Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

[SugarPlumTree]

Potting shed thread for those who enjoy talking about gardens and plants. Plenty of garden chairs and the wood burner lit now there is a chill in the air, please join us !

Any organic matter is good really. Best thing would be a combination of the bark and some poo too. If you've got stables nearby that's perfect! Just make sure it's well rotted.

It doesn't really matter if you cut the orchid stem down to the base. It will eventually grow a new one. Cutting it half way down is just a short cut to getting more flowers - it doesn't always work though!

Hmm. The well rotted may be a problem, I suspect, with anything we get from the stables but I can buy some from the horticultural society. Pity that dd was never interested in joining the Pony Club.

Hello everyone and a belated Happy New Year.

I am just recovering from the news of the giant cockroaches at Kew

Royal poo sounds brilliant Maud.

It is great to read gardening resolutions. Mine is to do some gardening. ANY gardening! I was eyeing up the spring borders earlier and thinking that I will get out with ToddlerCObbler in tow and try to weed them. Snowdrops are surfacing. I wish I had planted more hellebores.

My favourite garden thing at the moment is the dogwood triangle next to the downy birches. It looks lovely at this time of year. I must underplant with snowdrops by next year.

Happy New Year, Humph!

::air kiss::

Oh yes, the poo comes straight from the royal stables, doncha know.

I am hoping for some dry weather, so that by the weekend the ground is dry enough for a bit of planting. At the moment, it's a balmy 10 degrees here, so it should be warm enough.

It is rather wet here in wales (no surprise here). Feeding the pigs is hard work, slipping and sliding all over the place.

What are you planning to plant?

I think the problem with my courgette/pumpkin patch this year was poorly rotted horse poo. I'm topping it up this year with muck straight from the chicken coop over winter instead. I want a courgette glut next year to make up for this year's deficit.

Rosemary is currently in one of the pots I need to replace on the patio as it's gone woody and leggy. If I put that by the front door I'm going to have a gap in my herb pot collection. Oh, decisions, decisions...

I have a huge backlog of things that have been plonked in their pots on the beds, awaiting proper planting. Off the top of my head, there's a rose, several hellebores, an astelia, a sambucus, at least two heucheras, two pulmonarias, some vincas that still have not been potted on from the plastic pods they arrived in and some little pots of snowdrops that have been hanging around for about three years. Oh and there are several clematis, waiting to go on the new fence if it ever happens.

Is ToddlerCobbler old enough to be given a trowel for light play digging? ::lost track a bit::

how satisfying to get that lot in! I have a few things that need moving. DH and I are arguing about the geum Hilltop Beacon in the pigscot borders, they flop over the path and drive him mad. I LIKE it that they flop over the path! Also I have nowhere else to put them.

ToddlerCobbler is fifteen months. I could give him a trowel but he would possibly brain me with it, he is addicted to hurling things around. He seems to have stopped trying to eat gravel though, which means the garden is easier to be in.

Bertha, I have found I either have no courgettes at all or too many.

Happy new year to the cobbler family!
maud Royal Poo! One imagines it is full of good quality organic non genetically modified excrement. Definitely add to compost heap or use in some way I say.
Not having access to Royal Poo I bought 4 bags of rotted horse manure for £12.50 on special offer from Wisley on Sunday and asked the helpful and knowledgable man who put them in the car whether it was too early/late to use it now given the mild weather and he said he thought best to wait a bit till spring otherwise I might start plants too early into growth.
But when is it spring if your rosemary is flowering already! In my old garden years ago, Miss Jessop Upright rosemary was the very first plant I planted in a sunny spot near the honeysuckle. It is a lovely vigorous scented pretty plant!

It will be if I achieve it! I generally place plants where I intend eventually to plant them, so that the space is 'booked', but I may need to shift some of them about and that may mean that some don't get planted because they've been 'bumped'. And I could create a new planting area if I lifted the canopy on the viburnum tinus. ::Indecision::

I love things flopping artlessly onto paths, although flopping onto the lawn and killing it, as my erysimum Bowles Mauve does, is less good.

Let's scrap the trowel idea, then, if it will leave you hospitalised rather than ToddlerCobbler peacefully amused.

Need to try to keep more up to date on here happy belated birthdays to all! DD will be one end of the month and can't believe it, I naively had so many plans re what iwas going to do with my time off

My success was the long border, it was lovely with lots of foliage varieties.

Failure was obviously the garage not going in or the sunny border being planted but these will be done this year, oh yes they will!

BAC does seem to have some odd people this time not sure I will enjoy it as much, oh well

echt is there an Australian gardeners world and can we see it over here? I know it won't be much use but it could fill a brief gap?

Hello funnyperson!

You have all reminded me that it is time to order the mulch.

ToddlerCobbler is rather a force of nature, over three days at Christmas he toppled a cup of coffee all over himself by PICKING UP A TABLE LEG (fortunately unharmed but a huge worry at the time), shut his fingers in the door of a museum, necessitating a trip to hospital for x-ray, no broken bones but lots of blood, and finally grabbing a knife that was supposed to be out of his reach and gouging multiple holes into a VERY posh dining table.....Running around after him is keeping me fit!

Oh dear, Humph! Ds is a bit like that. He quite literally lamped his sister yesterday, by whacking her in the face with a torch and giving her a black eye. She did provoke him, but even so, the speed with which he resorts to violence never fails to take me by surprise. It's all throwing and grabbing and hitting at the moment. At least biting seems to be on the wane, I suppose.

I just watched a repeat of the Gardens Through Time episode on Great Dixter. Lovely. I want summer.

all throwing and grabbing and hitting - this is so familiar
hope your DD is ok.

I too want summer. January is my least favourite month.

I think I want spring, when everything is so fresh and green and bursting with potential.

ToddlerCobbler and RhubarbBoy sound rather like my brother when young. He did eventually calm down, but my mother had always maintained that, had he been born first, he'd have remained an only child because the experience was too exhausting to go through twice.

not long maud not long. only a few more weeks of mud...
did a great tidy up yesterday, the fig tree is down to manageable heights.
proper aching muscles today.

Ah, is now a good time to prune figs? That's another job to add to the list. I wax wondering too whether I could get away with a winter prune of the apples now, as it didn't happen in November.

I don't want to wish my life away but you're right, mausmaus, I do keep telling myself that spring is just a few weeks away.

Your boys are so similar they would get on very well together!
I haven't planted enough snowdrops for an early spring in the garden, I must plant a lot more next year. But the primroses have been flowering all winter. think you can prune fruit trees still. I caught the end of the Great Dixter programme and the summer borders were magnificent. They prune brilliantly there. Wisley goes for the hedgehog style but Great Dixter pruning is an art form.
maud can I come and visit your garden? P ..l...e...a...se....

By the sound of it, if those boys meet, it had better be in an open area, with no tools, trowels or torches close by...

certainly true for mine! In fact, BOTH my boys have been like this.

Funnyperson - I very much believe in the dictum that a garden is never finished, but if I reach the stage where mine is 'finished' in the sense of no gaping hole in the fence, junk removed and everything planted, you'd be very welcome to come! Meanwhile, I will continue to put carefully-angled photos on FB.

I do wonder if we're having a sort of fake spring at the moment and there's lots of freezing still to come. I was in the garden yesterday and it was suspiciously warm but there's still lots of January and February to get through when we could have a big freeze.

So, I planted all the tulip bulbs I'd forgotten in the autumn (just 2 bags of 10) thinking it was almost certainly too late, but then I googled a bit and Monty says it's fine to plant tulips in early January.

Re Cambridge Botanical Garden, I was lucky enough to get a tour last month (incl behind the scenes - very large, very tidy potting shed) from someone I know who works there (not in a gardening capacity). They do have some very excellent dogwood, wonderfully red. How do you get it to grow in a clump rather than a tall shrub? Is it by pruning it right down to the ground every year?

I think this may well be a false spring. I doubt the temperature will stay at 10 degrees for long and that's why I'd prefer to get things planted; those things that are in 5 inch pots will probably be less susceptible to freezing once they're in the ground than they are in their little pots.

How lovely to have a behind the scenes look at the Cambridge BG. I killed my cornus by moving it, but I think the way to get a nicely-shaped clump is by pruning/pollarding.

Ref. indoor orchids, i've killed too many to remember but DD2 has a way with them, exactly like Rhubabrb says ;she keeps hers in the bathroom (not on the windowsil) with clear pots ,potbound, and stood in water occasionally. They live ! Not too many flowers lately though.

I have actually visited Great Dixter. I love it apart from the topiary which is not my scene, I'm going to start a meadow like their one this year because my 'wild wood' was cleared by our helper under instructions from dh when I was away .

I also have 3 bays, a variegated common hedge plant, a climbing rose and a self seeded purple leaved tree all waiting in pots to be made into a living fence or hedge!! opposite our kitchen window (where the overgrown leylandii were). It's miserable, cold and dank here.