Gardeners' Chat

[MmePoppySeedDefage]

Chat. For gardeners. About gardening, but we can go off piste and chat about things like non-gardening clothes, or food or whatever, without being told off

On 5th May I started some courgette seeds and they'd usually have come through in a couple of weeks, but they didn't. Went out and bought two plants from a nursery, then looked at the tray and one has germinated. Typical, but at least it's the variety I prefer, Romanesco. The same will no doubt happen with some beans I started.

I’d like bees, but I’d like someone else to do all the looking after them.

Tricyrtis I use Wilgrow too. Excellent stuff. This year though I was too late and they’d sold out, so I’m using Pukkamuck on my roses and veg beds instead.

I use wool compost for seeds, and in the tomato and pepper pots. A couple of years ago I grew half my peppers in wool, half in regular compost (all I could get hold of at the time due to covid). The plants in the wool grew smaller and more slowly. However, I kept track of the produce over the season, and despite the smaller plants, those in the wool produced just as many peppers as those in the other compost, of an equal size and quality.

We had such fabulous weather this weekend! Did lots of garden stuff, Chelsea-chopping some perennials, weeding, pruning, edging the bloody lawn... (DC were helping and kept begging "So are we going to buy that edging tool your internet people suggested?")...

And DH grandly declared he was going to take down our died-of-old-age Ceanothus tree. He quickly filled up the brown wheelie bin with chopped-up branches, and lo! the dead tree looks almost unchanged. "It looked like such a small tree!" he wailed. We're going to have to wait until the bin is collected to do the rest of the tree. And that's with us planning to save the whole trunk to edge one of our planting beds.

We did get out for a long walk to look at the glorious rhododendrons in our nearby woodland, followed by ice creams all round. And lunches and teas in the front garden too (we are the neighbourhood weirdoes who use our front garden as much as our back garden). So a marvellous weekend.

It is amazing how small plants become massive plants the minute you try to cram them into garden waste bins, isn’t it? One of the wonders of nature… I also have a dead ceanothus; I’m growing a clematis over it and it’s proving to be an excellent climbing frame.

@Kucinghitam ceanothus makes not bad fire wood once it's dry.

A beech tree blew over in a storm here once, landing on the barn and destroying it (but luckily missed the horses), and it was as tall lying on its side as it was standing upright!

I cleared and replanted two smallish beds, washed loads of pots and hacked the world's most congested agapanthus out of a lovely terracotta pot. It got caught by that sharp frost in February so was brown and crispy on top, but further down there was some green. But other than breaking the pot, there was no way I had a hope of doing anything with it, so I spent a happy half an hour cutting away at the remains with my huge French cooks knife, and hacking the bits out. Most satisfying and a good workout.

So I had a very good weekend and the light was sometimes so lovely and clear, it was gorgeous.

MmePoppySeed, that was me a few years ago. It was hard work and took ages, but made a lot of new plants.

So for me, it's forget me not clearing time. Working my way around the garden. I pull them up every year, but the very next my garden is once again full of them. I do love them, but when they start to seed they start to look messy, so out they must come. So two council bins full later, half the garden is done. And then....

Saturday night at dinner, itched my arm, took a look, and a bloody tick had attached itself. Irony was that I had only just bought some insect repellent as I had run out, so hadn't used any during that day. Every year I get two or three, it's such a pain, anyone else get them??

So today, hilariously, I sprayed myself liberally with repellent, put on a rain coat, zipped it up, hood up, wellies...... and once again faced the garden ready to pull up some more forget me nots. I must have looked a right state. The things I do for my garden 😂

Is Lyme disease an issue where you are? I got it once from a tick bite but luckily I got the classic bullseye rash and went straight to the doctor and took a month's worth of doxycycline so no ill effects.

Ticks are about the only insect I don't have a problem with, but every other biting insect on the planet loves me. These days I use Smidge and it's absolutely life-changingly wonderful. Apparently repels ticks as well.

Link https://www.smidgeup.com

<pedant>

Ahem, ticks are arachnids

/<pedant>

Are they? I didn't know that.

Yup. If you have the misfortune to encounter a tick, you'll see that they have 4 pairs of legs. Growing up in the tropics, and having a pet dog, I got to see a lot of ticks up close and personal, having to remove them from the dog (and occasionally, ourselves). Fucking enormous ticks, too. The thought of them still makes me gip, 30+ years on.

When we lived in Taiwan the dog got a few ticks, but I was so intent on removing them I never looked at them closely. The giant cockroaches were more of an issue at the time, but at least the geckos sorted them out.

Ah yes, the giant, flying cockroaches.

Several of our Biology insect dissection practicals utilised the aforementioned cockroaches, because they were (1) huge and (2) very readily available. The two that spring to mind are the "general omnivorous insect mouthparts" and "the respiratory system of insects." Specifically, we were required to BYO cockroaches, which (in our family) involved luring and trapping them with a plastic cup of dogfood. I still recall the schoolbus, on the morning of such practicals, many of us gingerly holding a rustling plastic bag of frantic giant vermin.

Erm, akshually <pushes glasses back up nose> I think you'll find the first larval stage of ticks has only three pairs of legs.

Not that it really matters, feckin' little, disease vectoring blood suckers <shudder>. My cat used to get them on his face.

Macman gets ticks, usually on his balls. I don’t suffer from them at all, and have surmised it’s because they can crawl up his hairy legs but have nothing to grasp on my smooth silk-scarf-floating skin.

So where others use expressions like “I’d rather poke my own eyes out with a pencil than [whatever], I say “I’d rather tweeze ticks off my partner’s bollocks”.

I remember having to dissect a cockroach when I did Biology A level in 1968.

Dog ticks aren't problematic, but deer ticks carry Lyme disease. There is a whole department of our university where you send any tick that bites you to find out what kind of tick it is and whether it's carrying Lyme.

Macman gets ticks, usually on his balls.

Now there's a sentence I've never read before. How horrid for him, Mavis!

One more tick story, from my Taiwan days. I wasn't at this gathering, but the story did the rounds - a group of friends were meeting in a flat, sat talking and drinking beer, when a huge cockroach appeared. They all reached for magazines, rolled them up and went for the cockroach, which flew into a nearby fan and immediately flew out again all minced up and sprayed them with bits.

Macman gets ticks, usually on his balls.

They all reached for magazines, rolled them up and went for the cockroach, which flew into a nearby fan and immediately flew out again all minced up and sprayed them with bits.

Is it wrong that I'm genuinely LOLing at these?

One more tick story

That should have been 'one more cockroach story', obvs.

Unfortunately yes. We are South West Surrey. DH caught Lyme a few years ago and was signed off work for 6 months. He didn't get the rash, but we knew when he began to feel "odd" to get antibiotics, as we had removed a tick from him a couple of weeks earlier.