Having spent time and money on reorganising the garden over the last year or so, replacing the leaning wall, regrassing, putting in paths and patios, this year needs to pull back on the spending while making the bare bones look good!
So the next few bites should help with brightening up the beds without touching the purse strings!
Month 5 - Bite 13 - Divide and conquer.
When the walls were being rebuilt we had to move ALL the plants. They kept breaking off bits and falling apart and we just kept replanting the small bits and pieces, watering them and keeping our fingers crossed that some of them survived. Well, most of them did and have grown on so well that now it's time to split them to make our garden grow even faster....
All these were small, bedraggled little plants that have prospered and are about to become even more colour around the garden.
Month 5 - Bite 14
One or two plants don't split, but have grown on to bigger and bigger examples. These pinks need layering. All I need to do today is weigh down on part of the growing plant with a stone or pin it down with a hairclip and wait for a new plantlet to start to grow.
Outdoors isn't the only place for this, there's the indoor ones too. The spider plants are putting out new baby plants that can be potted on and cut away from the mother plant and African violets are dead easy to take leaf cuttings from and grow on. If only Graeham liked begonias they'd be just as easy!
Month 5 - Bite 15
My Nan used to grow all sorts of things. She was a great one for indoor plants. Grandad may have provided vegetables galore, but she was queen of indoor propogation.
She would plant anything that she thought might grow.. apple pips, tomatoes that were too soft to eat, spring onion roots (although she would have called them gibbons). I did once try her methods with a class of mine. They were fascinated when we planted some potatoes that our cook gave use that had been around a while and started sprouting. We carefully looked after them growing them in large carrier bags on a balcony, topping up the soil and rolling the bags up as the greenery appeared. Their faces were truly a picture when eventually we split the bags and all the tiny potatoes came tumbling out. They reacted as if I'd performed some sort of magic trick!
I've got one or two things in the kitchen that I'm going to try growing to see what happens - you never know....
Month 5 - Bite 16
I was chatting to one of our neighbours about planting for this year and she announced that she's on Team Runner Bean. Apparently she and our other neighbour have decided that they will only grow one or two things this year as they want to get off travelling again and it doesn't make sense to have too much produce when they won't be around to enjoy it. It also means that my plant watering duties will be much lilghter while they are away. Anyway, she's doing the runner beans while the other neighbour is doing mange tout.. I've volunteered to be on Team Basil as I always grow too much, so between the three of us there should be some goodies to eat.
When I add my sister's tomatoes and cucumbers as well the summer is looking promising.
Month 5 - Bite 17
And finally...
I have got one or two other seeds - the end of a pack of rocket, four pumpkin seeds I picked up in a nearby field last autumn, six leftover runner beans of my own and some parsley seeds lurking in the shed. Planting these only makes sense if I''m not spending oodles on growing them so their seed trays will consist of the inner cardboard tubes from toilet rolls and old cardboard egg boxes. The plastic trays from fruit can be their plant 'saucers' to contain water and some leftover compost will be plenty for filling them.
Nice free containers that have the added bonus of being compostable, in fact they will rot away in the soil when it comes to planting out time meaning they will be easier to plant and won't have their roots disturbed either.. win, win, I say.
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