The (Covid) Garden in May 2020

We are currently in week nine of lockdown thanks to Coronavirus-19 and it has had an effect on the garden this year for sure.  Having no access to garden centres and local shops etc I haven't been able to find bits and bobs to fill the odd gaps and am currently waiting on a few plants to help it out.  For example we have dug up eight verbena bonariensis (they were decidedly straggly after two years and the winter) and are STILL waiting for their replacements - heaven only knows when they will arrive or what they will be like.

I have managed, again with a struggle, to get some salad stuff and beans planted but not quite what I wanted or the standard I would like.

If you can stand to just look at thirty-three photos, this is where it is right now.

Front garden has finally got a tree.  One year without one,followed by one year with a dead one planted.  At last we seem to be OK.  It never had a flower on it as it is a winter flowering cherry but at least it has come into leaf now.  Prunus subhirtella.  The usual two olives and the pot by the door. 

The pot by the door is a bit sad looking as yet but it will flourish I am sure.  Lovely plants using click and collect from Dunbar Garden Centre.  Downside is I muddled up which plants were going where so it will be a bit of a muddle in terms of colours I think.

Our olive trees were loaded with olives this year.  I am wondering if I should remove them so any strength goes into the plant rather than the fruit.  Must check it out.  Seems a shame as they are rather decorative.

South east

South West

North West

North east.  Surrounded by houses for sure!  It would be lovely if everyone planted trees.  I want two more - maybe in the autumn as we need this flipping virus to be over to even get to the nursery.  I need decent size trees at 75😊 so need to go to R B for the best price and then pay to get them planted as we did with the amelanchiers. 

Fern looking pretty sad - needs to put on new growth and then be trimmed.  The pot is overstuffed.  It could do with dividing.

Patio seating area spends most of the day in shade.  Deliberating whether to order a set of furniture we like but have sat in to test drive it.  It is a metal frame.  Does anyone know if metal furniture gets silly hot in the sun and would be a bad buy?

Susan Williams-Ellis roses doing fantastically well again.  They have some greenfly though, so maybe need to spray them.  

Top third of  East facing border.  My poor old Buddha is lacking a pretty plant behind him and something by his feet.

The middle of the east facing border.  Actually saw a starling drink from the bird bath.... makes it all worthwhile 😂

The bottom of east facing border.  Each border is theoretically planed in three sections.  Each area has a focus - a rose or bird feeder (or both!) then symmetrical planting either side which s then repeated in the next third.  Not quite worked out that way of course.  We thought this year we would dig up and move around stuff and start again.  Maybe not.

Gravel/veg seating area.  Gets the sun most of the day.  The long planters on the front edge and the pots have runner bean plants in them from Dunbar - no variety name so who knows what I will get.  Right now i just have not very promising floppy seedlings.  Needless to say a day after planting those my hestia bean seeds arrived after a five week delay.  Grrrrrrr

Early sensation clematis in top of west facing border

middle of west facing border

The bottom third of the west facing border.  I finally got a clematis planted in the obelisk.... downside is, it is the wrong one.  I chose this, discovered it reaches fifteen feet so chose another with a six foot growth but forgot to alter the order.  😱

Very cheap winter hanging basket bought last year and still doing its thing

One of my all time favourites coming back into flower - Fleabane

One of many purple sprouting broccoli I bought before I found out they need a lot of room!

One of a pair of newly planted hanging baskets - plants from the Dunbar pick up

Lavender doing just fine by the seats

Strawberries looking strong

Love looking up through the amelanchier

Our posh new trugs.  They are called 'Veg trug' and should have their name emblazoned on the front but me, being me, didn't want that so it got turned to the back.  they take a ton of compost.

Each trug contains the same.  Right now they have lettuce and rocket plants and.......

 .............. carrots, spring onion, radish and American land cress seeds

close up of the 'early sensation' clematis.  I am tempted to fill the fences with them.  We have wire on all the fences but I am uncomfortable with my stuff poking its way through the fence.  The neighbours all say they are OK with it but it does seem intrusive.  I am used to having fence panels and hadn't thought about the implications of this sort of fence

lonely little bluebell struggling through

Another winter pot still flowering its socks off

Sea thrift edging the west facing border

Our new bird feeder in hopes we can actually attract some birds.  So far just the usual pigeon, magpie and starling thugs.

Take a last look at the herb bed.  I am waiting for three parahebes to arrive and when they do this rosemary, sage and thyme will be out and they will be in.

So if you have plodded through that lot drop me a line here or via email with any thoughts, suggestions etc.  I will do a high Summer set of photos for the record in a couple of months.  Hope we are back to something like a normal life by then.  Meanwhile, Stay home, stay safe, look after yourself.

Cruel to be kind

We had a bit of a gale rip through for a couple of days with a load of rain and I decided it had made a lot of the plants look very bedraggled so I hacked off all the impressive swathes of geum, goodbye Mrs Bradshaw (for a while), and all the very large and very tall granny bonnets (aquilegia).

The big surprise was that the borders that seemed to be so dependent of those displays still looked relatively OK.

west facing - always fuller than the east facing one

east facing still looking OK

Wollerton Old Hall rose just coming into bloom

Delphiniums - two half eaten by our friend the slug

The ferns were putting up their wonderful new fronds, so it was time to cut out the leaves which had died over winter and freshen them up.

hart's tongue fern

soft shield fern

For anything which gets 'taken away' much more sneaks in.  I bought more plants for pots and extras of various established plants such as the Mexican fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus) and these little gems.  The Rhodanthemum Marrakech was bought for around the feet of my Buddha to give him something to contemplate.  The teeny Erodium was bought for the gravel area but it actually proved too teeny, hence four more fleabanes being wheeled in instead and the erodium finding a spot at the end of each border......  an odd sort of punctuation mark but I couldn't throw them away.

Summer Pots and Hanging Baskets

I might be working at this a little early this far north but, as always, I am itching to get the summer pots underway.  The Spring ones were still doing really well and I have kept the left hand one in place with a view to changing it when I see another hanging basket I like at the right price.  Meanwhile on a visit to Dunbar Garden Centre, because I got two fabulous pots from there last year for 'two for twenty',  I found the same deal again this year.  I have no idea how or why it happened but after giving the assistant our customer loyalty card we got two for ten pounds.  These may only look just OK for a fiver each right now but they have the potential for fabulous as time goes on.  What a bargain!

pelargonium, bacopa, petunia, lobeilia

The two spring baskets were still doing really well so I just dropped them into an appropriate size pot where they can continue to flower for a good while yet.

still looking bonny

I then moved on to potting up various pots.  

These Pelargoniums were two for three pounds from Aldi

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I has also bought a selection of hanging basket plants from Dobbies to mix around the pelargoniums.

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Most of these went into pots for the front garden

by the door

under the window

around the tree after squaring off the circle

looking forward to everything being fully grown

Among the collection was a couple of herbs.  I dug up the old parsley and re-arranged the plants in the little herb bed and planted the mint into its own pot to stand on the patio nearby.

I then potted up the chimney after removing the spring planting.  It takes imagination to see this with a huge volume of plants tumbling over the edges but it will come.

The rest of the plants went into two of the six new wooden planters which were bought for the gravel area..

The planters were £12.99 each from Aldi.  We had some delivery issues and some quality issues but eventually they were an OK deal.  

Initially I just put the perforated bags in the planters and tried to fold over the excess liner and to hide beneath the compost.  This didn't work very well.

One was planted with dwarf runner bean seeds and the other with salad leaves seeds.

For the other pair of long planters and the square ones I stapled the top of the liner to the inside edge of the box which gave a much neater finish.

The remaining two long ones were planted with three strawberries in each pot.  They were runners from my very old ever-bearer strawberries which I gave to my daughter a long time ago and are still growing strong.  I have never found a better strawberry and once they start fruiting they really do keep going all summer.

The two square planters were filled with a pelargonium and some trailing lobelia just to echo the pots at the top of the garden on the patio.