Hobbies and Crafts

Bulbs are peeping through in nearby gardens and I've seen violets and primroses this week there too.

Still quite a few flowers around,which I associate with summer.
Marigolds and some beautiful full stems of antirrhinum, when I was walking home today.

No flowers left in the garden except pansies but the bulbs are starting to come up, it does seem early and only hope they survive any frosts.

The frosts finally finished off the penstemons so, like Ann, I only have pansies flowering now.

Just before the first heavy frost I brought into an unheated conservatory a trough planted up with a slightly unusual and very pretty geranium. A couple of days ago I thought the plants looked a bit sorry for themselves so I checked them over and they were covered in tiny caterpillars :-|. If they had been outside I would have left them for a couple of days to see if the birds would eat them but as they were indoors I did spray them.

Anyone else had caterpillars at this time of year?

OH managed to get out in the garden this afternoon, just cutting back some of the rubbish. He came in after a short while because he said it was so wet underfoot, the more he walked on the soil the more he churned it to mud.

Vera, have you been happy with your garden this year? Is it its second year since landscaping. Are you still pleased that you had it done?

We love the garden Ann. The bulk of the planting was done in September 2015 so it has had one full year and we are into the second year, but it looks as though it has been established forever. Our problem is that everything has done too well, so we are going to have to take some stuff out in the spring.

Sometimes it still seems very small to me but having it rehashed and getting some height into it certainly made it look a bit bigger. OH has taken a couple of photos each month during its first year so we will have a record of how it has developed.

The ground is very wet at the moment. The only bulbs showing through are some mini Irises in pots but the hellebores which were still blooming in June are coming up with big flower buds again and the stems of a Cornus we put in are a lovely orangey red.

I saw some lovely sprays of pussy willow yesterday with beautiful soft grey adornments. They were growing in a fairly open site within school grounds.
It was interesting that only one of the several bushes had the fully-open buds.

Not sure if this is rather early for this plant to be showing open buds, but I tend to link it to springtime.

I would always think of it around Easter Gwyn.

Saw my first few snowdrops of the winter today, when I was out delivering cards locally .

Ooh they are early Gwyn

We noticed this morning that we have a small flowered (very insignificant) clematis in flower on the fence near the house. And also the Winter flowering Jasmine is covered in its pretty little yellow flowers. And right under the lounge window we have a Nemesia still in full flower.

Despite all the frost we have the prettiest display of yellow winter flowering jasmine on the fence. And, believe it or not, we have Nemesia flowering in a tub on the patio under the lounge window.

I had a quick look at the plants in the garden earlier. There are some little tete-a-tete daffs poking through but none of the bigger bulb plants are showing yet. However the hellebores have loads of big fat flower buds growing and I don't think it will be long before they are open.

I was also given a very pretty pale yellow orchid at Christmas. Not a good choice for me as I am the world's champion orchid killer :-(. This one had no label or care instructions with it but I think it is a phalaenopsis (spelling ?). Every bit of advice I get regarding its care contradicts every other bit of advice, so I shall just do what feels right and hope it survives.

EDIT. I forgot to say A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL <3

Vera, I have 6/7 orchids I think of that variety, they thrive well on my North facing kitchen windowsill. They should be in light but not full sun and away from radiators, feed while flowering and, if you can get to a garden centre, you can get a dpray with which to spray the leaves. don't repot until it really grows out of its pot. None of mine are flowering at the moment but they did flower for about 10 months through 2016. :-) :-)

Thanks for the advice Ann. Our kitchen window gets direct sun for a good part of the day and the sill is only about an inch above the work surface and sink so any plant there is constantly getting splashed with hot/cold/soapy water. I think it would do well in the utility room but we wouldn't see it there. The best place I think is where I have it at the moment, which is in the hall. We have a large hallway and I have a sideboard against one wall. It is on there and is getting light through the frosted glass panels of the front door but it won't be in direct sun there.

I might also try it on a low table by a front window in our sitting room as it is very light but more shaded than the back of the house.

Radiators aren't a problem as we have underfloor heating and once it goes on around end of October it stays on till we turn it off, usually early in May, so as long as the pot isn't standing on the floor, there is no direct heat and not much fluctuation in temperature.

I'll let you know how I get on with it :-)

Good luck Vera, both those places sound ok for it. they are pretty and the flowers last for absolutely ages. One more thing. Don't overwater. I water about (when I remember) every two weeks, stand for a while in water, don't water from the top. :-D

I had a laugh today.

A while ago my hairdresser and her partner moved into a house with a large garden. Having no experience of gardening she asked my advice about a plant she had found half dead in the garden and I told her to cut it back hard and hope for the best. Well, this plant flourished (it probably would have done anyway) and she got the idea that I was some kind of gardening guru.

When I went for a haircut today I found she had dug up a plant, part of which had broken away, put it in a pot and brought it in for me to tell her what to do. Me? The woman must be mad. I didn't even know what the plant was, except it was clearly some kind of pine. The broken piece was the main stem and was only attached by a piece of bark so I told her to take it off, plant the thing back in the ground and hope the main sideshoot would turn itself into a new main stem. It'll survive or it won't.

The trouble is she still seems to think I am some kind of expert and I just know that each time I get my hair cut she'll have found another query for me to answer. I'll probably end up killing off everything in her garden.

By the way, I looked up her plant when I got home and it was a Japanese Umbrella Pine. She's going to have a shock if it survives as she thinks it is a smallish shrub but it eventually grows to about 40 ft. :-)

sooo! We are privileged to have a resident expert on this thread. Lol! I hope she doesn't sue you if all her plants die!


Very damp in the garden but I noticed a heather in flower that is very early and the helebores are budding well. Lots of bulbs popping up all over the place. :-) :-) :-) Soon be spring.

It was bitter cold overnight with a really heavy frost. The grasses in the garden looked sensational this morning covered in a silvery white frost. It's been very sunny today but has hardly warmed up at all.

Some daffs are showing through at last. I am relieved about that as ours are an early variety called February Gold and there was no sign of them, so I wondered if the bulbs had rotted.

The witch hazels are just coming up to bloom as well. Even though the blooms are not fully open yet, the yellow one looks really good against our grey-green fence. The dark coppery red one is usually a couple of weeks later but the colour is showing. Spring is on the way :-D

Spring is coming :-D

Before it started to get dark I had a quick look at the garden and, as well as the witch hazel, the helebores, winter aconites and viburnum are all starting to flower and some early tulips I planted in pots are poking through.

I just hope the winds promised for tomorrow don't flatten everything.

Yes, despite the horrid weather we have Helebores and snowdrops in flower.