Osteospermumsnet.com - flutter your foliage, pick your produce, shake your seed packets and bring your blooms to the Spring Show

[Lexilicious]

Welcome to the gardening quiche :)

Earlier malarkey was here

All welcome whether you are a Sackville-West or a Dimmock, an Oudolf or a Swift. Whether you dream of digging or dig for dreams.

Fair weather or foul, we've got disco lights in the potting shed and fairy lights on the terrace. Bring gin, wine just doesn't cut it round here.

I loved your Aussie garden too.

GW jogged a memory and in a dark and damp forgotten corner I found an old black cast iron kettle with a fern growing out of it, which I have duly tidied up and moved a bit forward, seeing as it was on GW. I looked it up on a fern website and think it is an Athyrium. Next to it was a maidenhair fern in a pot (left over from a student house the seventies) which looked happy so it stayed there. This appears to be an Adantium. I have now noticed there are a few ferns in the garden which I have totally ignored hitherto. I plan to collect leaf specimens and identify them. I like the notion of going on a mini nature trail outside my own back door.

An old species rose growing up against a wall has developed black spot. I looked it up and decided to prune off all the diseased bits as I don't want it to spread to the other roses. Apparently black spot is more common in damp conditions such as the rain we have had. Internet suggested treatments range from compost tea to fungicidal wash. What do you all suggest?

I don't do much with my roses, but I do put leaves with black spot in the green waste rather than the compost heap. You could spray, I suppose, with RoseClear or similar. That reminds me, though, that I need to feed mine.

I took four ferns to the gardening society yesterday. I dug them up months ago as part of my horticultural spring clean, so I hope someone inspired by GW will have rehomed them!

God, I must have been too busy to remember it all. Fierce pruning of a crepe myrtle which didn't bloom this year. That'll teach it.:)

Mass planting of arthropodium "Matapouri Bay" on the grave of poor old echtcat who was put to sleep two weeks ago. They are the best plants; do well in shade or full sun, which is what they get under our coastal tea-tree, in winter then summer.

I saw some wallflowers today in a market, though they don't have the intoxicating pong of the English variety, so won't buy them. There's a lilac tree in a yard about three kilometres from my house, and I pull over in the car in spring (October) to have a sniff. Heaven. Not sure why they're not more widespread here, as camellias grow like weeds.

Love to hear of the spring planting in the UK, as it gets me started for the same here.

I was wondering the other day about the aussie garden! great to hear from you echt.

Cloudy but dry here today. May do some potting out of my Pak choi and potting on my leggy brassicas. I've got all my potatoes in sacks now, and some nearly earthed up to the top!

Checking my perpetual garden diary, I note that on this day last year we had a female stag beetle crawling on the deck. I guess they will come out of hibernation (?) later this year due to temperatures.

Have just been given a pot of leek seedlings, which are very tiny (look like strands of green hair). Should I plant them in the raised bed Bowie grow them on for a bit first?

::veg novice::

I don't think Bowie would grow them for you. I'd give them a week or two to get a little fatter but ime, leeks are fairly tough.

I love hearing about all your gardens, especially the Aussie one. I used to have an allotment in Chicago and never failed to be amazed at how things grew. Because the seasons are so extreme, the growing season is much shorter than in the UK but it goes from being barren to a tropical jungle in days. I miss my allotment.

Oh for Heaven's sake. Bowie should have been now or.

Every time I go to write pak choi on my phone it amends it to 'Pakistan choice'. Took me bloody months to train it that I wrote DH far more than I was ever likely to write Dhaka. The iPad is less slow to learn. But it is slavishly correct about respecting upper/lower case trademarks, like iPad, eBay. Technology eh. Give me a low tech dinner and tamper any day.

Or even dibber.

I was wondering about the significance of 'bowie'.Lexi you are definitely queen of the online innuendo.I've done lots of potting on today.But will someone please stop me buying multiples of everything as i now have pots and pots of erysimums.The patio is full of little pots and there is no room for anything else[apart from a continual rain of pine needles].There again,I suppose i will have lots of pots to donate to the school plant sale.Now the sun is out,i feel a trip to the garden centre coming on.

Ooh, have I missed Lexi's latest rood innuendo?

::innocent::

I wonder whether David Bowie is a celeb gardener. They usually come out for Chelsea. I suppose I could turn off the autocorrect but, of course, at other times it's quite useful.

This afternoon I will be mostly planting perennials in the Brownie garden.

Maud I don't think Bowie would worry about planting his leeks out just yet, celeb gardener or no. I start mine off in seed trays and they stay in there until about pencil size then they go into the main bed. I reckon mine have another 4-6 weeks yet as they too are still feeble little hair strands.

Meant to ask advice on cosmos seedlings. The ones MIL gave me last week are about 10 inches high with no branching. If I nip out the tops will they branch a bit more, or do I need not worry, or, will I kill them?

Ivory rhodedendrons, pink valerian, bue ceanothus pale white aquilegia, white clematis, and red paeonies in flower here. Also blue forgetmenots, purple violets and a spider plant which got planted out by mistake years ago and has flowers very tall in spring, like a bullrush.

Buds on the roses, clematis viticella polish spirit, cistus, pinks, etc. Birds flying into garden and poking around: cuckoo, blackbirds, blue tits, robins. No slugs.

Ordered the Roseclear, fed everything with tomato food, sewed spinach and lettuce, and sat and enjoyed a cup of coffee in the garden in my colonial ivory basket chair. Will plant dahlias next weekend.

Computer borrowed by revising DS most of the day so resorted to reading gardening books from the bookshelves in the spare room, and discovered why my Gwalior sandstone stepping stone path is a design disaster. It should have been brick to tie in with the house.

Gobsmacked by the Thai orchids and South African plants on the show about Chelsea. And I loved Beth Chatto and her empty river bed. I prefer Beth Chatto to some of the big Chelsea concrete structures because I can relate her garden more to what might happen in my own garden. Some of those Chelsea gardens made me feel very small and novice.

I forgot that Chelsea was on today-will catch up on i-player.Bought nemesia Confetti for some of my pots today[looks light and airy].Plus a clematis diamontina[sp?] with some smaller apple blossom nemesia.Also some beautifully scented violas in yellow and purple/black.I buy flowers now when i used to buy clothes and make-up!.Is this the onset of middleage?.

:: refuses to comment about correlation between love of gardening and onset of middle age::

Drat. Missed Chelsea prog and as pc is kaput will have to watch on phone, which will be a pain what with wearing my bifocals on a chain round my neck, a la Hinge (or was it Bracket?)

I have finished planting the Brownie garden and had so many plants left over I did some guerilla gardening in other parts of the churchyard.

I have just spotted buds on the Buff Beauty rose and nearly all the geraniums and aquilegias are in flower. The only clematis in flower are the Montana (Elizabeth, I think) and Wada's Primrose. Polish Spirit still needs a good hack back, but I think there are stil birds nesting in it. It may have to miss a year. It's such a good doer. I luffs it.

My finger just slipped on the 'add to basket' button on the Thompson and Mirgan website and I have bought nine black plants (potted, not plugs) for £8. Bargain, and possibly even better than shoes.

What did you buy Maud?

hello everyone. The weather really improved here by the end of the afternoon, and I went to an open garden near my house. It was lovely.

All the iris that were supposed to be yellow are actually purple. But the alliums are starting to look amazing. Slugs have eaten every seedling in the round veg patch, I am seriously pissed off and put slug pellets down. The peas have finally germinated but am still crossing my fingers for the wildflower meadow. Surely they will start to grow soon????? We put a lot of different seeds down there, they can't all have failed, surely?

The rose walk is looking really good, I think this will be the year it arrives (as it were). The Paul's Himalayan Musk in the cherry tree is going great guns as well, but the Kiftsgate is looking rather pathetic. We planted it too close to the tree.

Am off to look at the Thomson and Morgan site now Maud, you are a bad influence

T&M have lots of offers at the moment,, Humphrey.

::siren call of the gardening websites::

I bought black hollyhocks, aquilegia black Barlow and black scabious - three of each as a package.

Oh, does anyone still use potting grit? Even a large garden centre I tried didn't have it. I don't want sand. I don't want fine gravel. I want potting grit.

::stamps foot::

I had to got to about three different garden centres last year for potting grit. When I eventually found it I bought loads. Think I found it in one of the smaller places in the end.

Yeah, I'm obviously going to have to trek from garden centre to garden centre. Sigh.

I'm on a no garden centre ban too - at least for anything bigger than seeds. Must try and find a plant swap somewhere though. I have so many spare.

Today I finally flung out the dying bay tree from the pot by the front door. Such a shame as it used to be really pretty and I was shaping it up to be quite a nice little lollipop but the cold 2 winters ago was too much for it. Instead I've put out a big pot containing a purple foxglove, a pink aquilegia, a red campion, 2 pink cosmos and some feverfew. Hoping it will be a bit classy naturalistic and will have to do as a front garden as we don't have one.

Bertha I grow tons of cosmos and have never pinched it out, always seems to do fine and quite big branching plants. Its a failsafe for me, and needs very little tlc.