#SixOnSaturday
Back again with a Six on Saturday post. It’s been a very wet week, with not much I could do in the garden. My photos are from the last week when I’ve been able to get out and dodge the rain clouds. My lunch breaks have been snatched minutes in between rain showers all week but I’m still eternally grateful to have my garden to escape to even when it’s wet.
1. This is the first year I’ve grown potatoes in a raised bed. I’ve tried them a couple of times before in bags and I have four bags of main crop stashed near my shed, but I have a full raised bed of Charlotte second earlies. I faithfully chitted them indoors and planted them out in the middle of April. They took a couple of weeks to poke their heads out but this week’s growth has been incredible. I haven’t earthed them up – I’ve had lots of conflicting advice about earlies so I’m going to leave them as they are and hope for the best. The main crops in bags are being covered each time they poke through the compost.
2. Azaleas. They are a bit of a mystery to me – I got this plant as a free gift when I bought some Cosmos last year and it did very little. This year it has burst out with these vivid pink flowers and I’m a little bewildered by them. They seem a little bit rose-like to me (I don’t like roses) but they don’t seem to have thorns so I can forgive them that resemblance. I fear that maybe I should have pruned them before they got to produce these flowers on the ends of very bare stems!
3. My beautiful lupins. I adore these plants. I got three of them last year and they were a bit sorry for themselves all year and I lavished them with attention, desperate for them to survive, they were so temperamental seemingly reacting to every little change in their environment and not always with a. positive attitude! They didn’t flower but oh my, the photographs after they’d been watered or it had rained. I am a sucker for a drop of water on a leaf. They died back over the winter and I willed them back to life and in early March they started to push their tiny little dramatic leaves back towards the sky and here they are – bigger and stronger than they ever were last year. I don’t even mind too much if they don’t flower as long as I can keep taking pictures like this.
4. A friend of my husband gifted us some hostas. I love them, I know they may end up as slug sacrifices but I still love them and hope they survive. I think I’m quite lucky that we have a major sparrow and blackbird population in the garden that seem to keep the slug situation under control so hopefully these guys will survive.
5. The cherry blossom is in its transition stage of blossom to leaf. I suppose this is its least impressive state in the year but we gave it a severe pruning last year so I’m glad it’s coming back into leaf and we didn’t kill it off completely.
6. Another perennial I bought last year that didn’t flower. Columbine/Aquilegia according to my plant identification app but I’m not sure which variety – I guess I won’t know till it flowers. I love watching all the buds developing – so delicate but holding so much promise for the coming weeks.
So that’s my six this week. Thanks to The Propagator for the chance to take part. You can read his blog here.
The Garrett Garden 