Reluctant Gardeners sign up here - gardening flylady style.

[Carrotsandcelery]

Anyone up for a gardening motivational thread, flylady style?

The idea is little and often.

We post what we have done here and hopefully inspire/motivate each other to get cracking in the garden and have a beautiful summer.

Keen gardeners are very welcome too, to show us how it is done.

this is the website I was thinking of

Thank you very much! I'll have a look at that website.

I may well come and find you when we actually move in -we've spent the weekend painting woodwork, and have a lot more painting to do - but once we're in we will have to make a start on the garden. I think your flylady approach may be very useful.

Hi everyone. Whilst I haven't been online for a while (family crises to numerous and boring to go into), I have still been doing my 15 mins.
My alium (probably spelt wrong) are flowering at the moment as are some little alpines, so the garden is looking a bit jollier.
Sybil - sorry about the seedlings....I hope the ones remaining are flourishing.
Carrots - it sounds like you have been doing sterling work!
I like the idea of finding a website with some sort of checklist.
My next plan for getting more plants into all my gaps is to do a bit of a swoop on the village summer fairs when they start. I don't think I have any more money left for the (lovely but rather expensive) garden centre, but I remember my mum picking up plants for very little from church fetes and the like........

The plants from the church fetes etc are often the ones that do well in the area where you live and therefore often the ones which thrive twinmum.

Great to hear you are still with us and doing your 15 mins a day.

I bought fish, blood and bone this morning as I heard on the tv that it is good to sprinkle some around the bottom of the daffodils once they have been dead headed, to encourage good growth next year.

I am quite repulsed as I am a vegetarian but I have resolved to give it a go.

Has anyone done this before? I have no idea what to do. Do I literally just sprinkle it round the base of the plants?

Sorry Carrots i don't have any bulbs so have no idea whether the fish guts will work or not - it does sound disgusting though!

i have done no gardening today (hangs head in shame) I will try to do better tomorrow.

Hi everybody.
Its rained for about two weeks here now. I am well and truly fed up of it. Ive still been out watching, pruning and weeding. The plants That I thought were sweet peas was actually weeds But the sweet peas have started to grow now so Im happy.

I have moved the clematis to the back of a border Carrots and when it has settled into its new home I will cut it down ready for next year. I also pulled up all the pansys because they were just looking scruffy. Probably because I never dead headed before.

My cottage garden is coming this week so I will be busy planting that up this weekend.

Ive put blood, fish and bone on my vegetable plants and I must say they are looking good. Does anybody know when to pick carrots. I bought them as plug plants at the beginning of April along with red onions and baby sweetcorn but I dont know when I am supposed to harvest them.

I haven't either sybiland the sun even came back to us.

The man who prunes came today though and pruned

He also dug out some dead shrubs and told me what to buy to replace them.

Apparently the black leaves on my ivies is frost damage and they will recover - phew!

Today I have spent 2 hours cutting up dead branches/leaf sweepings that seem to accumulate next to the shed so I can put them in the brown bin. The bin is full but i barely seem to have made an indentation on the rubbish

I have also watered as there is still no rain here in the south east [sends coaxing rain vibes Voldemorts way]

I feel very virtuous, although my back is aching in an old lady way which is a bit de-moralising.

Sounds like you have both been busy. I have been busy but not in the garden. I am missing it.

I am of the cottage garden. I imagine it will be stunning. I love cottage gardens.

Just done my 15 mins, nearly in the dark! Can still see the weeds though!
Exciting re. the cottage garden Voldemorts
No rain here either........

Ive been very busy planting my new cottage garden today. The plants arrived yesterday evening at my mums house. Her neighbour who is a postman saw the parcel at the sorting office and brought it home for her because they were live plants. Which was lucky as she has gone on holiday this morning.

They came as bare root plants. I had a bit of trouble which way up to plant them with quite a few of them. Hopefully I havn't planted any upside down.

The plan that came was great and it fitted perfectly into the border I had ready. I cant wait to go out and watch them all begin to wake up and come to life.

I am so excited for you Voldemort - I am such an impatient gardener. I always just want to see it all grown and blooming there and then.

at planting them upside down. I have a very large plant in one border and I am not sure if it is a beautiful lily or a big weed

Yeah for the arrival of the cottage garden Voldemort - how is?

Has everyone had this crazy wind? The weather variety There are trees down, bits of branches everywhere and leaves absolutely everywhere, including all over the shop floors etc.

I hope everyone's garden survived it. I am not sure my precious raspberry can has. It was bent over and I took it inside. It has not snapped but the break has some open bits on it - do raspberry canes heal??

have just typed a long message and then lost it - grr

Basically the jist was;

• sorry to hear about your raspberry canes Carrot hope they are ok
• my tree surgeon has cut down the tree outside, he was sadly far from hunky
• only a few tall plants broken in our garden, and that may have been from ds1 and his friends playing football!

Hope everyone else ok

Bad luck on the tree surgeon sybil. Next time we will have to ask Mumsnet to recommend suitable eye candy for the job!

I hope your garden recovers. Ours gets a similar bashing from playing football and the dog diving into the undergrowth after the ball. There is no point in a garden if you can't go out in it though.

Can I ask everyone's opinions? I have ordered tiny little white solar fairy lights to wind round a sort of pergola frame we have in the back garden. We have four climbers growing on it but they will take a while to grow big enough to wind right through it. I was going to wind the lights round it so the plants could grow through it. Dh is horrified, says he hates lights in the garden and it would look tacky. What do you think? You can be brutally honest. Is it a naff idea?

I FINALLY got back out in the garden today after storms and rain. It is still windy but not as bad as it was.

There is quite a lot of debris all over the place now. I spent about 15 mins weeding and filled half of a large black bag - mostly with debris, not weeds.

The stalks from my dafs are starting to go yellow so I will have some big gaps to fill. Any ideas what to put there? It would have to be something that comes up after the dafs die down for them to share the spot. I tried to start a thread about it but got very little response.

Does anyone know anything about aqualegias? I have a lot of well established ones and in the beds around them there and hundreds of what I hope are tiny tiny little baby ones. I have moved around some small ones but I have never seen so many of these incredibly small ones. I don't know if they are weeds or are mini aqualegias.

Morning all! Is anyone gardening today? We just have a gentle breeze today so I am hoping to get out there again.

I went to the garden centre to collect some Polmenara I had ordered and left with a massive delphineum, a salvia and another plant whose name I have rudely forgotten

I will have to get them planted

I also suspect some watering would be in order.

The lights sound lovely Carrots - not naff.
Glad to hear you have had more garden centre trips.
I weeded the whole garden on a bit of a mission last week.
My project for the next couple of weeks is a 'courtyard' (ie grotty area at the side of the house that could do with some sprucing up). We are having some new fencing put in and a trelice, then plants in pots that don't mind not having much light....I have an idea in my head of how I want it to look but not sure it will turn out that way!

I have some of those mini-aqualegias Carrot, I had just assumed that as this was the first year for them they hadn't had time to get established yet. They have had normal sized flowers on them, just on very teeny stems. Looks odd doesn't it?

I don't know enough about plants to be able to recommend something for after your daffs, sorry. We really need mumsnet to do one of those 'professional gardener webchats' again.

Courtyard sounds lovely twinmum I have an area in between my shed and fence I have no idea what to do with. It has holly bushes growing over it so is quite dark. It is just wasted space, which offends me!

Sybil - I'm with you being offended by wasted space. We moved here out of London from a house with a tiny garden. The new garden isn't exactly huge, but the courtyard is almost the size of the garden of our old house and any wasted space just seems wrong.
I've been reading a small RHS book called 'Plants for Places' to get ideas for what could go there- quite good for advice for shady spots and might be good for your shed / fence area.

Oh - and carrots, I say let the 'baby-aqulegias' grow and see what they turn out to be.
Having said that, I spent 6 weeks carefully watering what I thought was a geranium and it turned out to be a buttercup!