A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

[MaudantWit]

Join us for ongoing gardening chat in the MN potting shed. Blow the cobwebs off a deckchair, help yourself to a glass of elderberry champagne and tell us about your garden.

How awful about the fire.

I have tried every slug and snail deterrent known to personkind! Because I plant very densely (ie cram things into very small spaces), there isn't much bare ground on which to put the eggshells (which I roast in the oven for extra sharpness) and the pesky molluscs can apparently abseil from one plant to the next!

Buoyed up by my salvia cuttings, I may try some rose cuttings now. How long did you make each cutting?

If your rose cuttings have taken castle now may the time to plant some of them on into richer compost. I did that recently with a rose cutting that was losing its leaves and it's perked up no end. I am sorry to hear about the fire too.

I noticed Monty has a lovely deep red lupin on GW, which reminded me that I used to have two lupins but they disappeared this year. Pesky slugs no doubt.

I had been avoiding slug pellets but then got so frustrated at my little plants getting eaten when I planted them out last year that I used them more freely this year and oh! it's made a difference. What I thought was seeds not germinating was simply the little thugs eating them before they grew up,. I did spread the pellets thinly and there aren't that many corpses, but they still seem to be effective. There are so few birds in the garden now since the neighbours' many cats appeared, that I can't rely on the birds eating the sluggies.

A couple of ohotos of my pride and joys...

One my Japanese Wineberry, it's like a bramble, with red stems but the fruits...they only open when ripe and there is this beautiful jewel of a berry there and this year, the plant is loaded with flowers yet to open. I have two but this is the best. Bought from the gardeners at Ryton.

Second, my Egyptian Walking Onions, in year 5 now they have suddenly shot up taller and bigger than before, and the first 'top' is just about to root. They produce bulbils on the top of the stems, and when the weight is too much, the stem falls over and they root where they fall. Lovely.

funky those are really funky plants!
my roses 'gloria dei' (the one that was already here when we moved in) is about to bloom, as is the 'hansestadt rostock' whick has too many bulbs to count! blue for you is finished for now, have deadheaded it and hope for more flowers later.
it's a good year for strawberries, we get loads, a nice bowl full every day perfect with ice cream

Tell me more about your Japanese wineberry, Funky. I have one but don't really know what to do with it. I anted it next to the fence and intended to tie it into the fence but, before I could get round to it, it had escaped and is heading for the top of the apple tree. It looks quite good there but it'll be hard to reach the fruit. Do you prune yours? By how much? And have you trained it onto a framework or is it free to do its own thing?

Planted it ...

Yes I strung up three wires along the fence and trained a main stem along each. I allow it to fruit as much as possible then prune it back to near the main horizontal each year, but above a outward facing bud. Much like a grape.

They will go bananas if let loose, they have to be trained. Much like brambles.

We had planted a grape there, one of the 'last on the shelf please buy me for 10p' from Wilkos...and it did nothing for 2 years. So the wineberry went in and bingo - that spurred the grape on. You can just see some of the leaves intertwined. So I am training that in and out of the fence posts as the wires are now fully laden with wineberry.

Today we drove up to the goldfields, Maldon in particular, a lovely preserved Victorian gold rush town. There was a market selling lots of expensive posh tat. More entertainingly, we went to the first swap meet I've ever been to in Australia:lots of cars parts/weird garage-filling crap.
One smallholder had the lovely tagline "pathetically exquisite".:o

More horticulturally, we drove through Harcourt, heart of apple country in Victoria and were inspired to buy online later: a Cox's Orange Pippin and Campbelltown Russet, dwarf trees from Tasmania, that will turn up in July. So time to give the coup de grace to the non-flowering crepe myrtle and get the ground sorted.

Thanks for that, Funky. I bought the JW on an 'unusual edibles' stall without doing much research on it!

I wind it around the wires, rather than tie it in. Don't want to have to untie one of those buggers.

Hello all!

Love the quote feel I am learning lots of poetry as well as gardening can't be bad!

Castle so sorry about the GP's house, with regards to the cuttings I use the root grow fungi stuff on everything so if you do pot them up would recommend it!

I tried to make elderflower champagne last year and it was foul at least what was left go it no more making fizzy drinks in glass bottles for me!

Humph I spent yesterday traipsing round a gardens open day in rain and there were other people so there are dedicated people who won't be put off by the weather, am jealous I can't make it.

How to I get on to the Facebook page to see the photos?

2 ngs gardens open near us today so will be off to see them. I think I will replant my rose cuttings into organic compost then and take some more too.
How quickly the garden changes. The purple alliums and irises are over already!
Echt I Love hearing about Australia.
Maud are you feeding your clematis tomato feed at present? Is now the time to feed them?

Echt I love hearing about Australia too. When we lived there DH went off to a goldmining ghost town for a weekend hunting for gold! Still trying to visualise those monster geraniums!

Thanks for rose tips. I will have to do something. The compost I planted them into is always cracked and dry looking. Can't be helping.
Maud I cut pieces approx 50cm long and then trimmed them closer to 30cm when I went to plant them. I googled lots first. I was liberal with the rooting hormone powder.

A bit of an off-topic, but do any of you have an Aga? Since we have put in underfloor heating there is very little argument to NEED one, but I really want to buy a reconditioned one.... Any thoughts?

New thread lovely :)

wynken what a lovely thing to do for your friend.

castle underfloor heating! Sorry I can't help you with Aga query but I think there are some old threads about it.

I've just finished nights and am still in bed although house work is calling, boo.

Castle I am so sorry to hear about the fire .

I'd love to have lupins but heard they can give you bad hayfever and as we get through bottles of antihistamine, I'm too scared to try. Justoobad, we have someone who comes and cuts the grass and the hedges etc. takes the pressure off and I enjoy the garden so much more now I can do the bits I like.

We don't really have fences, there's just a couple that are more gates. The rest of the plot is bordered by strawberry trees, leylandi and laurel which take a fair bit of maintenance. To over the bare bits of conifer hedge outside where the huge conifer was however, I've just ordered some willow panels . This is what we look out on from the kitchen door and is behind my new border so should really improve how it looks.

Re the rose cuttings, I noticed my Queen Eluzabeth one has just flowered . This is very easy to get going though and I've had success with this before. The others aren't looking do great so think I might pot them up and see what happens.

Echt, are Possums the Oz equivalent to UK slugs?!

Castle my 2d on the Aga question is that friends have them and love them. We often stay in a holiday cottage that has one so I have had a play too, drawing on my friends' experiences and advice.

You do have to cook in a different way (using the ovens not the top heat, to keep the heat in), and because the temperatures of the ovens are odd (very low and pretty high on a 2 oven Aga) the things you can cook can be restricted - it depends what you like to cook.

If I were you, I would borrow a few Aga cookbooks, and even stay somewhere with one, to see how you get on.

I would have one like a shot if our kitchen were big enough, but would also have a big combination microwave/oven/grill for when the Aga is not able to be used.

Missed the Aga question before. I only know 2 people with them and they are a friend who grew up on a farm and her Mum.. Think friend was born ith Aga usage coded into her genetic make up. They didn't have a kettle or toaster for ages , was all on the Aga. There isn't anything she can't do it . She totally gets the whole planning times around it.

We house sat once for a week and I was quite worried before but managed fine. It does cost her a fortune in oil to run though. At one point she was spending her entire part time nurse's salary on oil for the Aga and petrol for the car.

MIL has an aga. We never eat when she says we're going to. I think other people manage better than she does!

Photo of guests I found in the veg plot today. Saw two of them so they're obviously happy there. Can anyone identify them? They are obviously immune to slug pellets like my slugs which is good.

I think it's a newt.

Yes, been googling, I think common newts. I have no idea why my veg plot is so attractive to aquatic species. We have heaps of frogs too. No ponds in the vicinity at all.

Thanks for the advice ladies!
Wynken I can't believe your rose cuttings are doing so well! Some even in flower?!
Bertha what exciting garden visitors! I had a fox cub yesterday!

Nothing accomplished here, but the hardy geraniums have rewarded me for transplanting onto the bank by springing into flower! Yay! Something is in bloom at last!

It's just the one from the QE rose Bertha. It's in a different place to the others and to be honest I had forgotten it was there until I saw the flowers. I think it went in earlier than the others and it is next to the main plant - which likes it where it is, was supposed to be a bush but turned out to be the climbing version and is very easy to get cuttings to take from. I've got two other decent sized plants fom previous cuttings .

We've had a couple of foxes in the garden during the day recently. The lovely dog came in stinking of fox poo and barks if she hears them at night. I hate it when they scream, frightened the life out of me the first time. They are getting quite desperate here as we changed frm bin bags which they used to constantly rip open to plastic bins.

Love the newts!

I had some fun tonight, planting the Lidl pear tree in its giant pot and then threading it with solar fairy lights. I had forgotten quite how many sets of lights I had bought lady year; they have been sitting in a box in the kitchen ever since.

Duh. Last year. Drat that auto-correct.

Wynken, possums can be as devastating as slugs, and have the added advantage of being a protected species. :o

Today was a vair fresh 6 degrees in the a.m., but very sunny so a bout of gardening soon had the jumpers and scarfs being flung about.

We began the reclaiming of the deceased lawn: lots of natives, mostly tube stock; tons of mulch and step back and wait. Natives demand the discipline I lack, that is, you plant some weeny scraggy wee shite of a plant, and wait for it to spread two metres. The whole planting in threes and fives just don't go.

The raised bed that housed the cannas that wouldn't do anything is now home to a grevillea "Superb", chosen for its year-round flowers and capacity to take a chop - it's at the edge of sight for the deck, so don't want it to get to two metres.

Round the side of the house I pulled up a useless grevillea alba and planted Banksia integrifolia, the coastal banksia. It will grow into a ten-metre tree if we let it, but is amenable to pruning. We won't see it from our windows, but it will cool the house and feed the birds.

DH called me to look at a tree full of cockatoos - about twenty-five - corellas, not the sulphur-crested kind. They look like big white Christmas tree baubles.

I now need to rest and have a gin and Dubonnet, the preferred beverage of the present queen's mum. Mark of respect, don't you know. (hic)

:o