Tomato Plant Purchases

I of course rushed home the moment I bought them to photograph them... or I might have not got round to it for several weeks so here they are several weeks worth bigger than when I bought them at the beginning of May time

There is a special place in my heart for tomato plants, and not because Im fanatical about tomatoes.  No its because they remind me of my granddad, and not because he was fanatical about tomatoes either.  Having worked as a gardener the man knew a thing or two about growing and until I was ten he had a tomato greenhouse; an actual full size greenhouse exclusively for them.  Inside it was always hot and heady, the air thick with that pungent and distinctive tomato plant smell.  There was also a deckchair in there as it was where he quite liked to take a nap, and who wouldn’t lets face it.  I only have to smell a tomato plant and he is conjured up before me, complete with patterned maroon jumper.  Like getting a whiff of a mother’s favourite perfume it just takes me back to my childhood so im not going to lie, I make sure I get a daily nostril full.

Because of this I look forward to that moment when I get to hot foot it to a garden centre and purchase my plants for the year.  ‘Your not growing them from seed?!’ you cry, and no Im not.  He always bought plants and if it was good enough for him its good enough for me.  Plus I would have six of the same variety and that’s a tad boring.  Variety truly is the spice of life.

For no particular reason other than its where I got my vegetable plants from last year I went to a different garden centre to my usual one.  Choosing how many to get was pretty simple, they sold seven varieties and I just bought one of each.  I have grown tomatoes for a couple of years now and I never have enough plants.  The first year I had three so I had a very intermittent and not exactly overwhelming supply.  Last year I think I upped it to five or six which did me fine, but nobody else got much of a look in.  So this year its seven.  I don’t know that I have enough decent sized pots to put them in but that’s never stopped me buying something before.  The selection process I went for was short and stubby with solid growth.

The varieties I plumped for are:

Sweet Millions
Shirley F1- Apparently the mother can remember granddad growing this one so im expectant
Alicante
Moneymaker- the label says 'agreeable flavour' which apparently means you grow it for productivity not taste, 'you wouldn't grow it if you were growing tomatoes yourself the mother said when I got it home.  I think what Im doing may be lost on her.
Tumbler F1
Gardener's Delight
Supersweet 100

Because Im not overly organised I can’t remember what I grew last year but now I will have a record of good producers for next year.  I accidentally bought a yellow tomato the first year, never again.  Don’t get me wrong they tasted fine but a tomato should be red and that is that.  

My little assistant Gardener

You may not be aware of it, but I have an assistant gardener, and not its not my mother.  I would like to take this opportunity to introduce her on here as she is very involved.

Apparently puss will be sowing the seeds.  The shoes are not a fashion statement, they are purely for the garden because they are easy to slip into.  Why they weren't on my feet at this point I don't know.  Look at my tray of peppers before a slug got them :(

Monty Don may have a dog, but this is my rat; my furry partner in crime.  She may be a cat but has the temperament more of a lap dog.  It is impossible to be in the garden and not have her trailing about after you, generally being cute but also being a right pain and getting in the way.  In one such example below I had put the kneeler out because I had kind of hoped to sit on it to save my bum, but turns out puss had the same idea and slipped into position when I went off to the loo.  She won’t sit directly on the paving stones, its too cold for her dainty posterior.  We ended up compromising with me on the kneeler and her curled up in the fleece against my back, jammy toad.

I don’t know what it is about a freshly opened shed door, maybe the alluring whiff of stale air mixed with petrol fumes from the lawnmower that she can’t resist but crack it open just wide enough to retrieve the slug pellets and she is in there.  The only way of getting her out is to shut the door and leave her in there for twenty minutes or so until boredom sets in and then she comes out quite happily.  Unless I forget I shut her in there, or she gets herself marooned on top of the garden chairs and I have to wade in to rescue her like she did the other week.

Plant a whole row of bean seedlings? Find her lounging in them the next day.  Put in some iris bulbs?  Turns out to be her new favourite sunbathing spot.  And she is completely obsessed with the kneeler.  You have to love her though and she does make excellent company.

Its sunny and hot so yes, I will stretch fully out and roll around squeaking on the patio.  Its also the perfect opportunity for a bath 

Clearly being helpful assisting while I staked my beans  

She always looks thoroughly browned off in photos but she is actually a happy thing.  This is not me

Henryi Clematis

The huge white and green flowers are set off nicely against all the foliage

For the size of garden that we have, there is a surprising number of Clematis.  The reason being is the mother absolutely loves them so has bought a few, and they are my failsafe Mothers Day present which is how this one got bought a couple of years ago.   I thought that as we have so many I would just do a little post on each one.

I went for white, as she prefers the really traditional deep royal purple and white colours, where as I rather like the more unusual ones, surprise surprise.  I would say that unlike many white clematis which often have touches of purple on them, this one is different with touches of green to it.  Down the front of each sepal (the petal bit) when they first open is a vague green stripe that fades off in the sun and the central stamen is green and yellow.  I would say that the flowers are quite large being roughly the size of a medium plate.

Together we chose to put it in the empty space in the front part of the garden behind a Camellia.  It was a complete mare getting it planted for two reasons.

1.     It is difficult to dig a hole when you have to stand about two feet away on the other side of a bush.

2.     Our soil is solid clay; it is difficult to dig a hole wherever you stand.

After a struggle it was in.  Clematis like to have their feet in shade but their flowers in the sun so the theory was that as it grew up into the gap it would get late afternoon sun and be fine.  However that first year it didn’t grow very much as only being a small plant it was all in the shade so wasn’t that happy.  The second year it did much better being a bit bigger but a new problem developed.  As the buds developed big and fat and I got all excited, something started munching.  Something ate its way into each bud and polished off the flower before it even opened.  I think, through some research that it could have been hungry earwigs but I have no idea why.  We have never had this issue before, I don’t know if being situated in quite a leafy dark corner makes it more susceptible.  This only happened the one year.  The only other drawback is because the sepals are large and quite thin they get damaged easily.

Henryi flowers on last years wood and now its got going it has shot up the flowers really stand out silhouetted against the gloom of the dark corner and against the sky.  Letting it grow tall has meant the undersides of the flowers are visible and these actually have more colour being tinged green and red.  It could probably do with a prune after this year otherwise we wont be able to see the flowers at all.

The flowers getting away from us, but looking pretty silhouetted against the sky

Henryi's slight drawback, pray there isn't heavy rain or critters when its blooming or they will quickly look less like the ones on the right and more like the beauties on the left.

Henryi isn’t my favourite clematis but the flowers work well glowing out of a dark corner and the green elements are different and blend in well in quite a green leafy area, so if your garden is very green and you don’t want something to stand out too much, this would be a good one to go for.

A tale of two bees

A bee drinking honey aided by a cocktail stick.  The dishcloth is old if your wondering

This Is a quick tale about two bees, and one nutter (my mother) who tried everything in her power to save one.  A bee.  Now I know that bee numbers in this country (England if your unsure where I am) keep falling and we are encouraged to plant things that bees will love, but I feel there is a point where one must draw a line and spending 40 minutes resuscitating a bee is possibly on the wrong side of that line.  We have a very bee friendly garden with lots of plants like Echinacea, alliums and fuchsias which all seem to permanently have a resident bee on them which is good.  In fact our garden is so great we have a whole nest of Bumble bees resident in the loft, which is less great.  I love a good bee and im not particularly scared of them, unlike my boyfriend who practically has a fit every time one comes near.  Nothing gives me more amusement then hearing that when he came home from clubbing at three in the morning he was greeted in his room by a little friend in a stripey jumper that he had to spend 20 minutes escorting out. Haha.

She found the bee that needed saving lying on her last legs by the kitchen sink and promptly scooped her up on the dishcloth and took her outside to be plopped on a flower.  As it was about 9 in the evening the mother decided she was too tired and wouldn’t make the trip home to wherever that may be (probably our roof) without a little pep-me-up so brought her back in to give her some honey.  This is where I appeared on the scene to find her molesting it with a cocktail stick.  Having spooned some honey next to the bee she gently prodded it and much to my surprise it did get it’s proboscis out and start lapping it up and presently it did start looking a bit perkier.  This is where the plan fell apart a bit though as I don’t know if the bee got drunk on said honey or what but the next thing you know its laying flat on it’s back, legs waiving in the air.  As much as the mother tried she couldn’t get it to flip back over and only managed to poke the bee into the honey.  Therefore the bee now needed a wash and about 40 minutes had gone by.  It was eventually placed on a flower.  The worst of it is my dad and I had to wait for this debacle to be over before being allowed to crack open some rather tasty buns my dad had bought.  In a choice between buns and bees I choose buns.  I don’t know if the bee survived after all this but It was gone in the morning.

This isn't bee torture she is actually trying to flip it over but it was being very helpless

This is not my only experience of her dropping everything to help bees.  She was meant to be cutting and passing me twine while I was stationed in the centre of my pea patch but she got distracted by two bees she had to help that had gone cold on an allium.  My twine supply stopped.

There is not much of a tale to tell about the second bee, it just stopped for a little rest in my window so I snapped it.

Bumble Bee close up, they are surprisingly hairy little things

Peas- Mr Fothergill's Onward

Mr Fothergill's Pea- variety Onward.  Plump and juicy peas it says and that is what we hope for.  If my peas turn out as smooth and insanely shiny as they do here I will be impressed.  Methinks somebody went a bit crazy with the lighting and dodge tool in photoshop...

You may have noticed in my post on broad beans that there were randomly four pea seedlings in my tray of beans.  I mentioned it enough so you should have done, but I did not explain why.  I think I had sowed fifteen broad beans across two trays containing a mixture of sweet peas and beans and had six spots left so just bunged in some peas to make use of the space.  Obviously only four came up, but then I sowed another tray of peas to make up the numbers, and like the broad beans virtually every one came up which was good.  The trick I think to getting a good germination result is to pay attention to the sow by date on the packet.  I am the type of person who will happily eat something past its use by date, I fully believe that if tastes and smells all right your good to go.  I will even go so far as to scrape mould off things like jam to eat the stuff below.  A little mould never hurt anyone.  Anyway I digress, turns out the same attitude can not be applied to pea and beans as last year I sowed a whole bunch and got one lonely, miserable and lets face it, pointless broad bean.  Nobody’s going to get fat on that.  They were out of date, not by much but apparently they are a little pedantic and if the packet says 2012 then there is no playing ball in 2013.  Seeing as they were sown in exactly the same way I can only think of this as being the reason.

I have obviously got very blasé about seeds coming up as other than those in my broad bean post I forgot to take any pictures.  Although god knows why because my seed production has been a complete disaster this year, more on that to follow!  The packet of peas came again from Chelsea and for some unknown reason I plumped for a variety of marrowfat peas rather than just the usual garden peas.  Having just done some internet research it says these are left to dry naturally in the field and are used to make mushy peas, which I did already know.  That wasn’t really my plan for these I have to admit.  I was planning on letting them fatten and ripen and then whip them off and it them solid.  I presume this is possible, I guess I will find out in due course!  The variety is Onward, which seems a strange thing to call a pea considering it doesn’t go on to anywhere, it tends to stay put in the ground where you planted it.  Obviously I don’t know how it tastes yet but I can confirm it’s a good germinator.

As I didn’t photograph them until I had them in the ground here is a little snapshot of my pea patch with my peas freshly in.  This would probably have been around late April early May time, it certainly doesn’t look as neat and orderly now.

My pea patch, complete with helpful labels.  Hopefully next year I might be able to expand into more varieties or different types.

Wisteria- on mass or wild and free?

Wisteria grown along a wall in a fairly standard fashion, more blooms came out after this, I was a bit prompt with the photo

Grown up the front a house; contrasts nicely against the white.  Unfortunately for these house owners they only live a couple of doors down from the bottom house so this one pales into insignificance in comparison!

Im fully aware that its not Wisteria time.  However I took loads of photos when it was out in late April and through a combination of working a 40 hour week, commuting ten hours, seeing the boyfriend and trying to coax cucumbers to not wilt plus trying to find time to sleep I just haven’t got round to sharing them yet.  So here we are.  I don’t personally have a Wisteria, but I would love one.  I tried to convince the mother a couple of years ago but I was flatly refused because apparently if you plant them by a house wall which is what I would like to do, they merrily ruin your foundations.

I think nothing looks more English than a Wisteria spread over the front of an old house, which is ironic considering that they are Chinese and Japanese in origin I believe.  Normally this is my favourite way of displaying them, if you will, as shown by a lovely house in a nearby village to me that was absolutely smothered in it.  I vaguely think it makes it look like a purple version of Sully from Monsters Inc.  I really like it on mass like that, not subtle but totally going for it.  If your going to grow something over your house it should definitely turn the whole outside purple.

But on my way home from work I stumbled across a completely different way of letting it grow.  Left I imagine to its’ own devices another Wisteria had clambered its way high above a road through a tree and although looking a bit wild and unkempt I quite liked it.  You don’t get that mass of colour the same but it has a slightly eerie appearance that I quite like, like an abandoned garden of an empty stately manor.  What a romantic image.

The thing I really love is the way the ‘large pendulous racemes’ or ‘flowers’ to you and I (I found a fancy horticultural book in the loft) is the way the colour gradates from white to dark mauve at the bottom.  Somehow the larger white petals at the top wierdly makes them look like they are painted rather than being real flowers.  Like in this photo, don’t the flowers look like they have been painted on impressionist style?  So there we have it, a little late Spring flash back.

Wisteria growing up through a tree

This Wisteria has really gone for it travelling widely about this tree, its probably been doing it for decades.  Kind of nice I think

One seriously purple fluffy-looking house.  And yet the house looks fairly stable- mother take note!

Don't the white top petals make the flowers look hand painted rather than real?!