?­