I thought water snails liked water.

I’ve finally been able to get down to some serious gardening the last couple of weeks.  With the sweet peas gone and the lobelia going over it was all looking a bit too green so I set out to get some colour.

These are Echinacea, with the great name of ‘Purpurea Pow Wow wild berry’.

I love these flowers – not the most exotic looking but they add such a lot of sunshine to the garden and they like it in full sun, which is a priority in picking flowers for the roof. They are called Coreopsis, ‘grandiflora rising sun’.

This is Wild Bergamot ‘fireball’; the bees love this.

I have tried to grow ‘Black-eyed Susan’ over the last couple of years to no real success but I’m not deterred. The only time it really worked was when I grew it in the ground, but this one is called ‘Sunshine Suzy’ and it says on the label it can be grown in window boxes. As of yet it looks pretty weedy (hence the close up photo). So fingers crossed, because I love them.

Now please tell me if I’m wrong, as it’s a wild statement, but we have managed to witness, and I would like to think have a hand in, the speeding up of evolution in water snails.

You can see in the picture above, this little water snail that I found along with a few others. I don’t know how they made their way up here, but I felt terribly sorry for them so I popped them into some water with some lettuce leaves. 

They hated it and climbed straight out. I kept putting them back in but they just wouldn’t stay and now they can only be found on the sides of pots away from any of the little trays of water. It’s very odd.

Now to some very sad news. You may remember my amazing pumpkin plants on my last blog. Well look at them now.

Black fly has struck in biblical proportions and death and disease has set in.

The majority of the leaves are covered. The ladybirds and their larvae were in heaven but so were every type of fly you’ve ever seen and I HATE flies. so we made the sad decision to pull them up.  

We were just left with 2 very small pumpkins.

Our potato plants have become victims of little killers too – I think slugs. There is not a stem or leaf left but amazingly there are potatoes.

They may not the be the biggest and the best, but I’m proud of them just the same.

Happy gardening!