Sweet peas, repotting, and TOTAL FAILURE. ðŸ˜
Hello Friends!
A very warm welcome if you're new to this letter, and thank you for letting me into your inbox! This is where I lay down my entire week of five minute forays to illustrate all the little things I do to keep my outside space (and myself) happy. I hope you find inspiration here, (or if not, then at least some solace!) We do a lot of emailing here, so please feel free to hit reply and ask me anything - I aim to get back to everyone over the week - I love hearing from everyone; this is by far my favourite group of like-minded souls!
Monday
The first Monday of any holiday at home starts like a slick, well oiled machine. Plans have been put in place and timings have been agreed. People go off to their various activities or camps or playdates or whatever and I flutter around my computer like a crazed moth, desperate to get all my work done before everyone comes home again. When they do, and I am finally finished, I collapse on the sofa as they charge off into the garden and have to gulp down my irritation when they come at me with armfuls of tulips, MINUS THEIR STEMS. Friends, you would be so proud of me. I smile, and hug them and thank them...they never knew...Luckily I have the most brilliant vase for such 'gifts'. It has holes in it and you can fill it with water and as long as there is a cm or so of stem, everything is FINE. My response to this is to go out and pick as many tulips as are out, or emerging, this time WITH stems, and put them in another vase. This is my gardening for the day
Tuesday
The rain is incessant, so I look for something to do indoors (there is nothing - I have sown all my seeds for now, and watered the houseplants - so I go out in my anorak, grab a kneeler and sit down next to the alpine trough I made about a year ago. It still looks beautiful, flowering started about a week ago and the veronica is still going strong. The sedum has sadly died (too wet I suspect - these things can deal with any amount of cold but wet will have them keeling over) so I start pulling out the grass that has seeded itself, and tidying up any dead bits, ready for a new sprinkling of grit. New grit makes me so happy - it's like putting horse poo on my flowerbeds - it makes everything look lovely. I have run out of the small horticultural grit I used last year, so I raid my old paperwhite vases and anoint the pot with a new, white top-dressing. Happiness abounds. I'll be on the hunt for a sedum replacement but until then I run out of the rain, grabbing a pan of sempervivum as I go, to do much the same thing to that pot, but in the comfort of my kitchen. I remove all the weeds and any rotten leaves, and then I put GRIT on my shopping list and call it a day. Full details on how to keep alpine containers happy here.
Wednesday
A playdate has been planned which rather gets in my way today...totally my fault - I planned it, but I sit in the garden for two hours drinking tea, making polite conversation and positively GURNING to mow the lawn. It's not to be...as soon as the little girl and her mama leave I have to take two small children to learn to ride bikes. Yes friends, I have guiltlessly outsourced this job, paying a grand total of £180 so that a man called Ed can teach them how to ride a bike in three one hour sessions. I struggled for about a nano second with the idea that they needed THE MEMORY of a parent teaching them to ride a bike but then paid my money and forgot about it. Friends, I have never wanted to stay and watch anything my children go to, but this was an exception....the whole thing is just too impossibly cute...but Ed is rather stern and doesn't let me stay, so I hop off to a nearby garden centre and accidentally buy two enormous terracotta pots (along with the horticultural grit I actually go in for). Big shout out to this place -- it's called Squires garden centre and their customer service is so good that I never have to lift anything...I just waft around and point at things and they are magically put into trolleys, and then into the car for me... It is only now, at home, as I write this, that I am wondering how on earth I'm going to get the damn things out of the car and into the garden. Rotter won't be home until it's dark. Oh dear.
Thursday
I can't put it off any longer; I'm going to have to tell you all about the massive failure that is my lawn bulbs. I planted them back in autumn (November I think) last year... about fifty snakeshead fritillaries and at least a hundred crocuses. Friends, I don't know what's happened, but not a SINGLE bulb has appeared. It's a bit devastating really, because I royally messed the lawn up doing it. It might be that they've been dug up (surely not the whole lot?) or it might be that the batch of bulbs was bad (again, surely not the whole lot) ... I just don't know but I'm telling you this because I feel rather ashamed about the whole thing...something about the fact that it OUGHT to have worked but didn't ... I've done it before and it worked, and I've subsequently WRITTEN about doing it in a national newspaper. I suppose what I'm saying is that things don't always work out, and sometimes we just don't know why. Sometimes we just have to either try again, or cut our losses. I don't feel desolate about it, but I do feel embarrassed, because I made a big deal of it on the social, and it was supposed to be spectacular, and it just ISN'T. So there you go.
All this, because the sun is shining at last, and I rush out as soon as the grass is dry to mow the lawn, and because there are no lawn bulbs I don't have to dodge anything....I LOVE mowing the lawn now, because I have been given a cordless mower. You just have to click the battery in and off you go. Easily pleased, me.
Friday
Exhausted. BUT, there are five minutes to be snatched at the end of the day, while everyone just trashes the house and I'm past caring. I mix a load of multi purpose compost in a wheelbarrow with some horse manure, and fill one of the pots I bought on Wednesday, ready for sweet peas. I then stick in hazel twigs to make a slap-dash wigwam. Do I actually get around to planting out my sweet peas? No I do not, but at least the pot is ready.
Saturday
Bonus gardening because there is no violin group, and the friend I invited over FORGOT to come 😂 ha! You know you're old when someone forgets your invitation and instead of being upset you are thoroughly relieved. Anyway, I transplant the cobaea scandens which have been slowly working their way up the wall of my kitchen while I decide what to do with them. I decide to let one of them romp away inside, and hope that I won't spend the next few months preventing it from falling down (there are no supports and it's impossible to put any in). I put one in a large pot for indoors, and one in the same size pot for outside. There's been no hardening off here...the thing will just have to cope with the shock of suddenly living outside. this will probably stunt its growth (it may even die if we get a frost, but I have a few more in the wings so I don't care).
All the good things, as always
x Laetitia