Wallflowers under glass

In my compulsion to keep sowing I unearthed the seed box from the cupboard under the stairs and found the saved wallflower seed.  The wallflowers, which must have come from my family, lasted two years as I recall, and when they got too large and straggly we let them go to seed.

I checked in a reference book that this was the right time of year to sow and then went to the potting shed and filled two seed trays with compost.  My husband's experience told him that they would not germinate in such a cool place unless covered by glass and he found two sheets.  (Probably recycled from an old fridge.)  

Under the glass the wallflowers did well and germinated within a week.  They are bi-annual and require patience.  The related rocket, an annual salad crop has been slow this cool and rainy season and only now is beginning to sporadically come to life in our 'salad crib' alongside the Little Gem lettuce and radishes.

Meanwhile my husband has lifted our little trough of tulips from the front gatepost border and left them by the back hedge to die down.  He inserted  and netted another one sown with a mix of saved wild flower seeds and a part packet of free seed (the annual Clary - salvia horminum) for the pollinators.  

This is how we live now, protecting what we sow, mostly saving and sowing again.  The days of filling our front border with bedding plants have gone.  We are returning to the traditional stuff of gardens like ours - Sweet Williams and wallflowers.  We split what we can - gifts of perennials from friends and the occasional purchase like phlox, and in turn pass on where we can - mint, Michaelmas daisies, golden oregano.

Now for a packet of fresh 'Rocket Runway' and let us hope for the best.

Home-grown Hedging

 Our hawthorn hedge is recovering from last year's renovation work and is about to come into flower.  Every now and again I go outside and pull a few more dead twigs out of its interior.  This is not strictly necessary but it satisfies my urge to tinker and does point up the moral that it is easier to see a dead branch when the rest of the hedge is filled with green leaves.  

I hope that there will be more green leaves at ground level as some hawthorn berries that scattered when we brought down the unwieldy sections onto the back lawn have begun to germinate in the flowerbeds.  So soon we will have our own little trees to plant for the Queen's Jubilee Platinum Year (as announced today).  These will be in addition to the pre-existing holly, hazel and two hornbeam saplings that we found in a pot while gardening for a friend - a project of a previous tenant.  There are dog roses, ivy, privet and forsythia too, but no potential for alliteration there. 

Amidst all this colourful jumble (or jungle) we will have our home-grown hedge.

PS.  Since posting this we have found hawthorn germinating on the other side of the hedge in the glade, the area freed las summer from the dominating and dark Leyland Cypress.

Sparrows on Sweet Peas

One of the delights of our small scale 'gardening for wildlife' plan has been the way that small birds have become increasingly tame in their search for aphids to eat.  We regularly see them among the branches of the rose 'Golden Showers'; they also inspect our two apple trees, nooks and crannies in the shed and guttering on the greenhouse.  Insect eaters such as blue tits are a delight to watch as they balance on the tips of the trees delicately picking away.

Until this week I would have included sparrows on this list but I have been sadly disappointed.  At first they appeared to be flying down from the fence to the staging on which my husband had set out his tripods of home grown dwarf sweet peas and carnations.  I assumed that they were removing greenfly.  Unfortunately for us they were pecking at the tender leaves and buds of the sweet peas and eating them.  I wonder if this is what sparrows do in farmland to commercial crops.

The sweet peas on which my husband expended such care over the winter have now been moved to our recycled plastic 'bothy' and concealed behind a length of recycled net curtain. We shall have to consider where to put them when they bloom in warmer weather.  I shall still enjoy watching the sparrows - but now their diet will be restricted to what they can glean among the grass of our unsprayed lawn.