Horticultural

Sowing flowers from seed: successes and failures

My brain is currently a grab-bag of blogposts: of all sorts of bits and pieces. Blogging's had to take a back seat to all sorts of things, not least changing numerous nappies, replacinga broken dishwasher, fridge and DVD player, reading The Tickle Book over and over and OVER to my 1-year-old, and making lots of jam from my Victoria plums.*

Here's the first brain dump. I wrote a while back about how I've been growing a lot of things from seed to save money, so I thought I'd tell you a bit about what worked and what didn't.

The Cerinthe purpurascens seeds from T&M all germinated with ease and produced attractive plants (pictured left) just right in temperament for my rather dry big border, and loved by the bees - the only wrinkle was the packet was a bit measly, although each seed was huge, almost pea-like. Given that this is a good self-seeder I am hoping it will spread copiously, and I'll probably help it along by saving some of the seed myself to sow next spring.

Another banker has been the verbascums, now settling in nicely to the dry border and destined to provide spires of white blooms ('Snow Maiden') next summer. What's so great about growing verbascum from seed is that ALL of them germinate, so you get hundreds of plants - and they're pretty tough even from a young age so any underwatering is quickly forgiven. Next year I'd like to try a pinky-red one from seed, like 'Cherry Helen', but so far I've had no success finding the seed.

Cenolophium denudatum, on the other hand, was a disaster. Got two seedlings from the whole packet, which when planted out promptly got munched by slugs. Clematis hieraclifolia, courtesy of Everett Leeds of the Clematis Society, so far so good - half a dozen plants from a similar number of seeds, all young plants now in situ(pictured above) and I'm hoping for a good show from this unusual herbaceous clematis. (Never heard of it? It is scented and needs no support, apparently. Will keep you posted).

Honesty seeds collected on my travels and scattered liberally about the garden should fill some more gaps, while I am encouraging my Briza media to self-seed for similar budget-busting gullness. One busted flush was the eryngium seeds I tried - possibly too old, I suspect.

*I wrote about how this tree was sulking after pruning two years ago - the commenters were right, I didn't prune in 2010 and this year it's been happy as larry, producing a top harvest of big, juicy plums.

On the verge: why my garden can't possibly live up to the delights of the A421

I am not such a great driver right now. Whenever I am on the road, I keep getting distracted by the verges, like this one on the A421 towards Cambridge.

I could bash on about how nature does it so much better than us, but you've probably heard that all before. It is interesting, though, how similar some road verges are to some of the planting at Chelsea this year, as Alys Fowler pointed out to me when I bumped into her at the show. I keep seeing amazing specimens of milk thistles (I think), but not in places I can stop the car!

It's the fullness, the boldness and the sheer exuberance of the poppies lining this drainage ditch that I want to recreate in my own garden. And on my green - by which I mean still mostly brown - roof. I am hoping that through my complete lack of intervention, something wonderful will happen up there and I'll end up with a lovely motorwy verge-style display to be enjoyed from my bedroom window. Perhaps today's rain will get it on its way. Otherwise I shall have to publish a rather ridiculous thing that's been rattling around my head the last few days, a sort of sub-Muddy Waters number entitled "I Got the Green Roof Blues".

Anyhow. Having long since run out of money for new plants for my still yawningly empty beds, I have resorted to sowing lots of perennial seeds, as I have already said. For some reason that's mainly verbascums right now - who knew they were ridiculously easy to grow? Cenolophium denudatum, on the other hand, scorns me. As does Eryngium bourgatii and some unusual clematis from Everett Leeds of the Clematis Society. Humph.

So the verbascums will have to do for the minute, but I am taking inspiration from the Leeds City Council garden at Chelsea, which featured them along with British native fox and cubs or Pilosella aurantiaca. I've already got P. aurantiaca up on the roof, will have to consult the green roof literature and see if the verbascums will have a chance up there, too...

Salad blue days: growing potatoes in containers

I don't know if it's because I am often on holiday in June, but my potato plants seem to be doing particularly well this year: possibly because I'm around to tend to their every need. I wrote a piece about the benefits of growing potatoes in pots earlier this year, and I've put my money where my mouth is and planted half a dozen sacks and junk shop pots with different varieties this season. It has been handy to be able to move them around the garden at a time when we've been revamping the plot. Through necessity rather than choice, I've used a mishmash of things as a growing medium - some peat-free multipurpose compost mixed with spent compost from containers, wormcasts from my wormeries and compost from my heap. They've been getting regular feedings with the much-diluted liquid from the wormeries, and it all seems to be paying off.

This year's pleasant surprise is how good the lush foliage and flowers look, even in a rough old builder's bucket. The star of the show is undoubtedly the Salad Blue with its gorgeous pale violet flowers, pictured above. If all goes well I am looking forward to experimenting with blue chips and mash. I can't tell you exactly what other varieties I'm growing, as I've had to hide the labels below soil level to fox my 3-year-old who likes nothing better than mixing them up. 

How are your potatoes doing this year?

Foxgloves and other flowers from seed

I don't tend to grow many flowers from seed, partly because I haven't had the space or facilities up until now, and partly because as regular readers will know, I am a bit of a vegetable growing enthusiast - give me a choice of edible or ornamental and I'll opt for the plants that can end up in my gob!

But I did sow these white foxgloves from a packet of seeds that came free on the front of Gardens Illustrated back in autumn 2008. And now they've finally flowered: it seems like they've taken forever to get to this point, possibly through my completely rubbish "nurturing", but they do look rather lovely now. These definitely won't be ending up in my gob, given that foxgloves are poisonous, or as Amy Stewart notes in her book Wicked Plants, ingesting digitalis is like putting your heart on steroids. 

I'd like some other suggestions for flower seeds to sow this autumn for a low-cost boost to my (newly expanded) borders: now I have my potting shed (did I mention my new potting shed?!), a whole new world of possibilities has opened up to me. Just add your thoughts in the comments below. And if you too sowed these GI seeds, when did yours flower - were mine as sluggish as they felt, or was I just being impatient as usual?

Anna Pavord on her new book, Bulb

I promised a blogpost on Anna Pavord's talk at the Garden Museum on October 1 and hey, presto, 14 days later, here it is!

Anna was talking about her new book, Bulb, which took her four years to write, and you can see why - it's an erudite, beautiful piece of work that deserves to be pored over on many a cold winter's evening to come. The talk was full of gems - her bulb planting mix recipe (two scoops of John Innes no 3 to one scoop of 6ml grit), what bulbs to pick ("the simplest route to growing bulbs is to find out what likes you and grow lots of it"), and her description of Narcissus cyclamineus as looking "like a surprised piglet caught in the wind".

What was most reassuring to me was her emphasis on the importance of remembering that it is an "unreal expectation" to asume a bulb will flower every year: even in optimal conditions in the wild, many only bloom sporadically. So it may not be your fault when your tulips don't come back year after year! If you want to get more of a flavour of what she said, read this piece in the Independent. Here she is above signing copies of her book after the talk.

I was so inspired I went straight home and planted loads of bulbs the following weekend, and ordered many more. Incredibly, I've never grown paperwhite narcissus, so I'll be giving those a try for the first time this year, and using this top tip of giving the bulbs a nip of vodka to stop them falling over (funny, that - it's the reverse in humans!) And whatever the Garden Monkey says, I'll be growing some hyacinths (white ones, probably) because I like them, and that's that.

Also in the audience were the garden designers Dan Pearson (who I'd never met before) and Cleve West (who I already know), and I got to meet Christopher Woodward, the Garden Museum director, in person for the first time. Have a look at the Guardian gardening blog for my post on the museum's latest exhibition, The Good Life: 100 Years of Growing Your Own.

Nerine discovery

There's not a lot by way of exciting plants in my new garden, but I did thrill at the sight of a patch of the lovely autumn bulb Nerine bowdenii which have come up in one of the raised beds, partially covered by a rather rampant rosemary (try saying that after a few pints).

I've not grown these before but they're fairly straightforward provided you don't bury the bulbs too deep. There's a good piece from the Telegraph last year if you want to find out more.

Freaky foxgloves

I've just been leafing through the latest edition of Gardens Illustrated, as you do, over a screenbreak in the Guardian canteen. I got to the readers' questions page, a stalwart of any gardening publication, and had to double-take over the picture of an odd-looking foxglove.

I'd seen this somewhere before - twice. In a weird coincidence, THREE gardening mags - GI, plus BBC Gardeners' World magazine and Organic Gardening (I think - I don't have a copy of the latter on me to check) - have featured a question about foxglove flowers that have fused together, like this.

GI's John Cushnie says the distortion has been caused by damage from a sucking insect like a capsid bug or aphid, wheres BBCGW says it's "a naturally occuring abnormality, known as fasciation". Can't remember what OG thought it was, but I hope Bob Flowerdew or someone thinks it's down to a lack of zinc or somesuch.

But what are the chances of a weird foxglove triple-whammy, particularly when two of the mags in question are produced by the BBC? Are our foxgloves at risk? The nation's gardeners need to know.

Red and white campions

Now the allotment is (nearly) no longer mine, the focus of this blog changes to my garden.

I don't have a huge amount of blooms on my plot: as the picture to the left shows. I do love the acid green of the dogwood's leaves against the dark glossy red of the heuchera. (The Allium christophii was the sole survivor of several blubs planted two years back, and had been well and truly battered by the rain - only the branches of the dogwood were holding it in place for this photo.)

But the flowers that have given most pleasure for least effort so far this year are the red and white campion that are sprinkled on the bed outside my kitchen window. The plants were a Valentine's day gift bought from Wiggly Wigglers a year or so back and they've been no trouble - aside from a small amount of blackfly easily removed with some soap spray. The pink flowers dominated at first, but now the whites are taking over. 

They need no staking, are slugproof and very pretty in an understated way. The fact that they're "wild" is neither here nor thereto me, really, although I have noticed more birds in the garden since I introduced the campions. I've recently bought some devil's bit scabious and stinking iris (which, i am told, don't actually smell that bad), but does anyone have further recommendations for expanding my little patch of wildness?

Rose growing the organic way

I've never had many roses*, at least in part because they're reputed to be a difficult plant to grow organically, and partly because I don't feel confident enough to prune them correctly.

When our daughter was born earlier this year, we were given a patio rose called Many Happy Returns, which was a lovely gift, and prompted me to finally get around to some rose care research.

I found the Organic Rose Gardening site,  which was useful although fairly basic. But I had an idea in the back of my mind that the HDRA as was, now Garden Organic, had been looking into how to manage roses. A quick Google search brought up the Garden Organic/National Trust technical note on organic management of roses (a PDF file), which is a superb resource. Not surprisingly, the practices mentioned will be of no surprise to anyone with experience of organic gardening techniques - hygiene, rigorous soil preparation, and biological control to deal with aphids and other pests are all crucial. It's also helpful if you're prepared to dot your roses about among other plants in the garden rather than the more traditional "rose bed" approach, a monoculture that can result in lots of diseases flourishing.

Despite being left to languish on the patio largely untended as I tended my child during the summer, my rose did very well, flowered abundantly, providing blooms for the house and brightening up the garden. It will get a pruning in February or March, as per the RHS instructions here, and will, I hope, bring many happy returns.

*I have been given a few of those miniature roses you can get that are meant to be grown as houseplants, but they've always ended up outside, because unless you live in a huge, poorly-heated stately pile, they're atrocious as indoor plants - they need bright conditions but a cool room of 50-70F in the summer, which not many of us can achieve in modern homes. They also need lots of humidity, which is also not conducive to the bone-dry heat of the modern radiator. So, if you see one going cheap at the garden centre, do buy it, but think of it as a temporary visitor to your home and plan to find a place outside for it before it succumbs to mildew or wilts away in the heat.

Aubergine in bloom

This is the first flower on my aubergine plants (sounds so much more classy than the US word "eggplant"). If the fruit's anything like as gorgeous as the bloom, I'll be delighted.

The hot weather should make for a good harvest, I hope.

I am not sure exactly what I am getting, because it was a mixed packet. Given the huge variety of types in the aubergine family, I could end up with anything.

Please pass on any good aubergine recipes, because it's not something I cook with a lot. Rick isn't a big fan - or rather, wasn't, until we had a dish in our hotel in Italy that was so good he was completely won over. It was an aubergine tart - you can see a picture of it here - but we'll have to wait until the Montali recipe book comes out before we can make it for ourselves.