Dreaming Spirals

For several years now, our garden has been getting rather out of hand.  Until a couple of months ago, the border on the left hand side consisted of lots of overgrown bushes (mostly dead actually), with more mostly dead honeysuckle growing up them.   I decided to cut back two of them.  Well, I cut them back so much that it looked like they’d had it, and I exposed about 8 feet of soil in the process!  One trip to the garden centre later, and I had several perennial plants to fill it up.  This is what it looked like just after planting.  A bit sparse….

I decided to plant some annuals in the gaps to fill it up a bit.  I got some pot marigold and some other unidentified yellow plants.

Then I put in an evening primrose plant I had growing in a pot on the patio – this self seeds really easily and though it is only biennial we’ve had them every year since we bought the original one about 20 years ago.  And a comfrey plant on the left.  They looked really nice when all these were in flower:

This was taken a couple of weeks ago – already they are starting to fill up that space.  Now almost all the red flowers have finished but there are loads of that orange one.

It was a wet day when I took this one!

And in case you wondered, those two bushes did recover and are about to fight back – I will have to remember to prune them vigorously in future!

Jamie Pulley has just published a very useful Gocco comparison chart which looks pretty comprehensive, so if you’re thinking of buying one and are confused by the various models and the differences between them, hop over to his blog and have a look!

A week or so ago, we had a heatwave here, and then at the weekend a rather spectacular thunderstorm.  It caused quite a lake on our patio:

I’m glad that the patio slopes away from the house because it was getting ever deeper! 

The ever growing beans seem to have held up against it, though!

Pity about the redundant hosepipe and water jug – they seem a bit incongruous!  As you can see, though, the beans and tomatoes are growing apace and I looked today and there are several tomatoes on there.  Plenty of bean flowers though no beans yet to be seen…

This is just a quick reminder that I still have about 8 fabric bundles for sale… and as a way of clearing some space in my studio the next person in the UK to buy some can have 3 bundles for the price of 2! Just pay with the Paypal buttons for two and email me to let me know which other one you want and I’ll mark them as sold. I’ll post on here when they’ve gone. You can find them here. This offer will expire at midnight on Wednesday 3rd June.

And I also have a number of Print Gocco machines for sale – I haven’t got any B6 machines but I have several PG10s and PG10 Supers. They are on my Print Gocco machines page.

If you haven’t the foggiest what I’m talking about, there’s a page of links about the Print Gocco here.

This is a card I printed with it. I really must get it out and print some more… they really are addictive once you get going!

Well, the patio is looking a bit better stocked now;   I just hope these French beans will look as healthy after the slugs sniff them out!

And here are the tomatoes all bedded in!   The big ones are Alicante, the smaller ones Gardener’s Delight.

Just to end this little horticultural interlude, the wisteria at the front of our house is in full bloom; it smells heavenly.

And to get back to textile content, DH and I went and got a HUGE piece of MDF for my printing table the other day – here it is in my studio.  So now I won’t have to keep pinning and unpinning fabric and moving it along to do the next bit…

Here’s a sneak peek at my reeds hanging no.1.  The stuff on the table above is being auditioned for hanging no. 2.

This year I decided I want to grow some tomatoes and French beans – we used to grow amazing tomatoes in the last house we lived in, because the patio area by the French windows was such a suntrap, and tomato plants loved it.  But I hadn’t managed to find a comparable spot in this house, even though we’ve been here over 10 years now (having three growing kids might have had something to do with it!).  The house faces south so the front gets the morning sun, but the back, where the patio is, faces north.    Besides this, the patio was a bit overgrown a week or so ago…

This is it halfway through being cleared!   Most of the pots are now empty because they were full of weeds. 

What I decided to do about the tomatoes was to take photos of the various possible areas hourly throughout the day to see which bit got the most sun. 

This is the bit that won… trouble is, that was a tad overgrown too…

That is the garden path you can see in the foreground, so I had to clear that and reclaim a couple of feet against the wall so I could put two growbags there.  And what a difference!

I took this before I’d cleared all the debris… but that’s all gone now so I’ll give it till the end of May for the weather to do its worst and plant them to see how the tomatoes fare there.

While I’m on the subject of gardens, I would like to draw on your expertise … in the front garden, we have some mystery plants which come up every spring.  I think they belong to the onion family because they smell of onions when you rub them, and I’d love to identify them to see if they are edible.  These are the leaves… an untidy mass of droopy plants.  I’m pretty sure they’re bulbs.

Here is a photo of them over the wall:

They have a small white flower, about an inch in size.  I couldn’t get a very good photo of it, unfortunately – I did pick one and tried to take a close up but it didn’t seem to have enough contrast to focus properly. 

Can anyone shed any light on this?  I did look it up in my wild flower book and wondered if it was something like ramsons but they have wider leaves and clusters of small flowers, but I think it is similar.