Garden2014

19th April 2014

Not a particularly impressive start to the year - but it's fairly inevitable when most of your favourite plants are natives of South America and grown fresh from seed every year.

Just the tree fern and cordyline and a few large pots of bulbs and a self-sown tub of forget-me-nots ... and ironically for what was to prove my most productive gardening year ever, planting those rather late in February, I pulled a muscle in my hip and developed sciatica for the first time - meaning I couldn't walk unaided for any distance for the next six weeks without excruciating pain - but that made my garden bench very appealing - and the particularly mild winter meant that the passionflower "roof" had made it through unscathed.

The garden is optimised to be viewed (and smelt, and to some extent heard) from the living room window - the room in which I also sleep - a "stage set" if you will - with the intention of making it seem much bigger than it is - the "wings" are usually fairly full of plants being got ready - benefiting from sunshine before being brought forward to "perform" at the optimal moment.

My gardening is rather sporadic.

I moved here in 1984 and whenever I did find the energy to garden, it was strictly veggies for the first 15 years or so, but I "emerged" in my late 30s from several years of enthusiasm for dancing all night in local warehouses to "repetitive beats" and needed a creative outlet. I suppose I must reluctantly admit to owing something to the "makeover" TV fad of those years, but also to the realisation that I was never going to build my two storey conservatory and that there wasn't enough sunlight that close to my west-facing house to make it suitable for much more than begonias ... and living in Bristol with global temperatures on the rise, "winter" is usually just a few days when my fingers get cold cycling to work - so I also realised I could grow some fairly exotic plants outdoors - raising a lot from seed and giving the others the winter protection they needed.

Speaking of which ...

My beloved brugmansias waking up in the greenhouse in April, after a very mild winter. (more later).

I Haz a Plan ....

5th May 2014

Still not much to see at this stage, but my indoor seed-raising facility is working flat-out.

I bought a dayglo magenta senecio and planted up two tubs with bought-in sweet peas - most of the work was in moving vast amounts of compost and accumulated rubbish.

And the veg patch.

One of the sunnier spots in the garden.

I fancifully call this my "Isla de tres hermanas".

I have several times tried to grow the famous American Indian combination of corn, beans and squash. Since I don't have room for the corn, the bamboo has to stand in.

For several years this was a bamboo jungle after I foolishly planted a phyllostachys aureosulcata aureocaulis on this corner of the greenhouse and abandoned the garden for seven years. (it was originally going to be a eucalyptus).

I hacked it back into reasonable shape in 2010 (I still have a huge stack of bamboo and a heap of leafmould from that summer's work), but the winter of 2010 cut down some favourite plants and I got distracted by newly-discovered 40 mile Sunday cycle rides and cycle camping weekends.

Protected by the bamboo, I reckon the banana - musa basjoo - might have flowered if it hadn't been cut down to the ground by freezing weather for the first time in the winter of 2009... and embarassingly its three progeny were killed in 2010.

17th May and the brugmansias had to come out of the greenhouse before they got too big.

With these two plants in such large pots and therefore too big to take into the house, most years the best I can hope for is that they only get cut down to soil level, and then it takes them until August to reach flowering size. In fact I lost the one at the back in 2012/13 to neglect and cockchafer grubs and had to grow it from a cutting I'd rooted on my bathroom windowsill, but the winter of 2013/14 didn't really happen, so they started the year as "trees".

My fragrance plan is taking shape :-

I'd grown most of these things before, but not all together and in such quantity ...

May 22 and my fuchsias arrive :-

Night scented stocks :-

May 27th and my runner beans are under way.

Greenhouse shelves filling up :-

Gradually getting some colour in with bought-in plants.

This year's new bamboo shoots :-

June 7th and I've planted out some nicotiana affinis and my one surviving brugmansia cutting in the front garden.

June 11th and the veg garden is underway.

June 15th and still a bit sparse

21st June and I attack the fern with my secateurs - thus making the near left area less shady. It took me several days to come to terms with this.

June 25th and I have EIGHT flowers on my pink brugmansia - it's usually the first week in August before the first one opens.

The veg patch is still mostly a holding bed, though the beans are making progress and the courgettes and squashes have been planted out.

28th June and starting to fill out.

A close up of my ornamental spinach :-

Comma butterfly - its progeny will be demolishing my hops later ...

July 7th and I've moved a few things around.

This was supposed to be a red, trailing begonia, but in the final analysis I'm glad it turned out this colour - though it's a bit too close to my other, small-flowered plant.

14th July

One of my less successful experiments this year.

I last grew nicotiana sylvestris about 20 years ago and recalled having to squeeze between a double row of triffid tobacco with huge sticky leaves, but in spite of getting them as big as possible in the greenhouse, after three weeks, the ones beside the fence are struggling due to the lack of light.

The French marigolds only just cope with the poor light, but next year I plan to have a lot more.

The ones in the front garden are faring a little better - with about an hour of sunlight on a good day.

The brugmansia on the corner has the best light in this east-facing garden with the ridiculously huge patch of Japanese anemones blocking the light ...

I have some healthier ones in 15 litre buckets getting decent amounts of sunshine on the veg plot that will be deployed either in the front or back garden, depending on how the planted ones progress over the next week or two.

The beans are growing well, but refuse to set.

Perhaps just as well because they're still difficult to get to with the daturas and tobacco still needing the sun. The courgettes in front are producing their first male flowers.

20th July.

Crunch time for everything needing planting or chucking in the greenhouse, or taking up space in the veg patch, so the scrawny nicotiana sylvestris along the fence got pulled up and my best three plants in containers went in their place.

As an experiment I put the remaining one out the front along with two daturas to see whether next year I'll plant them out there in containers.

29th July

Front garden 31st July

19th August

24th September

I brought one of the daturas through from the front garden to put on the right and moved the grotty sweet pea wigwam over to the left to clear the view.

Front Garden month by month courtesy of my security camera.

June - July

August - September

Got this for my front garden :-)