What have you done in the garden today? Part 5

[MereDintofPandiculation]

What have you done in the garden today? What went well? What surprises have you had? What could have gone better?

I love reading this thread, as a novice gardener I'm learning a lot.
Recently I've learnt that the previously unidentified bushes in my garden are actually snowberry bushes. I've also learnt that snowberry bushes aren't great 😞
They don't seem to be causing any trouble at the moment, but is there anything I should do going forward?

I saw a nice example of buttercups and geraniums looking very similar in form and location a couple of days ago - geranium sylvaticum and large white buttercups growing near to each other. Very pretty they both were too.

If you like them, keep them. It's your garden and you get to grow it how you like it.
I have several plants in my garden that would probably be weeds in someone else's, but my garden is a jumbled profusion of everything so they add to the joyful chaos.

@Goodgriefken I would suggest making sure it knows you are in charge.

I ended up with a mixed hedge that was 99% snowberry and it being impossible to dig them out as the soil was just solid root. Hence the elimination programme.

If yours still look like a nice bush (because they are pretty) make sure you pull out any runners as they appear before it gets delusions of world domination.

I have been out in the break in the rain and planted the last of the structural plants for this season - a crambe, gyposophila and brachyglottis. Plus the last of my woodland border.

Well I did like the buttercups, but I didn’t realise that they would get to 6 ft and floppy in a border, and be crowded together like sardines in a can.I thought there would be the odd one dancing gracefully. AndI like the geraniums more. I have swept a bit of the path today and then it began to rain. Again.

Thanks InMySpareTime and AnnaMagnani

Just keep an eye on them and don’t let them move into an area where you don’t want them.

It interests me that they’re in the same family as honeysuckle, and the new shoots from the base sometimes look very like honeysuckle.

Just heading out to buy supplies …

Marigolds are the preferred option of many cavers. Once there’s a layer of water inside they act like a wetsuit and keep your hands warm, they don’t impede your dexterity so you can cope with all that fiddly rope work, and cheap enough not to matter if you trash one. Easy to keep a spare in your pocket.

My sweet peas are flowering at last!!! I had almost given up on them! They mainly seem to be a rich purple/blue and smell gorgeous 😍

My husband has done loads of pruning, mostly the climbing roses and hydrangea which gets into the guttering if it's not kept in check. We had friends over last night and I may be suffering slightly today must have been a dodgy prawn 🙈🥂 so haven't done much apart from cutting back the laburnum tree and checking my salvia cuttings which seem to be doing okay.

Have been out and dead headed the roses. Found an old packet of Vitax Q4 and in a panic chucked some of it at the cannas - however while they may not be growing up, they appear to be trying to send up some new stems.

And I have a flower! The sum total of all my planting so far, one geranium has one flower on it.

Hopefully this is the sign of things to come.

Major tactical error here. Chucked some blood, fish and bone at my beans and peas (growing in pots). Now have DCat buried up to his shoulders in search of the source of that delicious smell

Me too, I’ve binned so many plants that weren’t weeds over the years.
My clematis Princess Diana looks like it’s got clematis wilts just as it was bursting into flower for the first time in three years 😢
The outdoors tomatoes look a bit dodgy, I’m hoping it’s the cold and not blight- it it is blight then that’s the last time I ever grow them again.
The foxgloves have stopped flowering so I will but them back and 🤞🏻 for a second flowering in late summer. At least the roses are doing well!

These are those beautiful weeds. I do think they're chicory.

I also need help identifying another weed that I don't have the picture for!

On the field in front of my sons school there's some tiny yellow flowers that look like sweet peas flowers but they're no taller than a clover at best.

Any ideas?

Next year my garden is going to be all weeds and I'm going to love it.

Tiny yellow wildflowers that look like sweet peas could well be vetch

Perhaps meadow vetchling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lathyrus_pratensis?wprov=sfti1

@MereDintofPandiculation your poor disappointed cat!

What's great about foxgloves is that the bottom pods have ripened before the flowers at the top have finished, so you don't have that dilemma about whetehr to cut bac in the hope of new flowers, or leave to get seeds for the 2026 season.

I think they are Blue Sow Thistle. The flower heads are quite spreading. Chicory flowers are on shorter stems, to they're much tighter to the main stem. They're also a more intense blue. It's a lovely flower though. well worth its place in a garden, you just can't make "coffee" out of it.

The two most likely suggestions for your "yellow sweet peas":

If they have long narrow leaves in pairs, they're meadow vetchling as people have suggested. If they have leaves made up of three leaflets like a clover, then Birds Foot Trefoil - especially if there are occasional red bits on some of the flowers, although BFT doesn't always have that. There's also Greater BFT, and a Fodder BFT. but you're getting into quite fiddly characters to distinguish those.

You noticed the sweet pea-like flower - that tells you it is in the pea/bean family Fabaceae, which makes it a lot easier to look it up in a wild flower book! Another one to look at is clover - if you look at it closely, each "flower" is actually a flower head of many tiny flowers, and if you look at an individual flower carefully, you'll see that also has the "sweet pea" flower structure that puts it into the pea/bean family.

She has a pretty good life otherwise. I don't feel too much sympathy!

Here she is in the greenhouse

I gave up on blood, fish and bone aeons ago, as it was an invitation to the local wildlife to dig up whatever I had planted with it.

I picked ten and three quarter pounds of berries today.

Blackcurrants? Or a mixture? Eating, jam or freezing?

Saskatoons. Tarts and freezing.

I should have left them for a bit so more could ripen but the blackbirds were going berserk and getting trapped under the netting. I had to put them out of their misery. Netting is off now, they can eat the rest.

We found this one this morning, had got under the netting goodness knows when and was moving Very Slowly. Tried to get out when we appeared but could not. We helped, a lot, and finally had to pick her up and offer her freedom on an open palm.

Eventually she took flight but very low to the ground and just a short distance. She was FULL!