Thankfully this month has been a lot kinder to my roses, they’ve continued to flower and just as the last (the fourth of the summer) arrived I was contemplating moving them back out from their shelter. Needless to say, that’s been postponed for a little bit - but it’s very different to the last few months where they’ve been a bit crispy and then bombarded with pests. They’re resilient plants aren’t they?
July was all about flowering succulents, many tiny apples and ripening the tomatoes from the two plants we had. There’s been more flowers blooming too, but it’s the succulents that have really held my attention this month. I’m not sure I’ve ever had one that’s flowered before, but it has been a complete joy ever since I spotted the first signs that something might be happening…
The flowers are dying off now, and I’m continuing to observe the plant to see what happens to it next - hopefully it won’t mean the end of my plant, but I suspect it won’t flower again next year though I’d be happy to be proven wrong. It has been a year of succulents, as I seem to have gained quite a few more at this year’s Gardener’s World Live - and more impressively have found pots for all of them.
Finding pots for my new plants has been a bit of a challenge, and I’d completely forgotten about the painted pot that the aeonium is in, even though it was right in front of me in the garage. Luckily though the small crab apple tree doesn’t require any kind of pot, though it is fully laden with apples this year, and would no doubt be grateful for some help supporting its weight.
I did need to give some of the branches a quick trim as they were growing over the fence and into, then up the wall. As the month has progressed and the sun has shone they’re turning a delicate shade of blush. It’s currently looking like there’ll be plenty to make crab apple jelly, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to use some of the fully laden branches in an autumn wreath, but we’ll see.
I bought two tomato plants from the garden centre this year and they’ve happily been growing away. I like to grow varieties that you generally don’t see in the shops, and this year I’ve had this black fruit and a smaller but very sweet red tomato. After picking the first of the black varieties we learnt they weren’t quite ready to eat, but they soon ripened indoors. The tops of the black tomatoes turn a vibrant red when they’re ripe, and they taste much better that way too.
They have found a new spot in the garden too, a slightly less salubrious location close to the bins and the sick bay inhabited by the bay trees (which by the way have made a remarkable recovery and are now green again and growing new leaves). It’s a sunny spot though and I think the plants there - both the bay trees and the tomatoes - have benefitted from this.
I’ve picked all our tomatoes and brought them indoors to fully ripen. The remaining plants have been composted and the soil has been reused in the new and rather large olive pot - more on that in another post, and of course this also means I’ve two more pots at my disposal for any new plants…
The daisies that I thought might not make it flowered, which was a relief, though they’re back to not looking too healthy at the moment, so I’ll continue to keep my fingers crossed for these longer term.
My astrantias flowered for the first time - yay! - and the globe thistles which I bought earlier this year at the Newark Flower Show also flowered starting with the palest of blues. I’m hoping their colour will develop further, and they too, along with the roses, will move to somewhere where we can see and enjoy them!
In the borders by the garage the plants have continued to thrive, a little too much while we were away if I’m honest, and I’m still catching up with taming them. It’s a case of thinning and taking off some of the height as while the bushes would give us some privacy from the road, they also stop us seeing what’s going on!
It was great to catch the sun on these two, and the bonus of a web on the achillea too.
I’ve also added a santolini to my growing number of pots this year - we’ve seen this many times on holiday in both France and Italy, so it’s nice to have a tiny bit of that in our own garden. I brought home two peonies from my dad’s garden (he gave them to me, honest) and in my pot shortage I’ve needed to reuse some rose pots, but the peonies seem to be doing well which is a relief.
I’m joking about the pot shortage, but at times it’s been quite the thing. I know that the big way to solve this is to get on and get the garden design sorted, but the fear is real. I mean it’s great to have a blank canvas, and while I have quite a few plants to add to the new beds I suspect they won’t go as far as I think, there is the pressure (from myself mainly!) to get the layout right. It’s likely that we’ll get someone in to help transform my ideas into real plans, but that’s as tricky as getting started myself.
And in the meantime I’ll be keeping an eye out for the female stag beetle that wandered across the patio and onto the gravel for a bit of mountaineering to see if she, or anymore stag beetles make a return. So far this year there’s been 14,081 spotted in the UK, including ours. We used to see them in our last garden, usually earlier in the summer, but this is the first time we’ve seen one here though hopefully not the last.
