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 added to my thyme collection today. Went to the Ricky festival and saw with great happiness that possibly my favourite gardening outlet were ther - Herbal Haven. I now have about eight thymes and am going to start treating them nicely - will make up another terracotta container for all of them. Maybe parsley and sage would go well in the two pots (rosemary done yesterday) then I would have my little garden theme song...

So, I have common thyme, orange, white, creeping white, silver posie, doone valley, one other I can't remember without going to look to see if I labelled it at the label, and today's are lime, woolly and pink chintz. Oops. That's ten. I may have a bit of a thyme problem...!

I love thyme - I'm going to get some more too. I only have 1 at the moment so am not in your league, lexi!

I've just been watching the Chelsea programme on I player.I love the Sarah Price garden and the Chris Beardshaw one.Interesting to hear that he doesn't think it will win anything because its not fashionable.Its very similar to my garden here.I grow what works on my soil and thats rhodos/azaleas and camellias with blowsy flowers-Basically lots of spring flowers,i need more summer flowering plants.I didn't like the Thai pavilion -very tacky[but colourful].The Korean garden was very cleverly done as was the tropical plant-finders garden.I'm looking forward to the rest of the coverage.

Settling down, watching Chelsea now.

Adds Chelsea programme to list to watch

It's lovely hearing about all your gardens. And I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one on a garden centre ban or limit. Although having said that I'm off to the garden centre tomorrow but will have to be very strict about what to buy. My list is rather long

I'm wondering if I should pot on my tomatoes or just go for it & transfer to a grow bag. They're the cold frame at the moment but we don't have a greenhouse so I'll have to take my chances with the outdoors. Too early to transfer to final growing place?

Oooh Hello! I'm at my mum's helping her recover from her hip operations and I find myself in charge of peach rescusitation as well. A quick google has revealed it has peach leaf curl and while the rhs site is very good on giving me advice what to do for next year to prevent this from happening again (plastic tent, bordeaux mix) there is very little about what I should do now! It says take off the affected leaves and fruit and burn them but the tree is only a baby and this would completely defoliate it.

What should I do?

RHS on peach leaf curl
apps.rhs.org.uk/advicesearch/profile.aspx?pid=232

I have the same problem Helen. I'm leaving leaves on unless they look actually fungal, and making a frame for covering them next winter.

more plants sold at work today, and I've been promising to do cuttings for people. Getting a bit of a cottage industry going!

Not all that inspired by the chelsea show. And I think I am on the pearl-clutching side of the fence about that new category (but didn't the RHS lady do an impressively hyper pitch for it!)

Thanks funny and Lexi. I think I'll leave the leaves alone and implement a Peach protection strategy for the winter!

Now on to sorting out their vegetable patch. A veggie patch on almost solid clay I ask you! Also I have NEVER seen as many slugs in one place as my mother's house. She appears to live at slug central! We took 53 from the big pot with her mint in it on Sunday - 53! That's a lot of decomposing slugs.

Yes she did!.I was a bit exhausted after watching her.I dislike the fresh exhibitions too.However i do love the impressionistic naturalistic planting thats present in many of the gardens,plus the beautiful trees.I love the garden with the perforated copper/bronze screen dipping into the water done i think by a very experienced Chelsea veteran but didn't like the Aussie one.

I didn't see all of yesterday's Chelsea programme and none of Sunday's but am very thrilled at all the arts and crafts planting that seems to be going on, as that's how my garden is planted and, much as I love bold and stark architectural planting with three Dicksonia Antartica and a rill, it'd never work for this garden and this house.

Just had a look at some Chelsea pictures on the Telegraph website. Photographers are hilarious. Nice picture, bugger the caption. I'm pretty sure those vibrant Hollyhocks are Hyacinths and that country is Grenada - not Granada!
www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/chelseaflowershow/9280408/Chelsea-Flower-Show-2012-The-weird-and-the-wonderful.html#?frame=2225850

I quite like the Sarah Price Garden but I like Joe Swift's better.

We had a dicksonia antartica but it died last year after the hard winter. Was wrapped up but obviously not enough :(

Teta, I went to Chelsea FS last year and the aussie garden then was similar - kind of bland, really. However, its chief attraction which I doubt has any effect on the RHS judges was the rather scrummy young men standing around it, handing out plant lists. I came over all Lady Chatterley for a moment.

Have planted radish, spring onions and pak choy THREE times outside, and nothing has come yet, apart from the odd straggly radish sprout...

but with this weather, I am planting out my peas and courgettes today, along with some pak choy seedlings (hangs head in shame) but they're leftovers from my dad's garden, so can justify non-seed growing ;)

[offers elderflower fizz from lst year] I love this sun!!

Has anyone grown corriander/dill/tarragon successfully from seed? Would I use a pot or put them direct into a spare patch in my herb garden?

And does parsley need replenishing every year? My plants from last yr are still quite bushy but have gone to seed a bit... have they had it or are they rescuable?

Lexi - giggle, I applaud your Lady Chatterly perversion tendencies, bravo!

I've got some coriander seedlings on the go now, although they se to have suffered a bit from the combined effects of potting-on and snails. I don't usually grow the others as I don't know what to do with them, culinarily-speaking, although fill makes a very pretty plant.

I sitting in the garden trying not veryhard to motivate myself to do and do some ironing. I think I may plant up the herb planter and have a swig of that very palatable elderflower fizz instead.

:: to dampen Lexi's ardour with the seep hose::

Oh and I think parsley is a biennial, so once it goes to seed it's pretty much had it (and the flavour changes too).

Dill should be easy from seed. I have some starting to come through in a tall slim pot with fine gravel on top, actually from seed heads collected off last year's.

I've done Russian tarragon from seed but it's not as 'culinary' as French, which can only be propagated from cuttings.

Coriander is a pain. I can't get it going, nor basil. No kitchen windowsill is my problem.

Didn't Monty say in the autumn that parsley should be left out over winter as a perennial? Mine (curly) thrived on that.

Maud - we grab handfuls of dill and do them briefly at the end of grilling salmon on the BBQ and tarragon goes in chicken bake things. With wine.

If he said that, then dear old Monty got it wrong!

Strawberry plants. Greenfly. Infested. Suggestions? ARGH!

Everything in our veg garden has been killed by slugs, and I suspect that is what happened to the wildflower meadow seedlings too They have even stripped the potato crop, which was fine a few days ago.

I spray greenfly with a soapy solution, seems to make them go black and drop off. Only done it on roses though.

Soapy stuff is good but has to be direct hits to kill.

Coriander is tricky; whenever I grow it from seed it throws out a few nice leaves and then bolts to seed. Am trying it in a hanging basket this year in the hope that will work better.

If anyone has any ideas of what I can do with 200 square metres of empty soil, that SHOULD be a wildflower meadow? I don't think we are going to get the slug population under control this year, and we have already spent quite a bit on seed that has failed, not to mention the seed that Maud so kindly posted to me

DH is not happy. He has slug rage.

sorry, that didn't even make sense