Random Garden musings...

Friday was quite soggy here - it was raining when I woke up, and pretty much carried on raining and stopping, and raining and stopping, all day. I did get my head outside a couple of times in the gaps though, and was really quite chuffed to see just how lovely our little pocket-handkerchief of garden is looking at the moment...

Remember the troughs and baskets we planted up in the spring? Well they're flowering away beautifully now and making a wonderful splash of colour both at the front and back...add to that the chives which have such pretty flowers!

Hmmm...there are issues with not labelling things, aren't there! Dill, we think...although I don't actually remember sowing any....

Coriander....or perhaps flat leaf parsley?

 Ah! I know what these are - tomatoes, of course! Everything seems to be growing oh-so-slowly - need these little fellas to make a giant leap forwards so that we stand a chance of getting some fruit from them this year.

Now here you have one of the advantages to a rainy day - the fantastic pattern of raindrops on petals, and the light furring of moisture on stems and stalks.....

Robyn

"But it's not a proper camera...is it?!"

You might remember I treated myself to an upgrade on my phone a few months ago - going from the iPhone 3GS to the 4S. I use the phone a fair amount, saved every penny of the cost before I bought, and shopped around carefully before buying, and I love the new one every bit as much as the old one!

Traditionally one thing I've never used much on my mobile is the camera - I've used it for quick "grab shots" but nothing much more, as in comparison with the other gear I've got, the quality has always disappointed me. The old 3GS camera wasn't bad - it always did a great job of exposure  and never suffered from camera-shake (something which seems to let down a lot of on-board cameras in mobiles) but once I got the pictures onto the computer and started playing, there was always something lacking slightly, which frustrated me.  I've been pleasantly surprised with the 4S though - the results so far have been brilliantly sharp and crisp, and it deals with colours superbly - something else which I always found slightly "off" with the old one. As a result I thought I'd sing its praises with a blog post - the pictures here are ALL taken with the 4S camera.

I've been walking after work again - it makes sense as I have time to kill while waiting to collect MrEH, and when the weather is good it's hard to beat a head-clearing walk after a long day. The gorse is out everywhere at the lake I walk round some days - looking absolutely stunning...

...and this is a wider view of the lake and surroundings - not bad for London eh?

Closer to home - remember those ridiculously cheap plants we bought this time last year? They made our balconies (front and back) look absolutely stunning right through the spring, summer, and most of autumn, but they've not finished yet as these gorgeous violas reappeared a while ago and are flowering beautifully!

...and just to prove that the iPhone's camera can handle contrast as well as colour - this bush with its beautiful delicate flowers is just along the road from us - gorgeous aren't they!

Finding myself at St Pancras with some time to kill last week, naturally I popped upstairs to say hello to Mr B....

...now if it can handle the amount of detail in that scene it can handle anything!  It's no slouch at close up stuff either - one of the pots on the balcony has gained itself a fine collection of mosses and I thought I'd see if I could get a decent photo of some of it...

Not bad, eh? (To give you some idea of perspective, the pot is about 7" inches across).

I have certainly been using the compact camera less since getting the new phone - for anything that requires zoom I'll still continue to use it for sure - that's one thing that the iPhone camera really can't cope with (unsurprisingly considering it's digital, rather than optical, zoom) but for standard shots like those above, the phone will be seeing a lot of activity, I suspect!

Robyn

First signs...?

I do believe it might have sprung at last....after the sudden turn of cold weather again during last week, the promised warmer temperatures made an appearance this morning, and a quick potter outside revealed some hopeful signs...

The first leaves appearing on our Gooseberry bushes. We planted these last year to replace the bush that was killed by being buried under scaffold for 8 months back in 2010 - it had struggled on manfully but was getting thinner and thinner and eventually we decided it had to go. The replacement needed to have properties which would over time deter anyone wanting to come and peer in through our windows, and ideally was to be useful as well, and so the spikiness (both is texture AND taste) of the Gooseberries seemed to fit the bill. Hopefully we might get some fruit from them this year. 

This is purely ornament rather than use - a rather lovely clematis. I can't remember for certain which one it is but I have a feeling it might be Clematis Jackmanii  - either way it produces stunning flowers in the spring, and, so far, has proved immune to our usually ability to kill anything that climbs within the space of 6 months. Of course as you might remember from a few weeks ago it now has a nice green trellis to climb up, as well.

Right then, might need Fay's help for this one - these come up each and every year, look very pretty, and we have no real idea of what they are! Not even certain whether it is something that we planted (they are in a terracotta planter which sits on the balcony wall) or whether they just sort of appeared there....things do that, sometimes, in our garden.

Aren't the leaves on this little rose beautiful, too? This is one of those little patio roses that people buy more for the instant loveliness of the flowers than with any intention of keeping them, but this one, on being planted into the garden, went absolutely mad and is still happily flowering away years later. It has the most gorgeous tiny complex red flowers, which it seems to produce from about April through to October without pause.

Finally, I was pleased to see signs of life from our herbs, too. We do like our herbs and currently have two good sized Bay trees - one planted in the garden outside and the other which sits in a pot on the balcony, plus a good sized rosemary in a pot, also on the balcony. We also have a large sage bush which, in  spite of ruthless haircuts each and every winter invariably ends up larger than ever by the time midsummer comes around. These chives (and their parsley next-door neighbour) were concentration camp (Supermarket) refugees - they settled down brilliantly in their new home and have repaid the time we spent teasing their roots apart and repotting with a ready supply of fresh onion-ey greenness through last summer. Fingers crossed we'll get more of the same this year!

Now we just need to cross our fingers that this time, Spring is here to stay...!

Robyn

Garden Potterings..

It was a truly gorgeous day today - one of those March days that really gives you hope that not only has Spring sprung, it's intending to hang about for a while too. Just a perfect day for getting some work underway ready for a productive year from our pocket handkerchief of a garden. The actual veg patch space we have is tiny - less than 2m x 2m - so we have to plan carefully for growing as much additional stuff in containers of one sort or another as we can.  It also means that we can't really grow too much stuff that requires a lot of space - the room we have has to work hard and everything gets crammed in at far closer quarters than the seed packets demand! Anyway - first time for a little look at what is growing elsewhere...

... Ladybirds, it would seem! We always get a lot at the start of the spring, but this year we seem to be absolutely over-run with them! All good though, they eat lots of the pests that will make a nuisance of themselves otherwise. The other thing we have masses of is worms - we relieved my parents of a tub-full from their compost bin a few months ago, and by all accounts the little chaps are thriving on their diet of rather more citrus peel and onion trimmings than they are meant to like!

The first few flowers are showing themselves too - the pulmonaria above is looking as healthy as it ever has, and the bee on the left of the picture seems to be appreciating it too! I love this plant - we got a small plant from Auntie D's garden not long after we first moved here, popped it in a relatively shady spot, and away it went - the flowers come in all colours from pale pink through to deep blue, via various shades of mauve, and it flowers for months, too! The other bright spot was finding a good amount of new leaf breaking on our Clematis - we've struggled for years with keeping these alive - this one has now come through its second winter with us and appears to be doing well.

Anyway, time to get those seeds in. As usual we have planted a few of lots of different things. Leeks - sown in the traditional toilet roll centres - sown 2/3 to a tube. Those tubes will be planted directly into the ground as and when (if?!) the seedlings come through, and we probably won't thin them much either. Some Courgettes - "Eight Ball" - a round one that we know from experience has compact plants and prolific fruits. If those come up OK they will go into the flower bed side, where they should be fine. Some peppers - Cayenne for heat and Californian Wonder for sweetness. These will end up in pots, and will probably stay on the wall where they will get as much sunshine as possible and reflected warmth from the brickwork. Tomatoes - Alicante & Gardeners Delight. Again, these will get put into containers - of all shapes and sizes. Some large plant pots we got from Ben's Mum, a tub of the sort that mushrooms are wholesaled in which we found, an old bird-food bucket..... The trough has assorted salad type stuff in it, mustard greens, oriental leaves, and rocket.  As an experiment some Aubergines - we had the seeds, so decided to give them a go.

We planted some flowers too - Nasturtiums which cross the barrier between food and flower so far as we're concerned - the leaves are just delicious added to a burger, even better if it's a cheseburger, and the blooms not only taste good, but look beautiful in a salad. Then sweet peas - anything that we can use to climb up our slightly boring railings at the front of the flats just has to be good, so we always grow those. Plus they smell glorious and are wonderful as cut flowers, too.  Then finally three of our rather lovely blue china pots planted with a mix of all sorts of random things from the bottom of the seed box - pansies, violas, lobelia and more. We suspect most of those won't come up - some of them were incredibly old so the odds are against it, but we'll see!

Robyn