Hello friends, old and new...
Hello friends!
...it's been, ummm, about three years since I wrote a newsletter or touched my blog (I've been deep in nappies and rice cakes) but I've been doing this thing called #thefiveminutegarden over on Instagram which seems to have struck a chord with so many people like myself, who feel overwhelmed when they look at their garden, and simply don't have any more than five minutes (if that) to spend on it per day. The instagram posts are like mini blog posts, but it's a tight space for detail, so I'm putting some extra bits in a newsletter, and hoping you'll find them useful and/or fun!
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This week's five minute forays
Monday - snipping my agapanthus flowers...It's a great time to remove spent flowers, preferably before they set seed (before the petals have all gone and the flower has swollen into a seed-head)...so that the plant can spend less energy making seed, and more to its roots.
Tuesday - weeding a small patch of earth...deeply satisfying and totally addictive. Get yourself a kneeling mat (or an old cushion), a pair of soft gardening gloves that you can feel things through, and a long thin trowel. (Long thin trowel not obligatory but it is VERY much the best tool for chasing the roots of bindweed and gives you extra reach removing easier weeds. If it's dry then you can just hoe like it's going out of fashion, leaving the cut foliage of the weeds on the surface of the soil to fry. Remember though, that if you've got bindweed or similar, hoeing through the stems and roots will just encourage more to grow, so avoid them and dig them out instead.
Wednesday - I took cuttings of my scented-leaved pelargoniums. If you don't have any of these, then go out and snap one up immediately and then follow the guide below for lots of free plants next year. You need scented pelargoniums in your life. Believe me, you really really do.
Thursday - thinning out my rainbow chard seedlings (sown a few weeks ago). I grow all my veg in pots, because in-the-ground veg gardening is too labour-intensive for me at the moment. Having a small number of large wide pots means I can grow most of our greens easily and they aren't so prone to slimy invertebrates. When you're thinning seedlings, don't thin to the final distance all at once; instead leave extra seedlings for insurance just incase you lose some, and thin these away once things are really up and growing well.
Friday - Chopping off the spent flowers of some argyranthemum (pretty little daisy things that just go on and on and on flowering as long as you deadhead them regularly)...problem is I went away, and the pot was simply full of dead heads. In these cases the best thing to do is give the whole thing a haircut, feed with tomato food and then hide it away until it starts flowering again. It feels drastic but this is a great trick, particularly for plants like nemesia, which get old and tired and leggy...easy new lease of life.
Pelargonium cuttings - This is how I do it (there are other ways!)
You need:
A pelargonium plant
A sharp knife (I use one of those medical knives they sell in craft shops)
A small plastic pot (plastic is better because it retains moisture better than terracotta) about 15 cm diameter - this will be good for about 6 cuttings
Some cuttings compost. I use a mixture of ordinary peat-free multi-purpose compost, with about the same amount of horticultural grit, and a few handfuls of perlite. You can buy cutting mixes in bags, but I find they're a bit heavy....gritty gritty gritty is what you want - here's my mix below:
Select some side-shoots from your plant - ones with no flowers coming out from them - and chop them off about 10cm from the tip and just above a side shoot. It's important to chop here, as that's where there's lots of growth hormone, so if it means your cutting is longer or shorter than you'd like, then that's okay. Here's my cutting below:
Now slice the remaining side shoots off the stem, leaving just a couple of smaller leaves at the tip:
Now make a hole in your compost with the pencil, and push the cutting in gently, making sure that the base of it is in contact with the compost (you can use your pencil to measure exactly how deep to make the hole). You want to bury the cutting to just below where the top leaves are coming out. Firm the compost around the cutting, make another hole next to it and continue, until you have a circle of little cuttings around the outside of your pot. Make sure none of the leaves are touching. Here is one of my cuttings (in it's own tiny pot because I don't have room for a larger one on my windowsill.
Now water the whole thing well, but gently, place on a bright windowsill (indoors) and that's it. These cuttings will take a few weeks to root, and you'll notice new growth coming up at the top when that happens. They will live quite happily on your windowsill through the winter, and then you can put them in larger pots and get them acclimatised to the outdoors once the frosts have gone.
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Five minute things I might do next week:
Potting up some mint and parsley to take inside for winter
Harvesting some of my rather sour cooking apples and doing something (preserving? pie? pudding?) with them
Buying bulbs (yes, shopping for plants is still gardening in my book)
Sowing some sweet peas for next year (I missed them so much this year!)
Weeding, watering, deadheading, tying in, mowing, playing, dreaming...
One last thing... I'd love to see pics of the results of your five minute gardening projects - just tag your pics with #thefiveminutegarden so I can feast my eyes!
Love, and all the good things, always,
Laetitia
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Daily posts on instagram:
www.instagram.com/laetitiamaklouf
You can find my books here and here (Sweet Peas for Summer is a bargain right now at only £2.99!)
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This will be a weekly newsletter, no more than that, but I realise that, having not heard from me for a while, some of you may not want it, in which case I don't want to spam you so please do feel free to hit 'unsubscribe' (I won't cry, honest...well okay, maybe just a little bit😉)