After The Rains.

The rain hasn’t really been terribly inspiring to get out onto the roof this week, but when the clouds broke on Tuesday I went out and got to work.

I potted up my ‘Roma’ tomatoes; the ‘Yellow Pears’ still aren’t showing much sign of life yet. 

It was also time to pull out some of my spring bulbs that had gone over, to make way for the summer plants.

I just stick all the spring bulbs into pots with some soil and leave them till it’s time to replant them. I have to be be quite economical with space and do quite a lot of moving around through the spring and summer.

Also I had good reason to shift things about as my mum and I went to the garden centre on Monday, to kit ourselves up for summer. I have to say I was the definition of abstemious – I actually counted what pots I had free-ish and stuck to it. What I’m going to do with all the seedlings I have coming was a factor I didn’t really think about till now actually, but I’m sure we’ll find room, otherwise there will be a lot of sunflower gifts being given.

I did stick to plants that I could put in small pots like this Centadenia, ‘Cascade’.

I also bought, Brachycombe, ‘Strawberry Pink’ which look like little pink daisies,

Diascia, ‘Blush White’ which are little white flowers with pink and yellow centres. My favourite is Dahlia Tricoloure, for which I had to break my rules and get another slightly larger pot for.

I also bought some Lobelia and a  Barcopa for my hanging basket. When coming to plant it up I found that the liner was pretty shredded, so I took some of the rather sodden newspaper from the bottom of the wormery to add to the lining, the idea being that all the worm goodness will go into the soil. I’m holding my breath for spectacular results.

Every day now when I go out with my tea to survey the estate as we call it, something new is emerging and changing. Watching My Parrot tulips evolve is a growing hobby, especially as I’m studying flower structure on my course at the moment. Rich thinks they look rather gross, but I love monitoring their changes in colour each morning.

My other joy on the roof at the moment is seeing my Eucalyptus perriniana (or Spinning Gum) coming back to life. What is out of shot in the photo above is the 5ft stick that once was the tree. The plan was to leave it one last summer to grow peas up, It must have sensed me and my lethal secateurs arguing with Rich that he can’t want to keep a bare stick, but he did, luckily. It sounds like this should have a fable ending but I can’t quite think of one.

Happy gardening.